Vindicating Paul Suerken

Vespas on Corfu. Suerken’s undoing. I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t done enough for Suerk. As I was updating, I saw this comment on an earlier post here. Steve June 18, 2020 at 3:24 PM If you'd like to reach me sometime, you can contact me at [stevenblank]@yahoo.com I was Paul's close friend for many years, and I think I can address certain things that you've brought up. I absolutely loved (and love) Paul, and I know he felt the same way. The story is a little bit more complicated than I'd like it to be, but perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between , as the old expression goes. In any event, you have my email address.   The boldface is mine. Steve’s right. The truth is always more complicated than the politically correct want it to be. Yes, Suerken was gay. That didn’t make him a pedophile or a predator. I am in a better position to know that than most. He had a boyfriend at Mercersburg, another thirtyish esthete, who taught Greek to high school jocks. He didn’...

Me, an old guy who remembered how it really was. Bootless as it turns out. They cut up pretty rough with me. The headmistress(!) didn’t like my allegations. Grottlesex schools were awash with tales of decades-long, even traditions, of homosexual abuse. I knew Mercersburg wasn’t like that. The belated charges against Suerken seemed like a deliberate piling on, a way to be the vanguard of correcting the disease called prep.school. I said so. They were quick to sicc a lawyer on me, warning me of how many ways a school with a $100 million endowment could ruin my life. All I wanted was her admission that she was an accomplice in an unjust witch hunt. So I called the attorney. She was, like the headmistress, female and unyielding. I concede I had only one objective. I knew they could ruin me. I have no money to fight and no allies to fall back on.  Which I got. I don’t lose arguments with lawyers. I jollied her into admitting that Mercersburg had no evidence against Suerken that would st...

Mercersburg 1969. Howard was the Dean. Kept a close eye on Levin and me. We were troublemakers. Suerken was the Good Guy floor master, couple flights down. But not Levin’s or mine. After Savage got fired for drugs,  I  was the floor master.  And homosexuality was NOT a thing at Mercersburg. Old days. Live and let live. So let’s talk about all this, shall we? The charges against Suerken are somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. The testimony that “convicted” him was obtained during telephone(!) conversations in which the accusers were assured of permanent, total anonymity. The most extreme charges were surfaced in 2017, seven years after Suerken’s death, whose passing in 2010 was noted with profound grief in a blog here: For Paul Suerken Only one of the listed charges, a “sexual assault,” would have been actionable at the time it supposedly occurred, but it was never reported, documented, or investigated at the time. Now it has no more weight than malicious gossip of...

  Yeah, they’re old now, 1,500 pages of breakthrough writing. Because I trusted him so, I sent Paul Suerken my manuscripts of the work-in-progress called Sourh Street before it was finished. The scope and scale of it scared me. It was either great or a grand illusion of mine. He responded quickly. He hated it. He told me it all sounded like I had an ax to grind. He said literature was not about hatred but something more elevated I had not discovered. He delayed me from showing it to a publisher by ten years. How much I valued his opinion. Some years later I called him. Told him how much he had hurt me. And how he had catalyzed one of the key books of the Punk Testament, the one called ‘They’: The Boomer Bible alone was 880 pages. The Book of They was about a thousand words. Suerken stopped my writing. What happens to writers. They trust too much. He apologized. He said he knew, instantly, how great it was. And he couldn’t live with it. But you all have to understand, that’s a condi...

Extraordinary place. Ruined to death, beginning in 1969. So let’s talk about all this, shall we? The charges against Suerken are somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. The testimony that “convicted” him was obtained during telephone(!) conversations in which the accusers were assured of permanent, total anonymity. The most extreme charges were surfaced in 2017, seven years after Suerken’s death, whose passing in 2010 was noted with profound grief in a blog here: For Paul Suerken Only one of the listed charges, a “sexual assault,” would have been actionable at the time it supposedly occurred, but it was never reported, documented, or investigated at the time. Now it has no more weight than malicious gossip of the He Said/He’s Dead variety. No state’s Statute of Limitations would permit legal action so many years after the fact, especially in the case of an anonymous accuser not now or ever subject to in-person cross-examination by an attorney or competent police officer. Nothing ...

Have you ever had a really great teacher? Somebody who made a permanent difference in your life? Now, imagine that some ambitious academic decides that this teacher, this great teacher, makes a perfect patsy for a career move based on political correctness. Why is he a perfect patsy? Because he's seven years dead before you bring your first accusation of sexual misconduct. That is the present plight of Paul Suerken, for generations a revered and beloved figure at Mercersburg Academy, which has somehow managed its way onto Business Insider 's list of the 50 Most Elite Boarding Schools in the United States. I don't know what to do first. Tell you about Paul Suerken the man and the teacher, or about the foul letter I received from the Head of School and the President of the Board of Regents denouncing and destroying his entire life and career in furtherance of one woman's ambition to be head of school in the Grottlesex world. Evidence? Drummed up hearsay, 20 years...