Extracts from 

Michael Davidson's  

“The World, The Flesh & Myself”

 p 31.

"... I can see so that this was the beginning of an inveterate 'motherliness', the broody fussiness with which I've coddled all my boys - plaguing them about warm underclothes or changing their wet socks, and trying to 'feed them up' after they were already full. 

I suppose every true pederast’s emotional foundation is the maternalism; I know that in all my relationships, other than the most casual, I've been driven just as much by a passionate protectiveness as by sexual interest - the second, for all I know, may be an extension of the first, as a mother gets sensual pleasure out of suckling ... 

And even during actual bodily play, my pleasure - beyond the mental joy of seeing and touching, which is intense - comes from a consummate privity to his pleasure; if that's absent, the whole process seems absurd and pointless. My own orgiastic conclusion may happen as a mere afterthought, if it happens at all - that too depends on his desires. I'm seeking an analysis of my own emotional lusts because, if I've found it, it's typical I imagine of most 'normal' lovers of boys; the propulsion is pretty much that of a mare nuzzling and licking her foul."

p.46

"I rather think I was born without the capacity for religion: without the mystical gift which, surely, is the reality in religious experience. Or else I believe - and I say it in all sincerity and without blasphemous obliquity - that mysticism, for me, is a kind of distillation of sexuality; that religion, in me, seems an atavistic recrudescence of a worship of the ancient; that the deity, for me, is the principle, the mysterious 'Let there Be', of generation; and that, for me, its symbol is the phallus. 
I don't mean that I've consciously got a pet religion of my own; I'm merely trying a rough rationalization of my governing instinct. And I don't mean that what I'm seeking to describe, has anything to do, beyond an unquestionable origin in it, with physical sensation, with what's called lust, with carnal gratification; that's important too heaven knows; but in another compartment.

I'm talking about a fierce and transcending joy of the mind; a kind of spiritual gloating over a unique aspect of beauty; an experience of apprehension that I can only describe as mystical. 

The moralists will execrate, the pundits doubtless pooh-pooh me. But here I am stating, as far as I am able, the truth about myself: my highest, most intense, pleasure or happiness is of the mind; and comes from seeing, being with, touching, looking into the mind of, a boy who, emotionally, mentally, rather than bodily, is simpatico; and from visually absorbing the multiple delights of his nakedness. 

Any sexual acts which may, and generally do, accompany, follow or precede this mental joy are adjuncts - prologue or epilogue to the essential monograph of his mind."

p.52

"The sorrow of death, anyway, is a milder one than the sorrow of separation from the still-living - the cruelest of all compulsions, perhaps, in this determinist life; and one which people of my sort, peripatetic both in geography and in love, must perennially expect."

p.70

"All my life, like a child at a pantomime, I've been so agape at a new episode that I've forgotten the one before - another trait of adolescence, I suppose; and many fine friendships have withered away through my fault - my fondness hasn't diminished, but I've been too selfishly absorbed to look back, to take the trouble to write or telephone; and then as time goes on that awful sense of guilt shuts finally the door."

p.90

"Because, I suppose, my sexual objective has never been primarily physical gratification, I've never liked 'prostitutes' - people I mean, for whom the primary objective is payment.
Of course, every sexual transaction contains an element of 'prostitution' ; a girl expects a present or a seat at the pictures ;  a bride wants position or security; a young man, from his patron, male or female, hopes for a new suit; a boy needs cigarette-money or a new inner-tube for his bicycle ...
'Love', whatever its form, requires a tit-for-tat - it's a kind of natural law. But for sexual pleasure, for emotional happiness, the 'love' must come first, the honorarium second in the scale or preference. No fortuitous 'pick-up' could ever attract me unless genuine sexual interest were his first motive - or unless there were a touching need of 'mothering'."

p.91

"I've seen overt juvenile orgies that would have surprised any of our prevalent fetishists of moral welfare. What surprise them more, is the argument - not perhaps outrageous when solemnly considered - that such behaviour among the young is, in a sense, moral welfare; though doubtless not the etymon from which acquiescent social discipline derives.

The exalting freedom of nudity, solitary or in company, releases naturally - not perversely - other freedoms, of the mind, the spirit and the body. A smooth, untimid, eruption of these freedoms, as natural as an errand-boy's whistling, surely must lead to moral health (if that's what moral means); their constriction, to deformities of the spirit.
Of course, they can lead too by derivation to pretensions to further freedoms, inconvenient to whatever brand of 'law and order' obtains."

p.111

"I wanted Arcadia, an idyll of unending tenderness; and thought that 'we' - I and a boy, any boy - had merely to live together in sunlit candour for life to flourish and happiness to be infinite.

I hadn't yet learned, of course, what every paedophile has to learn - that the lifetime of his loves, if he gets any, endures no longer than his boy's beardlessness; they pay the penalty of a butterfly's freedom and, as a child out of last year's clothes, grow out of themselves.

Not rarely, these ease into friendship; but that fierce and mystic delusion which is the sexual lunacy cannot span more than three or four years at most: suddenly, overnight like an overblown flower, it is dead; the unique and magic boy has become an ordinary young man, and one can look at the curve of his cheek without feeling a pang and an ineffable joy.

Ideally, if one can use the word in so reprobated a context, the pederast is, as the Greeks knew, a pedagogue: his loves should pass in succession through his life as pupils progress through a master's class; and like the master he should see that each owes him at the end some mental or spiritual growth. But this is an ideal scarcely possible to attain, in this prying world, outside parts of Asia and the Mediterranean."

p.119

"I went to the man only once; and consciously, lying on his sofa, refrained from exposing my unconscious. Deliberately, I edited my answers; for I knew I didn't want to be cured. I don't think, through all the ups and downs of my life, despite all its humiliations and futilities, I have ever wanted my fundamental emotional nature to be different - not even when I went to prison on account of it; because if that nature, the essence of myself, were changed, than the 'I' that I know, the 'I' that is myself, would cease to exist - I'd be somebody else, a notion which is inconceivable.

One may despise oneself; one may regret one's incapacities, ugliness, weakness of mind, deformity of character; and know oneself to be rotter; but one cannot contemplate surely being a self that isn't one's own self.

I have often, during 40 or 50 years, tried to see myself as 'normal'; but the attempt has been as ineffective as searching for the end of infinity. 'He's a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else,' Samuel Butler observed. 'No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person.' So I gave that psycho-analyst no help."

p.121

"In London came a tiny occurrence, silly in itself, which gave another warning of what my heresy must bring; or rather, which made me a stage more sensible of that tumour of furtive 'guilt' that my unconformity with society was ineluctably planting in my soul - guilt, though, that I've never correlated with ethics, but with the anathema of one's fellow beings."

p.170

"I've always considered that most of the sexual actions one's nature drives one unreasonably to perform are too silly for words. Why, I ask, does one want to do such pointless things? Yet at the moment, nothing in life seems so important.

When these things are publicly described in the nerveless tone of a dusty solicitor from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and publicly ascribed to oneself, sitting in the dock under the public's goggling eye, they make one feel not only an imbecile but also a monster;  in his mouth things which seemed to one perfectly natural become horribly deformed. And that, evidently, is what's intended."

p.171

"It seems remarks like this are prompted more by hatred and fear of heresy than by a heart sorrowing for the countless innocent souls waiting to be corrupted. Sexual heresy must seem to the unswervingly loyal member of the sexual Establishment like an affront to his most recondite and 'sacred' sentiments; and at the present time particularly, when the public has suddenly become aware for the first time how widespread and various these heresies are, he must feel that they constitute a positive danger to the rightness of his sexual simplicity.

This is why, I suppose, a greater sanctity than ever seems to be given nowadays to the word 'innocence' - both by those whose blood boils when they hear of it being corrupted, and by others who confuse childhood with the first snowdrops of spring.

 'As innocent as a new-laid egg', said Samuel Butler somewhere; and that's nearer the mark than the usual comparison - the new-born babe's innocence lasts as long as its elders can artificially and unnaturally keep it swaddled, and often not nearly so long as the elders suppose: the young creature’s own bodily senses and instincts will sooner rather than later 'corrupt' it.

Sexual 'innocence', as ordinarily understood, is manifestly unnatural - true innocence, I suppose, is the natural progression of knowledge and experience with the creature's growth and understanding. But 'purity' artificially maintained by prohibition and insulation against knowledge is really disciplinary device invented by adults: and can, I'm fairly convinced from observations of its opposite, be a contributor to England's psychological chaos."

p.283

"Love, which should always be kind, can be as cruel as torture when arbitrarily wrenched apart."

p.286

"A few, perhaps, privately commented: 'Michael really is rather the limit' ; but these people were too humane, too intelligent, to look down their noses at me or treat my business as theirs; they were among the best friends I had."

p.345

"I've hardly any regrets; my unhappiness were inherent in my nature. I wouldn't have been different, not for ten City directorships; because without my unnumbered faults, I suppose, I wouldn't have had my few qualities .....  I don't believe anybody's been unhappier for knowing me, and perhaps some have been even a little happier. If that be true, I couldn't wish for a better epitaph."