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   <TITLE>KATE MILLET:  "I would like to see a broader movement involving young people who would be making the decisions because it's <B><I>their</I></B> issue and <B><I>their</I></B> fight. <B><I>Theirs</I></B> is the authentic voice."</P>
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<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Kate Millet</FONT></H2>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#800040">Sexual Revolution and the Liberation
of Children </FONT></H2>

<H3 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Mark Blasius interviews Kate Millett</FONT></H3>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><B>Mark Blasius</B>: How would you envision a sexually free society?
Do you think any limitations should be placed upon a sexual revolution
and what role would cross-generational sex play in a sexual revolution?
</P>

<P><IMG SRC="millett.gif" HSPACE=8 VSPACE=2 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=158 WIDTH=175 ALIGN=LEFT><B>Kate
Millett</B>: A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women,
who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual
oppression. Part of the patriarchal family structure involves the control
of the sexual life of children; indeed, the control of children totally.
Children have virtually no rights guaranteed by law in our society and
besides, they have no <I><B>money </B>~ </I>which, in a money-economy,
is one of the most important sources of their oppression. Certainly, one
of children's essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably
primarily with each other but with adults as well. So the sexual freedom
of children is an important part of a sexual revolution. How do we bring
this about? The problem here is that when you have an exploitative situation
between adults and children as you have between men and women, cross-generational
relationships take place in a situation of inequality. Children are in
a very precarious position when they enter into relationships with adults
not only in a concrete material sense but emotionally as well because their
personhood is not acknowledged in our society. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: Do you think that a tender loving erotic relationship
can exist between a boy and a man? </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: Of course, or between a female child and an older woman.
Men and women have loved each other for millennia, as have people of different
races. What I'm concerned about is the inequitous context within which
these relationships must exist. Of course, these relationships can be non-exploitative
and considering the circumstances they are probably heroic and very wonderful;
but we have to admit that they can be exploitative as well ~ like in the
prostitution of youth. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: Don't you think that age of consent laws are barriers
to exploring possibilities for non-exploitative cross-generational relationships
and, more importantly, serve to further deny the right of youths to sexual
expression? </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: Well, they were originally meant to protect the child
from exploitation. But what's interesting is that the right to child sexuality
is not being approached initially as the right of children to express themselves
with each other, which was the issue in the '30s with the early sexual
liberationists. Instead, it's being approached as the right of men to have
sex with kids below the age of consent and no mention is made of relationships
between women and girls. It seems as though the principal spokespeople
are older men and not youths. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: That's probably because children or youths have no political
voice. But most gay male youth groups seem to support a lowering or abolition
of the age of consent as a first step. How prevalent are erotic relationships
between women and girls, do you think? </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: In general, women are given more freedom than men within
patriarchy to love across generations. But I don't see the correlative
of the man/boy relationship existing in lesbian culture as I know it. There's
a lot of cross-generational contact among lesbians and even heterosexual
women ~ for example between older and young women artists ~ but they're
mainly as friendships or as mentor relationships. And cross-generational
sexual relationships are more of a topic within the male homosexual movement
than the female homosexual movement and women in the movement often condemn
its advocates. As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also,
having been exploited we're more sensitive to the possibility of exploitation
~ we've been minors all of our history. We're more sexually repressed than
men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior
than men ever have. Men engage in sexual activities that women often regard
as promiscuous ~ it's as though men don't have the defenses that women
have against mutual exploitation ~ against sexual use to the degree of
abuse. So as women, we've experienced a great deal of sexual repression;
at the same time, we're less exploitative. It's possible also that the
conditioning of lesbians has been so repressive that it prevents them from
seeing female people below the age of consent as sexual partners. There's
still, I think, a holding back among lesbians from converting that Platonic
mentor relationship across generations into an erotic one because of the
enormous and potentially catastrophic complications involved in doing so.
Catastrophic not only in the personal sense but also in terms of the persecution
inflicted by the outside world. </P>

<P>The dialog about these issues within the lesbian and homosexual male
movements raises very interesting issues. Have you thought about incest
as an issue too? I've always wondered about the power of the incest taboo
because as child and adult sexuality reaches out to greater and greater
freedoms, the proximity of family members makes one experiment and challenge
this taboo. The incest taboo has always been one of the cornerstones of
patriarchal thought. We have to have an emancipation proclamation for children.
What is really at issue is children's rights and not, as it has been formulated
up to now, merely the right of sexual access to children. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: But shouldn't one of the rights of children be that
of choosing to have an erotic relationship with an older person? </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: Oh, sure, part of a free society would be that you could
choose whomever you fancied, and children should be able to freely choose
as well. But it's very hard to be free if you have no rights about anything,
if you're subjected to endless violence ~ both physical and psychological,
if you're not permitted to speak, if you have no money, if you're already
governed by a whole state system which demands that you put in forced attendance
in school whether you want to be there or not. I would think that given
the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many
things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: It strikes me that there is a contradiction in supporting
children's liberation while maintaining paternalistic age of consent laws
and stigmatizing adults who have erotic relations with young people. </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: If you don't change the social condition of children
you still have an inescapable inequality. That's like the story of the
1917 revolution. Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody
could divorce each other by postcard. It's just that the women had the
babies and getting divorced by postcard when you've been given no means
to earn a living and no education and you're in an enormously inferior
economic situation meant that you were only being declared an equal while
not being given the substance of equality. I can see how gay youth groups
would be very interested in abolishing the age of consent law because it
must be very oppressive for them. But it just seems to me that this has
been mainly an issue for older men rather than for gay youth. </P>

<P><B>Blasius</B>: The rhetoric of pedophilia -- that of older men speaking
out for the sexual freedom of boys -- reflects the underlying powerlessness
of children. One could say that it is symptomatic of this powerlessness.
Boy lovers are directly and acutely cognizant of the social and economic
conditions which crush kids. But it is these same conditions which prevent
kids both from having a real political visibility and from acting on their
own behalf. </P>

<P><B>Millett</B>: But what is our freedom fight about? Is it about the
liberation of children or just having sex with them? I would like to see
a broader movement involving young people who would be making the decisions
because it's <B><I>their</I></B> issue and <B><I>their</I></B> fight. <B><I>Theirs</I></B>
is the authentic voice. </P>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><IMG SRC="millett.gif" HSPACE=4 VSPACE=2 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=50 WIDTH=56><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Kate
Millett</FONT> wrote <I><B>Sexual Politics</B>, <B>Prostitution Papers</B>,
<B>Flying</B>, <B>Sita</B>, and <B>The Basement</B>.</I> Mark Blasius teaches
Politics at Princeton. This interview, untitled, first appeared in &quot;Loving
Boys,&quot; <B><I>Semiotext(e) Special</I></B>, Intervention Series//2,
Summer 1980. Copyright Semiotext(e) Inc., 1980. Reprinted in <B><I>The
Age Taboo </I></B>(see below).</P>

<P><BR>
<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><IMG SRC="taboo.jpg" HSPACE=8 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=266 WIDTH=200 ALIGN=LEFT>Tsang
centers this collection of essays on man/boy love around the issues of
gay male sexuality, power and consent. He has labored to include disparate
voices in the discussion, with pieces from feminists Kate Millet and Pat
Califia as well as the editors of Lesbians Rising. Gay and lesbian teenagers,
some themselves in cross-generation relationships, are also represented,
and the subjects of childhood, racism and ideology are explored. The work
captures both a historical moment at the end of the 70s, when most of the
pieces were written, and continuing questions that divide the gay and lesbian
community to this day. (Alyson Publications, 178 pp) Order TAT $9.50 </P>

<P><B><I>The Age Taboo</I></B> is available from <B>Ariel's Pages, P. O.
Box 2487, New York, NY 10185, USA.</B></P>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>


<P><A HREF="index.htm"><IMG SRC="m0p7nau7.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=58 WIDTH=58></A>Copyright
&copy; NAMBLA, 1997. All rights reserved. </P>

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	<TITLE>KATE MILLET: "I would like to see a broader movement involving young people who would be making the decisions because it's <B><I>their</I></B> issue and <B><I>their</I></B> fight. <B><I>Theirs</I></B> is the authentic voice."</P>
	</TITLE>
	<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="NAMBLA's goal is to end the oppression of men and boyswho have mutually consensual relationships. Our membership is open to everyone sympathetic to man/boy love in particular and sexual freedom in general.">
	<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="NAMBLA, NORTH AMERICAN MAN/BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION, MAN/BOY LOVE, BOYS, BOYS SPEAK OUT ON MAN/BOY LOVE, WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT NAMBLA AND MAN/BOY LOVE, POEMS OF LOVE AND LIBERATION, NAMBLA BULLETIN, NAMBLA TOPICS, NAMBLA JOURNAL, AGEISM, YOUTH, GAY YOUTH, INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY ASSOCIATION, ILGA, INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATION, DAVID THORSTAD, MICHAEL C. BAURMANN, MICHEL FOUCAULT, ALLEN GINSBERG, KATE MILLET, JOHN MONEY, WALT WHITMAN, CAMILLE PAGLIA, JANE RULE, THE AGE TABOO, PAT CALIFIA, JIM KEPNER, HARRY HAY">
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	<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Kate Millet</FONT></H2>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#800040">Sexual Revolution and the Liberation
	of Children </FONT></H2>

	<H3 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Mark Blasius interviews Kate Millett</FONT></H3>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><B>Mark Blasius</B>: How would you envision a sexually free society?
	Do you think any limitations should be placed upon a sexual revolution
	and what role would cross-generational sex play in a sexual revolution?
	</P>

	<P><IMG SRC="millett.gif" HSPACE=8 VSPACE=2 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=158 WIDTH=175 ALIGN=LEFT><B>Kate
	Millett</B>: A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women,
	who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual
	oppression. Part of the patriarchal family structure involves the control
	of the sexual life of children; indeed, the control of children totally.
	Children have virtually no rights guaranteed by law in our society and
	besides, they have no <I><B>money </B>~ </I>which, in a money-economy,
	is one of the most important sources of their oppression. Certainly, one
	of children's essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably
	primarily with each other but with adults as well. So the sexual freedom
	of children is an important part of a sexual revolution. How do we bring
	this about? The problem here is that when you have an exploitative situation
	between adults and children as you have between men and women, cross-generational
	relationships take place in a situation of inequality. Children are in
	a very precarious position when they enter into relationships with adults
	not only in a concrete material sense but emotionally as well because their
	personhood is not acknowledged in our society. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: Do you think that a tender loving erotic relationship
	can exist between a boy and a man? </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: Of course, or between a female child and an older woman.
	Men and women have loved each other for millennia, as have people of different
	races. What I'm concerned about is the inequitous context within which
	these relationships must exist. Of course, these relationships can be non-exploitative
	and considering the circumstances they are probably heroic and very wonderful;
	but we have to admit that they can be exploitative as well ~ like in the
	prostitution of youth. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: Don't you think that age of consent laws are barriers
	to exploring possibilities for non-exploitative cross-generational relationships
	and, more importantly, serve to further deny the right of youths to sexual
	expression? </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: Well, they were originally meant to protect the child
	from exploitation. But what's interesting is that the right to child sexuality
	is not being approached initially as the right of children to express themselves
	with each other, which was the issue in the '30s with the early sexual
	liberationists. Instead, it's being approached as the right of men to have
	sex with kids below the age of consent and no mention is made of relationships
	between women and girls. It seems as though the principal spokespeople
	are older men and not youths. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: That's probably because children or youths have no political
	voice. But most gay male youth groups seem to support a lowering or abolition
	of the age of consent as a first step. How prevalent are erotic relationships
	between women and girls, do you think? </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: In general, women are given more freedom than men within
	patriarchy to love across generations. But I don't see the correlative
	of the man/boy relationship existing in lesbian culture as I know it. There's
	a lot of cross-generational contact among lesbians and even heterosexual
	women ~ for example between older and young women artists ~ but they're
	mainly as friendships or as mentor relationships. And cross-generational
	sexual relationships are more of a topic within the male homosexual movement
	than the female homosexual movement and women in the movement often condemn
	its advocates. As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also,
	having been exploited we're more sensitive to the possibility of exploitation
	~ we've been minors all of our history. We're more sexually repressed than
	men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior
	than men ever have. Men engage in sexual activities that women often regard
	as promiscuous ~ it's as though men don't have the defenses that women
	have against mutual exploitation ~ against sexual use to the degree of
	abuse. So as women, we've experienced a great deal of sexual repression;
	at the same time, we're less exploitative. It's possible also that the
	conditioning of lesbians has been so repressive that it prevents them from
	seeing female people below the age of consent as sexual partners. There's
	still, I think, a holding back among lesbians from converting that Platonic
	mentor relationship across generations into an erotic one because of the
	enormous and potentially catastrophic complications involved in doing so.
	Catastrophic not only in the personal sense but also in terms of the persecution
	inflicted by the outside world. </P>

	<P>The dialog about these issues within the lesbian and homosexual male
	movements raises very interesting issues. Have you thought about incest
	as an issue too? I've always wondered about the power of the incest taboo
	because as child and adult sexuality reaches out to greater and greater
	freedoms, the proximity of family members makes one experiment and challenge
	this taboo. The incest taboo has always been one of the cornerstones of
	patriarchal thought. We have to have an emancipation proclamation for children.
	What is really at issue is children's rights and not, as it has been formulated
	up to now, merely the right of sexual access to children. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: But shouldn't one of the rights of children be that
	of choosing to have an erotic relationship with an older person? </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: Oh, sure, part of a free society would be that you could
	choose whomever you fancied, and children should be able to freely choose
	as well. But it's very hard to be free if you have no rights about anything,
	if you're subjected to endless violence ~ both physical and psychological,
	if you're not permitted to speak, if you have no money, if you're already
	governed by a whole state system which demands that you put in forced attendance
	in school whether you want to be there or not. I would think that given
	the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many
	things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: It strikes me that there is a contradiction in supporting
	children's liberation while maintaining paternalistic age of consent laws
	and stigmatizing adults who have erotic relations with young people. </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: If you don't change the social condition of children
	you still have an inescapable inequality. That's like the story of the
	1917 revolution. Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody
	could divorce each other by postcard. It's just that the women had the
	babies and getting divorced by postcard when you've been given no means
	to earn a living and no education and you're in an enormously inferior
	economic situation meant that you were only being declared an equal while
	not being given the substance of equality. I can see how gay youth groups
	would be very interested in abolishing the age of consent law because it
	must be very oppressive for them. But it just seems to me that this has
	been mainly an issue for older men rather than for gay youth. </P>

	<P><B>Blasius</B>: The rhetoric of pedophilia -- that of older men speaking
	out for the sexual freedom of boys -- reflects the underlying powerlessness
	of children. One could say that it is symptomatic of this powerlessness.
	Boy lovers are directly and acutely cognizant of the social and economic
	conditions which crush kids. But it is these same conditions which prevent
	kids both from having a real political visibility and from acting on their
	own behalf. </P>

	<P><B>Millett</B>: But what is our freedom fight about? Is it about the
	liberation of children or just having sex with them? I would like to see
	a broader movement involving young people who would be making the decisions
	because it's <B><I>their</I></B> issue and <B><I>their</I></B> fight. <B><I>Theirs</I></B>
	is the authentic voice. </P>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><IMG SRC="millett.gif" HSPACE=4 VSPACE=2 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=50 WIDTH=56><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Kate
	Millett</FONT> wrote <I><B>Sexual Politics</B>, <B>Prostitution Papers</B>,
	<B>Flying</B>, <B>Sita</B>, and <B>The Basement</B>.</I> Mark Blasius teaches
	Politics at Princeton. This interview, untitled, first appeared in "Loving
	Boys," <B><I>Semiotext(e) Special</I></B>, Intervention Series//2,
	Summer 1980. Copyright Semiotext(e) Inc., 1980. Reprinted in <B><I>The
	Age Taboo </I></B>(see below).</P>

	<P><BR>
	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><IMG SRC="taboo.jpg" HSPACE=8 BORDER=1 HEIGHT=266 WIDTH=200 ALIGN=LEFT>Tsang
	centers this collection of essays on man/boy love around the issues of
	gay male sexuality, power and consent. He has labored to include disparate
	voices in the discussion, with pieces from feminists Kate Millet and Pat
	Califia as well as the editors of Lesbians Rising. Gay and lesbian teenagers,
	some themselves in cross-generation relationships, are also represented,
	and the subjects of childhood, racism and ideology are explored. The work
	captures both a historical moment at the end of the 70s, when most of the
	pieces were written, and continuing questions that divide the gay and lesbian
	community to this day. (Alyson Publications, 178 pp) Order TAT $9.50 </P>

	<P><B><I>The Age Taboo</I></B> is available from <B>Ariel's Pages, P. O.
	Box 2487, New York, NY 10185, USA.</B></P>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>


	<P><A HREF="index.htm"><IMG SRC="m0p7nau7.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=58 WIDTH=58></A>Copyright
	© NAMBLA, 1997. All rights reserved. </P>

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