Trapped In Childhood

I was listening back to my musical Player Boys when I finally picked up on an element that I’ve been exploring for a while but I’ve never put into words before.

The feeling of being trapped by childhood.

I guess this is why Claudia as a character resonated with me so much when I watched Interview with the Vampire. For centuries, she was a woman trapped in a child’s body. She mourned her ability to grow up and become a woman, to be strong enough to take care of herself, to be emotionally and physically independent from the adults in her life who treated her like a child. (Louis is the vampire who fed from her, and his companion is the one who turned her into a vampire.) She developed a romantic affection for Louis in the story because as a woman, she found him to be handsome and protective and loving. But he would always see her as a child because she never grew into a woman. His love for her did not go beyond paternal (for good reason, I think).

In Player Boys, Ira has a similar experience when he is thirteen years old. (Player Boys is a musical I wrote about a castrated Shakespearean actor who plays women onstage in the early 1600s, when it was illegal for women to act publicly.) He’s castrated by Mr. Westchester, the director and producer of the plays at the Westchester Playhouse, the man who takes him in, provides him with a home, and feeds him after Ira’s parents reject him. I never go into detail in the musical, but as Ira gets older and taller and his hair grows out—because his voice isn’t changing—he physically resembles a woman more and more. And his relationship with Mr. Westchester beyond closed doors is never sexually intimate, but likely closer than it should be.

In “So This Is How it Ends,” Ira’s mournful ballad at the end of the musical, Ira comments that he thought Mr. Westchester loved him as a son or as a lover, yet Mr. Westchester never “touched” him. Because Ira was raped by men throughout his late teens and twenties, he recognized all male attention toward him as sexual in some way. So Westchester, in his mind, took on the role of both father and lover, similar to the way that Claudia viewed Louis.

And in Diary of a Depressed Philosopher, much less fantastical and historic than Player Boys, Fiacre has a much more on-the-nose blend between son and lover relationship with the man who groomed him, Jesse. When Fiacre was thirteen years old, Jesse was the first person—and the first man—to express sexual interest in him, and he got Fiacre to feel less afraid of his body and to accept his libido as a sexual being. They had a lot of e-sex until they broke up, and Fiacre developed an obsession with older men who could molest him. He fulfilled one of these fantasies in the high school bathroom when he was almost fourteen, and a seventeen-year-old boy who reminded him of Jesse took advantage of him, reveling in the fact that he wasn’t old enough to go to jail.

After a few months of this amorous infatuation with older men, Fiacre tries to end his life once again. Exposure to the horrors of the psych ward worsens his condition. Over time, he seeks younger boys and girls as sexual partners to distract him from his repressed obsession with Jesse. Jesse no longer occupies the forefront of his mind until he’s almost eighteen, when he begins thinking about Jesse again. After his birthday and the end of his minority, Fiacre reaches out to Jesse on Facebook. When they first met, Jesse was twice his age. Now he’s thirty-one.

As Fiacre and Jesse resume their illicit online sexual affair, Fiacre feels transported back to the time he was a helpless thirteen-year-old who idealized Jesse enough to be convinced that—even if he thought a thirteen-year-old was sexy—he wasn’t actually a pedophile. Now Fiacre knows the truth and recognizes how vile it was for Jesse to groom him, but he loves this man, he’s never felt more deeply attached to another human, and he wants to meet Jesse in person and have a normal monogamous relationship with him.

Fiacre also likes Jesse describing himself as a more fatherly presence in his life, or older brother presence. Fiacre wants Jesse to take care of him and fulfill the suicidal void in his life, while also being his lover.

This is something I am exploring in more overt detail than I did with Shoshanna and Angelo, who represent another age gap couple, and the case of an older man taking advantage of a teenage girl. (This is from a novel I wrote called Forbidden Love Affair, which is a sort-of memoir about my own relationship with a man sixteen years my senior. Angelo is thirty-four when he meets eighteen-year-old college freshman Shoshanna in the cast of a musical, and the two quickly fall in love and begin dating.) Shoshanna is legally an adult, though she is a very repressed, sheltered, emotionally immature eighteen-year-old who both looks and acts like a twelve-year-old most of the time. She has four younger siblings and she has been deprived of adult attention by her own parents. So she looks up to Angelo as an older adult in her life to provide for her, teach her how to drive, give her a house to stay in. She certainly doesn’t want to see her older boyfriend as a surrogate father figure, but she’s aware that he makes a lot of jokes hinting about her being his step-child or his ward or someone under his care or tutelage. He introduces her to a sex life, he helps her achieve her driver’s license, and he teaches her how to pay rent for her own apartment.

Fiacre feels very emotionally insufficient to live on his own. He feels like a child masquerading as an adult. He feels out-of-control of his emotions. His instincts make him want to scream, cry, and throw things. He has urges to throw a tantrum but wields the self-control to hold himself back. He is also aware that Jesse is a pedophile and feels competition with his younger self, because thirteen-year-old Fiacre seemed a lot more sexually appealing to twenty-six-year-old Jesse than eighteen-year-old Fiacre does to thirty-one-year-old Jesse. Fiacre both wants to stay a child for Jesse forever but feels an incredible loss that he will never be a normal man.

Unlike Ira, Fiacre has gone through puberty and has a deeper voice. He struggles to grow facial hair, as some eighteen-year-old boys do. His loss of manhood feels more psychological than physical.

Ira mourns his physical loss of manhood because he is a target of rape by other men, women don’t want him as a husband, and trades don’t want him as a worker because he doesn’t look like a normal man. Ira is only suitable for the playhouse where he can channel his loss of manhood into a celebration of his fake womanhood onstage. He’s revered as a goddess and ingénue at the playhouse, and cast off as an incomplete man after the jig is over.

Another reason Ira has to believe that his relationship with Mr. Westchester is sexual is because Mr. Westchester willingly allows the patrons to rape him after the show, commenting that they pay better.

At the end of Fiacre’s and Ira’s stories, they both get away from their father-lover abuser. However, Ira is rescued by a much younger asexual girl who has fallen in love with him and wants to be his wife. Her father is conveniently rich, and Ira conveniently wins his favor by rescuing his only son from the same fate that befell Ira. So Ira ends up well-off with Ylanda without having to work for himself.

Fiacre has to get away all in his own. Similar to Player Boys, what causes his loyalty to his abuser to turn is when he sees his abuser take advantage of another boy. Ira does nothing to stand up to Mr. Westchester until he hears that Mr. Westchester wants to castrate the newest addition to the boy players—Andrew. Ira is an adult, almost thirty-one. Fiacre is an adult, nineteen.

Fiacre finds out that the boy Jesse has been babysitting for years is his most recent victim of molestation. Fiacre has to make the chilling decision to turn his lover over to the FBI. He adds on to Jesse’s charges by showing the FBI evidence of Jesse doing this to him and other boys five years ago. He has to imprison his lover and provider and fend for himself, an eternal man child unable to take care of himself.

Fiacre is rescued by the foster care system, where he becomes a volunteer. I haven’t yet decided whether to make him a social worker or simply a volunteer. Perhaps a volunteer at first and a social worker over time. Volunteering at the foster care system motivates him to pursue a master’s degree in social working. He then adopts a couple of boys from the foster care system and learns how to be a father to them, and to never blend the lines between father and lover. He becomes an attentive father that his own father never was, and a loving and guiding and protecting father that Jesse never was. Jesse abused his power over Fiacre to make Fiacre fall in love with him and provide for his sexual desires. As safe as Jess made him feel, as bound to Jesse as he felt, Fiacre was never truly safe around Jesse.

I just find it interesting that I’ve explored roughly the same trope twice—thirteen-year-old boy has his manhood stolen from him by a father figure, he feels trauma-bonded to this father figure, and he remains passive or loyal to this father figure until he watches the cycle replayed in another boy. Both Ira and Fiacre feel more galvanized to stand up for another boy instead of themselves, because they couldn’t stand up for themselves at thirteen, but they can stand up for another boy who can’t stand up for himself. In a way, Fiacre and Ira get slight satisfaction from healing their inner child by standing up for a boy who represents their childhood self.

My musical Player Boys