Sir James Barrie was an all-out pedophile who never consummated his
belated marriage to Mary Ansell (who divorced him, never having had the
option of sharing her life with him), yet he had no problems expressing
all his passionate feelings toward the sons of Sylvia & Arthur Davies.
It's hardly subliminal that Peter is also named for the erotic god Pan, &
the tradition of casting boyish women in the roll of Peter on the stage
very likely arose from the completely inappropriate nature of ever showing
on stage grown men carrying on in this manner with boys. And no wonder
Mark Twain assessed the play as "sordid."

Actually the business of using women arose from the fact that there
were severe restrictions on the use of child actors in Edwardian
Theatres. Peter Pan was not supposed to be a grown man, but a child -
high voice - no beard etc.

Barrie's arrested sexual development has been traced to his mother's
response to the death of his older brother David -- not because he grieved
that David Barrie died at age 13, but because James saw his mother's
extravagant grief, & began to wear David's clothes, whistle in the manner
of David, & sneak into his mother's room at night pretending to be David.
Whether this really marks the origin of James' pedarasty I wouldn't hazard
as strongly as do some literary historians, but it's interesting he was
always a weirdo. Like Michael Jackson after him, James, when in his 30s,
began to arrange fairy tale adventures for boys he had crushes on,
arranging repeatedly to be left alone with them. Such family friendships
might sometimes be possible with all innocent intent, BUT NOT WHEN LIKE
JACKO & BARRIE, THEY ABSOLUTELY INSIST ON BEING LEFT ALONE NIGHTS WITH
THEIR CHOSEN FAVORITES. Arthur Davies knew, & complained, that something
odd was up with James' obsession for the boys, & one of the actual "lost
boys" whose name was indeed Peter is on record stating planely that Barrie
"brought more sorrow than happiness into our family," & his life ended in
suicide by leaping under a tram (another of Barrie's five Lost Boys is
believed to have commited suicide at age 21, though there's an off chance
it was an accidental drowning).

I think it must be pointed out that Peter Davies is being misquoted
above. If you read Andrew Birkin's J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys,
1979 (to be reprinted in July 2003), you will see that Peter said no
such thing. As Peter's niece, Laura Duguid repeated in an interview
in the Daily Telegraph in Dec. 2001:

"Peter said the reverse of that in a way. He said that this family,
which JMB loved so much and got so involved with, must in the end have
brought him more misery than happiness"

This comment by Peter got misquoted in a newspaper article and has
since appeared misquoted in various places on the web.

Mrs. Duguid's father Nicholas (or Nico), the youngest of the Davies
brothers and the only one to live into old age helped Birkin with the
above named book.

As is quoted in The Scotsman Dec. 27, 1994:
"He assured Birkin that if Barrie had been a paedophile, he or his
brothers would have known, and when Barrie was dubbed "a closet
paedophile" by a critic, Nico wrote to the Observer: "Paedophile
literally means lover of children which Barrie certainly was _ but _
anyone using the not too attractive expression would be stress ing the
sex angle _ Of all the men I have met, JM Barrie was the least
interested in sex."

Again in 2001, his daughter said:

"Over the years, there has been some speculation about the
"healthiness" of Barrie's interest in the boys, but Laura says that
her father and her uncles never saw so much as a glimmer of
inappropriate behaviour. "My father lived with Barrie until 1926, the
year my father got married, and he always said if there had been any
sort of paedophilia - any intent in that way - he would have known.
And I do believe that."

"My father said that of all the people he ever met, Barrie was the
least interested in sex. He didn't know what it was all about. He was
a complete innocent in a way I shouldn't think anybody could be
nowadays."

Of course the truth is always hard to know, but apparently nobody ever
heard any of the Davies brothers (who were informally adopted by
Barrie after their parent's early deaths) suggest that Barrie's
interest in them was improper.