AGR-107 Hot Chicken
Hot Chicken
Adam’s Gay Readers
AGR-107
Richard Westerly
$3.95
Foreword
In loco parentis—in place of a parent—is a time-honored precept of educational systems. A child or youth is given over to the system by mothers and fathers. The educators, particularly teachers, are expected to act in their place. Perhaps this is why sexual relations between teachers and students are taboo. Observing in loco parentis, moralists draw a crude parallel between parent-child incest and teacher-student sex. No doubt it makes good sense and should be observed when teachers deal with impressionable children under legal age. But why are intimate unions between professors and university youth, of and beyond legal age, viewed as scandals, reason enough to outcast the professor at many universities. Why, even, should relations between a teacher and a high school senior of eighteen years be cause for indignation, outrage, discharge from work? In many U.S. states the youth is old enough to enter bars and make contracts, and certainly old enough to join armies and make war. In short, such a student is in propria persona—one’s own person—except with regard to teacher-student sex.
Another unjust feature of the precept is that the teacher is always assumed to be the aggressor, the seducer. This has been true as far back as the Greeks who demanded that Socrates drink Hemlock for “corrupting the youth of Athens.” Is it always the truth, however. The phenomenon of the “schoolgirl crush” is well-known. Recall Beatlemania and note today’s rock “groupies.” Read Lolita by Nabakov. Precocious young people are quite able to seduce an older person, deliberately or innocently.
In Loco parentis opens every teacher to the possibility of blackmail should a student decide to seduce him or her for sexual favors or other benefits an instructor might bestow—a passing mark, for example.
This is the crisis which arises for Richard Horton, an English teacher in a remote mining community. It matters little that Horton’s seducer and blackmailer is an eighteen year old male student, an adult in the eyes of the law. He is a student; Horton is the teacher. In loco parentis puts the teacher at risk, though the male-male nature of the seduction may make the punishment more severe in today’s society.
Horton’s story explores this dilemma. And it raises the question of why the student requires sexual favors as partial blackmail payment. Is it possible, as Horton suggests, that the boy “likes it?” Two friends the youth recruits for his blackmail come to feel that “maybe there is something” to man-to-man sex after all.
Over the last two decades America has wrought some rather significant changes in sexual attitudes and mores. Gay rights and tolerance and acceptance of the Gay movement have been a particularly large facet in the sexual “Renaissance” which followed the Fifties.
Times are changing, though, as true understanding and research bring the facts of our sexual nature into the open and dispel the fallacies and untruths. From economic, spiritual, and behavioral repression has come the New Man and Woman, proud in their preferences, accepting of their natures.
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