Love relationships between younger and older males
Young Sergio, fourteen just the other week, was subject for Surgeon Commander Doctor Gosse Lane’s tender temptations. Gosse was careful and made his passes with patience. It took him over a week to reach his goal.
Jeff diagnosed young Sergio’s American mother as a dipsomaniac. Often being drunk enhanced her value as entertainment for many of the island’s many yet unmarried young males. They gave her their love as she stumbled barefooted over the still warm beach sand to get home in the dark summer’s night.
Younf Sergio’s Greek father lived in Paris and even this year he had forgotten his son’s birthday. Considering the father’s minute interest in the boy’s unsuitable birth, forgetting its date was easy to understand.
Dr Lane reserved his more lustful encounters for the local boys. They gathered in large groups around the cottage, aware of the profits they could make by being friendly to the elderly Australian Surgeon Commander.
This is the love that dares not speak its name. An overwhelming cascade of signs and provocations captured young Simon. A little French family’s auspicious time together splashing in the water by the beach that Simon and the artists saw as their own. He saw a son and a father interacting with each other with respect and confidence and joy. Extreme needs for love bewildered and captured Simon. All he saw transformed from mind to body and made him ache with needs for love and for a happy daddy-son relationship. How close could he get to this beautiful boy? Simon’s body ached, and he suffered from this “chagrin d’amour”.
Jeffrey Smart offered Simon a secure remedy. “Toss off,” he said, “this will cure your disease and diminish your pain.” Simon was offended and asked Jeff to “shut your bloody mouth, this is something you don’t understand!” None of them understood that what became a sexual attraction to a young boy was his need to be as loved by the fathere as the young boy. Doesn’t love take its strange ways?
The above image is a copy from Jeffrey’s book Not quite Straight where he referres to Simon as his ‘lover’. How much ‘lover’ they were, Jeffrey Smart and the boy, is shown in the book Absence where the relationship between the two doctors to be, Simon PhD after 19 years, and Jeff an honorary doctor when he was over ninety. Now, Jeff was over forty and Simon still a teenager. He had recently finished his ‘baccalaureate’ and spent two months for observations in the Paychiatric ward at a children’s hospital.
The relationship between the two was friendly and polite but covered with banter relating to the sexual interest from Jeff and a lack of interest from Simon. However, the boy admired the old artist for his wit, his work in radio broadcasting, and on TV. Not to mention his great experience in the kitchen, in life, and with sex.
Justin O’Brian managed his relationships with young teenagers differently from Gosse Lane. Dr Lane consumed one young boy after the other. Justin kept his young lovers for many years, at least twice of them during a lifetime. Here is Justin with Brian Dunlop in Rome in 1968, about fifteen years after their sexual relationship began, when Brian was fourteen or fifteen years old and one of Justin’s (talented) pupils. After ten years, Brian broke the sexual part of their relationship, but they remained close friends. Brian later became a father and an established artist, with a recognized influence from Justin’s painting.
