BCM:  For the sake of our readers, I will introduce Miles Groth as the founder and Editor in Chief of THYMOS – Journal of Boyhood Studies as well as the Editor of The International Journal of Men’s Health.  Dr. Groth is also a professor in the Department of Psychology at Wagner College, New York.  Welcome to Boy Choir Magazine, Dr. Groth!I am really at a loss to know how to begin this, Dr. Groth.  I have only read through two issues of THYMOS and I feel like the scales have literally dropped off my eyes!  As I finished your article in the first issue - “Has Anyone Seen the Boy?” - I literally felt like I have been living in a primitive culture with little or no knowledge of the previous centuries.  I quickly and immediately recognized the essential importance of what you are doing with THYMOS and what your research and the research of the other subject matter experts is telling us through its pages.  And that was only the first issue!  After reading through the second issue, I am now convinced that it is one of the most important resources on the subject of boyhood on the planet.  I am just awed by its content and its approach!
 
I think the thing that I am most impressed by is your journal’s absolutely fearless approach to the subject of boyhood and all its interfaces, particularly with adult males.  You address directly the current societal phobias and all of their historic antecedents in such a guileless and straightforward way that I left with a feeling of freedom, armed with a timeless truth that transcends mere traditions and current fears.  Such convictions are sorely needed - especially by adult males who interface with boys on a daily basis.  In the end, the boys themselves need this kind of deep understanding that is truly vital for their long-term health.
 
As a matter of fact, THYMOS really helped define this issue of Boy Choir Magazine.  While the theme was selected before reading THYMOS, it truly helped solidify this issues’ direction and form.  I also believe that it has significantly altered our understanding of what we are doing on a permanent basis!

Let me dive right into a question that lines up perfectly with the theme of this issue of Boy Choir Magazine.  In your article, “Has Anyone Seen the Boy? : The Fate of the Boy in Becoming a Man”, you state that there is a creature among us called the “Other Male,” or the OM, in whom the boy inside of every man has survived being suppressed or purposefully or subconsciously hidden.  You describe this rare OM: “The OM is the individual in whom the boy has re-emerged, or rather was never rejected or abandoned, and has become fully melded with the mature male.”
 
I find this concept rather surprisingly liberating and powerful and it certainly expresses what I have found time and again in adult men who were former boy choristers.  It is also very counter to the current culture, as your article so eloquently expresses.  Let me just be blunt, Dr. Groth.  How do we cultivate this precious OM inside of each of us as adults?

MG:  First, let me thank you for asking me to interview with you for Boy Choir Magazine. I wish it a long life! Those of us who once sang from the choir loft as a boy and now listen to trebles and are transported into that remarkable world of sound and expression that boys create will always want to read your magazine, to see what the boy choirs are doing here and abroad, and to hear from the boys themselves.

Now to your question.  As you know from my essay in THYMOS, I see the Other Male as a slowly emerging alternative to the kind of man that the Western world has created.  I am convinced that the boy in the male never dies away but is forced into hiding and can therefore be recovered; brought back to life in physically fully mature males - in every man.  How to facilitate this and let this happen?  A major phobia stands in the way.

Recall that a phobia is a disturbance of thinking, not a disturbance of feeling, although when a person has a phobic thought the fallout of that is fear (or sometimes, in little boys, a kind of freezing up).  A phobia is an irrational thought that the person who has it knows is irrational but cannot help thinking is “for real.”  So with that little bit of clarification, I can identify the thought that frightens men and stands in the way of letting the boy in them resurface.  It is the thought that there is something degrading about being a boy and that it is a status that is best left behind.  To let the boy reappear is thought to be regressive; that is, a return to childish status, when the male was relatively helpless.

No one likes to feel helpless.  The solution to the phobia is a different understanding of boyhood, and that will be a matter of adjustment in society at large as well as in the individual.  As I write in my essay, boyhood is not a demeaned status at all, but rather an exquisite example of human beings at their best.  That is why I chose the title THYMOS for the journal.  It refers to spiritedness, the astral, animal soul in us, the human heart - not the pumping organ, but the source of our emotional lives.  Boys show this in their enthusiasm and vigor.

This in itself is perhaps another source of phobic thinking about recovering the boy.  He is, after all, such a powerful being - a force - and as males age they become wary of the sheer energy contained in the boy that lives on in them.  How to cultivate the Other Male?  Once past the irrational thought, the way of liberating this “precious” (as you say - and I cannot think of a better word!) way of being male is to spend time with boys.  They will show us what we were and permit us to be that way again.

Fathers, first and foremost, must now find much more time to spend with their sons.  The world has changed so that passing along a trade or vocation from father to son rarely happens.  The constant presence of our sons with us at work is now something of the past.  Instead, we have hiking and fishing, sports and - making music!  We need to find other ways of being with boys, especially to nourish their spiritual life.

A wonderful program has been established in two private schools in Australia by two innovative men called The Rite Journey.  This is an example of finding more ways of being with our boys.  We need to recall that boys like to do more than talk about doing.  We should not feel worried if they have little to say, and we do not need to fill the air with chatter when around them.  They will not think we are ignoring them if we do not do a lot of talking.  Boys enjoy watching what we do, taking instruction, and doing.  If they have questions, they will ask.  If they don’t have questions, chances are they are just following what we are doing and finding out how to do it or be it.

So, the short answer to your question is: Spend more time with boys and expect to learn from them what it is to be human.

BCM:  The next question is immediately related to the first.  How do many of our readers who interface with boys each and every day work to ensure that the OM is not suppressed by the adult model?

MG:  Boys have an exquisite sense of when we are being real and when we are faking it.  We, who as fathers, teachers and choirmasters come face to face with boys on a regular basis, need to remember that what is most important to boys is integrity.  Now this is a big word to apply to small boys and even to older boys.  What I mean is authenticity: acting in good faith, being real.  Boys are especially attuned to this value in human life. They dismiss us if we are going through the motions of being interested in them or wanting to spend time with them.  They draw close when we want to see them be the best they can be.  If we don’t know the answer to a question or don’t know how to do something, we have to say so.

Like cats - a comparison I make in my essay - boys are canny and persistent. They are not disappointed by our limitations and failures.  My approach as a teacher of older boys in college is to ask a boy for an answer to a question he has raised that I can’t respond to honestly out of what I know.  I often ask them to show me how to operate my computer, find sites on the internet.  Yes, I also ask them to help me do things I can’t do very well any longer, such as lift a heavy object or sprint to pick up a book from the library.  As I said earlier, boys mostly learn by imitation and example, not by verbal direction.  This is why they are especially good in performance settings, whether it be on a playing field or on the stage of concert hall.

Finally, I never stifle a bit of silliness in myself when it feels the need to come out.  I allow myself to behave in ways that all of the socialization I have been subjected to says I should avoid.  I allow the boy in me to break through - when he feels the need to, not when I consciously think, for example, “Oh! Now I should be spontaneous, silly, say something ‘cool’, drop the professorial mask.”  The integrity boys value is related to honesty, authenticity, spontaneity.  I think this sort of interaction will encourage boys, as they age, to be the kind of Other Male I have written about.

BCM:  I had the clear impression even before I read THYMOS that our culture regards boyhood almost as a curious artifact of childhood that is rather insignificant and certainly passing.  While I believe it is true that we dearly love our children, it seems like we tend to focus on the destiny of our children as men rather than the essential preservation of their permanent boyhood.  As a father of five sons, I believe I may have fallen into that social quagmire myself.

MG:  I am working on a psychology of being male that addresses this issue.  What I have realized is that every approach to being male has started with manhood as the central concept, so that boyhood is seen as a passing phase, something to “transition” out of.  This has been the approach of psychology, sociology and anthropology - and medicine.  The social sciences have seized on the concept of development to explain the view of boyhood as a stepping stone to manhood.  I am suggesting instead that boyhood is the focal concept and that we need to understand manhood in terms of boyhood, not the other way around. The English poet, William Wordsworth, knew this and expressed is so well: “The child is father of the man.” Social scientists have assumed that the man is the “father” (the dominating idea) in terms of which to understand boys and that we must interpret boyhood in terms of and from the perspective of manhood.

I believe that boyhood holds the key to understanding what it can mean to be a man - a human male - and perhaps a human being at our best, with most possibilities open to us.  What is a male’s destiny?  There is no answer to that question as of yet, it seems to me, but history has shown that manhood in the traditional sense certainly is not a viable way of being male.  Read all the history we have on record.  Look around.  We are still underway as a species and I think males are in some ways at an advantage for becoming Other than what they have been.

I think we love our sons and other couples’ sons best by cherishing the qualities of boyhood that arise spontaneously in them.  As I have written in the THYMOS essay, we have to admit that currently we are socialized to perceive boys with a mixture of fear and fascination.  This will change, I feel sure.  Fascination is enough to fill our response to boys.

BCM:  The boy choir, as well as other unique and pure assemblages of boys in our culture, is under attack by politically correct ideologies that demand integration and the purposeful expunging of the distinctiveness of boys.  In light of what I have read in THYMOS, written particularly from a psychological perspective, this would not only seem individually unhealthy but also damaging to the culture as a whole.  What are your thoughts on this process?

MG:  This is a troubling issue for me, since to date the approaches to discussing it have been primarily by sociologists, most of whom are motivated by ideology.  Psychologists take the perspective of looking at an individual’s experience.  Sociologists look at observable behavior.  If we take a genuinely psychological approach, we need to think first and foremost about the experiences a boy has with another boy.  Notice I do not say “other boys.”  The so-called homosocial preference (of boys to play with other boys and girls with other girls up to a certain age) is said to be a psychological feature.  It is really a sociological datum.  We still need to ask what a boy experiences when with another boy, just as we might ask about what a physically fully grown man experiences when with another man.

This is a special experience which is modeled on the son-father relationship. A boy who has had an emotionally rich relationship with his father will relate to another boy in ways that do not include homophobic thoughts or extremely rivalrous ways of interacting.  I have written in the psychology of being male mentioned earlier that I think the son’s first affectional (emotionally intense and positive) relationship which he initiates with another human being is with his father.  This relationship, which depends a great deal on how the father responds to the boy’s overtures of affection, will be the model and template of all later relationships the boy forms, including those with girls and women, those that are friendships and those that have a sexual component - that is, relationships with females.  A boy learns how to be loved from his mother, but he learns how to show affection in a relationship with his father.  The key here is that the boy is the initiator of the relationship.

All of this - I hope not too much - is by way of answering your question directly.  Boys together in boy choirs, for example, relate to each other -boy-to-boy - in ways that are unique. We are talking here about boys from age 5 or 6 to perhaps 13, when the voice “breaks.” Among boys at this age, sexual differences are not the primary factor, but rather the male-to-male relation I described (boy-to-boy, modeled on son-to-father).  This is what is on boys’ hearts and mind during this period.

With puberty, things change, of course. To mix boys and girls together in youth choirs not only damages a longstanding tradition and violates the intentions of the composers who wrote for all-boy (or all-male) voices, but it also disturbs the ethos of the all-boy world we find in, for example, a boy choir.  We are not improving boys’ lives by assuming that during this period (roughly 5-13) they need to be socialized for a gender role.  There is ample time for this after puberty, which now begins 4-6 years earlier than it did in Shakespeare’s time and so shortens the period of boyhood.  Boys are mostly attached to one female throughout this period and that is their mother.  The pleasures and challenges of life in sexual relationships and marriage will wait until puberty.

This reminds me of an issue that has gained a lot of notoriety - the presumed sexual undertone or subtext of relationships between boys and especially between boys and older men such as teachers, coaches and…choirmasters.  It is such a lot of nonsense.  A few minutes reflection helps us realize that seeing all relationships as first and fundamentally sexual is a product of the 20th century; specifically of the psychoanalytic theory of childhood sexuality.  I have come to realize that the notion is mistaken.  Boys are erotic, but they are not sexual.

Without burdening your readers with too many details, let me just say that the usefulness of seeing human relations as fundamentally sexual has just about run its course.  We will be more clear-headed about many of the issues your question alludes to when we disabuse ourselves of this 20th-century myth of the primarily sexual nature of relationships between males, between females and, for that matter, males and females.  There are other places to begin - for example, with the aesthetic, the erotic, and the spiritual basis of relationships.  Hearing the sorts of worries and questions raised today would have surprised people only a little more than a century ago.

BCM:  The boys choir is also under pressure because of a rising phobia of allowing men in daily and direct contact with boys.  In my experience as the editor of this magazine, now into its second year, it is a deep fear that is spoken of in whispers, in private emails, off-the-record comments and even hysterical accusations!  And yet, from my viewpoint, it is also leading to the distancing of the boy from his essential role model.  From my perspective, the dread has reached the point where I believe that the phobia has now overtaken reason.  If we continue down this path of fear, we risk losing a generation of boys who may end up lost and fearing the very models they require to become healthy adults.  How do we get a handle on this?
MG:  This question allows me to amplify a bit on what I said in the earlier response. The spectre of pedophilia among teachers, choirmasters and now even parents (fathers and sons) would be laughable were it not taken so seriously by the media.  Some years ago Noelle Oxenhandler published a book (based on an article in The New Yorker magazine) called The Eros of Parenthood.  She wrote eloquently about the media hysteria that had arisen around the issue of intimacy between parents and their children - for example, worrying where touching changes over from comforting to sexual stimulation.  Simultaneously, public schools were giving workshops to in-service teachers about how not to touch boys. They were not talking about corporal punishment but about comforting a boy who had tripped and fallen or was upset.  Some of that craziness has been modified recently in many states, so that teachers are not as anxious as they were for more than a decade about whether they could “legally” help a child up off the ground or hug him if he was afraid.

Pedophilia and pederasty are often compared.  They have nothing but certain observable patterns of behavior in common.  Again, the experience of the boy is not considered.  Antisocial personalities sometimes prey on boys and they are newsworthy items to feed the irrational response of the public.  These men and women are sadistic, however.  There is no element of “philia” (love) in what they do.

Here once again, I would ask the question about the source of the phobia regarding intimacy with boys.  Intimacy between a man and a boy is not something to be wary about.  It is essential, first of all in the father-son relationship, but also in relationships where the boy wants to learn to do something: ride a horse; build something; pitch a ball; sing.  As the psychologist Rudolf Eckstein wrote many years ago, we learn from a position of loving.  We learn because we love the person who is our teacher.  Only then can we love learning.

How to deal with the phobia surrounding pedophilia?  First, the context of the discussion must move from the legal and sociological to the psychological and historical.  Human males - prepubescent boys and post-pubescent men - have been interacting for more than 200,000 years.  This is the estimated age of our species.  There is a great variety of forms of such interaction in history and among cultures outside of urban Europe and America.  These need to be discussed and a broader context must be set for the discussion.

The assumption that there is a relation between male homosexuality and pedophilia is another myth, as a short study of pedophilia (including boy-man relations), shows.  Most discussions forget that pedophilia includes relations between men and girls as well as between women and boys and women and girls.  It will be important to find a forum for rational discussion: independent, non-commercial television stations and, of course, journals that are not primarily about “pushing” an ideology.  In all of this, it will be most important to hear what the boys have to say - before they have been coached by attorneys and media representatives.  It is remarkable how the American mindset moves without losing a beat from “interest” to “abuse.”

BCM:  The boy choir is many centuries old and it has many manifestations across the globe, from the Anglican tradition of mixed men and boys in the United Kingdom to the all-boy choirs of Europe and the United States to the emerging “boy-band” choirs.  Boy choirs embody a social unit that has blossomed in many nations across a parade of civilizations as though international boundaries were meaningless.  To my way of thinking, boy choirs are imbued with a kind of unique power that seems to be expressed by the singing itself.  It seems to me to be spiritual and otherworldly.  And yet, for the same reasons, as a scientist I realize it is also deeply emotional and psychological.  As one who is a boy choir aficionado yourself, and one who daily surrounds themselves with their music, how do you interpret that ephemeral power?

MG:  I wrote about this a bit in the THYMOS article and am guided in talking about the topic by this wonderful quotation from Richard Baker: “Let us not forget the treble voice is made in heaven, God given and God taken away.” Sitting here thinking about your question, I find a smile coming on.  It seems enough - but you have asked me about the features of the boy’s voice that make it so extraordinary.

First, the more prosaic.  A boy’s voice is neither a male nor a female voice; not a woman’s, not a man’s.  It’s pre-sexed, pre-gendered.  It is perhaps the prototypic human voice.  This gives it a certain universality and a kind of humanness that is there before cultures began to break up humanity into the categories of sex and gender.  Recall that the discovery of the two sexes occurred only in the 1700s (!) and the invention of the genders is a phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century.  I hear the boy’s voice as the human voice, like white light which contains all the other colors of the spectrum.  It is direct, unaffected, honest, and courageous.  When trained, it is able to express these features without harming the boy’s voice.  I like the idea of the trained boy’s voice for this reason and do not agree that artificialities are introduced.  The connections of a boy’s voice with time and eternity are, for me, very moving.  It is a voice that will pass with the Stimmbruch.

With every phrase sung, we are reminded of the evanescence of things, the end of beauty. The Japanese wait for a certain day, even hour, to observe cherry blossoms in springtime, knowing that after that brief time, perhaps a too heavy breeze or a brief shower, the perfection will be gone.  Every time I listen to a boy singing, when the song is over I think about this: How long will he be able to do this? Soon he won’t.  By the way, this is another feature of the boy’s voice that argues for preserving the all-boy choirs.  Girls’ voices do not change as radically, although they do change.  Benjamin Britten, who wrote such wonderful music for boys, wrote a piece “Abraham and Isaac” in which the voice of God is a unison of a boy’s voice and a man’s.  The boy’s voice seems to add the sacred to the man’s earthly.  Alone, a boy’s voice seems to be what we can hear of the numinous, the divine, on earth, with our ears.

Then there is the strength of a boy’s voice.  This does not minimize its capacity for gentle tones, and the combination of the two qualities - urgency and sweetness - is uplifting, sometimes overwhelming.  The boy’s voice seems to occur at the horizon where the earthly and godly meet.  Finally, there is the utter absence of affectation in the boy’s voice; a simplicity that I associate with the cosmic and ineffable.

BCM:  The boy in the choir is, by definition, an immature adolescent at the very beginning of life’s journey.  Hence, by definition, his view of where he is and what he is involved in is somewhat limited.  And yet, as we have spoken with many former choir boys at the very end of life’s journey, they have told us repeatedly that the experience was one of the most important and life-shaping of any of their lives.  As a psychologist, what do you think is going on inside the boy that would cause such a lasting, indelible impression?

MG:  I think the boys must be talking about a sense of freedom to be what they are while singing.  They know very well how much they affect us, but this power over us is unself-conscious, not something they hold over us.  I think, too, that the boy-to-boy experience I mentioned earlier is very much a part of the vivid and lasting memory of their days as singers in a boy choir.  What is so important about this it the absence of competitiveness -perhaps the watchword of traditional manhood.  This is central to other boy activities, such as sports.  Singing together, they are not vying for dominance.  How reassuring this memory must be to them when they are older and being drawn into the often deadly round of everyday manhood which forces them to fight with and outdo each other.  I’m guessing many of them associate boyhood with singing, pure and simple.

BCM:  A boy choir is an assembly of boys in a formal, very controlled and usually intense setting.  And yet, most boys seem to thrive in this situation.  How is it that boys who are by definition “wild at heart” seem to prosper and bloom in an environment of such apparent demanding rigidity?

MG:  I don’t think they perceive the atmosphere as rigid.  Demanding and intense, yes, but not controlling.  It is, after all, the music that imposes the control, mediated by the choirmaster.  Boys understand this.  They know at some level that music is embodied mathematics, and I suspect they see the orderliness and discipline required of them as flowing from the nature of music, not from the imposition of restrictions on them by the choirmaster.  If they falter, they try again and again…
 
BCM:  In your previously mentioned article, you stated that there can be a time when “there is an acknowledgement and even welcomed presence of the boy in the mature man.”  I cannot tell you how liberating that simple comment was and how it framed the essence of Boy Choir Magazine.  In reality, while we do have many readers who are either current boy choristers or recent choir boys, most of our readers are adults who are rather far removed from the experience, or never were boy choristers but are drawn to the art and its inescapable power I spoke of previously.  I believe that it is the boy in them that draws them to the boys who are singing, because boys are naturally drawn to other boys.  I will go ahead and give myself the freedom to say that even in this psychologically traumatized and troubled culture.  Dr. Groth, could it be that we are drawn to the power of the boy choir for these underlying reasons that many do not even clearly understand?  What are your thoughts?

MG:  You are asking, I think, why do boys do this?  Why do they sing -especially given the social constraints often associated with being part of a boy choir (something I have called the “Billy Elliott phenomenon”)? And I think you are also asking, “Why do men love this music?”  Those who sang as a boy (in my case, as an occasional amateur in a small Lutheran church in a Western Pennsylvania town), I cannot say why I sang and enjoyed doing it.  I did not have exposure to rehearsals led by professionals that would have allowed me to observe boys while at work.  I have since watched them perform and listened to many recordings.  I can only return to my impression that these boys “know” that they are bodying-forth something human - not something male or female, masculine or feminine - and something important about our humanness.  The composers who wrote (and write) for boys had the confidence in the boys’ inherent knowledge of this.

I’m reminded of listening to a tape (on a CD) of Benjamin Britten rehearsing his War Requiem.  This included working with the boy choir.  He did not talk down to them.  He spoke to them as creatures who “know” something that only they can vocalize.  I think that boys sing to tell us what they know.  As for our attraction to their singing when we are all grown up, I would say it is chiefly based on our nostalgia for our boyhood.  This interview implies that boys singing and boyhood itself are closely related.  When we hear a boy sing, the boy that remains in each of us wakens and sings (to adapt the title of a play by Clifford Odets).  Their singing is liberating and it reminds us of the living boy in us that the Other Male welcomes.

BCM:  Let me just close with these last words you wrote in your article in which you said: “OMs will not be ashamed or afraid of the boy in themselves.  The boy in him will remain as fascinating as ever - for sure - but we will no longer be afraid of him.  We will find the boy and welcome him.”  As I survey the boy choir world around me, it is an exciting thing to speculate that perhaps we have reached the bottom of this social quagmire we have created for ourselves to protect us from our fears.  And as we do so, perhaps we can all seek out the boy hidden for so long inside ourselves, and allow him to breathe the fresh air and light of a new day.  In so doing, we can more fully appreciate the boys who sing to us in their innocence of form.  Perhaps then we can find ways to help them preserve and protect the boys that they are and never teach them to hide him away in exchange for the man who will always be a lesser creature without him.

MG:  It has been a pleasure to talk with you about boyhood, boys and a man’s relation with the boy in himself.  The important thing, it seems to me, is what you refer to in the last sentence: that we “find ways to help [boys] preserve the boys that they are.”  In closing, I would just say that we need not worry that boys will preserve the boy in themselves.  This all boys do, even those who have been miserably treated.  If I am right - and this is what my work is now concentrating on - the genius of our species has been to create this form of the male that we call the boy.  To repeat yet again what I enjoy saying: boys show us what it is to be human.

What we have done in making manhood the focus of being male was perhaps necessary in our evolution, but when the world of boyhood was founded - and at this point I am proposing that it was quite recently, likely in the mid- to late-19th century, and here in the United States - it opened up possibilities for a way of living that combines the qualities of spiritedness, directness and integrity.  We are now witnessing a time when traditional manhood is attempting to hold its place in the scheme of things, but is - happily, I would emphasize - giving way to an Other Male; another way of being male that revels in the clear-eyed sensibility of boyhood.  In retrospect, we should have recognized the men’s movement as really the boys’ movement, the emergence of the human symbol of pure possibility. When Walt Whitman wrote “I hear America singing,” I think he heard the voices of boys.