aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A lot more to learn than we’re ready to acknowledge

The December essay by Washington Post staff writer Philip Kennicott, The Instructive Message of ‘History Boys,’ should be read again in the context of the Colorado teenager and his female teacher:

The scandal and the play...force consideration of a question perhaps more troubling in American society than British society: How to deal with precocious adolescents, with adults who desire them, and with the relationships that result when these two volatile elements combine? [...]

“History Boys” follows eight young men of exceptional intellectual abilities, but who desperately need shaping and discipline if they are to be serious “Oxbridge” contenders. Two teachers, whose highly contrasting educational styles form the philosophical conflict of the play, undertake the work of refining the boys. Both men are homosexuals and both are perilously attracted to their students.

Hector, the orotund, poetically inclined older man who teaches with no particular program but the spirit of intellectual play and adventure, has been groping the boys under his tutelage for years. Irwin, a newcomer, younger and more brutally pragmatic about teaching, is brought in to teach them the art of intellectual pizazz, the style-over-substance tricks that will make them stand out among the competition.

Bennett stacks the deck mostly but not entirely in the favor of Hector, who is charismatic, witty and erudite. Hector’s also taking liberties—reaching back for the occasional grope while driving a boy on his motorcycle—that the boys have come to accept as one of their teacher’s eccentricities. The boys don’t particularly enjoy it and they casually banter about what they consider Hector’s pathetic personal life. But they also love him, and not only do they dutifully submit to the groping, in the end, they defend Hector when outside (and more puritanical) forces threaten his cozy relationship with them.

The acceptance of homosexuality within the English school tradition is legendary. Nicholas Hytner, the director of the “History Boys” film, says he attended a high school not unlike the one depicted in Bennett’s play. “Even in the ‘70s,” he says, “we would have found casual homophobia disgusting.”

But it’s not just the attitude toward homosexuality that distinguishes this play from anything that could be written in the United States during the age of programs such as NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” or fallout from the Foley scandal. Bennett, in an interview in an English newspaper, said (of the sexual encounters between Hector and his students): “I think I’ve been criticized for not taking this seriously enough. I’m afraid I don’t take that very seriously if they’re 17 or 18. I think they are actually much wiser than Hector. Hector is the child, not them.” That acceptance of a gray area about sexuality involving late adolescents is all but impossible in this country, where the sexual predator has become an absolute category, a universal figure for evil and nightly fodder for pursuit and punishment on programs such as “Law and Order: SVU.” The collective response from society—concerned that sexual abuse is being ignored—is a vigilance so strict that there is no room for exceptions of any sort, even if the abused are all-but adults and don’t feel particularly victimized. [...]

In Bennett’s play...the boys’ canniness about a flawed teacher’s sexual desires gives them a power over him that they also refuse to use. They know their teacher is what used to be known, in so many small communities, as the dirty old man—slightly ridiculous, and often harmless. And in their acceptance of Hector in that role, the boys seem preternaturally wise.

That may be the most controversial thing about the movie, which could reach an audience well beyond the theater world of New York and fans of Bennett’s work. Bennett’s boys are intellectually sophisticated and live in a rarefied (and fictional) world where their youth and brilliance make them little princelings. Their ability to negotiate, with grace and understanding, what would in almost every other context be considered sexual abuse is very much limited to the particulars of their social position, and the particulars of Bennett’s play. And Bennett’s play is also the work of a mature man, imagining the inner lives of high school boys. The sexual dynamics imagined in any such work—call it the Lolita factor—must be subjected to the following suspicion: Is this an apologia, by an adult, that mischaracterizes the sexuality of youth?

The American drama of sexual abuse, played out almost weekly in hysterical terms on “To Catch a Predator,” has very little room for the larger continuum of the sexual interactions between adults and youth suggested by Bennett’s play. NBC’s popular but scabrous program, in which adults impersonate highly sexualized children in order to entrap other adults into sexual encounters, eliminates any actual children or youth from the equation. The voices heard in Bennett’s play or Burroughs’s memoir or the transcripts of the Foley case, have been eliminated. NBC uses “reality” TV to fictionalize child sexuality as much as Bennett or Nabokov or any other author. But works such as Bennett’s and Burroughs’s, and even the transcripts of the Foley exchanges, suggest that there is a lot more to be learned about how sex is negotiated—especially between adults and youth who are almost adults—than American popular culture is quite ready to acknowledge.