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Benjamin Britten - feted as a great composer, known to be attracted to boys, suspected of one rejected advance - can we claim him as a non-offending MAP?
Benjamin Britten was born today in 1913, and after a boyhood suffused with music, grew up into one of the great classical composers. I heard his most popular pieces from an early age because he sometimes aimed at children's ears.
The basic fact that he had an unusual interest in boys on the cusp of puberty is undisputed. Not only did he write mountains of music for boys to sing, he wrote operas that encoded attraction to boys (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd) and one, late in his career, that faced it explicitly (Death in Venice).
But in addition to what he half-revealed through his work, John Bridcut's book, Britten's Children, records that he cultivated numerous real life friendships with boys, identifying strongly with their spirit and participating in their worlds. He also had a habit of dropping them in a stone-cold manner when they aged out of his interest.
It is known that he had a sexual and romantic attraction to "thin-as-a-board adolescents" as his friend W.H. Auden described them, but less clear whether his connection to boys was sexually motivated. There were certainly non-sexual, personality motivations.
There is no evidence he ever sexually assaulted any of the boys he befriended, but there is evidence of one attempt: thirteen year old Harry Morris departed a Cornish holiday with twenty-two year old Britten's family, telling his mother when he got home that Britten had made an advance on him. His mother didn't believe him.
So, another pedophile who couldn't quite manage to hold himself back, despite clearly having a lot of finer feelings. Why do I care about this?
I'm a non-offender with a definite sexual and romantic attraction to boys. I have also never made a sexual advance to a boy (still less tried to sexually interact with one) nor viewed sexual images of boys. I have never written any operas or concerti. I would very much like to believe that somewhere in the pantheon of famous people I admire, like Britten, there are some that are like me in having, but not acting on the attraction.
But Britten's case sadly demonstrates the way the evidence works. There are three ways we can know that someone has these attractions: either it is voluntarily documented (in correspondence, chat records or diary entries), it is exposed when a child finds out about it—even if a physical assault does not take place, or the law is broken and the authorities act.
Britten teased around the edges of confession with his work and with admissions of homosexuality, but he did not ever explicitly write he was sexually attracted to boys as young as thirteen. Morris' allegation makes it pretty certain he was. Unfortunately, the allegation also removes doubt that on at least one occasion he stepped beyond fantasy and beyond appropriate boundaries and acted.
And this is what you get when a subject is forbidden. There are mostly invisible cases of men (and some women) who live their lives never admitting to a private feeling, and never acting on it. They die unremarked and unrepresented. Britten's opera Peter Grimes talks of being able to "hear those voices that will not be drowned", but these ones are. Mine will be.
Meanwhile, pedophilia, when it is acknowledged at all (and it's odd how successfully Britten's musical dominance has inoculated his reputation against these known facts), is only represented by the moments of lack of control, and the people who didn't quite make the purest non-offending status. That is visible pedophilia.
The other thing you get from the social taboo, of course, is some great art, driven by the tension of silence. In Britten we frequently hear the voice of the marginalised sexual outsider.
This has been enthusiastically borrowed and sanitised as a rainbow story, but it is the story of a pedophile, an imperfect one. He was likely high in virtue in his dealings with most boys, but not quite high enough with every one. Had he reached the standard I wished he had, we would likely be in a situation where nobody would accept he had the attraction, and he would not be recognised as a non-offending pedophile.
By way of contrast, one person recently has tried to gain recognition as a non-offending pedophile—not an accomplished artist, just an alienated young man. This year, he took the stage at Wikicon in New York with a gun and threatened suicide over Wikipedia's explicitly stated policy barring pedophiles from participation, regardless of whether they act on their attractions or not.
The policy, while rightly banning advocacy for child sexual abuse, also says "Editors...who identify themselves as pedophiles, will be blocked and banned indefinitely." So now it is not just a social taboo that prevents the visibility of non-offenders, it has become encoded into a formal rule on one of the major international town squares. It is not a matter of misfortune and where attention goes. It's a deliberate choice by platforms. It forces concealment (but fails to achieve the removal of pedophiles, of which I have no doubt there are many among its editors).
I think that the silences that tormented Britten have tortured many others and they are failing us. We have to face the facts about those who fail the standard of 'virtuous pedophile', but I wish we could find a way for the other voices not to be drowned.
About the author: I have been writing and talking about the experience of being a pedophile since 2017. Once on twitter until my account was banned in 2020, I co-led Virtuous Pedophiles from 2021 to 2025. I now continue to look for ways to improve the lives of pedophiles, but never at the expense of harming children. I have never viewed illegal material, and never sought or engaged in sexual activity with any child. The rest of my life is countryside walking, friends, Radio 3 and feeling doleful about ageing.
No Offence is currently live on Substack, where you can subscribe for email updates. This content is either previously published there or scheduled for future publication.
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