Edward Perry Warren's three-volume A Defence
of Uranian Love, written under his pseudonym Arthur
Lyon Raile and privately printed in 1[zasłonięte]928-19, can be
judiciously labelled "the premier paederastic apologia
in the language." Warren always and rightly called this
work his magnum opus: it is the clearest elucidation of
the motives that lay behind his acquisition of
Graeco-Roman antiquities for the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston and other prominent collections. Warren's
acquisition practices converted those antiquities into a
"paederastic evangel," as he himself declares, and his
Defence is intimately woven into this lifelong,
evangelistic mission. "My verses and my prose,"
writes Warren, "advocate a morality, but it is not the
current morality in certain matters." This is
understatement at its most playful, for Warren's
Defence is a detailed map to a Utopia where
"Grecian grandeur" is restored, and the "Christian
sublime," all but banished; where masculine virtues
topple the feminine that have mistakenly led to
democracy, sexual purity, and feminism; where
aristocracy, nobleness, and male supremacy establish a
civilisation in which Nietzsche would have found himself
at home; and where paederasty, in the form familiar to
the ancient Spartans, could and needs must flourish.
For, according to Warren, "Love" (in this case,
Boy-love) "can revive the old Hellenic day." It is this
revival - this veritable "Renaissance of
Paederasty"-that Warren's elaborate apologia aims to
begin, by reminding Western culture of what it has lost
or only forgotten: a sacral Boy-love and its
accompanying traditions.
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