Tag: William A. Percy remembrances

I. Three Modern Trends

This essay owes its inspiration to three contemporary observations that are usually considered independently of one another, but are, as I shall argue, closely interconnected: (1) young people’s growing awareness of the environmental devastation wrought by capitalist pursuit of economic expansion as an end in itself, (2) the multiplication and unprecedented acceptance of non-reproductive paths of sexual and gender identity, and (3) an asymptotic rise in mental health problems among the young in conjunction with a decline in partnered sexual activity. From my perspective as a queer historian of ancient Greek sexuality, I would posit that the Greeks provided an early model for the avoidance of (1) and (3) by positive assimilation of (2). While every society has its own internal cultural logic, there are lessons to be drawn from how issues are addressed in other times and places.

Before turning to ancient history, let us first consider evidence concerning the three recent social developments I outline. (1) Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, threats to our environmental future have frightened the young. Substantial warming of the planet appears to be inexorable even under the most optimistic scenarios for compliance with international protocols for reduction in carbon emissions. Renewable sources of energy, far from being a solution, are affronts to the natural landscape, ecologically disruptive, inefficient, unreliable, and dependent on rare earth minerals, which can be extracted and refined only at the cost of highly toxic pollution. Even if an as yet unforeseen technological miracle were to satisfy modern civilization’s energy needs without substantial poisoning of the environment, global population increase will continue to erode natural habitat, as it is consumed to provide more housing, agricultural production, and economic growth demanded by the populace of both developed and developing nations. Although expanding population is seldom discussed openly as the cause of the world’s environmental maladies, any serious effort to reduce the human footprint on the planet needs to acknowledge the finitude of the Earth’s carrying capacity. By 2050, world population is projected by the UN to increase almost 30% to 9.8 billion,ⁱ and stabilization, much less reduction, of human demands upon the Earth seems hopelessly out of reach, short of coercive demographic restrictions like China’s now abandoned one-child policy.

(2) Whether consciously or unconsciously, young people in advanced industrial societies have responded to these bleak prospects by deferring marriage and childbirth or opting out of reproductive sexuality altogether. According to World Bank data, the fertility rate in the US, UK, and Australia is below replacement level at 1.6 per woman, lower in most continental European countries, and lowest in wealthy and densely populated Asian jurisdictions like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore.ⁱⁱ While this is a source of concern to right-wing nationalist factions, the trend should be celebrated by all who seek environmental sustainability. Equally welcome is the growing adoption of LGBTQ identities by younger cohorts in the West: according to Gallup, 20.8% of Americans born 1997-2003, 10.5% of those born 1981-1996, compared to far lower numbers in earlier generations.ⁱⁱⁱ This should not be attributed just to the increasing social acceptance of non-heterosexual identities, which would result in an equal willingness to so identify regardless of age. It also cannot be attributed to more gay sex, as those rates are down for the young and many adopt the labels, especially the more amorphous “queer,” without ever having had an actual same-sex experience.^iv It more likely reflects resistance to the traditional procreative family paradigm and its freedom-compromising strictures, as if the organic response of a species that senses its own degradation through excessive multiplication.

(3) Despite a degree of general prosperity, tolerance of sexual and gender diversity, and de-stigmatization of mental health challenges that is unprecedented in modern Western history, young people, including the LGBTQ, are unhappy and suffering mental anguish at record levels, as attested by suicide rates and standardized measures of depression and anxiety.^v It is popular to blame social media, but much of the rise in these measures pre-dates its advent, and studies are inconclusive whether excessive attention to social media is a cause or effect of mental health problems or even correlative at all.^vi Some psychologists have associated poor mental health with young people’s sense that they have too little autonomy or control over the most important aspects of their personal lives.^vii Despair over our collective inability to save the Earth or stop war, famine, homelessness, crime, and inequality is only part of what ails the young.

Teens’ lack of autonomy and ability to control their destiny haunts them on a more primal level. Children experience the powerful onrush of puberty at ever younger ages and are exposed to ubiquitously sexualized media, including easy access to hard-core pornography online, but actual real-world experience is criminalized (up to the age of 18 in progressive California, with no like-age exceptions, and very strict legal rules for establishing explicit verbal consent among college students). Whereas the youth revolution of the 1960s and 70s envisioned young people’s sexual liberation and independence of bourgeois norms, the media and educational discourse of sex that has confronted young people in the last four decades has been a cascading torrent of terror, risk, and trauma: “stranger danger,” AIDS, child sex trafficking rings, Satanic cults abusing children in day-care centers, therapeutically induced “recovered memories” of abuse by one’s own parents, online predators lurking in chatrooms, pedophile priests, coaches, and Scoutmasters, widespread sexual harassment and rape on campus and at work. Some of these, like AIDS, were real problems at one time, but are now largely treatable and preventable. Others, like the campus rape “epidemic,” are limited problems exaggerated by media sensationalism based on tendentious studies generalizing from biased convenience samples.^viii Others, like Satanic cults and QAnon, are mass delusions. Alarmed by this array of real and imagined threats, parenting during this period has become intensely protective: according to one study, 46% of parents restricted younger children’s outdoor play and mobility due to exaggerated fears of “child predators.”^ix Among all Western countries, the US ranked highest in parental anxiety, with 62% of parents agreeing with the statement “I feel I need to be over-protective of them in this world.”

Letting minors adopt a sexual or gender identity becomes an acceptable substitute for actual experience that might help them test or discover their identity, but in other respects formal sex education today is as conservative and admonitory as it ever was: “you aren’t old enough and don’t have enough judgment to do this safely.” Lessons about sex as an instrument for creating mutual pleasure and personal growth are absent from this curriculum. It should not surprise us that young people, whatever their professed identity, are gaining less real-life sexual experience and self-confidence compared to their age-peers in earlier generations. The effect on young males is particularly severe, with an ever lower proportion choosing to attend college, more failing to launch, and many finding a community of fellow losers in the bottomless abyss of online gaming or the toxic swamp of “incel” culture.

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II. The Greek Model

Greece was fairly unique among ancient Mediterranean cultures in judging men’s worth by memory of their individual and collective accomplishments rather than the number of their offspring. The Greeks were acutely aware that the poverty of their soil, mountainous terrain, and aridity of the summer climate could only sustain a limited population. Hesiod, one of our earliest extant poets, composed a didactic poem on agricultural life, and explicitly advised men to delay marriage until the age of 30 and avoid having more than one son, lest the brothers quarrel and the estate be divided into unsustainable fractions. The Athenian lawgiver Solon also designated the 30s as the right age for a man to marry, and this appears to have been the norm for most Greek states in the archaic and classical periods, with the exception of the late fifth-century BCE, when Athens was at the height of its mercantile empire and had acute manpower needs due to losses from plague and war.

Late marriage did not, however, necessitate sexual abstinence for young males. The same Solon who advised late marriage also made provision for low-cost state-sponsored brothels that could satisfy the needs of young men of all economic classes. Unmarried youths also had the option of courting and establishing romantic/sexual relations with other men or adolescents. Aristotle (Politics 2.10) connects the origin of male same-sex relations with the legendary Cretan lawgiver’s prescribing the social isolation of women and men’s dining with other men apart from their wives; he says the specific goal was that the women not bear too many children. That these relations extended to adolescent boys needs to be understood in the demographic context of a system where only about 50% of boys reaching 18 still had a living father, since Greek men married late and died early (particularly in times of war).^x In a culture where learning advanced arts and professions was done by individual instruction rather than institutions, the texture of relations between older and younger males was often one of pedagogical mentorship and encouragement in public arenas of vigorous masculine competition: athletics, hunting, cock-fighting, drinking, clever conversation, musical performance, politics, oratory, philosophy, and even war.

Within the unique cultural logic of the Greek demographic system, same-sex relations were socially functional by instilling a strong competitive ethos and self-confidence in young men, whether adolescents vying for the attention and approval of adult role models whom they admired, or young adults competing to win the favor and company of a particularly beautiful and promising adolescent. But as Foucault has emphasized, adolescence was also a time of testing the discretion and wisdom of a boy’s choices in company and deportment, and intemperate sexual behavior as a youth could later be used as grounds of political attack.^xi That pederastic relations were particularly common among boys and youths of the leisured upper classes suggests that they were not motivated by an impulse to prey upon the weak and vulnerable, although there is some evidence that a wealthy and well-connected lover could offer his younger partner a path to social advancement that might not otherwise be available to him.

Greek pederasty was not without its contemporary critics, but it never occurred to them that such associations were psychologically harmful to adolescents in virtue of being “unequal” or featuring a “power imbalance.” If anything, a desirable younger partner was considered to have the upper hand in manipulating a love-stricken admirer, as reflected by the laments of love poets about boys’ inconstancy and the frequent scenes of both gift-giving and rejection depicted in Greek vase painting. Plutarch relates that the young aristocrat Alcibiades’ older lovers put up with outrageous treatment at his hands. The criticism of pederasty was rather that it corrupted some boys by giving them an unfair advantage, training them to feel entitled and become meretriciously acquisitive, manipulative, too prone to bribery, and overly ambitious in politics. The comic poet Aristophanes said that the majority of the city’s most prominent politicians and intellectual leaders were euruprôktoi (literally, “wide-assed” in virtue of taking a receptive role in anal intercourse when younger). Non-consensual assault of a boy was an outrage that merited either human or divine vengeance, but there is no evidence that consensual relations were anything but beneficial in a culture that aestheticized the developing male physique and accorded pederastic relations positive social reinforcement. Arguably, by allowing men to avoid the burdens associated with supporting a family until they were older and financially established and by engaging masculine energies toward molding the next generation of men, same-sex relations contributed to the unique intellectual and cultural productivity that distinguished Greece from its contemporary neighbors.

Greek society usually dealt with female sexuality by arranging early marriage (early teens for the upper-class girls with generous dowries) to older husbands. Like pederasty, heterosexual marriage linked an adolescent’s sexual development to guidance by a more experienced partner. In most respects, Greek practice does not provide a good model for female happiness and fulfillment, but it should be noted that the most gender-egalitarian society among the Greeks was that of Sparta, where women were conditioned from an early age to be as much like men as possible: unsentimental, unemotional, bold, physically fit, unashamed of naked exercise in front of young men, and encouraged to ridicule any young men whom they perceived as weak or cowardly. Spartan women, not men, were supreme in matters of household and estate governance and often accumulated considerable property in their own name. Since Spartiate men lived in a state of semi-permanent military mobilization, marital bonds were relatively weak and women could enjoy separate relationships with men other than their husbands. We are also told that a version of female pederasty was practiced in Sparta, initiating girls into the mysteries of love and sex much as Sappho did in 7^th century Lesbos.

Greek science also recognized a spectrum of gender diversity that was biologically determined by the mixture of seed at the moment of conception (Parmenides, fr. 18; Hippocrates, On Regimen 1.28-29): some men were soft and feminine, some women were bold and self-assertive like men, some men hyper-masculine heroes, some women of exceptional beauty and grace, and most just average.

So to summarize, ancient Greece provides the model of a vigorous, successful culture in its time, that eventually (under Alexander) came to influence the entire Eastern Mediterranean and ultimately Rome. For most of its history, it maintained a population in stable balance with its natural environment through demographic strategies that encouraged non-procreative sexual alternatives and limited procreation within marriage, with colonization as a relief valve any time the population outstripped local capacity. Young males in particular were from adolescence exposed to invitations by sex workers, older men, and their peers, and were entrusted with the self-determination and judgment to consent or not consent. Our sources give no evidence that this relative sexual freedom harmed them, as long as they avoided socially disruptive adultery with another man’s wife.

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III. Can Adolescents Consent?

While the political and economic determinants of our contemporary environmental crisis are well understood, the sources of the present sexual and mental health malaise among young people are less clear. How, when, and why did sexual activity come to be policed and criminalized until young people were of an age to provide independent financial support of children they might procreate? In the US and most European states, the age of consent was in the range of 10 to 12 for most of history; in 1885 Victorian reformers, alarmed by sensationalist reports of factory girls being exploited in “white slavery” rings, induced Parliament to raise the age to 16 in Britain and Ireland, and in the US the Women’s Christian Temperance Union added an age of consent of 18 to its platform of moral reformation, along with prohibitions on alcohol, gambling, sex work, and a variety of other “social purity” issues. By appearing to make it safer for rural girls to migrate to cities and work in factories, these mainly elite and middle-class Protestant reformers evaded the real problems of economic inequality that necessitated child labor to feed a rapidly industrializing economy. In practice, they were more concerned to curtail population growth and out-of-wedlock births among poor immigrant and African-American populations; their goals were often explicitly eugenicist, but they in practice found allies in socially conservative immigrant populations themselves, accustomed to arranged marriages and patriarchal control of daughters’ bodies. In the same period, vague laws on disorderly conduct and vagrancy were used to incarcerate unmarried women of any age whose behavior was deemed morally suspect. However, even at the height of this Progressive Era crackdown on vice, the age of consent laws did not pertain to males, except to use the threat of prosecution to compel any young man responsible for a pregnancy to marry the girl.

That age of consent laws came to apply to “protection” of males at all was more a result of historical accident in the US than consciously designed policy based on scholarly research concerning male sexual development.^xii The push for gender neutral language in legal statutes beginning in the 1970s had the effect of imposing on male adolescents a regime of paternalistic regulation originally designed to police adolescent females and discourage premature pregnancy. In the face of AIDS and moral panics spurred by a tiny handful of actual pedophile abductions (and even more lurid fantasies implanted by ideologically-fixated child therapists, given credence by mass media at the time), more stringent regulation of sexuality was demanded in the 1980s by newly ascendent religious conservatives and some elements of the feminist Left, both of which approached the issue based on emotion rather than sound social science.^xiii Having no votes, teenagers were the ones who lost their rights to sexual citizenship, supposedly in the name of their own protection, even if the forces of repression lost the battles to ban adult sleaze.

European states took a different approach. At the same time that US states were raising ages of consent and extending the reach and severity of laws on statutory rape, most of Europe avoided the false premise that adolescents cannot “consent,” but instead focused on ages below which the law would provide special protections against exploitation, with authorities becoming involved only if a young person complained. Non-judgmental sex education and routine provision of contraception to girls after menarche have worked far better in giving EU countries lower rates of teen pregnancy and STI infection than the US approach of criminalizing teenage sexual behavior. Indeed, lower ages of consent and liberal attitudes in European countries do not correlate with earlier first intercourse,^xiv but they do correlate with lower rates of youth suicide.^xv Cultures that trust the young with more capacity for independence and judgment tend to see healthier behaviors from them.

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IV. A Leftist Sexual Agenda

To demand of hormone-surging adolescents years of sexual discipline, deferral, and self-denial is an anthropological abnormality: most human societies either practice early marriage of females or allow some license for adolescent experimentation either with each other or with more experienced young adults.^xvi As a developmental strategy, sexual repression matches the demands of a late capitalist economy for an obedient workforce whose persistence has been tested by years of post-secondary certification, supported in the US not as a universal right, but often through infantilizing submission to the continuing dominance of the patriarchal family even over adult children. What began as a legal effort to suppress teenage pregnancy in an era when safe and reliable biomedical technologies for doing so did not yet exist has metamorphosed into state repression of even non-procreative experimentation and intimacy, anathematized in countless federally-funded studies as undesirable “risk behaviors.” The banishment of risk is driven by an assumed teleology of ultimate fulfillment only in a “serious” monogamous relationship, which is itself deferred to a time dictated by the rewards of conformity to the capitalist economy. Parental and state anxiety to protect the young from all risk conditions them to accept surveillance, control, and denial of the most basic form of bodily autonomy.

However, as Freud observed in Civilization and Its Discontents, this extended repression and deferral comes at tremendous psychic cost. A “liberatory” sexual ethics de-coupled from economic constraints, as envisioned by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), seemed briefly capable of realization in assorted youth, feminist, gay, and counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, only to be quashed by multiple forces of regression in subsequent decades.

The modern Left can recuperate this earlier revolutionary energy only by abandoning its allegiance to exhausted and fundamentally reactionary victimological tropes surrounding sexuality and returning to bold advocacy of basic principles of personal autonomy. The rights of all young persons who are biologically mature enough to feel sexual desire should be acknowledged: these should include the rights to consensual association with partners of their choice, to free and confidential access to contraception, abortion, and pre-exposure prophylaxis, to comprehensive sex education including the full range of orientations and gender creativity as well as training in how to ask for and assert consent, and to a general recognition that the primary goal of sexuality should be shared pleasure and loving community, not reproduction to perpetuate stale paradigms of consumerist family life amid perpetual economic growth.

At the same time, a just polity also needs to acknowledge limits to sexual freedom when it conflicts with a legitimate community interest in preserving the freedoms of others. All citizens should be free from sexual violence or exploitation by those in positions of professional or political control. However, progressives should embrace systems of restorative justice in such cases, rather than continuing to feed the maw of the carceral state based on the myth that sexual offenders are incorrigible deviants who must be permanently exiled from society.^xvii

Similarly, reproductive freedom need not include the right to create so many children that the carrying capacity of the physical environment and the social welfare state become overburdened. Maintaining quality of life should take precedence over the quantity of life. The Left may need to reconsider policies that award more tax or welfare benefits to families with more children, or those that encourage mass immigration from high-fertility, low-consumption economies into low-fertility, high-consumption economies. Environmental threats are global and must be addressed through aggressive programs of family planning, LGBTQ rights, and sustainable development worldwide, rather than allowing authoritarian regimes in failed states to maintain order by exporting their unemployed to feed the demand for cheap, non-unionized labor in first-world countries that are already struggling with excessive population density and fraying structures of social support.

 

Remarks given by Andrew Lear at Bill Percy’s memorial gathering in the Fens in Boston, December 10, 2022

Bill Percy was a big personality: to use a phrase he might not have liked, he was a great example of someone who “lived large.” Bill was extremely energetic (sometime perhaps compulsive) and self-dramatizing, and the self he dramatized was often created by contrast with sides of society that would limit people’s freedom. That is to say that Bill was a contrarian. But he was a contrarian with joie de vivre. He loved having other people around, he loved to argue with them. And he clearly enjoyed provoking them into argument – and never took it personally, even if they had conniption fits at him.

A lot of people now – to make clear what I am saying – think of Bill as right-wing. He said a lot of racist things over the years, defended the Old South (of which he presented himself as the heir), had right-wing friends that no-one else would invite to dinner, and supported Donald Trump (though not after January 6th, by the way, for those who didn’t know him at the end). But first of all, Bill always said pro-Trump things with a twinkle in his eye. He loved having anti-Trump friends to spar with; in fact, I think he liked best to have the right-wing and left-wing over at the same time, to let them argue with each other. But to understand all this, you have to know that Bill started off on the political left. He had some experience as a young man of the KKK, and he hated it. He fought for desegregation in the 1960s, along with opposing the Vietnam war. And he always hated religious fundamentalism. In short, Bill had a troubled relationship with the South. I think that he started to play up his Southernness when he was at prep school in Massachusetts, as a way of provoking his Yankee friends. It was only long afterward, when the gay rights movement was well underway, and the left veered off in a prudish direction, that Bill started protesting, or embodying a protest, against the left.

Because above all, Bill stood for freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of sexuality. He lived for a long time as a gay man in world in which gay white men were discriminated against, had to hide his sexuality (until he was over 50!) and possibly suffered the effects of discrimination himself. And unlike more conformist personalities, he continued even after gay white men became fairly acceptable to make common cause with other sexual outlaws, defending (as we probably all know) what he called “the six P’s” (later seven, then eight): promiscuity, public sex, pornographers, paraphernalia (i.e. sex-toys), prostitution, and pederasty. This was not because these were characteristic of Bill’s own sexuality, but because he felt that people were being oppressed by prudery and laws based on it.

In fact, Bill brought together all of his sides – his high energy, his insistence on freedom, his provocativeness, and his gregariousness and generosity – into the fight for sexual freedom, which was the core of his concerns from the 1990s, when he wrote a book about ancient Greek pederasty, to the foundation of the William A. Percy Foundation in the 2010s. He also brought these together in personal acts of generosity toward those who were suffering because of the oppressive sexual regime, and I will conclude by introducing you to Tom Kenny, who wants to speak to you about Bill’s generosity.

by James Dubro

I first met Bill Percy in the early 1990s at an afternoon high tea at the venerable Boston Atheneum library and museum on Beacon Street where he had been a longtime trustee. I was introduced by Joe McGrath, a longtime mutual friend, who told me that Bill was a very eccentric history professor and classics scholar at the University of Massachusetts as well as a very successful real estate entrepreneur and Boston landlord. At the time he was publicly offering a reward of $10,000 to anyone who could credibly “out” an American Catholic cardinal or a sitting US Supreme Court justice. I was intrigued by Percy as an older gay gent with his wild-eyed brand of gay activism at a time when outing anyone as gay was highly politically incorrect. But when I got to really know him over the years he was always a warm, gracious, generous gentleman with a ready wit and a dark sense of humor. He loved talking about everything from fresh perspectives and he had a voracious appetite for good racy gossip about friends and enemies. Since I live in Toronto and he in Boston he’d call me regularly the past few years about every week or so for a long talk. It was always a great delight to chat with him on the phone about politics, recent gay activist developments, Percy foundation business, and the lives & movements of our many mutual friends (increasingly of late to mourn recently deceased mutual friends who have been dying off at an alarming rate).

I shall very much also miss his great company and luncheons in Boston at his large, bookish, eclectically-furnished South End townhouse. But alas there will be no more fun chatty conversations. Rest in peace Bill – your life was indeed a blessing for many of us. You’ll be sorely missed.

by Avi Eindorot

Friends and causes in common meant that sooner or later I’d end up at Bill Percy’s salon. It was a place I would frequent over four decades whenever I was in Boston. Percy’s stately apartments were in his once-slum, now-chic South End brownstone. East Concord Street never shook off all its former grit – post-1980s gentrification couldn’t stop its being half a block from Boston’s public hospital and near its open-air opioid market. Yet venturing through Percy’s impossibly heavy front doors one passed via wormhole into antebellum splendor and hauteur. Percy’s rooms were chockablock with an English country home’s worth of bric-à-brac arrayed floor to ceiling.

Bill reigned here, impresario of an international salon, a plexus of diverse demimondes and intellectual margins variably obscure, cutting-edge, and cranky. At any given weekly Tuesday brunch one might find militant gay activists, writers taking time out from their garrets, ex-cons and the lawyers who helped cut their shackles, priests both frocked and nus, HIV-denialists, and academics current and cancelled and never quite launched. No one was cancelled here, but everyone was called to account with sharp questions. Those heavy front doors were always open, sometimes for months at a time, to itinerant scholars down on their luck or between jobs.

Bill presided with witty banter, cheap jug wine served in no-two-alike goblets, and excellent seafood (until Morse Fish sadly closed across from the park on Washington Street – Boston’s colonial hanging grounds). In a pinch, Bill’s partner Barry could be counted on to whip up something tasty. The price of admission was debriefing about recent projects, any fresh gossip, and inevitably some irascible needling. The reward was hearing the news and innumerable stories about Bill’s many lives and pursuits from worlds gone by – the segregationist South, all-boys Middlesex prep, postwar Princeton, and the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services.

Scion of a family of Southern gothic literary legends, Bill made his life in the North, embodying the shuttle that had knitted the United States into being. New England’s early prosperity after all owed so much to the slave trade, as did its righteous airs when Boston finally got seized by abolitionist fervor. The checkered history of overwrought Puritan principle marbled with gutsy opportunism gave Boston radical political potentials – not least in the 1970s for gay liberation, whose major scholars and activists Percy was friend, colleague, confidante, and sometimes scold.

A crossroads of regions, eras, ages, classes, and ideologies, Percy’s salon represented the fertility of gay life before it grew rainbow-flagged and picket-fenced. Beneath Percy’s taste for scandal and the outré was commitment to righting wrongs others were content to gloss over, speaking the truth as best he could, and supporting those who paid the price for doing same.

by Richard Yuill

On hearing of the passing of my good friend Bill Percy, I was caught between two very human reactions: understandable sadness on hearing the news of the death of someone close but also happiness, looking back at a life lived, including all the laughs and experiences I shared with him over the years. I would like to focus on three aspects which come to mind when reflecting on my relationship with Bill over more than 14 years.

The first was kindness. People would often refer to Bill as an old curmudgeon, yet I got to see a generosity of spirit and material help which was invaluable to me during especially difficult periods in my life. I was fortunate to stay at Bill’s “retreat” (for that was how I saw his Boston apartment) on three separate occasions: 2008, 2013 and 2015-16. During these “sabbaticals” he helped me regroup, introduced me to other like-minded fellow travelers, and during these moments I got to enjoy the delights of his many witty anecdotes.

The second was openness to new experiences. In 2015 I took Bill and his partner, Barry, to a hotpot restaurant in Boston Chinatown to meet with former Chinese students who were now studying in the U.S. He enjoyed the cuisine so much that he regularly returned to sample the delights of spicy Chinese food. He also entertained a former Shanghai student of mine, Howard in 2015, who still recounts his five days at Bill’s place as a truly wonderful life experience.

Finally, Bill’s sense of humor was truly unique. Sometimes I never knew if he was serious when conversations moved to certain subjects, but I took his bemusement at my Glaswegian accent as highly entertaining. Other times he would deliberately stir things up but would do so in a humorous way. He was certainly contrarian and politically incorrect, but these were just two qualities of many which really did make him legendary and a pleasure to have known.

by Beert Verstraete

I met Bill Percy for the first time in December 1987 at a conference, “Homosexuality: Which Homosexuality?” at the Free University of Amsterdam in a session devoted to the ancient Greek and Roman world, each of us presenting a paper there. His paper came right before mine and took up some time from the time scheduled for it. However, I didn’t mind at all, for his paper was such a performance, namely a highly rhetorical assault on John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality which was certainly right in its sharp criticism of Boswell’s soft-pedalling of the virulent homophobia, from its beginning onwards, of the Christian church. The force of Bill’s well-aimed volleys simply held me entranced. We talked briefly after our session was over but nothing more happened.

Bill and I met again exactly two years later at the annual meeting in San Francisco of the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the American Historical Association. We had dinner together and discussed, among others, what had been done so far in scholarly work, in the English-speaking world, on homosexuality in Greco-Roman antiquity. Bill was highly critical of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality – widely acclaimed for its badly needed combination of open-mindedness and high scholarly standards – which he argued showed a latent homophobia by being too focused on physical sex and ignoring the emotive dimension. He said that he had started work on a book on Greek male homoerotism which would correct this shortcoming but was afraid that because of his – as he saw it – precarious health he would not be able to finish it: would I be prepared to help him if necessary? I gladly offered my assistance but then did not hear anything for several years when, finally, in 1995 I received a letter from the University of Illinois Press saying that a Dr. William Percy had submitted a manuscript of his proposed book, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, and had suggested me as a referee. I read the manuscript carefully and wrote the publisher that while the author was not a classicist and was therefore entirely dependent on translations of the Greek texts, this study met the scholarly criteria I would expect from a book on the ancient Greek world coming from an academic publisher; however, the book might be considered highly controversial in some circles. Publication took place the following year and I was delighted to see some time later that it received a very positive commendation in a review by Paul Cartledge, the world’s leading expert on ancient Sparta, at the University of Cambridge.

Over many visits to Boston

The publication of Bill’s opus magnum – as I would call it – in 1996 marked the beginning of my friendship with Bill, and with this friendship I would also enter his wide circle of friends. I must have visited Bill at least 25 times, starting in September of that year, my last visit being in August 2019. My friend Terry from Vancouver accompanied me on that first visit and in the early 2010’s my local friend James (Jim) came with me three times – each time we drove all the way from Nova Scotia to Boston. Terry became very fond of Bill, but Jim and Bill just feasted off each other’s voluble loquaciousnes, this mutuality being further bonded by the fact that Jim was also a superb cook and in fact did just about all the cooking for one of Bill’s legendary dinner parties.

At first things did not seem auspicious for Terry and myself after we arrived in Boston late in the evening in September 1996. The taxi driver tried to cheat us by not driving us directly to our destination 39 East Concord Street, but circling around block after block, and when we made it clear we were aware of the con job he was playing on us he threatened to go to the police. We dared him to and he did then quickly comply; I think I deducted a few dollars from the fare that showed on his meter, no tip of course. Bill met us at the front door of the big Victorian house which he owned, and together we went up to his and Barry’s main apartment on the second floor. It was rather dark there; not all the lamps were turned up and with their subdued lights gleaming dully on the heavy, dark furniture, I could not help but think for a few moments that we had walked into something like the domicile of the Addams Family of former TV-series fame. However, Bill, ever the great host, sprang immediately into action. He showed us a cupboard plentifully supplied with spirits, liqueurs, and fine wines, where we could help ourselves, and prepared us a nice snack. I have always enjoyed staying with friends and family where I am encouraged to help myself and not to hesitate to rummage around in the kitchen and refrigerator: just like home! Terry and I were then shown to our sleeping quarters in the front apartment on the third floor. This was the study; it had a sofa as well as a tiny adjoining bedroom with a single bed and two heavy filing cabinets. Eventually, Bill was to join the rear apartment to his own on the third floor and place it at the disposal of his guests.

As we woke up next morning daylight was streaming through the tall windows set beneath the high-ceiling, and as the morning moved along I began to appreciate more and more the unique interior décor qualities of Bill’s apartment, especially the main part on the second floor: the large sitting room, where Barry slept and the big TV was located, the equally large dining room, the ever-so-tiny kitchen with standing room for only two persons, the two minuscule bathrooms, and finally the large bedroom at the rear where Bill slept and the perpetually turned on TV showed the ticker-tape Dow Jones updates streaming across its screen: yes, Bill had made himself independently wealthy, not dependent only on his professor’s salary. Amusedly I’d describe the interior décor as a whole as eclectic bohemian, some of which, though, did give me real aesthetic pleasure: lots of antique or near-antique furniture, classical Greek wall relief sculptures – reproductions of course – objets d’art, genuine or faux, and lots of bric-a-brac. By far my favorite art work was a magnificent painting, done in the 1920s, of Bill’s great-aunt Wilma. Books everywhere of course. Clutter there certainly was. A lot of kitchen supplies had to be housed on shelves and in cupboards in the narrow hallway outside the kitchen, and most egregiously of all, produce from greengrocers and farm markets – to which I often accompanied Bill when he still did this kind of shopping himself – was sitting in baskets on the floor of the dining room along with one-gallon bottles of cheap wine. I came to relish the color, the Dickensian eccentricity and exuberance of it all, so different from the Dutch bourgeois alles moet netjes zijn (“everything has to be neat”) milieu in which I grew up as a boy.

Thanks to my numerous visits I really got to know and love Boston. What a grand beautiful city steeped in history! Usually, I would set out to explore myself. But especially in my early visits I benefited from the company of Bill and occasionally of Barry, and was also joined by my friends and fellow guests. Terry, Glenn (for one visit in 1997), and James. Terry was very generous in inviting me to join him in his travels outside Boston, taking me in 1996 to Provincetown – I loved the boat trip – and later in 2003 we did New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore by rail. I had visited New York and Philadelphia before with my past partners Brian and Scott, but Baltimore – which at the last moment we substituted for Washington, where both of us had been before – was a quite a revelation, a rather poor city in comparison with the other seaboard grandees but blessed with an impressive waterfront. Boston itself had so much offer: its great two art museums, the Boston Museum of Fine Art (which I would rank only a little notch below New York’s Metropolitan Museum), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (with its magnificent Botticellis), Copley Square, iconic churches, grand streets and boulevards, the Commons with the State House, Old Boston, the Athenaeum, Quincy Market, and beautiful historical neighborhoods like Bill’s own South End, with its block after block of meticulously restored Victorian homes.

I also explored Cambridge, on the other side of the Charles River. My friend Glenn, who joined me. actually preferred it to Boston because of what he regarded as the European atmosphere of its downtown. I found the Harvard University not as impressive as I had anticipated but admired its Civil War Memorial Hall and the three fine museums associated with the university.

When Bill was still teaching I accompanied him a few times to UMass Boston, where he treated me to lunch and introduced me to a few of his colleagues, including a congenial elderly mathematician of Hungarian background, whom he consulted on the methodology of doing statistics, a topic he felt was of relevance to the book on the age of Roman marriage he was co-authoring with me. One afternoon I also sat in on his office hours. With his students, Bill was certainly the stern disciplinarian when dealing with laziness and lack of motivation, but there was also ample patience and kindness. That same afternoon I sat in on a class of his: it was both Bill the lecturer and the provocateur, with him continually encouraging, even cajoling, his students to speak up. I once took a side-trip to the JFK Library, which was located nearby on the waterfront. It was a compelling and moving experience for me: I was 19 when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated and the tragedy of that horrific event had been imprinted forever on my mind.

A scintillating salon

Social creature that he was, Bill had a wide circle of friends in Boston but also nationally and internationally. The large majority, not surprisingly, were gay men, but there was also room for straight men and women. Two of them will always stand out in my mind. John Lauritsen, author, editor, and eventually the publisher of the Pagan Press, a graduate in classics at Harvard, was bound to make a big impression on me. Slightly older than myself, he was a gay activist in the 60s and 70s, very much to the left of center, a Trotskyite in fact, and very good-looking to boot. During the AIDS crisis – I learned this from Bill, John never brought this up himself – he gained notoriety for questioning the scientific consensus on the aetiology of the disease. His socio-political ideology also began to swing well to the right – with the big exception of his continuing sexual radicalism – with views on gun control and race relations I found deplorable, although, to his credit, he kept them largely out of conversation. He was an “aesthete,” as Bill liked to call him, blessed with an antiques-appointed Boston home – except for the messiest imaginable kitchen – which included a grand piano. He was a great cook and Bill and I were his guests several times. He was a great enthusiast of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom he claimed was bisexual and at the center of a coterie of bisexual men – he wrote a book on this subject. This enthusiasm I shared. However, I did not follow him in attributing the novel Frankenstein to Shelley rather than to his young second wife, Mary, although she herself did admit she got a good deal of help from her husband. Misogynist that John was, he believed Mary did not have the intelligence and creativity to write such an astounding work. I, however, have read Mary’s remarkable apocalyptic novel, The Last Man, and am able to say, therefore, that John was completely wrong.

I am very glad, though, that John and I corresponded off and on with each other over the years and I mourned for him when he passed away very suddenly in his home last spring. I am sad that, as far as I know, he never shared his life with a true partner and sad also that I never got around to sending him the truly magnificent poem by the Canadian poet Charles G.D. Roberts celebrating the centenary of Shelley’s birth in 1890. Therefore, I am all the more pleased that the major collection of papers, Same–Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, of which I was the co-editor, contains a paper by him on the Shelleyan Circle.

The other friend of Bill who continues to stand out in my mind is Warren Johanssen, who boarded with Bill for several years but died well before my first visit. I became already acquainted with him, though, in the 1980s when, in a fiery article, he lambasted John Boswell’s 1980 book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, for soft-pedalling the medieval Catholic Church’s hostility to homosexuality – I had already found some bad inaccuracies in that part of the book which looked at the political and social history of ancient Rome. Warren, a phenomenal multilingual scholar, was of enormous assistance to Bill in his research, as Bill himself always generously underlined.

There was a constant coming and going of people at 39 East Concord Street: friends and acquaintances dropping by, dinner guests, cleaning ladies, secretaries who were usually also his ever-needed typists – and who eventually morphed into the people working Bill’s computer – tenants, tradesmen, and, during his final years, personal care workers. Being the ultimate people person, Bill fully relished all this hustle and bustle – he would have been a most unhappy solitary man. Even when I went to a walk with him to go shopping or sat with him in the nearly small park, which was adorned by a delightfully good-sized fountain, the need to socialize was never absent. The park was bordered by a large low-income housing complex whose residents were mostly black; these, too, Bill drew into his orbit with a friendly greeting and, sometimes, a little chat. Yes, one might sense at times a bit of condescension there. but it came with a kindly demeanor that came naturally with Bill’s being, after all, a Southern Gentleman, an integral part of his unique charm that never deserted him. I should mention his dogs: during the 23 years of my visits, he had three in succession: Pete, Jack, and Missie. He was very fond of each of them and they always accompanied him on his walks. Regretfully, after Missie passed on and with his failing health, dogs could be no longer a part of his life, but a somewhat reclusive large cat stayed on.

Bill started his academic career as a medievalist. A few decades I ago read the book, The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century, which he co-authored with Jerah Johnson and was published by Cornell University Press in 1970, and I remembered then that its central thesis was amply demonstrated by my native city of Zwolle, which prospered greatly in that century and saw the erection of the two large churches, the impressive architecture of which I took in almost every day when I attended my high school in the city center.

After Bill, encouraged by the Boston poet-activist Charley Shively, whom I got to know well over the years, came out of the closet, so to speak, he threw himself into the study of Greco-Roman antiquity with a heavy emphasis on how male homoerotism and homosexuality fared in its societies and cultures. This finally issued into what I have already called his opus magnum, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, and it got him going anew in the lecture circuit. He was a guest speaker at my university in 1997, staying at my place and meeting my friends some of whom, especially June and her Indo-Canadian husband Nirmal, invited him to their home, were really taken in by his charm as the perfect Southern Gentleman. His lecture was well received by his open-minded audience who had, on the whole, a typically Nova Scotian appreciation for Bill’s style of humorous bonhomie. One catty question, though, “What benefit did those Greek boys really get from sex with adult men?” – this is only my paraphrase omitting the vulgarities – coming from an always outspoken woman, an adult student in the classics program. Bill sailed around it beautifully. He outdid himself in the lecture he gave at the 1998 annual meeting of the Classical Association of Canada in Ottawa: about halfway through his presentation, he departed from his script and launched into a vivid foray of his erotic appetite as a boy already well versed in the art of cruising, with a particular predilection for sailors. There was a half-audible gasp from his audience and Bill got the publicity he always craved; as he said, in a slightly different context, a bad review is better than new no review at all.

Age of marriage in Rome

I am proud I played a major role in the research and writing of The Age of Marriage in Rome, published in 2002, in which I was a co-author with Bill and his former graduate student, Arnold Lelis. It was Bill who seized upon the book’s topic, for he was troubled by the fact that in the 1980s the long existing scholarly consensus on this subject – namely, a very early age of marriage for both Roman women and men – was overturned. In this view, this state of affairs applied only to the upper classes where indeed it was supported by the literature, which, however, reflected only the views and the social mores of the upper strata of Roman society. For the practices of the lower classes, the scholars turned to epigraphic evidence, of which there was a huge amount, namely tomb inscriptions from which they gleaned and interpretated the numerous data which, so they claimed, supported their view, namely that Roman women married not quite as young as the older scholarship held, that is, in their early and mid-teens but rather in their late teens. Their conclusion, however, on the age of marriage of Roman men outside the elite classes was far more radical: Roman men married not in their late teens or early twenties but in their late twenties and early thirties. Utterly wrong and completely at odds, as Bill liked to emphasize, with the pro-natalist views and practices of Roman society from the Early Republic onwards. In its interpretation of the epitaphic evidence, the new scholarship started off from basic assumptions which were seriously flawed, and we showed how these could and should be corrected in order to support the older scholarship. We did not win over the supporters of the new consensus — these included very eminent scholars — I guess there was too much at stake for their academic reputations. However, one review in Phoenix, the journal of the Classical Association of Canada, while rather negative and indulging in a lot of what I’d call nit-picking, did allow that the current and well established views on the subject were in need of re-examination. Even better, Luuk de Ligt, an expert on Roman social history at the University of Leiden, was very supportive, especially on the age of marriage of Roman men, and in fact provided us with new data, from the cemeteries of Christian Rome, which confirmed our conclusion on the age of marriage of Roman men.

Two days ago I looked at the 2005 publication, which I mentioned earlier and was co-edited by Vernon Provencal, colleague of mine in classics at Acadia University, and myself, and I was still, after 17 years, very happy with the quality of its 14 papers contributed by American, Canadian, and Dutch scholars and ranging across the width of the Greco-Roman World, including four papers which took the reader into the reception of Greek and Roman same-sex desire and love in the later West; for three of the latter Bill had introduced me to the authors. Within a few years after the start of my visits to him, Bill, like the true, stubborn mentor, he was, had encouraged, even prodded me to write the definitive book on Roman homosexuality he claimed I had within me, flattering me by saying I was the world’s greatest expert on the subject – flattery indeed since I had only a couple of published papers and some book reviews on the subject to my credit. However, any ambition I had might have had in that direction was pre-empted anyway by the publication in 1999 of Craig William’s excellent Roman Homosexuality, and I was happy with the step I eventually took towards the major project I was in charge of together with Vernon.

I will not dwell at length here on the two near-debacles in publication which started with the near-cancellation of the 2005 book by the Haworth Press and was followed four years later by the nearly fatal obstacles that beset the publication of its sequel, Censoring Sex Research: the DebateOover Male Intergenerational Realities. I was mightily relieved, therefore, when Tom Hubbard, blessed as he was with his sure-footed experience in the worlds of American academe and publishing, joined me as co-editor and eventually secured publication with the Left Coast Press in 2013, and in addition also took care of the final editorial work. During these years of trial and tribulation I developed a healthy appreciation for a scholarship that does not hesitate to be socially engaged and thus is willing to run the risks of controversy, even bitter controversy, and to defy the onslaughts of calumny and willed ignorance. Bill did so in his own unique style, and later on Tom, thanks to his coolheadedness and his superb organizational skills, could look at his own victories and achievements. It is good to leave the scholar’s proverbial Ivory Tower lest it become your prison.

Bill as a historian

A few more comments on Bill as a historian. For Bill doing history was, above all, telling a story, and in order to do this effectively one must choose an appropriate style, and for him this had to be a style and manner of elegance, free as much as possible from academic jargon and abstraction: after all, history is about individuals and the societies and cultures created by them. Thus it is not altogether surprising that Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University, in his positive review of Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, which I have already mentioned, commented favourably on Bill’s writing like a Victorian gentleman – and, I would add, like a Southern gentleman. This quality, attractive certainly to myself even if somewhat old-fashioned, will immediately strike any reader of Bill’s 1996 opus magnum and of the lengthy lead-in paper he contributed to the 2005 collection of papers published by the Haworth Press. We must not forget, though, that, thanks to his years of graduate study, one year of which was spent in Italy and culminated in his doctoral dissertation on taxation in a medieval Italian kingdom, he also acquired the virtue of careful, meticulous scholarship, as shown, for instance, in the fact that he was always au courant with the existing scholarship on the subject under consideration. This scholarly strength, in combination with Bill’s capacity for sound, common-sense judgment, could lead him to illuminating insights: I have already shown that Bill was absolutely right in seeing that the current views on the age of marriage in ancient Rome were in flagrant contradiction to the strong pro-natalism of that society, and I must also call attention to his convincing solution, in the aforementioned 2005 paper, of the puzzling fact that in the course of the 5^th century B.C.E pederastic scenes were to disappear from from Athenian painted tableware pottery.

I must add a half-comical foot-note here. Bill told me once that he wanted to write a paper, “Sappho Was a Man,” to be put on his website, along with a flashing light in order in order to attract the attention of browsers: “this will really get the lesbitarians riled up.” Wacky and mischievous, of course – but with a substratum of — admittedly speculative — truth: Sappho was almost certainly a historical figure but would have composed her poems orally for idem circulation and transmission, for hers was still an almost completely oral society and culture, and this state of affairs was to last for generations. Her poetry, therefore, entered the creative oral-culture mainstream in which male symposia were also immersed; there is no reason, therefore, to exclude the possibility that at these occasions, too, the Sapphic corpus was embroidered upon and indeed enlarged. The great Athenian dramatists of the fifth century B.C.E. were to demonstrate that Greek men were capable able, in their art, of exploring and portraying the outer and inner lives of women.

Final thoughts

I am concluding with some recollections and observations based mainly on face-to-face and telephone conversations with Bill, all these leading up to the setting up less, than a decade ago, of the Foundation named after him. Bill was very fond of the adjective “elegant,” which he bestowed on individuals, families, and households which obviously met his criteria of culture and good taste embodied in the epithet. A bit of social class prejudice obviously came to the fore here, although I must again emphasize that Bill got along conspicuously well with people of the working classes. Did I meet this standard? If so, my ranking in this respect must have shot up even more when I told Bill my uncle Herman, my dad’s youngest brother, had served for many years in the Dutch diplomatic service. Bill always admired my gift for diplomacy, which I somehow combined with being “fearless,” as he put it. Maybe Herman and I shared certain genes in which this gift was encoded. There was also the idiosyncrasy of Bill’s love of gossip – actually not all that exceptional since I have met my share of straight men who were very good at it. Having spent much of my life at a small-town university, where gossip is, not surprisingly, endemic, although not so much now since most people there seem to spend most of their lives behind the computer, I never saw much malice in it: it was more like entertainment, like that provided by a TV sitcom, to liven up humdrum lives.

I won Bill over once in persuading him – I Latinist, he the Hellenist – in a lengthy outburst of alcohol-fuelled eloquence, that Roman was by no means inferior to ancient Greek literature, expounding as I did on the unique emotive qualities of Roman love poetry, which was one of my academic specialties. He, on the other hand, won me over with his argument that the South should have been allowed to secede from the Union; in actual fact, as I began to see, the American Civil War was a war of secession, not a real civil war like, like the Russian or the Spanish Civil War of the past century. Lincoln and the Northern states fought the war, in their own words, to preserve the Union; the abolition of slavery was only the inevitable result of the North’s victory. I have always been fascinated by counterfactual history, fictionally answering the question, “What if?” However, I recognize that if secession had been allowed the North would certainly have rescinded the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and so North and South would have been embroiled in serious, perhaps even conflict, anyway. The upshot of it all was that slavery was on the way out in the Western world – the British Empire had abolished it in 1833 – and the South would have been increasingly pressured to follow suit; I believe it would have done so well before Brazil abolished it in 1886. I speculate it would have been far more acceptable to the white South in that case and, as a great boon to the blacks, there might have been much less of the degradation of blacks in the Jim Crow of the post-Reconstruction South.

Bill had very decided social and political views, being a traditional Republican insisting on small government and low taxes. By contrast, my views are of the social-democratic order, a fact obviously stemming from my Dutch and Canadian background. In addition, Bill was an almost big-style landlord and thus the apartments at 39 East Concord Street were rented out as capitalist investments, alongside those in the stock market. They were not available to prospective tenants within the context of a social-economic policy of subsidized rents for low-income people, so Bill, while being a conscientious landlord who kept his apartments in good order, charged the going rate for rents in a an admirably restored but very expensive neighbourhood. Bill learned most definitely what my views were, but he never harangued me about them and maybe even respected them; his fundamental open-mindedness also revealed itself here.

Finally, there was the big, big issue of pedophilia. Bill and I were utterly agreed on the calamity of the pedophilia panic that had been sweeping the world since the late 20^th century and the gross injustices, even barbarities, it inflicted on gay sex offenders, who once released from prison, were still not rid of the injustice but were treated as pariahs by society. (Bill here showed his capacity for practical benevolence by giving major financial assistance, in the form of substantial loan with good terms, to three young men, who were thereby enabled to set themselves up in a business of home repair and improvement.) It was not surprising, therefore, that a circle of Bill’s friends, led by Tom Hubbard, began to coalesce towards a more organized and articulated fight for the badly needed reforms in the especially cruel American judicial and penal system, and this led to the formation, within the past decade, of the Foundation named after Bill. I am happy to think that the William A. Percy Foundation was already making gains, small though they still were – I am thinking here of the book service to prisoners, prisoner surveys, various small research projects, and now, very recently, the hiring of a professional criminologist – before Bill passed on.

When I received the news of Bill’s death I was of course deeply saddened, but the mourning was offset by thoughts of consolation – Bill had lived to a ripe old age surrounded by friends and blessed with conspicuous achievements as a scholar and activist – but now his passing, as the days and the weeks go by, cuts even more deeply. He was a unique friend, a true American Original, whom I will always miss dearly.

A final note: I had been concerned about Bill’s partner, Barry, but have talked with him on the phone and have been gratified to hear that he was charting a good path for himself into the future.

November 2022
New Minas, Nova Scotia

In this annus horribilis after the passing of so many friends of Bill Percy and the Foundation, it is the culmination of our sadness to announce Bill’s own glide into perpetual sleep at some point in the early morning of Sunday, October 30, 2022. The Foundation’s vice president visited him the previous day and put the phone on speaker so that he and I could talk together with Bill. Bill was resolved that he was ready to die and would not be talked out of it, and without further delay his wish was fulfilled. He had already survived much against the odds: HIV, COPD, prostate cancer, a stroke. He now felt he had no more to give us.

‘A contrarian with joie de vivre’ 
Andrew Lear 

A Generous Curmudgeon with a Twinkle in His Eye
Richard Yuill

‘A ready wit and a dark sense of humor’
James Dubro

Friend, Colleague, Confidante, and Sometimes Scold 
Avi Eindorot 

My Memories of William Armstrong Percy III 
Beert Verstraete 

I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 2002, when I was on the East Coast as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and had been invited to lecture at Boston University. I had reviewed one of his books and Bill had reviewed one of my books for the Gay & Lesbian Review. Through a mutual friend (the foundation’s vice president), Bill invited me to a party in my honor at his antique-stuffed South End townhouse. The following spring, when I was a Humboldt fellow in Berlin, Bill somehow showed up in Berlin, where he and I spent more time together, getting to know personalities as diverse as Erwin Haeberle, Arno Schmitt, and Egmont Fassbinder. Unlike me, Bill was a shameless extrovert. We quickly became friends and visited each other at least once or twice a year until the dismal days of COVID.

What impressed me about Bill was his willingness to defy political correctness and popular Zeitgeist. Opposed to a gay movement that had become corporatized and obsessed with respectability, Bill sought to reclaim the discarded and more frankly sexual elements of historical gay liberation struggles, what he called “the five P’s”: prostitution, pornography, promiscuity, pederasty, and “paraphernalia” (i.e., sex toys, poppers, other sex aids). I suggested and he readily agreed to a sixth P, which was public sex. Bill himself admitted to personal investment in only one (or maybe two) of the P’s, but what he recognized in all of them were historical aspects of gay life that had come to be swept under the rug and denied by mainstream gay media and organizations, even though they continued to play a prominent part in the lives of many gay men. With this insight was born my proposal that we form the Percy Foundation as an effort to pool the resources of the many gay men who wish to see the gay movement return to the heady liberationist goals of the 1970s, before the reactionary assimilationism and political correctness of later decades advanced limited officially recognized rights at the expense of the very qualities that made gay sex genuinely subversive and revolutionary in previous eras.

– Thomas K. Hubbard