Skip to content
Permalink
main
Switch branches/tags
Go to file
 
 
Cannot retrieve contributors at this time
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pederasty and Homosexuality</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="NAMBLA's goal is to end the oppression of men and boys who have mutually consensual relationships. NAMBLA's membership is open to everyone sympathetic to personal freedom.">
<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 NEWS, AGEISM, YOUTH, PEDOPHILIA, PEDERASTY, PEDOPHILE, PEDERAST, GAY YOUTH, DAVID THORSTAD, INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY ASSOCIATION, INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATION, PRISON, PRISONER, PRISONERS">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/3.04Gold (Win95; I) [Netscape]">
</HEAD>
<BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFEA" LINK="#0000EE" VLINK="#551A8B" ALINK="#FF0000">
<P><IMG SRC="newlogo1.jpg" HEIGHT=78 WIDTH=310><BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</P>
<CENTER><P><B><FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><FONT SIZE=+3>Pederasty and Homosexuality</FONT></FONT></B></P></CENTER>
<CENTER><P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><FONT SIZE=+2>by David Thorstad</FONT></FONT></P></CENTER>
<P><FONT COLOR="#EC2813"><FONT SIZE=+1>Speech to the <B><I>Semana Cultural
Lesbica-Gay</I></B>, Mexico City, June 26, 1998. More than 600 people showed
up for the talk: standing room only, and many had to be turned away. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[This
is an English translation of the speech, which was given in Spanish]</FONT></FONT></P>
<UL>
<P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=900></P>
</UL>
<UL>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>&quot;Our movement today stresses
the liberation and empowerment of young people. Instead of pedagogy, democracy.
Rather than a Greek love mentor-relationship, the companionship of independent
and autonomous individuals. In place of male supremacy, a vision of sexual,
economic, and political liberation for all. Freedom is indivisible. The
liberation of children, women, boy-lovers, and homosexuals in general,
can occur only as complementary facets of the same dream.&quot;</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=900>&nbsp;<BR>
</P>
</UL>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><FONT SIZE=+3>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<BR>
T</FONT></B><FONT SIZE=+1>he issue of love between men and boys has intersected
the gay movement since the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the
first gay rights movement in Germany. In the United States, as the gay
movement has retreated from its vision of sexual liberation, in favor of
integration and assimilation into existing social and political structures,
it has increasingly sought to marginalize even demonize cross-generational
love. Pederasty - that is, love between a man and a youth of 12 to 18 years
of age - say middle-class homosexuals, lesbians, and feminists, has nothing
to do with gay liberation. Some go so far as to claim, absurdly, that it
is a heterosexual phenomenon, or even &quot;sexual abuse.&quot; What a
travesty! </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Pederasty is the main form that
male homosexuality has acquired throughout Western civilization - and not
only in the West! Pederasty is inseparable from the high points of Western
culture - ancient Greece and the Renaissance. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In Germany, in the late nineteenth
century, pederasty was an integral part of the new gay movement. The first
gay journal in the world - <B><I>Der Eigene</I></B>, published beginning
in 1896 (one year before the formation of the first homosexual rights group,
the Scientific Humanitarian Committee of Magnus Hirschfeld) - was a pederast
and anarchist journal &quot;for male culture&quot; with an individualist
anarchist outlook based on the ideas of Max Stirner (author of <B><I>Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum</I></B>). Its publisher, Adolf Brand, was a leading
figure of the gay movement throughout the first decades, until the Nazis
came to power. The journal continued to appear until 1933. Brand died in
an Allied bombing of Berlin in 1945. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Another leading pederast and writer,
Benedict Friedlaender, was also a leader of Hirschfeld's committee, until
1908 when he committed suicide. Not unlike today, the two groups - the
pederasts in the <B><I>Gemeinschaft der Eigenen</I></B> (the Community
of Self- Owners) and the Hirschfeld group - constituted two wings of the
gay movement. Although they collaborated in some things (for example, both
opposed the sodomy statute, Paragraph 175), sharp ideological and scientific
differences separated them. In uncanny ways, many of these differences
persist in the quite different circumstances of today. </FONT></FONT><BR>
</P>
<CENTER><P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>---</FONT></FONT></P></CENTER>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><FONT SIZE=+3>W</FONT></B><FONT SIZE=+1>ith
the spread of the medical model of homosexuality in the late nineteenth
century came an increasing influence of doctors and psychiatrists in the
gay movement. These viewed homosexuals as a &quot;third sex,&quot; or as
&quot;intermediate sexual types&quot; (<B><I>Zwischenstufen</I></B> in
German), a &quot;male soul trapped in a female body&quot; (or vice versa
for lesbians) - a view advanced by Hirschfeld. The pederasts actively combated
this view. They believed in an inherent bisexuality of human beings and
argued that the influence of the medical profession gave the gay movement
the aura of a hospital. Most felt that younger and older males were naturally
attracted to each other and that pederasty was a positive good for society
because it helped to socialize young males and provided them with a necessary
sexual outlet, thereby reducing undesirable social phenomena such as unwanted
pregnancies and prostitution. A few (Hans Bl&uuml;her, for example, famous
for his book on the Wandervogel movement) believed that pederasty and male
bonding provided a basis for a stronger nation and state - a view that,
in a perverted form, found a distorted expression in the militarism of
the Hitler Youth. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Friedlaender, for example, ridiculed
the concept of &quot;a poor womanly soul languishing away in a man's body,
and of the `third sex,'&quot; and attacked the third sex concept as &quot;degrading
and a beggarly...pleading for sympathy.&quot; He insisted on a historical
approach that also took into account anthropological evidence, and wrote:
&quot;A glance at the cultures of countries before and outside of Christianity
suffices to show the complete untenability of the [<B><I>Zwischenstufen</I></B>]
theory. Especially in ancient Greece, most of the military leaders, artists,
and thinkers would have had to be 'psychic hermaphrodites.'&quot; <SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 1">1</A></SUP></FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In their critique of the third-sex
concept and their recognition of the ambiguities and potential bisexuality
of the human animal, the pederasts had their feet more securely on the
ground than did the larger &quot;mainstream&quot; gay movement. The third-sex
argument has been thoroughly discredited for years. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Increasingly, the assimilationist
gay and lesbian groups in the United States, in a kind of throwback to
the nineteenth century, argue that homosexuality is inborn, that it is
genetically determined (&quot;we can't help it that we're gay, we were
born that way, so please don't discriminate against us&quot; - an echo
of the nineteenth-century argument that practically solicits pity and that
in no way challenges the built-in social repression of same-sex love).
The middle-class gay movement today seeks special treatment for a special
kind of person who has adopted a &quot;gay&quot; identity - &quot;gay people&quot;
- rather than seeking to liberate the repressed sexual potential of everyone.
For them, what matters is identity, not practice. The basic argument of
the gay movement today boils down to the following: Homosexuals are born
that way, and heterosexuals are born that way; therefore, homosexual liberation
poses no threat to the status quo and dominance of hetersupremacy. This
is the old &quot;nature versus nurture&quot; argument dressed up in new,
accommodationist clothes. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>The theoretical poverty of this
view can be seen in the fact that many people - including, no doubt, some
in this room change their sexual behavior depending on the circumstances
or over the course of their lives. If there is a genetic basis for homosexuality
and heterosexuality - that is, our behavior is determined by our genes,
rather than myriad social and cultural variables that differ from person
to person - it is not as distinct and mutually exclusive categories, but
as potentials for varieties of sexual expression that lie within everyone's
reach. (This line of antighetto thinking has been eloquently expressed
by the late Italian gay activist Mario Mieli in his book, <B><I>Homosexuality
and Liberation</I></B>.) </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>The real motivation behind this
revival of the &quot;inborn&quot; argument is political, not scientific.
The gay assimilationists want to become part of an existing, inequitable
capitalist society, not change that society in any fundamental way. Their
approach is inherently selfish, not altruistic. They seek minor adjustments
in the status quo, not radical social change. They have been co-opted by
the heterosupremacist power structure. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>One obvious contradiction in the
assimilationist position is that if homosexual identity is inborn, as they
say, then why do they oppose freedom of sexual expression for minors? Assimilationists
argue that sexual identity is fixed by age six, but they deny young people
the right to enjoy sexual pleasure with the person of their own choice.
For them, &quot;protection&quot; is the key word, not &quot;liberation&quot;;
they call on the state to &quot;protect&quot; young people from expressing
and exploring their own sexual behavior. They want to &quot;protect&quot;
young people from &quot;dirty old men&quot; (I, incidentally, am speaking
as a &quot;dirty [gay] old man&quot; - something I take as a positive goal),
but in reality are protecting them from themselves. They support criminalization
of young people's sexuality, especially if it involves sex with an adult
man. They condemn any adult who helps a young person to explore his or
her sexuality. They are like parents - only worse, because they pretend
to offer a guide to the gay future. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Of course, money plays a role in
this too. This is very clear, for example, in the many scandals in the
United States over sex between priests and youths, in which the Catholic
church has paid out millions of dollars in an effort to resolve them. If,
as has happened frequently in these scandals, (1) the boy came back regularly
over a period of years in order to have sex with the priest, and (2) the
&quot;victim&quot; waited twenty to thirty years before denouncing the
priest, one is entitled to wonder whether his motive was not financial
above all; and if there is a sense of guilt, it results mainly from the
medieval and hypocritical attitude of the church, and not automatically,
nor necessarily, from the sexual relationship itself. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>There are also a growing number
of gay child protection agencies (I call them &quot;boy dick protection
societies&quot;), youth support organizations, groups that work with abused
children and runaways (victims of family violence) who are receiving money
from the state. But that money is available only if these agencies parrot
the official antisexual (or antihomosexual) line of the state funders.
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In my state of Minnesota, for example,
these gay agencies do not fight to remove the sodomy statute. Minnesota
is considered to be one of the most liberal states in the United States
(and has had openly gay and lesbian legislators for more than a decade),
but the gay assimilationists barely acknowledge that the state still has
a sodomy statute when more than half of the others have eliminated theirs,
and this more than two hundred years after the French Revolution repealed
the French law. They are lapdogs of the ruling-class parties who prefer
cocktail parties with the oppressor as a way of protesting against oppression.
They also refuse to call for a lowering or a repeal of the age-of-consent
laws (in Minnesota, the age of consent for heterosexual sex, of course,
because homosexual sex is still not legal at any age - is, as it is in
Mexico, 18). The state also has no &quot;emancipation of minors&quot; law,
something that is desperately needed to empower minors who cannot live
with abusive families; but the gay youth protection agencies maintain a
deafening silence about the need for such a law. They do not wish to confront
the antisexual policies of the state, because the state is paying their
salaries, and they have become like pigs at the trough. As the great black
leader Malcolm X once said: &quot;When they lay those dollars on you, your
soul goes.&quot; <BR>
<BR>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;---</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><FONT SIZE=+3>T</FONT></B><FONT SIZE=+1>he
German penal code in the nineteenth century set the age of consent at 14.
In 1897, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee began circulating a petition
calling for repeal of the sodomy statute (a campaign that lasted twenty-five
years, without success). It hoped to make its proposal more palatable to
the authorities by proposing that, in exchange for repeal of the statute,
the age of consent be raised to 16! It thereby began a trend, which has
continued in the gay movement to this day, to shift the focus away from
the consensual nature of sexual acts toward achieving greater sexual elbow
room for adults at the direct expense of others - boy-lovers and young
people, whose relationships they know (or ought to know) are no less consensual.
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>The writer John Henry Mackay expressed
indignation at the efforts of Hirschfeld's committee to trade off an increase
in the age of consent for repeal of Paragraph 175. In his 1907 pamphlet
Geh&ouml;r! Nur einen Augenblick! (Listen Only a Moment!), he noted that
&quot;No law can protect youth from seduction. Only enlightenment can do
that.&quot; Instead of the law, we should trust the unwritten &quot;law
of love.&quot; He denounced &quot;professional seducers of youth&quot;
who would seduce a boy &quot;before he has reached the time of maturity,&quot;
but noted that everyone is different and therefore age cannot be the criterion:
&quot;This is where the borderline lies, and not in an artificial stipulation
of age. One person is mature, yet still looks like a child; the next person
is still a child, although we take him to be mature on account of his age.&quot;<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 2">2</A></SUP>
Summarizing his struggle in 1912, he concluded: &quot;it is our task, those
of us who love young people, to win them for ourselves - not through persuasion
and seduction, but through love and friendship.&quot;<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 3">3</A>
</SUP></FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In 1924, Mackay voiced bitterness
at the efforts of Hirschfeld and others to accommodate themselves to prejudices
against man/boy love:</FONT></FONT></P>
<UL>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>For it has been shown again in these
years that this love has to look for its worst enemies among those who
call themselves &quot;leaders&quot; in this fight and have made themselves
responsible, in one of their ridiculous and degrading petitions to those
currently in power, who have publicly advocated an &quot;age of consent&quot;
- not for children, but for mature boys and youths - and thereby the prosecution
and punishment of those whom they know, as no others do, to be just as
innocent as themselves, and once again those who love an older age have
sought to save themselves at the cost of the comrades-in-fate of their
time - a betrayal of the cause more disgraceful in intention and more dreadful
in its result cannot be imagined.<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 4">4</A></SUP></FONT></FONT></P>
</UL>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>A more recent example of this tendency
to seek improvements for some at the expense of others was the decision
of the state of Wisconsin in May 1983 to decriminalize consensual homosexual
sex between adults. Tacked onto the measure was an amendment that increased
from a misdemeanor to a felony sex between and adult and a teenager of
16 or 17 years of age! This attack on the sexual rights of young people
sailed through the legislature without any outcry from the lesbian and
gay movement. </FONT></FONT><BR>
</P>
<CENTER><P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>---</FONT></FONT><BR>
</P></CENTER>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><FONT SIZE=+2>I</FONT></B><FONT SIZE=+1>n the
early part of the twentieth century, pederasts reacted to the stifling
and sex-repressive atmosphere of pre- World War I Germany by celebrating
nudity and the beauty of the body. Glorification of the male body ... la
ancient Greece made it possible to depict and discuss a universal aspect
of human sexuality in the face of widespread ignorance, the increasing
medicalization of homosexuality, and repressive legislation. Together with
this glorification of the male body, however, went a tendency on the part
of some pederasts to denigrate other forms of sexual expression - particularly
between two adult members of the &quot;third sex&quot; - and even misogyny.
Friedlaender, for example, went so far as to reject Marxism and Social
Democracy on the grounds that their support for the right of women to vote
demonstrated that they had caved in to pressure from women! </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Such views were strongly criticized
by other pederasts. One of them, Edwin Bab, wrote several articles at the
beginning of this century that remain strikingly contemporary in their
analysis. For him, the goal of the boy-love movement was &quot;a fundamental
reform of our morals,&quot; and this could not be accomplished in isolation
from the women's movement, let alone in opposition to it. He accused Friedlaender
of having developed &quot;the most reactionary viewpoints,&quot; and warned
boy-lovers against allowing their &quot;cult of the love of friends to
drag along with it a contempt for women similar to the position of the
woman in ancient Greece.&quot; Both the boy-love movement and the women's
movement, he argued, &quot;unquestionably must work hand in hand.&quot;
If both movements could join forces, he hoped, &quot;in the not too distant
future, a truly human culture would bloom.&quot;<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 5">5</A></SUP>
Adolf Brand, Mackay, and Elisar von Kupffer all opposed Friedlaender's
misogynist views. Unfortunately, however, in view of the antisexual trends
within the women's movement over the past twenty years, Bab's views were
overly optimistic. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Mackay saw as the greatest mistakes
of the German gay movement the following: (1) an attempt to present this
love as &quot;nobler and better,&quot; when in reality it is &quot;a love
like any other, neither better nor worse,&quot; and equally able to bring
happiness if it is a true love; (2) an attempt &quot;to promote the freedom
of men to love, at the expense of women&quot;; and (3) a final error, which
was &quot;more disastrous, in my view, than all the others&quot;: &quot;This
love, persecuted by judges and damned by priests, has fled to the medical
doctors, as if it were a sickness that could be cured by them.&quot;<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 6">6</A></SUP>
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><FONT SIZE=+3>P</FONT></B><FONT SIZE=+1>arallel
to, and overlapping with, the early pederast movement in Germany were the
Wandervogel and youth movements. The first Wandervogel group was founded
in 1896, the year the first issue of <B><I>Der Eigene</I></B> appeared.
By 1913, there were approximately 800 different Wandervogel groups, with
more than 25,000 members. The Wandervogel (which literally means &quot;migratory
bird&quot;) was initially all-male, and organized youth into outdoor activities
such as hiking and camping. It represented a reaction to the constraints
of bourgeois society. The movement continued off and on until it was largely
subsumed by the Hitler Youth. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>It was not a gay movement, and its
ideology was &quot;lead and be led.&quot; The Wandervogel institutionalized
homoerotic sentiment - though not necessarily sex between leaders and followers.
This outlook contained an inherent ambiguity: it institutionalized something
like the Greek mentor-relationship on the one hand, but on the other contained
an implicit militaristic potential. Today, most of us would find the combination
of homoeroticism and leadership outlook less appealing than the free development
of all forms of tenderness and true democracy.<SUP><A HREF="#Footnote 7">7</A></SUP>
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>One of the leading figures in the
Wandervogel movement was Hans Bl&uuml;her, who joined in 1902 at the age
of 14. He was a misogynist who believed in the innate inferiority of women
- yet also that bisexuality was the natural human condition. Homosexual
and bisexual men, in his view, make the best teachers of the young - a
view strikingly expressed by Friedlaender too: &quot;Only he who is a good
pederast can be a perfect pedagogue.&quot; </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Bl&uuml;her professed disgust with
Hirschfeld and his circle, and said that the campaign to repeal Paragraph
175 &quot;was of no interest whatsoever to me.&quot; Homosexuality, he
said, should be accepted, not tolerated. Everyone has a gay component,
so knowledge about homosexuality benefits everyone. Homosexuality is more
social than heterosexuality, which leads to isolated coupling, whereas
homoeroticism naturally gives rise to larger social units, such as nation-states.
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Such views contain some insight,
but also have their problems, and are not of much relevance to today. Where
the Wandervogel movement looked to leadership and guidance of the young
(still preferable to the &quot;protection&quot; approach of today's gay
assimilationists), the pederast movement today stresses the liberation
and empowerment of young people. Instead of pedagogy, democracy. Rather
than a Greek love mentor-relationship, the companionship of independent
and autonomous individuals. In place of male supremacy, a vision of sexual,
economic, and political liberation for all. Freedom is indivisible. The
liberation of children, women, boy-lovers, and homosexuals in general,
can occur only as complementary facets of the same dream.</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Having touched on a few of the historical
and ideological aspects of our topic, I would like to conclude on a more
personal note. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>As middle-class gays become increasingly
part of the mainstream, and turn their backs on the ideas that gave rise
to and inspired their movement - and even on comrades who fought the heterosexual
dictatorship before they themselves had come out - and as the ruling class
steps up its efforts to control, police, and instill fear in the population,
and as it passes laws criminalizing more and more things, and builds prisons
at a breakneck pace to hold the millions it has criminalized (huge numbers
of whom are imprisoned for consensual and harmless activity, such as possession
of marijuana), life and survival for men and boys who love each other is
becoming extremely dangerous. To be an active pederast in the United States
today is like being a Jew in Nazi Germany. The United States is becoming
- perhaps already has become - a police state. The backlash against the
increased visibility of homosexuality since the Stonewall Riots in 1969
is striking pederasts most severely. Thousands are currently in jail in
the United States for purely consensual relationships, and the gay movement
will not lift a finger or a voice in protest. All the liberation movements
of the 1960s blacks, women, homosexuals, the left - have either moved to
the right or, in the case of the left, virtually disappeared. The women's
movement and the gay movement have fallen in love with the state and seem
no longer able to differentiate between their friends and their enemies.
In fact, these days, the gay movement in the United States functions more
as an adjunct of the police than as a movement for liberation. Nowadays,
I sometimes feel as if I need to be liberated from assimilationist gay
men and lesbians as much as I do from heterosupremacy, capitalism, and
police repression. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>It is difficult to identify with
a movement whose primary goals are to win official approval for gay marriage,
gay families, and acceptance in the imperialist military. Homosexuals in
the United States seem intent on demonstrating that they can be as conventional
as heterosexuals. These days, I have to struggle with myself not to be
antigay. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In April of this year, Edward Brongersma,
a distinguished Dutch political leader and writer, as well as a pederast,
died. He was well known for having once spent time in jail for his sexuality,
yet eventually rose to a seat in the Dutch Senate. In that capacity, he
proposed a bill to lower the age of consent to 16, and the bill was adopted
with widespread support, including from the church. Yet, the antisex hysteria
that originated in the United States in the late 1970s has reached Holland
as well as other countries in Europe. Brongersma was forced to flee his
home temporarily by hostile mobs after the wave of hysteria caused by the
Dutroux affair in neighboring Belgium reached the Netherlands. Brongersma
saw everything he had worked for wiped out in eighteen months. He died
a broken man. He was cremated in private within 48 hours of his death,
and no obituaries or even death announcements were issued for fear of hostile
public reactions. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In Minnesota, a highly respected
and prominent gay man who has worked with youth for years in state-funded
agencies was recently forced to leave his position when parents discovered
that he had an 18-year-old boyfriend (hence, not even a minor). The gay
movement has maintained a deafening silence about this. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>In my own case, my boyfriend is
now 18, but when he was 16 I could not approach any gay or state agencies
for assistance with schooling or anything else for fear that moralists
and television reporters would turn our life into a living hell. The law
stipulates that any person who works in counseling, psychiatry, psychology,
social work, teaching, and so on, who merely suspects that an illegal sexual
relationship may be going on, must report it to the authorities. Investigation,
harassment, hysterical and inaccurate publicity, arrest, and imprisonment
are the likely result. Ten or twenty years ago, the gay movement would
have been a source of support for such relationships. Today, it is virtually
indistinguishable from the heterosexist dictatorship itself. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Pederasty, like homosexuality, has
existed, and exists, in all societies that have ever been studied. Homoeroticism
is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, as even efforts to repress
it confirm. Men and youths have always been attracted to each other, and,
like homosexuality in general, their love is irrepressible. Even if it
is far from triumphing, or flowering with the freedom it merits and has
enjoyed in some other cultures (for example, Siwa oasis in Egypt), still,
it can never be repressed. It will continue to find its way to expression
despite all the efforts to suppress and demonize it. As John Henry Mackay
wrote in 1924 in <B><I>The Books of the Nameless Love: </I></B></FONT></FONT></P>
<UL>
<DD><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>They murder our love and yet it
lives. </FONT></FONT></DD>
<DD><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>They throttle our cry and it echoes
back from the future.&nbsp;</FONT></FONT><BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</DD>
</UL>
<P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=900><BR>
</P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Footnotes</FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 1"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP><A HREF="1">1</A></SUP>Quoted
in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, <B><I>The Early Homosexual Rights
Movement (1864-1935),</I></B> rev. ed. (Ojai, CA, Times Change Press, 1995),
p. 54. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 2"></A><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>2</SUP><FONT COLOR="#000080"><B><I>Die
Buecher der namenlosen Liebe, </I></B>vol. 1 (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel,
1979), pp. 463-64. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 3"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>3</SUP>Ibid.,
p. 66. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 4"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>4</SUP>Mackay,
Preface to the second edition of his <B><I>Buecher</I></B>. Quoted in Hubert
Kennedy, <B><I>Anarchist of Love: The Secret Life of John Henry Mackay</I></B>
(New York, Mackay Society, 1983), p. 10 (Kennedy's translation). </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 5"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>5</SUP><B><I>Frauenbewegung
und Freundesliebe: Versuch einer L&ouml;sung des geschlectlichen Problems</I></B>
(Women's Movement and the Love of Friends; Attempt at a Solution to the
Sexual Problem) (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Adolf Brand/Der Eigene, 1904),
pp. 22-23. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 6"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>6</SUP><B><I>Buecher,</I></B>
pp. 62-63. </FONT></FONT></P>
<P><A NAME="Footnote 7"></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1><SUP>7</SUP>For
a more in-depth analysis of the Wandervogelmovement, see Friedrich Kr&ouml;hnke,
&quot;'Wandervogel' und Homosexuellenbewegung,&quot; in <B><I>Der Eigene:
Ein Blatt f&uuml;r m&auml;nnliche Kultur,</I></B> ed. Joachim S. Hohmann
(Frankfurt am Main/Berlin: Foerster Verlag, 1981), pp. 345-73.&nbsp;<BR>
&nbsp;</FONT></FONT><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=900></P>
<P><A HREF="index.htm"><IMG SRC="m0p7nau7.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=80 WIDTH=80></A><FONT COLOR="#000080"><FONT SIZE=+1>Copyright
</FONT>&copy; <FONT SIZE=+1>NAMBLA, 1999. All rights reserved.</FONT></FONT></P>
</BODY>
</HTML>