ABSTRACT
Germaine Greer, in her recent book The Boy claims to have broken the taboo on admiration of the boy. More specifically, she states her mission as 'to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys'. By the 1950s, it had become clear that the reasons for admiration of the boy were shifting rapidly from the appreciation of precocious talent and future manhood to a new gaze on the sexual body. An analysis of pre-war popular culture by Dennis (2007) confirms the existence of the 'homo-romantic', an intense form of adventure driven young male bonding that never crossed the line into homosexual acts. The illegal status of homosexuality and the public abhorrence of it thus allowed innocent boys to go about such business as homo-romantic adventure or singing without the present day risk of being thought homosexual. According to another biographer, Christopher Headington, Hemmings was aware of Britten's affection but felt no sexual threat what so ever.
