01Oct24a LIE Screenwriter

L.I.E. Screenwriter: Homophobia Responsible for Conflation of Pedophile and Pederast

There is an interesting interview at the Website Film Freak Central with the person who wrote the script for the recent U.S. movie "L.I.E.": http://filmfreakcentral.net/notes/greatlie1.htm

The movie depicts suburban adolescence and the relationship between a 15-year-old boy and the neighborhood pederast. The title "L.I.E." is the name of the principal highway in the area, the Long Island Expressway.

The screenwriter, Stephen Ryder, says he does not endorse man/boy love but also he does not "regard gay men who have teenaged lovers as 'monstrous.' Inter-generational relationships exist in both heterosexual and homosexual spheres and have throughout history.... Elvis Presley met and fell in love with Priscilla... when she was TWELVE. By the time she was FOURTEEN, her father had given her PERMISSION to live with Elvis.... [Ryder's emphasis] Elvis Presley is on a U.S. postage stamp. No one referred to him then or now as a pedophile. Yet Big John, whose live-in lover is pushing 20, and whose current love-interests are both pushing 16 - -is a pedophile. What bullshit. It is the thinnest veneer for homophobia."

He was reacting to U.S. reviews of the movie. Many of the reviewers said they were uncomfortable since it shows a pedophile as potentially human.

The director and the lead actor (Brian Cox) made similar comments to the press. It is as if the three want to decriminalize pederasty.

One of Ryder's next projects is the film "Only Perfect", which he describes as "a Romeo & Juliet-inspired romance set in present-day Montreal, the kids being quite young (twelve-thirteen). The girl, Michelle Beaubien, is an upscale Francophone Quebecois, and the boy, Coleman Hawkins, is a poor Anglophone living in the East End.... Because this film too goes where no film has gone before (but not in the direction of sex) I have attracted the attention of one of Canada's best directors and we are conferring now on production budgeting and schedules."