March 26

Events

• Current events

• 1827 - Could he have been a role model for Uncle Ernie? - Ludwig von Beethoven died on this date. In 1816 Beethoven became the guardian of his 10-year-old nephew after his brother died. He loved and was devoted to the boy for years. In 1985 a film entitled Le Neveu de Beethoven (Beethoven's Nephew) explored the sexual side of his devotion to the boy. In 1994 the film Immortal Beloved was released. It focussed on the question of Beethoven's mystery love known only as his "Immortal Beloved." There is some speculation that a boy was the object of that affection as well. Incidentally, Jeroen Krabbé, who played the adult version of the loved boy in For A Lost Soldier (1992) had a significant role in this film as well.

• 1892 - "What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman" - World famous poet and pedo Walt Whitman died on this date. In his "To a Western Boy" he wrote, "If you be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently select lovers, / Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?" In "O Tan-faced Prairie Boy" he wrote, "You came, taciturn, with nothing to give - we but look’d on each other, / When lo! more than all the gifts of the world, you gave me." His "Calamus" poems were named after the river god Calamus who grieved for the death by drowning of his boy lover Carpus. One of Whitman's loves in his life was Bill Duckett, a boy who was in his early teens when he met Whitman and who eventually moved in with him. This was when Whitman was in his 60s.

• 1975 - Pete Townshend's first attempts at creating child porn - The film Tommy, on the rock opera by the group, The Who, premiered in London on this date. It was the first time that fans got to put a visual to the descriptions of wicked Uncle Ernie, who does his "fiddle about" routine with young Tommy. In more recent years, Pete Townshend has claimed he suffered sexual abuse as a young boy, but one can only wonder if it was just acid flashbacks to his own creation of decades ago.

• 1998 - The underhanded railroad? - In 1986, former Miami police officer Grant Snowden was convicted in Dade County , Florida (under the supervision of Janet Reno at the time) on child sex assault charges. At his sentencing, the trial judge asked Snowden if he had anything he wished to say. He said, "You are fixing to sentence an innocent man." He was sentenced to five life terms. On this date Snowden was released after his conviction was overturned by an appeals court. This was the result of clear and convincing evidence being uncovered that child witnesses were lead and even coerced into making accusations against Snowden. There was no evidence of any abuse other than these contrived accusations.

• 2002 - A landmark decision - Robin Sharpe was found not guilty of possessing or distributing written child pornography by British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Duncan Shaw on this date. But he was found guilty of two counts of possessing pornographic pictures of children, a finding that was expected because he had admitted the facts in one of the two situations. The judge said Sharpe's defense on the written material succeeded on two grounds: First, he said written material must advocate committing a sexual crime with a child to be illegal. "These writings simply describe morally repugnant acts," the judge said, but the stories "do not actively advocate or counsel the reader to engage in the acts described." Therefore, they are not illegal. Shaw also said the stories had artistic merit, based on testimony from two out of three experts. Artistic merit is a defense, "irrespective of whether the work is considered pornographic," he wrote. Sharpe was sentenced to a 4 month conditional sentence. He has since been charged with further 'crimes" by a police force stung by their loss and looking to persecute him further.

Deaths

Walt Whitman - March 26, 1892