Frank Torey

Frank Torey (1928-1996) was an author, publisher and boy-love activist. He was born near Detroit, Michigan. Torey was educated at Yale University and served in the US Air Force during the Korean War. In 1979 he moved to the Netherlands where he lived as an expatriate.

Ventures and adventures in boylove publishing

In Amsterdam, Torey published from 1979 to 1984 Pan: A Magazine about Boy-Love (changed to P.A.N.-Paedo Alert News from 1982). He also edited the first anthology of boylove fiction Panthology (1981), published by John Stamford's Spartacus. Pan stopped running in 1981 but Stamford employed Torey as a general editor of Coltsfoot Press, a division of Spartacus, specializing in boylove fiction. When Coltsfoot Press went bankrupt in the mid 1980s, Torey founded his own publishing house, the Acolyte Press, the most important publisher of boylove fiction and erotic for a decade. Torey was also an author and published many of his short stories under the pen names Peter Zupp, Scott Altman, Wallington Fuger and Jotham Lotring.

Apart from publishing fiction, Torey was interested in the scholarly work on boylove which was becoming important in the 1980s. He translated many scholarly books and articles from Dutch to English including Theo Sandford's The Sexual Aspects of Pedophile Relations (1982) and set up an additional publishing house, Global Academic Publishers, which published scholarly works such as Edward Brongersma's two-volume Loving Boys (1987) and Theo Sandford's Boys on their Contacts with Men (1987). In addition, he served in the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (1987-1995).

Legacy

Torey's work has been extremely important for the boylove community. As a publisher of fiction, he created the genre of the boy-love short story as we know it. With his scholarly ventures, Torey was instrumental in bringing some pioneering works to the English audience. Finally, as an activist in Pan, he fostered the myth of the Netherlands as a country tolerant to boy-love, "a myth that is becoming so terribly unstuck at the time of his death."(1)

Notes

(1) D.H. Mader, "Frank Torey, boy-love activist, author and publisher, died at the end of June 1996," posted at alt.support.boy-lovers (Wed, Jul 10 1996 12:00 am).