Queerupture

I just finished reading Karl Andersson’s Gay Man’s Worst Friend: The Story of Destroyer Magazine (2010) and I am left feeling inspired, ambivalent and intrigued. The book chronicles Andersson’s trials and accomplishments through out the four-year and ten issue run of Destroyer, a magazine dedicated to the beauty of the boy. It includes personal accounts of hilarious and nerve-racking encounters with the police, and expected yet disappointing rejection and hostility from mainstream LGBT organizations. Although I have not read through all of the issues (being a broke student makes them slightly too expensive…), the ones I have read were great for their mixing of academic(ish) critique and aesthetic appreciation of boyhood, deviance, and the LGBT community.

What I found the most interesting about Andersson’s account of the criticism he received, and his corresponding emotional and theoretical responses, is the tension he highlights between adolescent and child. On one hand, he claims to be more radical than the self-proclaimed sex-radicals for advocating for the sexiness of teens (a claim I find amusing because Andersson isn’t really advocating for sex at all). So much of the criticism that Andersson received was people basically arguing that he was advocating for child abuse or sex with children, and yet, time and time again Andersson argues against sex – saying that sex destroys that which is beautiful. The irony then, is that in arguing against sex, Andersson becomes somehow more sex-radical than the sex-radicals.

On the other hand, however, Andersson repeatedly situates himself and his desires through creating a divide between child and adolescent, allowing for and advocating for the sexiness of teens, yet constantly distancing himself and his fantasies from the bodies of children. Although I completely understand his desire to differentiate between the two, I’m curious if his language continues the type of vilification of sexual desires (through immediately linking them to harmful actions) that he is trying to complicate with his magazine. If he is never advocating for sex at all – why would he need to distance himself from advocating for objectifying children? If, as Andersson argues, worshiping and sexualizing teens through images is not harmful, as it encourages or gives a space for desiring and fantasizing that distances itself from action – how would worshiping children do any different? I think what happens in this moment of distancing is that it allows for the legality of the magazine and it allows for Andersson to argue for a frame of deviance and radicalism that won’t get him arrested or completely discredited from within the small sector of the LGBT community that timidly accepts him. And yet, what he does make clear in this tension are the ways that the “P” word (as he calls it) gets used to make people othered and abject, for even he, sex-radical-savant, needs to distance himself from the word’s association.

Overall, however, the book is a fascinating read for those of you who have ever thought about the behind-the-scenes goings on for magazines, especially magazines which are underground, independently published and take on controversial and/or sexual topics. Furthermore, it is a great (albeit partial) account of the politics of the contemporary European LGBT movement’s relationship with pedophile movements, hebephilia, and the politics of pornography. And of course, for those of you like me, who have read Destroyer and have been following its critiques and publicity, this is a wonderful account of its tenuous yet rich life from the determined and audacious man who made it all happen.