Heretic TOC yesterday meant to cover a further aspect of “Three reasons to be cheerful” but ran out of time and space. Well, I say ran out of space: I suppose a blog page can stretch to infinity but I doubt the same can be said for readers’ patience.
I had wanted to elaborate on one of the sources used by Jon Henley in his Guardian article. He refers to J Michael Bailey of Northwestern University: “…writing last year in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Bailey said…he was forced to recognise that ‘persuasive evidence for the harmfulness of paedophilic relationships does not yet exist’.”
What Henley did not reveal is that Bailey’s article in the Archives was a review of my book Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons. I hope fellow heretics will read his full review, but here is a brief taster:
…fascinating, challenging and discomfiting. Anyone wanting to understand Michael Jackson will need to read it. The idea that pedophilic relationships can be harmless or even beneficial to children is disturbing to many people, including me. The lack of scientific evidence supporting my largely visceral reactions against pedophilic relationships has been one of the most surprising discoveries of my hopefully ongoing scientific education…O’Carroll argues against my intuitions and he argues well. J Michael Bailey, professor of psychology, Northwestern University, Chicago
I trust I will be forgiven for plugging Bailey’s recommendation, especially once you hear about an extraordinary campaign two years ago to have the book suppressed. I had written Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons under the pen name Carl Toms, but angry Jackson fans discovered my identity and outed me online as a “convicted paedophile” soon after the book had been printed and just weeks ahead of its planned June 2010 publication. Until that disaster it had been tipped by Amazon in pre-launch publicity as a likely best-seller. Publishers Troubador had been aware of my real identity all along but panicked and disowned the title in the face of Jackson loyalists who hated my portrayal of their idol. This was because Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons defended Jackson as an active boy-lover rather than as a child-like “innocent”.
The upshot was that the only way I could get the book to market was to assume the role of publisher and distributor myself, and I started a company, Dangerous Books Ltd, for this purpose. All this necessitated legal action to secure the publishing rights and a heavy personal financial investment. That is one reason why the book cannot be offered at a low price if I am ever to break even. Another is that it is a 624-page doorstopper, which was expensive to print.
A year after the abortive launch, in May 2011, I was able to announce a re-launch via a press release headed “Sabotaged ‘work of genius’ to be relaunched”. The “work of genius” bit is not my hype, by the way: it is what historian Prof. William Percy, of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, actually said. It’s way over the top, of course. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons is just an analytical biography, not Einstein’s theory of relativity. I was grateful for Percy’s enthusiasm, though, and the re-launch worked well enough to attract interest from The Sunday Times: their features editor said they were thinking of running an extract in the magazine section, although that interest evaporated just as soon as they realized my angle was pro-BL as well as pro-Jackson!
All in all, Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons has managed to attract many excellent reviews and notices, but they have all been confined so far to obscure academic journals hidden behind pay walls and other places that are not exactly like an interview with Oprah Winfrey in terms of mass exposure. So I urge all you heretics here to ponder at least a few of the reviews and consider whether this is a book for you. One thing is for sure: love him or loathe him, Jackson was one of the most colourful, fascinating and enigmatic figures ever to perform in public, so making the book an interesting read was the easiest of my tasks. Making it original, insightful and truly illuminating took years of research and hard work, but there is no shortage of critics who say I have succeeded.
Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons is available at amazon.com (recommended supplier: MindGlow Media) amazon.co.uk (recommended supplier: SafeSend) and Dangerous Books.
I tried to buy the book Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons, here in Brazil, from a book shop that sells imported books, unfortunately they were sold out. I tried to do PayPal, but here they don’t accept debit card. My father is going to England this year, in July, while his there, he is going to look for the book in some store that stll might have it with a bit of luck.
Try Safe Send at Amazon.Co.UK
Apart from Good King/Queen Heretic-TOC’s unbending brilliance.
The comments/replies here, about other mere fact-finders, now Anglo-Fascist BANNED from so called “Modern Liberal Free Democratic Fair Open Academic” forums, is priceless.
Almost as good as raving-Right/Wrong-un Rupe’s U.S.TV FOX/Fix NEWZac – motto ” Fair & Balanced ” – WTF ?
The clock is striking thirteen….
Dear Heretic, the sooner you it into an eBook, the sooner I can buy it!
Scholar ones.
Congratulations on the effusive reviews! Many of them from people who seem actually to know what they’re talking about. And congratulations on still having your book ‘up’ on Amazon, after that company’s moral backbone crumbled so spectacularly. I’ll certainly be buying a copy, though – at over 600 pages – I suspect it’s going to take a while for this semi-literate Generation-Yer to muster the strength to finish it.
For those unfamiliar with the work, the boy character Prindy Ah Loy in Xavier Herbert’s Australian classic ‘Poor Fellow My Country’ is noted for marriage of the naked pre-pubescent, 1/4 cast Aboriginal boy to the daughter his age of an Indian hawker. By mid-puberty he is wearing a loin cloth and she is heavily pregnant.
There is much more, of course; the work itself is longer than Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. Hopefully I can manage to renew interest in this work as a comparative study, and have it added to extant readings on these issues.
Huck Finn by comparison, while nonetheless as averse to clothing as Prindy, spends his time on the Mississippi River with the runaway negro slave Jim, and at the end of the book remains virginal and inclined rather to “howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory.”
The thesis is available here: http://gilhardwick.com.au/huck_prindy_thesis_2011_pdf.php
Yes, that was fun. I recall you sending me a copy of the MS, resulting in my first posting to the Amazon kerfuffle as the only person who had actually read the book. Of course, in response they ‘outed’ me too, to the extent you can possibly ‘out’ a person who is already open and public in all his dealings. I was even dragged over the coals here locally, at a meeting of all things of the WA Council for Civil Liberties of which I was at the time Vice President.
And Bill Percy (the famous William Armstrong Percy III) rang me too, all the way from Boston to tell me that my 2011 Honours thesis on Prindy Ah Loy and Huckleberry Finn was “Brilliant!”
Coming at all this from the view of a highly experienced field ethnographer, of all sciences most acutely aware of the cultural embeddedness of irrational belief; here in this case the most cherished “intuitions”, and as a result considered most radical, most subversive of sciences, it gives me little pleasure to witness these quintessentially embarrassing moments for what gets passed off these days as Western “science.”
Having said that, of course there are many fine scholars making these observations and being attacked and vilified for doing so. The pay-back is, at the end of the day we stand vindicated.
Hell wicked.
Keep having fun, kiddies.
Offering a context inside which to unpack Bailey’s comment on sexual contacts between adults and children/youths is very useful, thanks for this Tom. (The text of Bailey being referred to is this one: “The lack of scientific evidence supporting my largely visceral reactions against pedophilic relationships has been one of the most surprising discoveries of my hopefully ongoing scientific education”.)
When the book you wrote on Michael Jackson, Micheal Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons, was entering public spaces I took an interest in an Amazon discussion group where the text was being discussed. I made numerous contributions/posts.
Those posts have been removed and Amazon have banned me from making any contributions for life. I cannot post to any discussion on any topic on their website site. If you were wondering what the tone of my post was I suggest you view my wordpress site takearisknz.
Apparently a woman in the Amazon discussion group told bold faced falsehoods to Amazon and profiled me as a pedophile (for readers please be informed I have no convictions in the country where I live, or in any other space on the planet.) who, of course, should not speak, should not be read, and should not have his views available inside spaces they (Amazon) control.
So as to keep this post short I will refrain from describing the woman’s actions, they were many and profoundly unethical. Tom, I think you know how all this works better than most.
I do not regret supporting an open discussion of your book. What happened for me was like Dr. Bailey’s experience, I have been offered a lesson that reaches into my reflections on sexuality and how to write about it – speaking truthfully can be difficult (an excellent theorist on this topic is Michel Foucault).
Peter, it remains a fascination for me to know why you keep getting ‘banned for life’, and others reduce to nervous wrecks, while some of us simply dance.
Maybe some of us were exposed early in life to pagan, hippy, liberated, sort of running around naked having fun, and finding things out for ourselves, and today live sort of, like, loose.
I know how the woman who fought hard to have me banned views me; since Amazon have let me know I have lost posting privilages (and when asked made it clear this is not a decision that can be reversed) they agree with the woman who complained. So I am puzzled as to how you see those of us you describe as “nervous wrecks”. Why the insulting remark?
Sorry, Peter, but at times you simply take insult when none was intended. It gives me a measure of how difficult it is to engage factual, objective debate on issues of human sexuality on the basis of material evidence.
For the record, I did not rank you among the ‘nervous wrecks’, merely making an observation on many of those targeted in this business, and what being dragged through the system does to them. I know quite a few boys and men so affected as well; the harm done by police, prosecutors and media, and to that end refered to others, not you.
It no longer surprises me that sexuality in the contemporary West has become so very confused, and our view of our own body so guilt-laden, and unhealthy.
Please refer to my other comment that I no longer see these issues as having anything whatsoever to do with sex or sexuality, but with mental health and the social (and by corollary) personal disruption we are all being made to suffer because of it.
That’s about where I started in this business way back then, growing up with a gay brother and his perpetual crises livuing in a redneck town, and on being faced by all this again in anthropology.
In the world of text in open spaces I get the impression what you offer here Gil is about as close to an acknowledgement that a reading of your text can be done the way I read your post as I am going to get.
I have to be honest I would not have described the text you offered referring to myself and others as “objective debate on issues of human sexuality on the basis of material evidence”.
We are both engaged, with others, in a debate about sex, pedophilia, and lots more. There are differences in how we write and perhaps even the way we use the tools at our disposal.
At this point in time I see sexual orientation has a currency in social science and public discourse that can be useful. I also see, especially recently, how this term can be used by those who are minor attracted (and this includes the pedophile).
The socially harmful aspects of stereo typing and the use of deviance as a way of punishing individuals is something I want to question, even oppose directly, and lets put a finer point on this goal, as stereo typing and deviance has been used of those whose sexual orientation includes youths and children.
I do not seek to make us all appear the same, I do not seek for the removal of any idea of different sexual profiles, the idea of the heterosexual, the homosexual (gay man), the lesbian (gay woman), and the list goes on, is not deeply problematic for me. I do see privileging as problematic, expressions of moral disgust at sexual orientations that are ‘not one’s own, is also a deep part of this ‘problem-making’ process.
It has been my belief that in the time of Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430) there was indeed a kind of sameness where transgression was an issue of excess. There was a belief one’s relationship to the divine was what needed protecting. The body, the spirit, these had meanings different to what we think today. I mention him because he has been famous inside the West for this prayer to resolve his struggle with desire and his being engaged both with relationships with others that lead to a son and a relationship he felt he had with the divine which for him organized his whole life story.
Both you and I Gil have other peoples texts to read and reflect on, as well as the need to write about what comes from that reading process, and yes managing the actions of the state, actions that seek to exclude, and sadly some examples of unjust actions, this all hopefully can be managed positively, leaving open the option of the odd dance.
Peter, I have allowed your interesting post through in full, but please note usual 200-word limit. This post is 459. On days when I am feeling less benign long posts may be brutally sawn off at the 200-word mark, right in the middle of a point you are making!
Peter, yes, I can see the difference between us. To me sex is nothing much, a body function, though vastly more pleasurable than taking a crap. A good pee after a few dark North Country ales comes awfully close.
My sexual preference; my ‘orientation’ if you will, has nothing whatsoever to do with who has a dick or a clit, or how old or young, but that whoever I am with at the time is capable of intelligent thought, witty repartee, good conversation, a refined palate, a sense of fun and adventure, and these days, discretion.
Professionally and academically I am far more interested in all the fuss, in all this late-modern Anglophone hysteria, as a post-colonial comparative study on the one hand, and more importantly as an excuse invoked by plainly disturbed people for going around beating up on other people, having them arrested, taking their money, their house, their kids, and publicly vilified.
It’s definitely mental illness behind all this crap, emerging without a shadow of doubt from post-Napoleonic Imperial England. The best thing you can do for yourself is realise it’s an ongoing problem they have.
It’s the game they play. Maybe they’re still fuming over George IV when he was regent, or loss of the Americas, or something.
Maybe read my April 2000 paper on Captain John Molloy of the Rifle Brigade. I wrote it for a reason.