Just…wow. I honestly don’t know what’s more shocking–that France’s culture minister, the same fellow who vociferously defended Roman Polanski and complained the director was being “thrown to the lions,” has a history of paying for sex with “young boys” in Thailand or that HE WROTE ABOUT IT IN A BOOK FOUR YEARS AGO.
And not that there’s a non-creepy way to write about traveling to Asia to have sex with young boys, but Frederic Mitterand certainly brought the ick in his memoir, The Bad Life:
I got into the habit of paying for boys….All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously… the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire.
I know the French consider Americans incredibly prudish and think we overreact to silly things like a political candidate fathering a child with his mistress while his wife is out campaigning for him and, oh yeah, dying of cancer. But I find it rather remarkable that Mitterand outs himself and not only is it not a barrier to his joining the Sarkozy government, but no one ever even mentions it until now. Of course, now Sarkozy’s political opponents are all over it. Had it never occurred to anyone to pop into a bookstore and skim the book?