Women

Gayle Rubin
"Youth Liberation has argued for some time that young people should have the right to have sex as well as not to have it, and with whom they choose. The statutory structure of the sex laws has been identified as oppressive and insulting to young people. A range of sexual activities are legally defined as molestation, regardless of the quality of the relationship or the amount of consent involved . . .

The recent career of boy-love in the public mind should serve as an alert that the self-interests of the feminist and gay movements are linked to simple justice for stigmatized sexual minorities. ... We must not reject all sexual contact between adults and young people as inherently oppressive."

. . . Gayle Rubin, lesbian feminist, in Leaping Lesbian, February, 1978.

Camille Paglia
"These days, especially in America, boy-love is not only scandalous and criminal, but somehow in bad taste. On the evening news, one sees handcuffed teachers, priests and Boy Scout leaders hustled into police vans. Therapists call them maladjusted, emotionally immature. But beauty has its own laws, inconsistent with Christian morality. As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization."

. . . Camille Paglia, activist and author
in Sexual Personae (New York, Vintage Books, 1991).

Pat Califia
"Boy-lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers are the only people offering a hand to help young women and men cross the difficult terrain between straight society and the gay community. They are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their stale morality onto the young people in their custody. Instead of condemning pedophiles for their involvement with lesbian and gay youth, we should be supporting them."

. . . Pat Califia, lesbian author and activist,
in The Advocate, October 1980.

Jane Rule
"My own initiation came long before I was legally adult. Though a number of males around my age offered to participate, a woman ten years my senior was "responsible, " at my invitation and encouragement. The only fault I find with that part of my sexual education was the limit her guilt and fear put on our pleasure, the heterosexual pressure even she felt required to put on me. What she did "for my own good" caused both of us pain. If I were to improve on that experience now, it would not be to protect children from adult seduction but to make adults easier to seduce, less burdened with fear or guilt, less defended by hypocrisy. ...
If we accepted sexual behaviour between children and adults, we would be far more able to protect our children from abuse and exploitation than we are now."

. . . Jane Rule, lesbian feminist. "Teaching Sexuality"
in Flaunting It, Vancouver, New Star Press, 1982.

Cris Gutierrez
"Those who oppose intergenerational sex believe that a kid's life is ruined if he or she has sex with an older person. Exactly what takes place is irrelevant; all such sex falls under the rubric of 'child molestation' and is irrevocably damaging. I think this idea is patently false. A child who is raped at a very young age and a sexually active adolescent boy who has an affair with an older man have nothing in common."

. . . Cris Guttierrez
Frighten the Horses, San Francisco, Issue #10, (Autumn 1992).

Men

Larry Kramer
"In those cases where children do have sex with their homosexual elders... I submit that often, very often, the child desires the activity, and perhaps even solicits it, either because of a natural curiosity... or because he or she is homosexual and innately knows it. ... And unlike girls or women forced into rape or traumatized, most gay men have warm memories of their earliest and early sexual encounters; when we share these stories with each other, they are invariably positive ones."

. . . Larry Kramer, writer and founder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), in Reports from the Holocaust, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Allen Ginsberg
"Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance ...
I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too -- everybody does, who has a little humanity."

. . . Allen Ginsberg, poet

"If you just take a walk through the Vatican, you could say everybody loves the slightly erotic emanation of nude prepubescent bodies."

. . . Alan Ginsberg from an interview in Seconds magazine

Samuel R Delany
"I read the NAMBLA [Bulletin] fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found. I think before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself to it and see what it is really about. What the issues they are really talking about, and deal with what's really there rather than this demonized notion of guys running about trying to screw little boys. I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

. . . Samuel R Delany, noted science fiction writer,
Queer Desires Forum, New York City, 25 June 1994.

Jim Kepner
"Too many in our society, victims themselves of prejudice and discrimination, pass those hatreds and fears to drag queens, pedophiles, bisexuals, leather men and women, transsexuals, and many other minorities within our community. We talk nicely about diversity, but practicing it is more difficult."

Michael Foucault
"It is quite difficult to lay down barriers [particularly since] it could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired the adult."

. . . Michel Foucault, philosopher, speaking against "age-of-consent" laws
See: James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992).

John Preston
"Sex between youths and adults is one of the most difficult issues in the gay movement. When does a youngster have the right and the power to make his own sexual decisions? How are laws against intergenerational sex used specifically to target gay men? What are the issues that make the romantic image of the Greek teacher and his student in times of antiquity turn into something ugly and forbidden in the modern age? If you want to explore these issues, NAMBLA is the organization that will supply you with brochures, thought-provoking books and booklets."

. . . John Preston, novelist, columnist and editor
in The Big Gay Book: A Man's Survival Guide for the 90s.
New York: Plume, 1991.

Oscar Wilde
Prosecutor: What is 'the love that dare not speak its name'?

Wilde: 'The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name, " and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

[Wilde's speech caused a loud burst of applause to erupt from the gallery of the courtroom]

Michael Kearns
"I... have a friend facing a possible jail sentence for having sex with a couple of 15- year-olds. I love my friend; he is a good person. At the preliminary trial, it became evident to me that the "victims" were the seducers, who had already repeatedly had sex with each other. But in the eyes of the court, their age is the sole determining factor to be weighed....
From tea room to drag queen, I applaud every gay subculture.... Discrimination among ourselves is profoundly self-destructive. NAMBLA deserves to be heard and respected."

. . . Michael Kearns, in 'Men Loving Boys' in the
Los Angeles gay magazine, Edge, August 31, 1988.

Scott O'Hara
"When I was 12 and 13 years old I would have joined NAMBLA in a minute, because I knew I was gay and I wanted to go out and get laid, not just read The Gay Mystique all my life; I needed personal contact.

We have a million gay children out there right now who are in the same boat, who know their sexuality, and aren't getting any support. Most of our supposed gay leaders are afraid to do anything with them. ... That means we're leaving the sex education of our youth to angry heterosexuals who don't understand.

That's one reason NAMBLA is so important. They are willing to take the risks that no one is willing to take... . They're the only ones willing to acknowledge that adolescents actually do have sex lives.

There is also a more basic reason why I support NAMBLA. They are the voice of dissent in the gay movement today. They're the whipping boy, the fashionable group to condemn. ... I say, watch out, tomorrow that whipping boy could be you... . In the efforts of the gay establishment to suppress NAMBLA I see the seeds of tyranny."

. . . Scott O'Hara, publisher and editor of STEAM magazine.
Spirit of Stonewall Press Conference, Stonewall Bar,
Greenwich Village, New York City, June 24, 1994.

Academic Perspectives

John Money
"If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way."

. . . John Money, Professor Emeritus of Medical Psychology,
Johns Hopkins University, in an interview in
Paidika, Spring, 1991.

Alfred Kinsey
"It is ordinarily said that criminal law is designed to protect property and to protect persons, and if society's only interest in controlling sex behavior were to protect persons, then the criminal codes concerned with assault and battery should provide adequate protection. The fact that there is a body of sex laws which is apart from the laws protecting persons is evidence of their distinct function, namely that of protecting custom."

. . . Alfred Kinsey, W Pomeroy and C Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
(Philadelphia, W B Saunders, 1948).
1999 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kinsey's first volume in 1948.

Alfred Kinsey
"When children are constantly warned by parents and teachers against contacts with adults, and when they receive no explanation of the exact nature of the contacts, they are ready to become hysterical as soon as any older person approaches, or stops and speaks to them in the street, or fondles them, or proposes to do something for them, even though the adult may have had no sexual objective in mind. Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves. The current hysteria over sex offenders may very well have serious effects on the ability of many of these children to work out sexual adjustments some years later..."

. . . Alfred Kinsey, W Pomeroy, C Martin, and P Gephard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, W B Saunders, 1953).

James Kincaid
"It is possible that the [boy-lover's] marginal position alerts him not only to self-interest but the pains suffered by all the outcast. This is not a necessary consequence of [loving boys], of course, any more than virtue is of poverty. Still, that passion for helping the child is so strong in relations [between men and boys] that even the police acknowledge it."

. . . James Kincaid, professor of English, University of Southern California
in Child Loving (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Colin Spencer
"Adult males in modern society who feel fulfilled in giving concern and tuition to boys and youths are portrayed as being interested only in boys' bodies (though this may be a small part of the attraction) and are spurned and traduced as sexual monsters. I believe we reap the harvest of our hysterical fear and homophobia today in juvenile crime, drug use and delinquency. Consider the ethical training which boys and youths gainded through shudo in Japan or in the system in classical Greece, the tuition in manners, customs and humanity, the degree of civilised values imparted to them, the ideas of loyalty, honour and truthfulness; this highly personalised education with love and sensuality at its center must be far more effective than any other. We in the West are bigoted fools to dismiss it with such horror."

. . . Colin Spencer, in Homosexuality in History (p 393). New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Preben Hertoft
"...in cases of mutual consent and mutual sexual attraction, sexual activity itself [between men and boys] seems to produce no damaging effects. It is to be hoped that this may put parents' minds at rest and help them to avoid being unnecessarily upset and anxious."

. . . Dr. Preben Hertoft, eminent Copenhagen sexologist,
'Introduction', Crime Without Victims, Amsterdam: Global Academic Publishers, 1993.

Journalist Perspectives

The New York Times (Dudley Clendinen)
BOSTON, 31 Dec -- Four years ago this month, after two dozen men were indicted for sex crimes in the nearby town of Revere, a conference was held downtown at the Community Church of Boston. About 30 men [and boys] stayed on to talk of the difficult issue discussed at the conference, and they decided to form an organization to promote understanding of their kind of love and to seek a change in the law. Thus, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where many of the laws on sexual conduct date from the Puritan period, was born the most provocative name of any homosexual organization in the United States: the North American Man-Boy Love Association, dedicated to the proposition that state laws establishing a sexual age of consent should be repealed. ...

. . . The New York Times, 1 January 1983 (page 1)

Metroline
"Our foes waved NAMBLA Bulletins at the state capitol for years protesting the gay rights bill. But NAMBLA has made very strong statements and distinctions against child abuse. How many of its opponents have really listened to what the organization actually supports?"

. . . from 'Accepting Diversity', an editorial in the Hartford, Connecticut
gay magazine, Metroline, 26 July 1991