Thoughts on NAMBLA
By Allen Ginsberg, July 13, 1994
- "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you." --William Blake
I became a member of NAMBLA a decade ago as a matter of civil liberties.
In the early 1980s, the FBI had conducted a campaign of entrapment and
"dirty tricks" against NAMBLA members just as they had against black and
anti-war leaders in previous decades.
In the January 17, 1983, issue Time magazine, following the FBI disinformation campaign, attacked NAMBLA as a group involved in the "systematic exploitation of the weak and immature by the powerful and disturbed." That struck me as a fitting description of Time magazine itself. NAMBLA's a forum for reform of
those laws on youthful sexuality which members deem oppressive, a
discussion society not a sex club. I joined NAMBLA in defense of free
speech.
Historically, societies have taken different views of this issue and the
political heat that surrounds the subject is unnatural. Demagogic
reaction to NAMBLA demeans the subject as a political football. At
present European nations do not share current US public sexual hysteria.
Various cultures and states offer widely varying definitions of age of
consent--age 15 in Czechoslovakia and some US states, 14 in Hawaii.
There's no universal consensus on "consent." It's a fit subject for
discussion, NAMBLA provides a forum.
Most people like myself do not make carnal love to hairless boys and
girls. Yet such erotic inclinations or fantasies are average and are
commonly sublimated into courtly sociability.
An afternoon's walk through the Vatican Museum will attest centuries of honorific
appreciation of nude youths, an acceptable pleasure in the quasi erotic
contemplation of the "naked human form divine." From Rome's Vatican to
Florence's Uffizi galleries to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, we
see statues of prepubescent Eros, pubescent Bacchus, male ephebes (naked
bodies 12 to 18), the adolescent goddess Kore, nymphs, naiads, young
fauns and satyrs in abundance, Laocoon and his boys with pubes exposed,
wrinkled old Neptune's loins, old hags with undraped withers and dugs,
Olympian Zeus and kid Ganymede. Western Civilization prides itself on
its foundation in classical Greek culture, wherein intergenerational
love was a social practice praised by philosophers.
A dash of humor, common sense humanity and historical perspective would
help discussion of NAMBLA's role. Further, libertarians or anarchists
may remember Blake's warning, "One Law for the Lion and the Ox is
Oppression."
These considerations shouldn't be distorted to apologize for rape and
mental or physical violation of children. I respect those who want to
fix a general law to prevent abuse of minors. This is a real problem
though less politically demagogic than advertised by some aggressive
therapists, politically correct thought police, and the obsessive
senator Jesse Helms. It is NAMBLA's mission to raise the subject,
explore it, and provide a platform of debate.
Child abuse laws have been abused, especially since the Reagan-Meese
commission's predictably incompetent linkage of pornography and
violence. Subsequent formation of a Justice Department child porn
bureaucracy sent federal squads roaming the states teaching local police
to practice prurient snooping, invasion of privacy and lawless
entrapment.
Often police intrusion into consensual intergenerational affections and affairs results in abuse of both parties. Police authority also has made use of mind rape of the younger person, forcing unwilling youths to fink .. friends with threats of jail or beatings.
One important function of NAMBLA is to keep track of bureaucratic
manipulations of adolescents by police, FBI, media, and other agencies
who handle such delicate issues with a meat ax.
- A Witch Hunt Foiled: The FBI vs. NAMBLA provides an impressive volume of information on these outrageous police practices.
From: Selected Essays 1952-1995
By Allen Ginsberg, 2001