Chapter 3 - NAMBLA - Text

‘Save the Children’: North American Man/Boy Love Association and the Limits of Liberation

[Page 94]
In April 1975, at the age of 31, Dick Bavely committed suicide. A long-time employee of the Massachusetts Welfare Department, Bavely had been using state resources to place gay runaways in the homes of adult homosexuals for years. Sources close to him held that the refusal of the welfare department to acknowledge the special needs of gay teens forced Bavely, himself a gay man, to act outside of the prescribed boundaries of the state agency. The police and local press, on the other hand, claimed that Bavely stole money to finance a gay prostitution service that led to the suicide of a 15-year-old boy in his care.

Dick Bavely’s story highlights the ways that the state (along with the mainstream press) deployed the rhetoric of “saving children” in order to win bans on gay adoption, limit employment opportunities, and police the gender and sexual norms of children. [*156]

• [* 156 - Phillip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 145-163.

In this framework, children’s protection was based on a series of assumptions about developmental stages, vulnerability, and innocence where the child was understood to be easily corrupted. Bavely and others like him were perceived as particularly dangerous because they believed in children’s ability not only to understand “mature” topics, but also to engage in practices deemed inappropriate for children — from autonomous decision-making to sexual behavior.

Unlike the mainstream approach that often sensationalized “threats” to children in order to highlight its investment in protection, Dick Bavely and those who supported him viewed the constraints placed on children as particularly injurious to gay youth whose sexually marginal desires already left them isolated.

[Page 95]
An emerging movement of “boy-lovers” argued that rather than protecting children, as the state purported to be doing, the continued persecution of the Dick Bavelys of the world limited outlets available to young people. Turning the dominant discourse on its head, advocates of  this perspective reframed protection as constraint and positioned themselves as the real champions of children. This approach would meet with opposition not only from the state apparatuses that it challenged, but also from other social movement groups that opposed the state but refused to advance an agenda based on the autonomous sexual agency of children.

In 1977 the fledgling North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) emerged as a leading proponent of children’s sexual subjectivity. [*157]

• [* 157 - In December 1977 a group of activist journalists from one of Boston’s gay periodicals, The F ag Rag, organized the Boston/Boise Committee to respond to a “witchhunt” targeting gay men and “boy-lovers”.
  One year later, in December 1978, the group organized a conference where they adopted the name North American Man/Boy Love Association. Though I attend to the ways in which the mission of the group expanded with the adoption of the new name later in this chapter, the similarities in membership, political orientation, and organizational strategy encourage me to use NAMBLA here as a short hand for both
  chronological moments.

Positioning itself as filling the need left by Bavely’s death to protect gay youth from the perils of homophobia, NAMBLA also fought to free boys to act on their “natural” sexual desires.

Like Bavely, NAMBLA members engaged in a battle to (re)define threats to children and the actions needed to save them. In so doing, they articulated a very different approach to the act of saving children as well as the positions of stakeholders within the debate.

The emergence of intergenerational sex scandals involving males, and the movement that arose in response to these scandals and which advocated intergenerational sex among men/ boys (NAMBLA), played a major role in fracturing the fragile alliance that existed between the feminist and gay movements in the 1970s.

[Page 96]
Many feminists, invoking the vulnerability of (girl) children as especially vulnerable to rape and other forms of sexual violence and therefore in need of protection, saw NAMBLA as a manifestation of patriarchal male violence against vulnerable individuals. Many gay men, who had built a movement in opposition to police harassment and persecution, and who had long been stigmatized broadly as child abusers, were suspicious of state-backed attempts to prosecute perverts.

Some gay male activists (including famous individuals like Edmund White and Gore Vidal) came to the defense of NAMBLA and saw linkages between the persecution of those involved in intergenerational sex and adult homosexuals. However, it was the gay activists who flatly rejected NAMBLA's claims, labeled them perverted and improperly "gay," and moved to disassociate NAMBLA from the "gay movement" that ultimately gained dominance within the movement. Thus, NAMBLA’s history reveals both the fracturing of feminist/gay left, as well as a turn away from radicalism in the gay movement.

NAMBLA — Origins

It began in December of 1977. After the Boston police arrested several gay men in public bathrooms and parks, 24 professional, middle-class gay men were accused of being members of a sex ring that used a Revere apartment to “abuse” teenage and preteen boys (the youngest was 12). Few of these cases went to trial, and only one resulted in a trial conviction, but the negative publicity was professionally ruinous for the accused men and undermined both the establishment of a gay community outside of
working-class neighborhoods as well as homophile claims that homosexuality was not
deviant.

[Page 97]
Located five miles north of the city in Boston’s Italian North End, Revere was one of the city’s first suburbs. By the 1970s, Revere was home to working-class Italian immigrants, second and third generation Italian-American families and a growing population of gay men. With its reputation as a boy-town, Revere acted as (one of) Boston’s gay ghetto, keeping homosexual men and activity contained in working-class, ethnic enclaves and centers of prostitution.

In the summer of 1977, Boston police arrested Richard Peluso. His arrest was the first step in establishing and prosecuting what came to be called the “Revere Sex Ring.” The prosecution held, and the media reported, that Peluso’s home was the site of numerous sexual assaults. A subsequent search of Peluso’s apartment uncovered a collection of Polaroid photographs featuring male youths in sexually suggestive poses.
Police, aided by the Suffolk County Investigations and Prosecutions Project, were able to identify 63 of the young people featured in the Polaroid collection.

With cooperation and testimony from 13 of these individuals, 24 men were indicted for over 100 felonies including: “rape and abuse upon a child under 16, sodomy, unnatural acts, open and gross lewdness, and indecent assault.” [...] On December 8, twenty of the indicted men were arrested. [*159]

• [* 159 - Four men were never located. After ‘fleeing’ the jurisdiction, the D.A. made efforts to involve
  Interpol in their capture, believing that the abuse conspiracy might extend beyond US borders.

Those residing in Suffolk County were picked up by Boston police, but arrests were also made in New York City, Baltimore and Atlanta with extradition orders bringing all of the defendants back to Boston.

[Page 98]
The arrest of Richard Peluso, the seizure of his photographs and the cooperation of some of the individuals featured in those pictures led not only to indictments and arrests but also to a moral panic.

The Revere Sex Ring stirred up public fears about the safety of children, political battles over the nature of homosexuality, and media coverage that heightened the pitch of unrest.

Participating in this panic Suffolk County District Attorney, Garrett Byrne, announced his “crack down” on child molesters and implemented a city-wide hotline that recorded anonymous tips about the sexual exploitation of children. Openly lesbian Representative Elaine Noble was quick to endorse the hotline, to denounce the accused men as deviant and to deny their claims to homosexuality.

In response, a group of journalists from the Fag Rag began reporting that the hotline was little more than an attempt to generate records that could be used to intimidate homosexuals, and they formed the Boston/Boise Committee (B/BC) in an effort to stop the hotline and the panic that inspired it.

The events surrounding the arrest of several homosexual men in 1955 Boise Idaho became a precedent for the panic in Boston. [*160]

• [* 160 - In 1955, the gay underworld of Boise was purged. The vice campaign was a power struggle between the city’s political and business elites and was couched as a necessary measure for the protection of children.
  For a complete outline of events, see John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City (New York: MacMillan, 1966).
  Further summary of events and their subsequent political positioning can be found in Jenkins, Moral Panic and Mitzel, The Boston Sex Scandal .

B/BC members explicitly referenced these happenings when they named the group.

Employing Boise was more than a rhetorical move, however. John Gerassi, author of The Boys of Boise , was a featured speaker at B/BC fundraising and public awareness events. Moreover, his analysis of the “witch-hunt” tactics employed by Boise’s business and political establishment would all be echoed in the writings of B/BC and NAMBLA members.

[Page 99]
Intent on revealing the political motivation behind the persecution of the Revere ring, the B/BC framed the 1977-78 panic as part of a broader narrative of oppression. The group adopted a three part agenda:

• 1) Investigating the facts behind the hysteria.
• 2) Contacting the accused, making sure they had proper counsel and were not being pressured into deals against their wills.
• 3) Working with the media to check their rampant homophobia and try to correct some of their more egregious errors. [...]

Though the B/BC, along with the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, was able to bring sufficient pressure to bear that the hotline was stopped, the group remained divisive. Group members encountered opposition from other leftist activist groups, the mainstream press, law enforcement, and legislators. This conflict did little to halt the B/BC’s continued development of an agenda that brought it into direct conflict with elected officials and many aspects of the judicial system.

Despite the aims of the B/BC to ensure proper representation for the arrested “victims” of the panic, several accused men actively resisted any association with B/BC members. For those men who claimed never to have had sexual contact with underaged persons, affiliation with the group intent on positively reframing such relationships may have seemed counterproductive. Moreover, B/BC efforts to position the accused men along side the boys as victims of the police could not always withstand scrutiny.

After all, the state’s case rested on the cooperation and testimony of several boys identified in Peluso’s photographs. By the time Mitzel’s book was published, NAMBLA was characterizing the state’s star witnesses as,

• “two15-year old hustlers in Revere who had been occasionally selling their sex to men the met at Peluso’s apartment, as well as elsewhere in Revere and Boston.” [...]

Instead of framing these two youths as victims of societal homophobia or as young people exploring their natural sexual curiosity, Mitzel adopted an uncharacteristically hostile attitude toward these gay youths.
[Page 100]
Clearly communicated are the ways that the state was railroading gay men for engaging in consensual acts, less clear was the well-being of the youths involved and the terms under which that consent was obtained.

In spite of the resistance of some of the accused, the B/BC continued organizing. They organized fundraisers featuring prominent speakers like John Gerassi and Gore Vidal. They worked to generate support for new candidates in an effort to oust incumbents D.A. Byrne and Representative Noble. [...] Fueled by victories in Boston, but unwilling to calm their vigilance, members looked to the future.

What is now clear — at least in Boston — is that there is no gay person whose rights won’t be supported by mass action, be they accused of ‘child molesting,’ ‘public sex,’ or, even from within our own community, ‘radicalism.’ We have shown that by organizing within the gay community alone, and not relying on the comforting and false promises of only-too-hostile legislators, foundations, priests and pols [sic], we can stop a witchhunt, make it rebound upon those who initiated it, and use this as one more way to politicize gay men and women. [...]

Finally, in December 1978, they hosted an international conference where a new name (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and a new mission statement were adopted.

Though group publications hail this as a time of growth and triumph, B/BC and NAMBLA participation in events became increasingly polarizing. Public demonstrations outside the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library following the arrest of over 100 men presumed to be homosexual brought greater visibility to the group and publicly situated them within a broader gay movement.

For those groups intent on separating the interests of gay activists from those of “boy-lovers,”
[Page 101]
this posturing was particularly problematic. B/BC alienation from other progressive groups came to a head around the September One demonstration organized to protest Anita Bryant’s arrival in Boston. A group of “200 people from the gay and women’s communities,” to protest an Anita Bryant fundraising concert in downtown Boston, the September One Coalition was celebrated by Mitzel as a moment when the B/BC enjoyed broad support from the progressive community. [*165]

• [*165 - Bryant’s concert was later cancelled, though the September One Coalition held their rally in Copley Square as scheduled.]

However, more than fifty groups and individuals, including State Representative Elaine Noble, the Boston Chapter of NOW and the Gay Business Association, signed a “Why We Can Not March With You” petition. Expressing sympathy with those who objected to Anita Bryant, petition signers nevertheless felt “unable to participate” because:

• "For some of us, the broadened scope of the march, which includes causes other than gay rights, makes participation in the demonstration a violation of conscience. Some of us object to the strategy of confrontation, which we feel feeds all too well into the Bryant plan of hysteria. Some of us feel strongly that the planned activities will unnecessarily jeopardize the safety of a large number of lesbians, gay men and their supporters. Others hold that the strategizing meeting was hastily called, chaired and dominated by a particular philosophy and, despite rhetoric supporting “unity” within the gay community, was itself one of the most divisive and insensitive gatherings of gay people in Boston to date." [*166]

• [* 166 - Brian McNaught, “Why We Can Not March With You” petition opposing participation in September 1 Anita Bryant protest demonstrations.

Denounced as “good gays” by Mitzel, those who protested the actions of the B/BC were described as dupes to a conservative, state-sponsored agenda who were completely out of touch with popular feelings in the community.

[Page 102]
John Mitzel closed his autobiographical polemic, The Boston Sex Scandal , with
the declaration that,

• “The so-called molestation of the young is the start of politics.”  [*167]

• [* 167 - Mitzel, The Boston Sex Scandal , 137. Emphasis original.

When he did so, he was not only re-imagining molestation, but also identifying children as agents within sexual politics. That is, the North American Man/Boy Love Association sought not merely to liberate children so that they could be more sexually expressive.

Its goal, and one of its claims to membership within a gay struggle, was to liberate gay boys so that they could express their sexuality with gay men. This was as much a political distinction as it was a description of the individuals and behaviors involved. Group members understood this quest for liberation as part of broader national and global struggles of the period, and they saw themselves as the radical voice of libratory activism.

Thus, NAMBLA challenged institutional power and also mounted a critique of gay and feminist groups whose actions and agendas it perceived as insufficiently libratory.

Mitzel’s text details the group’s history from its 1977 beginnings as the Boston/Boise Committee through the adoption of the name North American Man/Boy Love Association in 1978 and concludes with coverage of the Revere trials in 1980. A journalist and self-styled truth teller, Mitzel fashioned The Boston Sex Scandal as the “real” account of what happened in Boston as the 1970s drew to a close. Praise from celebrated authors Edmund White and Gore Vidal appeared on both covers of the book celebrating the text as “A major document” [*168] and “A brilliant and disturbing piece of investigative journalism.” [*169]

• [* 168 - Taken from the front cover of the book, the quote is attributed to author and gay activist, Edmund White. In the book’s front matter White is quoted at length: “In his irreverent, hilarious and hard-hitting prose, Mitzel reveals the hypocrisy and cynicism that underlie the current crusade against intergenerational love. This book is a detailed look at the often banal, always ambiguous truth that the sex scandal headlines have masked. I predict that children’s liberation will be the next great social movement in North America. This book will serve as a major document in what will turn out to be the most violent and radical debate on human rights we shall witness.”]
• [*169 - Taken from the back cover, the quote is attributed to scholar, author and NAMBLA co-founder, David Thorstad.]

[Page 103]
Indeed, Mitzel’s account was later adopted by some news sources as an accurate representation of the politics and events surrounding what the mainstream press dubbed “The Revere Sex Ring” and what he referred to alternately as a “moral panic” and “sex scandal.” [*170]

• [* 170 - Subsequent popular histories of NAMBLA have relied on Mitzel for an account of the group’s early years, especially David Thorstad’s A Withchunt Foiled: The FBI vs. NAMBLA.
  In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century NAMBLA was prosecuted in wrongful death suits and television programs began to dramatize, report, and satirize their agenda (especially: Law and Order SVU, 20/20, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and The Daily Show).
  As a result, the events of 1970s Boston once again received media attention.
  The Boston Sex Scandal , like the organization whose story it told, was vilified in these mainstream outlets, however, the gay press and a few social movement oriented sources treated the Mitzel text as a definitive statement on the origins of NAMBLA and also used it as a source for information about events in Boston and Revere. Mitzel’s account of events, interpretation of politics, and characterization of individuals involved was reproduced uncritically.
  See especially:
  • JoAnn Wypijewski, “The Passion of Father Paul Shanley” in Legal Affairs Sept/Oct 2004;
  • Benoit Denizey-Lewis “Boy Crazy: NAMBLA: The Story of a Lost Cause,” in Boston Magazine, May 2001;
  • Tom O’Carroll, “Paedophilia: The Radical Case,” in Contemporary Social Issues Series No. 12, 1980;
  • Steve Trinward, “The ‘Revere Ring’” Free Market News Network, Corp. Jan. 16, 2006.

Despite this attention, critical readings of the text have not been published. The Boston Sex Scandal , like NAMBLA itself, is celebrated or maligned, wholly accepted or dismissed depending upon the political orientation of the reader.

As a piece of “investigative journalism,” The Boston Sex Scandal provides a documented narrative of the events that led to the creation of the Boston/Boise Committee, the formation of NAMBLA and the groups’ early activities. An appendix including speech transcripts, fliers, petitions, and the Committee’s “Suggestions for Media on Handling Alleged Sex ‘Crimes’ Involving Gay Men” coupled with the copies of photographs and newspaper reports featured throughout the text corroborate Mitzel’s account of events.

The Boston Sex Scandal is more than a piece of journalism, however. A polemic that tells a “story of resistance,” the book also advances an
[[Page 104]
argument about the inadequacies of the mainstream media, the judicial system, and the legislative process while positioning NAMBLA as the group best suited to bring about necessary radical change.

In fact, Mitzel’s critique of the mainstream press and its lack of objectivity is ultimately what allows him to balance these two approaches — one supposedly detached and neutral, the other passionately prejudiced. That is, the hyperbolic rhetoric and angry tone that infuse the text can be read as a reasonable facsimile of mainstream journalism as Mitzel read it.

To understand both the possibilities and limitations of arguments advanced by NAMBLA, one must look at more than the actions undertaken by group members; close reading of texts like Mitzel’s Boston Sex Scandal and the journals and bulletins published by the group are also critical.

Tracing Mitzel’s use of the phrase “save the children” as well as his claims about the proper role of activism, the politics of rape, and the nature of liberation reveals the nuanced ways that NAMBLA sought to carve out a space for itself in the movements of the left.

These concepts in particular highlight the group’s critique of other perspectives typically associated with leftist politics as well as the ways that NAMBLA members tried to undermine institutional authority to define and regulate sexual behavior. Moreover, these texts, authored and edited by the cofounders of NAMBLA, are uniquely suited to present the radical politics, rhetoric and positions of the group as a whole.

Assuming a radical posture was central to NAMBLA’s critique. Mitzel grounded his claim to radicalism equally in the taboo of intergenerational sex with children and in the persecution visited upon him and the group he represented. He used this radical position to make pronouncements about the appropriate direction of political mobilization.
[Page 105]
That is, Mitzel’s approach to activism, his critique of other social movement groups, and his rejection of institutional authority all rested on the performance of radicalism.

In opposition to radical feminist groups like the Elizabeth Stone House which sought to redefine medical and legal notions of victimization by revealing the frequent and coercive nature of incest, NAMBLA’s radicalism was grounded in a loving orientation that led it to challenge feminist assertions about rape culture as well as institutional homophobia that punished and pathologized the behaviors of “boy-lovers”. [...]

Mitzel saw himself and NAMBLA as exclusively qualified to lead the sexual revolution because they were on the fringes, speaking for an erotic orientation that was almost universally vilified. This vantage point allowed Mitzel to claim that protecting the civil and sexual rights of “boy-lovers” was good for everyone since rights withheld from the stigmatized revealed the limits of equal protection.

NAMBLA’s politics extended beyond representing the interests of marginalized “boy-lovers” to include a defense of the boys who it argued were victimized by the very system that claimed to protect them. This approach to saving children from what Mitzel saw as the sometimes corrupt, always misguided efforts of legislators and reformers provided one of the cornerstones of The Boston Sex Scandal .

Indeed, Mitzel used the second chapter of the book, “Protecting the Little Children,” to expose the ways that conservative activists fabricated links between homosexuality, pornography and child abuse in order to deny children’s sexual subjectivity. Once linked, this three-part issue would repeatedly be used to galvanize conservatives, organize legislators, and polarize the left.

[Page 106]
Judianne Densen-Gerber, founder and topkick of the federally-funded drug rehabilitation center, Odyssey House, in New York City, announced she was launching a campaign against child pornography. [Anita] Bryant had explicitly stated that homosexuals did not deserve equal protection under law because all homosexual men were child molestors [sic]. Densen- Gerber’s rage had a similar theme: homosexual men were, by and large, responsible for child abuse, child prostitution and kiddie-porno. [...]

Densen-Gerber and Bryant were used as stand-ins for the “Right.” [*173]

• [* 173 - Other prominent figures are singled out in the text. On the first page, Mitzel argued, “[T]he war on homosexuals became overt and national in 1977 with coordinated campaigns by Anita Bryant, Ed Davis, Jerry Falwell, Judianne Densen-Gerber, the National District Attorneys Assoc., police, and press.” (5).

Mitzel placed their rhetoric at the center of conservative mobilization and pointed to the size of their following and the extent of their media coverage to substantiate this move. He understood the homosexual-pornography-abuse straw man as central to a “right-wing” strategy to achieve broader domestic goals.

• “With momentum built up attacking gays and kiddie porn, the Right hoped to move on to kill off the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, and recreational drug use, for starters.” - [* 174] - Mitzel, The Boston Sex Scandal , 13.

Mitzel positioned the strategies used to attack NAMBLA as part of broader efforts to subdue the left while simultaneously suggesting that conservative interest in children’s welfare was disingenuous. Thus, Mitzel was able to argue for recognition of NAMBLA as the vanguard of libratory activism and the group with genuine investment in the liberation of children.

Mitzel’s description of the views of conservative figures like Bryant and Densen-Gerber questioned the self-evident nature of the link between pornography, particularly “kiddie porn,” homosexuality and child abuse.
[Page 107]
He situated the proliferation of anti-pornography groups as a response to the findings published in the report of the President’s Commission on Pornography and Obscenity. The report recommended the decriminalization of the sale and ownership of sexual images and devices for adults. [*175]

• [* 175 - The report of the 1970 United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. For a treatment of this report, and the Meese Commission report of 1986 which directly contradicted it, see: Christine Miller and Bruce McKinney, ed. Government Commission Communication (Westport, 1993).

A political battle over the morals of American culture ensued with anti-pornography activists expanding their ranks beyond “the rabid, right-wing, rifle-toting Christians, pale, thin-lipped book banners and their ilk” to forge alliances with centrist and even leftist groups. [...]

Using the trial against the 1976 film Deep Throat as a point of entry, Mitzel outlined the stakes of the pornography debate and the position of the players within it.

• “It [the trial against Deep Throat ] demonstrated to liberals and those who generally supported First Amendment causes that they had to piss or get off the pot — that is, the issue of sexually graphic materials either involved serious matters of Constitutional protections or it didn’t.” [*177 - Mizel p 10]

This chastisement of “liberals” was the first of many to come. Indeed, Mitzel used The Boston Sex Scandal not only to highlight the hypocrisies of the “Right,” but also to condemn the ways that latent homophobia and misplaced morality allowed the “Left” to be dissuaded from pursuing a radical politics of liberation.

[R]eactionary political forces were going to exploit the porno issue and use it, whenever possible, to revoke or set back many of the progressive social changes which had developed in the past decade and a half. In the Right’s strategy, porno, like that of recreational drugs, was a perfect issue since no one would come to defend it, and it would give them a likely victory in their struggle to prosecute all ‘victimless crimes’ — a designation they refuse to accept. [...]

[Page 108]
Thus, the issue of pornography became one that could be easily exploited by conservative forces while liberals decided whether or not it was worthy of defense.
According to Mitzel, this hesitation, grounded in homophobic prejudice or middle-class feminist disdain, allowed reactionary forces the space they needed to dismantle progressive political gains. The furor over pornography met with increasing concerns about the safety of children. Both the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 and the Kildee Murphy Bill of 1977 enjoyed bi-partisan support, and both laws had provisions to protect children from sexual exploitation.

It was into this context that NAMBLA was born.

NAMBLA’s Agenda

In the introduction to his polemic, The Boston Sex Scandal, NAMBLA cofounder John Mitzel proclaimed, “This is a story of resistance.” [...] The tale that followed lived up to the book’s title and opening statement. Complete with sex, violence, persecution, suicide, and political corruption, The Boston Sex Scandal outlined NAMBLA’s origins from its beginnings as The Boston/Boise Committee (B/BC) and situated it in relation to broader liberation struggles, cultural change and institutional power. Mitzel’s heroic tale of resistance represented a dramatic revision of legal, political, and medical authority. In as much as NAMBLA members imagined themselves as the proper saviors of boys, they challenged the province of legislators, doctors, politicians and even parents to provide for the social and sexual needs of children.

[Page 109]
NAMBLA’s efforts to “save the children” were part of a larger national conversation about the dangers facing America’s youth. [*180]

[* 180 - 180 It should also be noted that the call to “save the children” was central to international relief and human rights efforts, culminating in the first UNICEF convention on the rights of children in 1989. Elsewhere in the dissertation I argue that domestic attention to the welfare of American children provided justification for US intervention in other sovereign states.]

Revisions in several states’ age of consent laws along with the introduction of new federal protective legislation designed to guard children from pornography, prostitution, abuse and neglect responded to growing grass-roots movements and a series of polls which suggested that Americans’ believed that the threat of child abuse was increasing. [*181]

[* 181 - For this and other poll information about American attitudes toward children, see: Joel Best, Threatened Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).]

Legislators advanced varied and sometimes conflicting agendas in their efforts to allow for children’s sexual subjectivity (as articulated by some medical and psychological
professionals) while preserving an ideological investment in childhood innocence. [*182]

• [* 182 - As early as the 1960s, six states (New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and South Dakota) began to recognize children’s sexual behavior through the implementation of lower age of consent laws. By the 1970s, these laws were joined by new federal and state statutes designed to protect children from physical and sexual misuse — i.e. Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 and the Kildee Murphy (Child Pornography) Bill of 1977. The development of these two sets of laws parallels increasingly public intellectual and political debates about children’s sexuality.]

This legislative conflict was evidence of a broader cultural ambivalence about the
proper treatment of children. Longstanding symbolic and rhetorical use of the figure of
the child was disrupted by the real political activities of young people in America.

Prolonged US involvement in Vietnam and the resulting draft combined with the social movements of the 1960s and 70s to catapult American youth into public politics in greater numbers than ever before. The discourses of liberation that circulated in the
[Page 110]
period were taken up by young people and by others on their behalf. It is in this broader context that the emergence of NAMBLA and the actions of Massachusetts politicians must be understood.

NAMBLA’s mission and activism undermined normative sexuality as well as the institutions designed to advance it. By endorsing intergenerational, homosexual relationships, the group challenged the family unit and gendered subject produced by laws regulating minors’ sexual lives. Moreover, in its efforts to raise consciousness, NAMBLA members revealed that state laws were economically invested in producing particular families and specific genders.

Thus, NAMBLA was able to position itself rhetorically as the morally motivated protector of children whose utilitarian agenda would accomplish the most good for the greatest number of people because it was dedicated to liberation rather than fiscal gains.

Opposed to “nuclear-family breeding, conventional parenthood and traditional child rearing, as well as state intervention to maintain status quo morality,” NAMBLA members mounted objections to “Judeo-Christian prejudice shrouded in statutes” and anyone who served as apologists for them. [...] Group members claimed that the language and practices of ownership often used to define state and parental relationships with children were the truly coercive forces in children’s lives.

Indeed, in their “Call for Justice,” the San Francisco Journal Collective wrote:

• "There are reasons for the reluctance of our political and social institutions to accept the liberation of children. Principal among these is the concept of children as chattel, that is, movable property. Legally, children are not owned by their parents, but nonetheless are completely subject to their parent’s domination and consequently, have the status of slaves." [...]

[Page 111]
A Dutch scholar whose writings were featured in The NAMBLA Bulletin challenged feminist, psychologist and legislative claims that adults in intimate, intergenerational relationships with children were dominating by citing a study that found no evidence that the pedophile dominated the child. [*185]

• [* 185 - Neither the name of the psychologist who conducted the study nor any bibliographic information about the study were included in the article.]
  • [Ipce: Supposedly it was PhD Theo Sandfort and his study

  • °       “Boys on their contacts with men: a study of sexually expressed friendships, Elmhurst, NY: Global Academic Publishers (1987), te lezen op
    < https://www.ipce.info/host/sandfort_87/index.htm > en, korter, besproken in

    °       “Sex in Pedophiliac Relationships: An Empirical Investigation Among a Non-representative Group of Boys; The Journal of Sex Research Vol. 20, No.2, pp. 123-142 May, 1984, te lezen op
    < https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/sandfort_84.htm >

He further argued against the broader orientation of domination taken where children’s lives were concerned.

• “There was, of course, nothing wrong with dominating children when it was used to teach them their lessons, to make them go to church, to discipline them and bring them up properly, but where sex was involved it was absolutely impermissible.” [*186]
• [* 186 - Edward Brongersma, “An Historical Background” in The NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 4, No.2 (March, 1983). ]
  • [< https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/98-013_brong_hist.html > - Ipce.

By highlighting this double standard and dismissing the idea that pedophiles are dominating at all, NAMBLA staked out a liberationist position in opposition to the repressions of state and family.

Some NAMBLA members, perhaps in an effort to ally with feminists, argued the biological and developmental differences between boy and girl children. Claiming that boys reached sexual maturation and sexual peak earlier in life, these members sought provide for the liberation of boys while allowing feminists to continue to protect girls.

However, this stance did not gain much traction in NAMBLA or among feminists. Indeed, the group’s orientation toward matters of children’s liberation was characterized by a refusal to accept developmental models.

[Page 112]
Though NAMBLA was most often engaged in battles over sexual expression and vilified for the erotic orientation that it endorsed, the agenda that it advanced was far more expansive. One piece proclaimed:

• “NAMBLA is against the draft, circumcision and clitoridectomy, ageism and other positions pertaining to youth.” [...]

Another argued:

• "When viewed in a purely sexual context, the subject of child-adult sex can be quite limited. But it is very difficult to view it solely in that context. Hard upon the heels of the question of the legitimacy of children engaging in sex with adults or other children comes the more important issue of the right of children to have control of and consent in all areas of their lives, non-sexual as well as sexual." [...]

NAMBLA’s refusal to adopt gendered or age distinctions, their unwillingness to accept developmental models challenged the foundations upon which much minor law rested. Where the law made distinctions on the basis of age, gender or sexuality, NAMBLA members were quick to highlight hypocrisies and double standards. Challenges both to statutes and their selective enforcement marked many NAMBLA publications.

At the time of the Revere ring, Mitzel compiled a list of several other cases involving violations of age of consent laws in Boston and across the country.

• "[I]n the midst of the ‘Revere Sex Ring’ witchhunt, a man was indicted in neighboring Brookline … He was charged with running an actual hetero ring which specialized in selling the sex of young females who were known as ‘The Sunshine Girls’ … Not one patron of this ‘sex ring’ had his name released to the press. The Brookline whoremaster pleaded guilty and was given a two year sentence … About this same time, in New Mexico, an adult female was charged with corrupting a 15-year-old male by having sex with him. She was acquitted. The judge ruled that such sex was ‘educational.’" [...]

[Page 113]
Curiously, NAMBLA efforts to reveal gender bias within age of consent laws might not have met much legal resistance. In the 1981 case of Michael M.

• “the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of … sex-specific statutes. The Court there stated that sexspecific statutes can be justified on the basis that a primary goal of age of consent laws is the protection of young women from the consequences of teenage pregnancy.” [...]

The Supreme Court position along with the language of several age of consent statutes which exempted women from prosecution explained why the majority of those charged with violating these laws were male. However, it did little to account for the prosecution of homosexual violators who faced no risk of unwanted pregnancy or the fact that same-sex violators of age of consent laws were often met with harsher penalties than those imposed for heterosexual sex. [...] For NAMBLA, the only remedy for this legally sanctioned discrimination was the abolition of laws regulating consensual sex and the liberation of children.

NAMBLA’s crusade against youth discrimination was founded on a belief in children’s liberation rather than a paradigm of children’s rights. Children’s rights, in this formulation, were externally imposed and inherently invested in maintaining the legal subject ‘child’. Statutory distinctions based on age were often perceived as oppressive to children. One article asserted that, “status offenses are by definition discriminatory.” [...] It went on to argue:

• "Children, for example, have the right in this country not to be treated as an adult in the juvenile justice system but forfeit as a consequence any and all of the legal rights adult citizens may possess. Children have a right not to work at
  [Page 114]
  arduous or dangerous jobs (though many do) but have been denied the right to earn a living and to live independently except at the convenience and behest of adults. Those rights granted to young people currently are those which when given still allow for easy maintenance of children as second class citizens." [...]

The equation of children with slaves and the use of language associated with other liberation and rights movements helped NAMBLA claim a position in a broader leftist struggle. The critique of ageism then extended beyond an exploration of the ways that the state oppressed children to include indictments against any group guilty of ageist discrimination. One teenager wrote:

"[W]e will not take the seat in the back of the bus so many would prefer to see us in. We will not idly listen while decisions are made concerning us without our consultation. We will not allow ourselves to be overlooked, overpowered, or ridiculed. We will not continue to internalize the ageist propaganda fed to us by parents and teachers. We will not agree blindly to anything told us merely because the person telling us is three times our age. We WILL BE HEARD!!!!" [...]

Though this teenager’s manifesto was directed at the gay and lesbian community, other NAMBLA members of various ages charged groups on the left to take young people more seriously, pointing to precedents of youth activism and working to stretch the age boundaries of inclusion. Moreover, with its Bulletin, Journal, and Newsletter, NAMBLA provided a forum for young people to publish their thoughts about their own liberation. One youth wrote:

• “I want to dispel the myth that children do not have the ability to decide what they want to do with their lives … Age is an irrelevant factor in the ability to comprehend rationally.” [...]

[Page 115]
In this “Letter from Twelve-Year-Old,” the author took issue with the gay rights lobby and mainstream society while heralding NAMBLA as “very revolutionary” and “truly gay”.

There is little way to confirm the age of the pseudonymous author of the “Letter from Twelve-Year-Old,” or the ages of several of the other young contributors to NAMBLA publications. The ages of those individuals who used their real names and went on to pursue lives of activism can be substantiated. The fact that NAMBLA may have been publishing text that was misattributed to minors calls into question the altruistic motives for which the group supposedly stands. Nevertheless, the possibility or the appearance of youth participation for what they represent to the public and for what they indicate about the radicalism of NAMBLA.

These possibilities and appearances are what led to years of FBI surveillance, arrests of leaders, and persecution of group members. They, as much as the reality that they imply, are what contributed to the public debate in which the group was intent on participating. Regardless of the veracity of names and ages, the questions posed by a movement calling for children’s sexual liberation remain the same.

More than ideological skirmishes or contests over who would determine the path of legislative reform, debates about sexuality represented a cultural ambivalence about the standing of the United States in the global order.

• “Suddenly the United States had one overriding concern: homosexuals. Their rights. Their ‘recruiting.’ Their alleged ‘exploitation’ of the little children.” [...]

Mitzel combined the visibility of gay rights and gay liberation with the backlash represented by pornography panics to advance arguments about a cultural preoccupation with and inability to handle sexual expression.

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He described this phenomenon in the following terms:

• "The organized left-wing parties were ignored in most gay organizing and didn’t know what to do. Several standard left cults are violently homophobic — it’s a ‘Bourgeois Degeneracy’ dontcha know? — so, despite their usual hunger to move in and try to take over any mass popular movement, gay lib dumbfounded them. The right-wing, floundering under a world slipping out of their control, finally found an issue around which they hoped to mobilize irrational support, so essential for their ultimate goals, They would Save The Little Children. From The Fags." [...]

Again, Mitzel pointed to the limits of conventional political approaches to establish the need for a radical revision of politics and to situate NAMBLA as the group to fill that need.

In the introduction to his text, NAMBLA co-founder David Thorstad reflected:

• “NAMBLA has a membership of a few hundred. How could such a small group pose a threat to American society?” [*198] 
• [* 198 - David Thorstad, A Witchhunt Foiled: The FBI vs. NAMBLA , (New York, 1985), 6.

The radical critique mounted by NAMBLA, which called into question the gendered, economic and familial systems supported by age of consent laws while giving voice to young people, threatened to undermine the foundations of American political life.

NAMBLA denounced U.S. foreign policy.

• It highlighted the inadequacies and hypocrisies of a system of laws that rested on erroneous assumptions about gender and the universality of heterosexuality.
• It challenged the role of the family as a political and economic unit and sought to undermine the authority of parents therein.
• And it redefined the political spectrum by rejecting distinctions between “right” and “left” in favor of advancing a radically progressive politics.
• NAMBLA’s battle for liberation, though inspired by erotic desire, had a reach far beyond the sexual lives of intergenerational couples.

[Page 117]
Indeed, it was the notion of liberation that they advanced that posed the real threat to the American social order. This freedom, this idea of liberation which set NAMBLA apart from other social movement groups, is what was at stake in all of the publications and prosecutions that sought to celebrate or demonize the group.

Responses to NAMBLA

The discomfort of the so-called “good gays” with B/BC and later NAMBLA initiatives was part of a longer history of gay activism. The homosexual had long been linked with the pederast in popular discourse. [*199]

• [* 199 - See especially
  • Jenkins, Moral Panics.
  • See also Philip Jenkins, Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
  • Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality.”]

At times, there was little rhetorical distinction between the two. Indeed, that history of association was part of what grounded the pornography-child abuse-homosexual triad that Mitzel accused conservative activists of advancing; it also provided the foundation for NAMBLA claims to membership in the gay liberation movement.

The political tension surrounding NAMBLA was not only about the future direction of gay liberation, but also about what the public representation of the homosexual would be. Some activists saw NAMBLA as particularly detrimental to a movement that had spent decades trying to unravel the link uniting pedophiles with homosexuals. Many homosexuals refused to acknowledge “boy-lovers” as members of the gay community, viewing them instead as psychologically damaged. One gay man wrote to The Boston Globe ,

• “It is one thing to be gay, but totally another to be sick like these men and we hope sensible people will not link us to this travesty.” [...]

[Page 118]
Some gay men who, as children, had had intimate relationships with men also did not embrace NAMBLA. Even when they did not understand their own experiences as damaging, they also did not perceive NAMBLA as a body that represented those experiences. Seeing them not as a group that represented the interests of children, but instead as one that represented the interests of men wishing to gain sexual access to children, these men were unmoved by NAMBLA’s claims that it stood for the needs of children.

Feminists, too, objected to NAMBLA’s attempts to position itself as liberator of children. [* 201]

• [* 201 - See especially Amy Hoffman’s account of lesbian reactions to NAMBLA and her own changing attitudes about the organization, its founding, and its mission. Amy Hoffman, An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).]

Seeing them instead as a group that twisted libratory rhetoric and principles in order to exploit a vulnerable and disempowered population, many feminists understood NAMBLA as part of a broader culture of sexual exploitation.

For both NAMBLA and the feminists who opposed them, the debate revolved around consent and coercion, rape and victimless crimes. That is, NAMBLA members advanced a framework where age alone did not determine one’s ability to consent to sexual activity at the same time that feminists’ efforts to reframe public discourses about incest identified children as a population in need of special protection.

Within a new feminist framework of rape culture, NAMBLA represented another violent sexual excess that abused those left most vulnerable within patriarchal societies — children. In contrast, NAMBLA members viewed the “consensual” intergenerational relationships that they endorsed, like the production and consumption of pornography, as crimes without victims.

[Page 119]
It was perhaps because both groups claimed membership in a leftist movement for change or perhaps because both had vested interests in remapping the judicial landscape by advocating the addition or abolition of laws endorsing their views that they existed in adamant opposition to one another. Whatever the reason, no easy peace could be made between NAMBLA and most feminist-identified groups.

NAMBLA members countered claims like these by arguing that the rest of the gay community would do well to rally around them because discrimination against “boy-lovers” would only make it easier to harass other homosexuals. By speaking on behalf of boys and boy lovers, NAMBLA claimed that it represented both the most vulnerable and most persecuted members of the gay community. Couching their rhetoric in the language of “love” and their politics in the language of “liberation,” members made efforts to forestall their expulsion from the left. Though the group was able to carve out a space for itself in libratory politics and in public debate, maintaining a presence in these spaces would become increasingly difficult as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s.

NAMBLA members advanced a two part agenda that called for an end to their surveillance by local authorities and the elimination of all age of consent laws. At the same time, they also fought to claim membership as part of a larger leftist, gay liberation movement. Mitzel placed clashes over sexuality at the heart of domestic politics, US imperial agendas, and the broader global order.

Thus, NAMBLA could not only claim membership in a broader struggle with a long history, but could also assume a position of leadership within that struggle.

[Page 120]
Despite this broad view and NAMBLA’s opposition to US imperialism, the group remained primarily focused on education and reform or repeal of legislation that denied young people full freedom and capacity to consent.

Controversial since its inception, NAMBLA nevertheless emerged as a visible in public debates about sexuality in the late 1970s. As the sexual revolution gave way to the rise of modern conservatism in the early 1980s, however, the redefinition of sexual politics could no longer recognize NAMBLA as valid, leftist or homosexual. With its leadership publicly discredited and its membership harassed, NAMBLA faded into comparative political obscurity, its very name used to foreclose discussions about sexuality. [* 202]

• [* 202 - Satires of NAMBLA have become increasingly prevalent with John Stewart’s Daily Show using the group as a substitute for any conservative group acronym. Here, the implication is that NAMBLA stands for everything reviled and contested by the group in question. In addition, the recent “war on pedophiles” declared by Oprah Winfrey on her show and the treatment of NAMBLA on television dramas like Law and Order: SVU operate to dismiss the views of the group and silence any who would advocate them.]

Examining NAMBLA’s rhetoric, the space it occupied, and the manner in which that space disappeared reveals the ways that invoking children realigned the actors in late 20th century American sexual politics. That is, the foreclosure of NAMBLA’s participation in public debate represented a loss to political discourse and to the promises of liberalism.

Thus, NAMBLA came to represent the limits of liberalism, becoming an object through which leftist groups abandoned their commitment to dissent as a constitutive part of democracy by participating in that foreclosure.