What People Are Saying About NAMBLA And Man/Boy Love "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 "NAMBLA Walks With Me." - Harry Hay, Radical Faerie & activist, L.A. Gay Pride Parade, 1986 "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 in The Big Gay Book: A Man's Survival Guide for the 90s (New York: Plume, 1991) "Membership in the... North American Man/Boy Love Association is not required in order to question whether every instance of intergenerational sexuality is damaging." - Richard Green, professor of psychiatry, University of California, Los Angeles, in Sexual Science and the Law (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992) "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." - Gayle Rubin, lesbian feminist, in Leaping Lesbians, Feb. 1978 "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 know 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) "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 speaking against age-of-consent laws, as cited in James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992) " 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 "...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: Paedophiles Don't Hurt Children" in Crime Without Victims (Amsterdam: Global Academic Publishers, 1993) "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) "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 an editorial, "Accepting Diversity," in the Hartford, Connecticut, gay magazine Metroline, July 26, 1991 "It is possible that the pedophile'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 pedophilia, of course, any more than virtue is of poverty. Still, that passion for helping the child is so strong in pedophile relations that even the police acknowledge it." - James Kincaid, professor of English at University of Southern California, in Child Loving (New York: Routledge, 1992) "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 as affair with an older man have nothing in common." - Cris Guttierrez writing in Frighten the Horses (San Francisco), issue #10, fall 1992 "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, Oct. 1980 "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: The Journal of Paedophilia, spring 1991 Yours in Liberation, Roy -- Roy Radow Now: radow@netcom.com (was: roy@panix.com) North American Man/Boy Love Association -For membership info & brochure write to: NAMBLA, Dept. RR, PO Box 174, Midtown Station, NYC, NY 10018. Send $5 for current Bulletin with amount credited toward membership fee. Publications list available upon request.