Frits Bernard
From William A. Percy
Frits Bernard (Rotterdam, August 28, 1920 – Rotterdam, May 23, 2006) was a Dutch psychologist and sexologist. He was a pioneer in working for the rights of homosexuals and 'pedophiles'.
Although Bernard was born in The Netherlands, his family moved to Spain when he was seven, where he was educated in the German international school. He returned to The Netherlands for his university studies shortly before the Second World War. He studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and took his doctorate from the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Professionally he was affiliated with the Port of Rotterdam, engaged largely in treating stress and work related conditions among their employees.
In the late 1950s he became a member of the homosexual lobbying and service organization COC, contributing academic articles on homosexuality and pedophilia to their magazine Vriendschap (Friendship) under the pseudonym “Victor Servatius”. Following his 1962 proposal that the COC should initiate a support group for pederasts and pedophiles, he became unwelcome in the group, and transferred his efforts to the NVSH (Dutch Association for Sexual Reform), which did support the formation of such workgroups, which then lasted until the late 1990s.
Initially Dr. Bernard and Dr. Edward Brongersma, the other 'big name' in Dutch pederast and pedophile activism, had worked together in the COC, and both had important essays in the pioneering Dutch collection seeking understanding for intergenerational relationships, Sex met kinderen, in 1972. In 1975 the two men broke with one another – officially over Brongersma's attacks on Bernard's book Pedofilie, the report on Bernard's psychological research on a sample of pedophiles largely drawn from the workgroups. This work was subsequently expanded and translated into German as Pädophilie. Liebe mit Kinderen, 1979, further revised as Kinderschänder?, 1982, and, in abridged form, translated into English as Paedophilia: A Factual Report, 1985. This same material provided the basis for literally hundreds of articles (his 1992 bibliography runs to 34 pages) which Bernard had published and translated into dozens of languages, as far afield as Japan, but particularly in Germany, where he was an active figure in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Humane Sexualität (AHS). The feud between the two 'giants' simmered on for years, with Bernard, writing under another pseudonym, “dr Ernst Otto Born”, sniping at Brongersma's subsequent work.
Bernard's activism for pedophilia and pederasty was not limited to scientific work, or to organizing, but also included two novels which he wrote during the 1950s. The first, Costa Brava, portrays the relationship between the novel's narrator and a twelve-year-old refugee boy during the Spanish Civil War, and the second, Vervolgde Minderheid (Persecuted Minority), the relation between an adult and a high school student in Amsterdam after the Second World War. Both were self-published under his pseudonym of Victor Servatius in 1960, followed by a second Dutch edition in 1984 under his own name, and translations into German (1979 and 1980, respectively), French (1989 and 1992, respectively) and English (1982 (in Gay Sunshine Journal) and 1988, and 1989, respectively). Although the relation in the former is disrupted by the boy's family falsely telling the man that the boy has died, after he succeeds in reuniting the boy with his family, it ends with a bittersweet chance encounter years later when they can affirm their love for each other; Persecuted Minority ends less happily, with the man's imprisonment for their relationship, and his commitment to emigrate and escape the hostile atmosphere of The Netherlands – an atmosphere that, while it may have mitigated for a few years in the 1970s, Dr. Bernard lived to see re-emerge with incredible vengeance in the 1990s.
