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Two people simultaneously and silently ask, I'm one of the good ones, but are you? Bly is a former co-director of Virtuous Pedophiles. Blog posts reflect his personal views, and are not statements from the organisation. There's a small subgenre of pedophile writing which you'll mostly find on our forums. It's called "the coming out post". If you've read many coming out stories from other minority communities you know the basic features: there's a friend, a lover, or a relative; there's the person who came out. There's usually a domestic location or a park or a cafe for it to happen in and there's the suspenseful few moments after the person says the word.
That's how it usually is for anyone who ever needs to come out, whether they're gay, lesbian, trans or one of the smaller categories. It's a tribute to how sane most people are in a currently insane world, that for LGBTQ+ folk, most of those stories these days end with the friend/lover/relative assuring the person who came out that they are loved, that this changes nothing and that everything will be OK.
As it was memorably put by Simon's mother in that sweet movie Love, Simon, "now you get to exhale."
An intolerable infusion of breath
Is it like that for pedophiles? Meh. Sorta. Sometimes. Personally, while I have breathed out the word pedophile to quite a few people and found it went OK, that's not really every story I could tell. Sometimes it's gone badly and always I am managing the situation carefully, rather than blurting it all out emotionally while the other person holds it together for me. I've never felt like I have ever gotten to fully empty my lungs. That's why I write these articles, I suppose.
I'll write another day about my experiences of coming out as a pedophile to non-pedophiles. Today, though, I want to talk about how it goes when both people are pedophiles but neither has yet admitted it to the other.
This one should be easy, right? A full exhalation and a quick win. Obviously another pedophile is in no position to judge or condemn you, and obviously they are going to be the person with whom your secret is safest.
Only, it isn't actually like that. It is mostly only like that when you enter a pedophile space anonymously online and can say who you are to other pedophiles, and be met with recognition and a welcome to the club.
When you are not anonymous, and neither is the other person, that seems to change the stakes. Let me give three examples.
Richard, the pro
The first other person I came out to in the expectation of hearing the same thing back was a guy I used to see casually back before this century began. I'll call him Richard. We both shared a kink and that's how we'd met. The kink was sufficiently adjacent to pedophilia that I'd already got a sense that I was not alone.
He was a career guy. He did something rather high-profile, and lived in an expensive part of London. He had a longterm partner, with whom he formed a mid-level power couple of sorts. The partner didn't share his kink but as is common among gay men, they both had licence to play away. He had distressed wooden shelves in his bathroom, bearing expensive aftershave, and enjoyed taking poppers at moments of high excitement, which terrified me. He had been privately educated, which I had not, but had always rather envied.
In retrospect, though, it was him who had lucked out. I was a young looking 23 year old and had waited plenty long enough to do "the thing" that I wanted to do with anyone who turned out attractive enough to try it with. He was a few years older, and lied a bit about his age, but not egregiously, just as gay men usually did then once past 25. We met blind in Soho Square and he later told me he'd been waiting by a fence to see if I was a munter or not. Had I been too ugly, he would have bailed.
He was very smart, rather impressive, and I did find him attractive. He was writing a novel. We lasted about two and half years.
Once, he said to me, "I find it very hard to read you." It was the first time I'd been made aware how undemonstrative I had become. This followed a childhood and adolescence of embarrassingly blurting everything to anyone, followed by a growing awareness that the weird things in my private imagination—which seemed wonderful to me—had the power to deeply offend or disrupt my relationship with almost anyone.
Did I read him right?
After about two years of regular meetings, having read parts of his novel, I decided I had read him. I took the plunge, explaining via our anonymous email accounts that part of why I liked roleplaying as a schoolboy was that I actually genuinely would like to look like one and that... well... part of the reason for that was that I liked the way schoolboys looked. Yes, in that way. I guess I presented it hesitantly and framed it as "my problem".
He responded in a kind way, and I think his email contained the words "this problem of yours". It may not have been quite that, but it was clear I had been left hanging.
I was single and barely begun on life. I had a lot of future to potentially lose, but nothing so much in the present. But his job, his partner, his house and his lifestyle were settled and tangible realities. It would take very little—had I been motivated to harm him, which I wasn't—for me to topple the whole arrangement and leave him scrabbling around in middle age with little left.
In retrospect I sympathise. I have learned that you can't easily be truthful about this if you're not prepared to take some risk of losing everything. As you can see, he was the self-preserving sort anyway, but still, nobody needs to be altruistic to a friend with benefits when they've got a lot on the line.
I brought it to a halt during the next depressing winter and moved on. I was able to track him online and watched the clues as he split from his partner, left the city and eventually the country, all the while searching for some niche where he could balance his desire for an impressive reputation with the need to avoid the disaster of exposure. Eventually he seemed to leave the internet altogether. Wise.
Kieran, the risk-taking motorcyclist
Five years later and I had flipped roles and was seeing a younger man, Kieran, in the same kink scene. We had talked extensively about the kink and shared a lot of fantasies verbally over the time we'd known each other.
It wasn't a mirror image of my thing with Richard. Neither Kieran nor I had a partner and my career was bumping along a rather middling path. Still, though, now I had my own place and a CV. I'd experienced periods of mental health instability and had to swim hard each time I needed to find a new job. I now had plenty to occupy and worry me over and above my largely dormant 'problem'. I was managing sexual relationships with adults, after all, even if I was beginning to notice that I most wanted to pursue younger men.
Kieran wasn't impressed with me. He was a sporty, cheeky young man with a fairly unkind dose of acne, who liked motorcycles. He wasn't bookish or nerdy. He seemed very emotionally robust, although I think it was a front. I had been alongside him—via the medium of SMS—as he first came out as gay to his mother.
I would see him when he randomly showed up (sometimes on an hour's notice) and usually I would protest when he said we were going to be watching some tacky horror movie at the cinema. I remember compromising on Shaun of the Dead, Casino Royale and House of Flying Daggers. I flat-out refused to be taken to Saw, even though he tried to bodily push me up the corridor in my flat and out of the front door to force the issue (it was only horseplay).
And one day, not long after I'd told him I loved him (he didn't love me and said so), he came out to me as a pedophile and I had to decide what to say.
And of course, hypocritically, I left him hanging, just as Richard had with me.
Why? When I knew how that felt?
Because I feared I didn't have the whole story. I just didn't see him as stable and mature enough to be trusted with my secret, even though, as he quite reasonably pointed out, "I don't see how you could be into these things we talk about and not like boys." A desperate spin doctor at that moment, I maintained that I was just a teleiophile who enjoyed 'being' a kid in sexual fantasy. Such people do exist, but I knew I was not one of them.
I wasn't unsympathetic. I was prepared to listen to him talk about it and unoffended by the topic. I can't remember what I advised him, but it wouldn't have been especially helpful—but I had had no access to good advice myself.
I'm one of the good ones. Are you?
A fear I think all pedophiles have about each other is that we can never fully and truly know each other's total commitment to "staying safe". It doesn't matter what you think about someone's attractions. What matters more is if they get themselves into trouble with the law. You could be suddenly explaining your connection to them in a way you hope never leaks to your other friends, or your employer.
This standoff, where two people simultaneously and silently ask, "I'm one of the good ones, but are you?" now has more of a solution because 'virtuous pedophiles' can meet each other in anti-contact communities and perhaps get more assurance that the person we connected with has some commitment , moral and practical, to staying out of trouble and not actually acting on these fantasies.
I gently reduced my contact with Kieran as I searched for a new, less complex future. In the end I gently let him go through the usual dance of "I've actually got something planned this weekend". Eventually, I met someone and it got serious and all-consuming anyway.
Kieran also met someone close to his own age from the kink. The last time he visited me at home, I gave a bright hug of greeting, but settled in a different chair and maintained distance as we talked about not much and drank tea, like a couple of mums sharing their tribulations. He read my signal about where things now stood, said nothing about it, showed no real emotion and after he left we didn't see each other again.
In retrospect, I was reacting to a baseless fear by not keeping him as my friend and by closing down the subject of The P Word. On the other hand, he didn't reciprocate my affection and we had little to gain from continuing. It would just add a strand of complication to both our lives and future relationships.
He was harder to follow online in the subsequent years than showoffy Richard, but I think I discovered where he is just the other day. From what I can tell he never sought nor got into trouble. Now he is older and more established in a presumably closeted life. I can't see what could be gained from finding him and trying to deliver the apology I owe for lying. But it's his should he ever ask.
Antoine, who read between my lines
And then ten years on it happened once again. This time the person was not a lover, just someone I had contacted via the same kink community. He had read some of the things I had posted online: my outlet during monogamy. He read a signal in them which I hadn't entirely realised I was sending, just as Richard sent one to me in the undertones of his draft (never published) novel.
I told my partner that I was going to meet with someone from "that world" and sat down with... let's call him Antoine, at a Thai restaurant uncomfortably close to my workplace. We had a lot to talk about and much in common, but lived in different countries. It seemed reasonably unlikely we would meet again. I don't think we knew each other's real names or occupations, which was different than with Richard or Kieran.
He left it until the very end of our conversation and even then didn't quite dare to say it. We both just listened carefully to the subtext of everything we had to say about other topics—the news; music; our childhoods—and heard the chimes and resonances we were listening for. He emailed me a day later to suggest there was a topic we hadn't talked about; he dropped strong hints that he read more into my online postings than I had spoken about.
I felt myself again choosing between risky honesty and hypocritical self-preservation.
"Yes," I replied, "but this probably isn't a topic we can easily email about."
Fortunately he knew (as I did not then) what an encrypted messaging service was and told me what to download and install so we could talk frankly.
And we did.
It was the closest I have had to a full exhalation, but bittersweet. For days and weeks, in spare moments of the working day and whenever I was out of the house, we railed and bemoaned our attraction while also comparing notes on how it felt. We agreed ground rules for the conversation, of which the most fundamental was never to completely cut ties, even if we took long breaks. It wasn't joyous, for he was anguished about his pedophilia and always trying to shut his eyes against it, I think in this he was somewhat under the influence of a censorious therapist he had seen about it. That was different to me, although, now trapped in a life where my feelings could not be acknowledged, I was not short of reasons for misery either. We ran a dismal erotic pity party.
I think he is still keeping it contained, but openness catapaulted me into knowing I could never push this aside again. After nine months of crisis talks with someone who could never get out of panic mode about his pedophilia, and inching myself closer and closer to suicide, I created an anonymous twitter account, connected to the anti-contact maptivists and eventually entered their community, where people weren't sweating it the way Antoine and I had been.
How the connection is made
That was liberating, but it went with admitting that I had opened up a box I would never be able to shut. That isn't catastrophising. It has turned out to be simply true: making space for this in my life has been consequential but not yet disastrous. The prospect of disaster hovers a little closer now.
Earlier on, in the pre-internet age before Richard and Kieran and Antoine, I had made early attempts to connect to other pedophiles. I had maintained a brief snail mail correspondence with two other people for five letters back and forth. I did not like the seediness of what I read; I withdrew, afraid of getting in too deep. I think the truth is that I wasn't ready at that time and was wise not to enter the wild west of the offline and early internet pedophile communities—rough and dangerous and always close to the boundary of illegal. I'm glad I waited all these years before breathing out any more.
In the future, would I would reciprocate if another pedophile I already knew came out to me? Perhaps not in every circumstance. I still have things to lose. I hope I would be much more ready to, at least. And even if I didn't, I have those magical nine letters I can share without giving myself away: V I R P E D O R G.
Now, it seems obvious to me that pedophiles can only get support if other pedophiles are able to make those tentative leaps to acknowledgement and conversation.
From the nineties to now, internet anonymity has facilitated this by reducing the reputational and personal safety friction on such honesty. VirPed's forum is a lynchpin of this.
Will this period of internet anonymity last? It's very hard to say but there are some extremely unpromising signs at the moment.
Even if it persists somehow, online anonymity has its own drawbacks compared to real life connection. Anonymity renders invisible a lot of information you need to pick suitable and lasting friends.
Eventually, despite the danger, we will have to cross the boundary of anonymity for the prize of breathing free.
There will be danger. There is no other way.
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