Society fails to understand and recognize that male children practicing survival sex and harnessed to the commercial sex industries, are simply highly stigmatized links in the broad networks of HETEROSEXUAL transmission of HIVAIDS. The vast majority of Men Who Have Sex With Boys present themselves within their communities and families as married men with children of their own; often employing violent and derogatory language in a public forum to distance themselves from their "secret sexual desires and practices" and seeking to unjustly blame and further stigmatize responsible adult homosexuals. It is time to rip down the cultural net curtains that permits so much HURT. Is it really so embarrassing to speak of the sexual violation of young males. If so, our humanity is surely dying of embarrassment.

I now know boys doing sex work from home (low profile on the drugs). The same homes they would have been kicked out of a couple of years ago. As punishment for the crime. What has changed. Simple: they’re the only people in the family who have work. It keeps the lot of them in food. But that is about it. It will not keep them in the home they are desperately clinging to. So your son is getting fucked for bucks. Where his daddy can’t get or keep a job. So Daddy is dependent, because no one wants to pay to fuck him.

A Grave of Sighs

The idea is that you can take kids who have a history of abuse, and at the same time (and, often, a consequence of the abuse), usually a long track record in sex work; you give them cameras. They make videos. They will bring up issues as they see them. And then, you have to give the kid space to sit back and be conflicted. He has to see if what he has created speaks to what speaks to him. It is not unusual for the boy to have a crisis when he can’t reconcile the conflicts of his life. That is when someone has to be there for him. No one can ever really understand what he has lived through. Especially abandonment. You are thinking sex. It’s almost too obvious. The more fundamental issue is abandonment. He is testing you. They are not really all that difficult to stand beside even if the price you pay (and you will pay it) is that you will be compelled to listen. To the kid. Not necessarily the video. The video is only a tool. You have to let them play with it if the thing is to ever have any value beyond the obviously superficial. And that is the accomplishment of the child. He has transcended — if he makes to the end of his video — the eternally skin-deep. He will find it exhilarating and at the same time he must not be abandoned. At this point, it will be an issue of life and death. If you abandon him over what he has put in his video, he will destroy himself. I have seen it many, many times. Telling him that he does not exist is redundant. It’s just stupid. He’s heard it before. It doesn’t really mean anything, and has very little impact. He knows he exists. But exists as what is his most pressing, focused issue. Cinematheque@Europe.com