A Defence of Uranian Love

Edward Perry Warren's three-volume A Defence of Uranian Love, written under his pseudonym Arthur Lyon Raile and privately printed in 1928-1930, 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.