"Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered (Long post)
James Gordon
The taboo against sex with children continues to erode.
By Mary Eberstadt
(from The Weekly Standard)
Until very, very recently, public questioning of the social prohibition
against pedophiliaóto say nothing of positive celebration of child
molestationówas practically non-existent in American life. The reasons
why are not opaque. To most people, the very word "pedophilia" summons
forth a preternatural degree of horror and revulsion; and the criminal
law that reflects those reactions has consistently treated the sexual
molestation of minors as a serious and eminently punishable offense. So
it is small wonder that, historically speaking, the taboo against using
legal minors for sex was no more publicly controversial in the United
States than the prohibitions against, say, cannibalism or bestiality.
Those few partisans of the idea who did sometimes sally forth
customarily found themselves regarded as the lowest of the social low,
even by the criminal class.
This social consensus against the sexual exploitation of children and
adolescents, howeveróunlike those against, say, animal sex or incestóis
apparently eroding, and this regardless of the fact that the vast
majority of citizens do overwhelmingly abominate the thing. For
elsewhere in the public square, the defense of adult-child sexómore
accurately, man-boy sexóis now out in the open. Moreover, it is on
parade in a number of placesótherapeutic, literary, and academic
circles; mainstream publishing houses and journals and magazines and
bookstoresówhere the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently
have been not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to
prosecution.
Dramatic though this turnaround may be, it did not happen overnight.
Four years ago in these pages, in an essay called "Pedophilia Chic," I
described in some detail a number of then-recent public challenges to
this particular taboo, all of them apparently isolated from one
another.1 Plainly, as the record even then showed, a surprising number
of voices were willing to rise up on behalf of what advocates refer to
as "man-boy love," or what most people call sexual abuse.
Yet while the examples themselves were easy enough to document, their
larger meaning seemed far from clear. Why, in a post-Cold War world
bursting with real political controversies, were some people intent on
insisting that the time had come to rethink an issue that most people
already vehemently, passionately, agreed about? And why was the taboo
against pedophilia under particular pressure in the mid-1990s, of all
timesóan interval when, readers will recall, public attention to the
sexual abuse of girl children had simultaneously reached an all-time
high? Perhaps, or so it seemed reasonable to speculate, all that really
lay behind these efforts was just that familiar postmodern idol, shock
value. Perhaps this "pedophilia chic," I guessed then, was simply "the
last gasp of a nihilism that has exhausted itself by chasing down every
other avenue of liberation, only to find one last roadblock still manned
by the bourgeoisie."
Four-plus years and many other challenges to the same taboo later, it is
clear that this hypothesis got something wrong. For one thing, no
sustained public challenges have arisen over other primal taboos. Even
more telling, if nihilism and nihilism alone were the explanation for
public attempts to legitimize sex with boy children, then we would
expect the appearance of related attempts to legitimize sex with girl
children; and these we manifestly do not see.2 Nobody, but nobody, has
been allowed to make the case for girl pedophilia with the backing of
any reputable institution. Publishing houses are not putting out
acclaimed anthologies and works of fiction that include excerpts of men
having sex with young girls. Psychologists and psychiatrists are not
competing with each other to publish studies demonstrating that the
sexual abuse of girls is inconsequential; or, indeed, that it ought not
even be defined as "abuse."
Two examples from the last few weeks will suffice to show the double
standard here. In the November 12 New York Times Book Review, a writer
found it unremarkable to observe of his subject, biographer Gavin
Lambert, that when "Lambert was a schoolboy of 11, a teacher initiated
him [into homosexuality], and he 'felt no shame or fear, only
gratitude.'" It is unimaginable that New York Times editors would allow
a reviewer to describe an 11-year-old girl being sexually "initiated" by
any adult (in that case, "initiation" would be called "sexual abuse").
Similarly, in mid-December the New York Times Magazine delivered a cover
piece about gay teenagers in cyberspace which was so blasÈ about the
older men who seek out boys in chat rooms that it dismissed those
potential predators as mere "oldies." Again, one can only imagine the
public outcry had the same magazine published a story taking the same
so-what approach to online solicitation, off-line trysts, and
pornography "sharing" between anonymous men and underage girls.
No: As was true four years ago, contemporary efforts to rationalize,
legitimize, and justify pedophilia are about boys. Forget about
abstractions like nihilism; what the record shows is something more
prosaic. The reason why the public is being urged to reconsider boy
pedophilia is that this "question," settled though it may be in the
opinions and laws of the rest of the country, is demonstrably not yet
settled within certain parts of the gay rights movement. The more that
movement has entered the mainstream, the more this "question" has
bubbled forth from that previously distant realm into the public square.
It should go without saying, though under the circumstances it cannot,
that many, many leaders and members of that movement draw a firm line at
consenting adults, want no part of any such "debate," and are in fact
disgusted and appalled by it. Then there are other opinions.
I
Let us begin with one recent public challenge to the taboo against
pedophilia that did garner the public attention it deserved, albeit
belatedly, and which demonstrates both the boy-specific character of
today's revisionism and the gulf between popular and other views of the
subject. This was the episode that began with the publication in July
1998 of an essay in the American Psychological Association's (APA)
prestigious Psychological Bulletin called "A Meta-Analytic Examination
of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples" and
co-authored by Bruce Rind (Temple University), Robert Bauserman
(University of Michigan), and Philip Tromovitch (University of
Pennsylvania).
The density of its professional jargon and 30-plus pages aside, the
argument of "Meta-Analytic" was straightforward enough: that the common
belief that "child sexual abuse causes intense harm, regardless of
gender" was not supported by the studies the authors cited; that, to the
contrary, "negative effects [of child sexual abuse] were neither
pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less
negatively than women." The article also criticized the "indiscriminate
use of this term [child sexual abuse] and related terms such as victim
and perpetrator," suggesting instead that the child's feelings about sex
acts with adults should be taken into account, and that "a willing
encounter with positive reactions would be labeled simply adult-child
sex."
What was equally radical about "Meta-Analytic," though less discussed at
the time, was its specific comparison of pedophilia to "behaviors such
as masturbation, homosexuality, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sexual
promiscuity." All such, the authors noted, "were codified as
pathological in the first edition of the American Psychiatric
Association's (1952) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders"; and all are so codified no more. What this analogy tacitly
suggested, of course, was the assurance that pedophilia, too, would
someday take its place at the liberationist table. In the meantime, as
the authors put it, "This history of conflating morality and law with
science in the area of human sexuality by psychologists and others
indicates a strong need for caution in scientific inquiries of sexual
behaviors that remain taboo, with child sexual abuse being a prime
example [emphasis added]."
As MIT psychologist G.E. Zuriff observed later in an essay for the
Public Interest, "It is not difficult to see how these ideas would
antagonize not only Dr. Laura [Schlessinger] but the public at large."
For although the incendiary potential of asking people to give
pedophilia a second look may or may not have been grasped by the APA
authorities who accepted the article for publication, no such ambiguity
marked the reaction of the lay public. Most people were made aware of
"Meta-Analytic" in March 1999, when Schlessinger devoted the first of
two radio talks to attacking the article, and their own livid view of
the matter was made known in the course of a multi-dimensional public
uproar that took months to die down. The denouement was a series of
unusual events, including a public castigation of the American
Psychological Association by majority whip Tom DeLay; a House vote to
condemn the "Meta-Analytic" essay itself (355-0, with 13 abstentions);
and a highly unusual public rejection by the APA of the piece's
conclusions, along with a promise to acquire an independent evaluation
of the article.
In retrospect, there were two significant and little-noticed facts in
all this. One was not so much the schism that this controversy revealed
between elite-therapeutic and popular thinking about pedophilia, but
rather that the schism itself had gone unnoticed for so long. For
shocking though it may have been to the general public, "Meta-Analytic"
was in fact only the latest in a very long series of professional
attempts to revise therapeutic conceptions of boy pedophilia, attempts
of which most lay readers remain quite ignorant.
Professionals in the field know better. Fifteen years ago, for example,
in his careful research volume Child Sexual Abuse, noted authority David
Finkelhor was already drawing attention to the "body of opinion and
research [that] has emerged in recent years which is trying hard to
vindicate homosexual pedophilia." To read Finkelhor's sources on the
subjectóor, for that matter, to read the notes in the heavily sourced
"Meta-Analytic" itselfóis to see exactly what he means. In their call to
redefine "abuse" as "contact," for example, Rind, Bauserman, and
Tromovitch were merely resurrecting research and conceptual work
stretching back over two decades; similarly, their distinctions between
boys' and girls' supposed experiences of abuse have a pedigree that
begins with Kinsey and branches out dramatically in professional
publications of the last 25 years. The authors of "Meta-Analytic" may
have made their points boldly enough to get noticed; but that is the
only academic novelty to which they could truly lay claim. The real news
about the normalization of pedophilia displayed in "Meta-Analytic" was
that nothing about it was conceptually new.
The second peculiarity of the outrage over "Meta-Analytic," which also
went unnoticed at the time, was that it was not, in fact, universally
shared. The notorious North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA),
predictably enough, cheered the study as "good news." Less explicable
was the reaction within the gay press, which not only failed to distance
its movement from the study, but went on to excoriate the APA's critics
(particularly Laura Schlessinger). This was the same approach taken,
independently, by at least two mainstreamóand relatively
conservativeógay journalists.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, prominent author and activist
Andrew Sullivan complained about the "sour reception" that had greeted
the study. After all, he wrote, Rind et al. had found that "lasting
psychological trauma among adult survivors of abuse, particularly for
men, was much less than feared." This, according to Sullivan, should be
"a reason for relief." Instead, and what he evidently found
disagreeable, "outraged members of the religious right accused the APA
of tolerating pedophilia" and "launched a crusade to punish the
organization." He concluded sarcastically: "That'll teach them to look
on the bright side."
Another writer outraged over the outrage about "Meta-Analytic" was
respected reporter and political analyst Jonathan Rauch. In his
commentary on the controversy published in the National Journal, Rauch
roundly defended the study. It was the critics of the "Meta-Analytic"
piece, Rauch wrote, who were "turning out stomach-churning stuff." The
vote in Congressóas opposed, say, to what Rind et al. had writtenówas
"faintly sinister." Like the authors of the piece itself, Rauch
advocated that, in the name of "science," researchers should "abandon
the current custom of referring to all adult sexual encounters with
minors, regardless of the circumstances, as 'child sexual abuse,'"
because they could "perform finer-grained analyses if they used 'abuse'
to denigrate injurious or unwilling encounters. Other encounters," Rauch
echoed, "could be called 'adult-child sex' or 'adult-adolescent sex.'"
To his credit, Rauch did report that "in 1989, when he was 23 and just
out of college, Bauserman [one of the Meta-Analytic authors] published a
cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward man-boy sexual relations
in a Dutch journal called Paidika." This journal, in Rauch's
description, "had taken pro-pedophilia stands"ósomething which he
admitted "raises red flags."
But at the same time Rauch, like Sullivan, avoided the real issue at
handóthat "Meta-Analytic" quite obviously aimed at de-stigmatizing boy
pedophilia itself. Even more startling, though, was his bland depiction
of Paidika. This is not exactly a journal in which pro-pedophile ideas
have somehow surfaced accidentally. It is a publication dedicated to the
phenomenon of "boy-loving," the most prominent such "scholarly journal"
in the world, whose long-time editor, the late Edward Brongersma, was a
convicted pedophile as well as the author of a two-volume pedophile
classic, Loving Boys. (To describe this as a journal which "had taken
pro-pedophilia stands" is akin to describing The Weekly Standard as a
magazine where conservative arguments have reportedly appeared.) And, of
course, the qualifier "23 and just out of college" served to soften
Bauserman's earlier appearance in Paidika, suggesting it was an excess
of youth.
Both Sullivan and Rauch are not only prominent gay journalists but also
leading proponents of the worldview to which the gay rights movement
owes much of its recent and stunning political successóthe argument
that, as Sullivan's Virtually Normal puts it, "homosexuals . . . have
the equivalent emotional needs and temptations of heterosexuals." Both
writers are also members of the Independent Gay Forum, an institution
aimed at "forging a mainstream identity"; and both have frequently
broken ranks with the leftists and radicals who dominate gay activism.
That two such mainstream authors should mock the public outcry against
that APA article illustrates something noteworthy: that in place of a
social consensus against pedophilia per se, a separate optionócall it
anti-anti-pedophiliaóappears to have taken root. According to that view,
the problem is less sex with minors than the people who declare
themselves against itóDr. Laura fans, congressmen, dissident therapists,
religious types, and anyone else who does not grasp the necessity of
putting words like "child sexual abuse" in quotes.
II
In some of the clinical and therapeutic literature on pedophilia, it has
become customary to distinguish between "ephebophilia," or sexual
attraction to postpubescent children and teenagers, and "pedophilia"
proper, meaning attraction to prepubescent children. Both forms are
exhibited more than occasionally in another part of the written world,
namely gay fiction. "Fiction" here emphatically does not mean
pornography as such, but the kind of literature authored by
self-consciously gay writers, published by reputable houses, and
reviewed respectfully in the mainstream press. Again, it must be
emphasized that numerous gay authors of note do not positively portray
sex between adults and minors, and ipso facto are not part of this
discussion.
Plenty of authors do cross the line, though. "Gay fiction," Philip
Guichard complained in an article for the Village Voice last summer, "is
rich with idyllic accounts of 'intergenerational relationships,' as such
affairs are respectfully called these days." Over four years ago,
"Pedophilia Chic" quoted passages from the works of several acclaimed
authorsóincluding Edmund White, the late Paul Monette, and Larry
Kramerówhich frankly and often sympathetically portrayed men seeking and
having sex with underage boys. Today there are many more such examples
to be found in gay fiction, all verifiable by a trip to the local chain
bookstore.
Last year, for example, St. Martins Press published a novel called The
Coming Storm by Paul Russell, a professor of English at Vassar and the
author of three previously well-received works of fiction. The drama of
this tale revolves around something that remains an imprisonable offense
in almost every stateóa sexual "affair" between a troubled 15-year-old
boy (Noah) and his 25-year-old gay boarding school teacher (Tracy). (The
age of 15, incidentally, is no definitive limit in Russell's narrative.
In the course of the book, Tracy also fantasizes about 14-year-old
boys.)
The Coming Storm became the object of effusive praise by award-winning
reviewer Dennis Drabelle in the Washington Post Book World (August 15,
1999). The Coming Storm, Drabelle enthused, "takes off from a
sensational subjectóforbidden sexualityóto arrive at unexpected heights
and subtleties." It "persuades the reader" that "the sexual relationship
between Noah and Tracy is not only not harmful to either but a boon to
the precocious junior partner, who becomes a better, more engaged
student after the affair gets under way." What is "troublesome" about
the book, according to Drabelle, is not that anyone is "corrupted" by
what happens ("no one is"), but that "it is apt to be stereotyped, not
least by the legal system that makes it a crime [emphasis added]."
This cheerleading for the sexual molestation of teenagers in the Sunday
pages of one of the country's major newspapers did not pass without
comment. One reader berated Drabelle in the letters column for "strongly
implying that child abuse, when it takes place between two males, should
no longer be viewed by the public as either a social offense or a
crime."3 Yet as even a partial survey of related literature shows, what
is truly anomalous about this caseóof a mainstream reviewer in a
mainstream family newspaper ratifying sex between grown men and boysówas
that anyone bothered to be bothered about it at all. Other writers,
including prominent writers among them, have gone further still, and
with even less consequence.
Consider David Leavitt, one of the best known of contemporary gay
authors, whose numerous novels and short stories, among them The Lost
Language of Cranes and, most recently, Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing,
are routinely reviewed in the better journals and magazines. In fact, it
would be hard to think of a gay fiction writer more consistently
represented in mainstream publishing.
For that reason, it is all the more surprising to read what this
ostensibly mainstream author chose to write in his introduction to the
equally mainstream Penguin Book of International Gay Writing (1995,
edited by Mark Mitchell). There, in the course of describing what the
anthology includes, Leavitt notes matter-of-factly that "Another
'forbidden' topic from which European writers seem less likely to shrink
is the love of older men for young boys." He then draws attention to one
particular book excerpted in the volume, When Jonathan Died, by Tony
Duvert. "The coolly assured narrative" of this work, Leavitt informs,
"compels the reader to imagine the world from a perspective he might
ordinarily condemn." Duvert, writes Leavitt, "offers us a homosexual
Lolitaóone in which the child is seducer as much as seduced."
The object of this praise by one of America's leading gay novelists,
appearing in one of publishing's most prestigious book series, is the
tale of a man and boy who are living together in Italy. The scene
selected is sexually graphic. And the age of this child, whom Leavitt
considers "seducer as much as seduced"? He isópage 427 in the hard cover
editionó"hardly seven."
Another seemingly representative collection of gay literature, this one
on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and also apparently selling without
comment, is The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read, an
Anchor Book published by Doubleday in 1998. Its editor/author, Robert
Drake, is a novelist and editor of other anthologies who has won the
Lambda Literary Award. Like the Penguin anthology edited by Leavitt,
Drake's book too strives for canonical status, aspiring to offer a
roadmap to the most important texts of gay history.
As it turns out, several of the texts that editor Drake thought worth
including feature scenes of man-boy sexóagain, what most of the rest of
the public calls abuse or molestation. One work is something called The
Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, described as a book about an
incestuous relationship between a boy and his older brother (to Drake,
"the best, most complex yet satisfying novel of filial love ever
written"). Another text, this one by writer Matthew Stadleródescribed as
the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for his first novelóis called
The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee. This book, says editor Drake, "is an
operatic adventure into the realms of love, personality, ambition and
art . . . a pure joy to read." Its protagonist is "a pedophile's dream:
the mind of a man in the body of a boy." Drake also excerpts and
discusses William S. Burroughs's nightmarish The Wild Boys: A Book of
the Dead, the pederastic violence of which defies description. Yet this
work, according to Drake, "tears straight to the heart of one of the
greatest sources, community-wide, of 1990s gay angst: What to do with
men who love boys?"4
Still another example of how standards are being lowered by a major
publisher and respected writeróthis one from academia and available at
Bordersóis A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, published in
1998 by Yale University Press. This book, "the first full-scale account
of gay male literature, across cultures, languages and from ancient
times to the present," is authored by Gregory Woods, described on the
jacket as "the foremost gay poet working in Britain today." It includes
a longish chapter on "Boys and Boyhood" which is a seemingly definitive
account of pro-pedophile literary works, ranging over texts from the
platonic Death in Venice to the noir likes of the aforementioned Tony
Duvert. Nothing is questioned, much less condemned, in the course of
Woods's account of these works. The only moral ambiguity that occurs to
him concerns not the boy but the man in the equation. Woods concludes:
"By playing [i.e., having sex] with boys, the man remains boyish.
Whether you regard this as a way of retreating from life or, on the
contrary, as a way of engaging with it at its most honest and least
corrupted level, depends on which writer you consult at any given time
[emphasis added]."
III
As for the related matter of gay non-fiction, here too, judging by the
public domain, the subject of boy pedophilia has a manifest niche.
One book only recently available in the "gay studies" section of a
Borders in downtown D.C., for example, is a peculiar classic of a sort
entitled Male Inter-Generational Intimacy: Historical,
Socio-Psychological, and Legal Perspectives, edited by the
aforementioned pedophile icon Edward Brongersma and two colleagues. This
book, according to one of its jacket endorsements, "shed[s] critical
light on the broad spectrum of man-boy love and its place in ancient and
contemporary societies." In other words, it is a series of briefs using
scientistic polemics in an effort to rationalize the sexual molestation
of boy children. The article abstracts speak for themselves.
("Pedophilia is always considered by mainstream society as one form of
sexual abuse of children. However, analysis of the personal accounts
provided by pedophiles suggests that these experiences could be
understood differently." "The incidence of violence is very low in
pedophile contacts with boys. The influence can be strong in lasting
relationships; it can either be wholesome or unwholesome." And so on.)
Of course, this opus that "gay studies" bookshelves now reserve space
for did not spring from nowhere. The book itself grew out of two issues
of the American Journal of Homosexuality (Vol. 20, Nos. 1/2, 1990)
dedicated to the pondering of "male inter-generational love." Here
again, an ostensibly mainstream gay vehicle was put to the service of
advocating pedophilia. In fact, the case of the Journal of Homosexuality
is particularly interesting as a case study of how a pernicious idea can
spread. The editor of this reputable gay journal, John P. DeCecco, is a
psychologist at San Francisco State University. DeCecco is favorably
quoted in the introduction to Male Inter-Generational Intimacy for
having praised the "enormously nurturant relationship" that can result
from pedophile-boy contact. DeCecco is also on the editorial board of
Paidika.
As one would expect, such cross-pollination in gay fiction and criticism
is verifiable many times over via the inhuman efficiencies of
cyber-correlation. It was not immediately obvious, for exampleóin fact,
it came as a surpriseóthat typing "Paidika" into an ordinary search
engine would turn up a reference to Gay Men's Press bestsellers; but it
did not take long to see why. For one of the books on the Gay Men's
Press bestseller list turns out to be Dares to Speak: History and
Contemporary Perspectives on Boy-Love, edited by Joseph Geracióall of
whose chapters but one appeared originally in Paidika itself. Another
book on the same bestseller list is Some Boys, described as a "memoir of
a lover of boys" that "evokes the author's young friends across four
decades and as many continents." Another on the same list is For a Lost
Soldier by Rudi van Dantzig, advertised as involving sex between an
11-year-old boy and a Canadian soldier in Holland in 1944. There are
more.
Surfing also makes plain that the better-known gay organizations, all of
whom stand dead set against any conflation of homosexuality and
pedophilia, are nonetheless sending mixed messages about what is and is
not off-limits for the underage. Most of them, for instance, now have
"youth sections" on their websites for and about legal minors. The
justification for this heightened attention to the young is to
ameliorate the angst of gay teenagers. At the risk of stating the
obvious, though, it is hard to see how this purpose is served by
encouraging boys to act and think sexually at ever younger ages, which
is an all but unavoidable side effect of the type of "outreach" these
sites engage in.
Consider, for example, the website of PFLAG (Parents, Families and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays), one of the more respected gay rights
organizations in the country. It is just a click of the mouse from
PFLAG's "useful links" to a site where one can read the "coming-out"
stories of children aged 10, 11, and 12. Similarly, the "youth" section
of GLAAD's publication list (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)
simply assumes that minors are sexually autonomousóand active. One piece
("Landmark Survey Shows Gay Youth Coming Out Earlier than Ever") notes
approvingly that most children now "realize" their orientation at age
12. Another piece, "Lesbian and Gay Youth Find Safe Place in
Cyberspace," counsels: "Don't believe much of the hype about how
cyberspace is populated with pedophiles." These citations are taken from
just the first two pages of GLAAD's 15-page list of publications for and
about "gay youth."
At OutProudóanother site recommended and linked by leading gay
organizationsóvisitors are routed to a comic strip called "Queer Boys."
It features two boys who are said to be 16 and look younger. They set
off for Manhattan ("Let's run away to New York, where it's safe to be
Queer!!" "Kewl!"), where they triumph over evildoers (i.e., parents and
reparative therapists) and find happiness at last thanks to the habituÈs
of a bar in the West Village. ("A gay rock club! That's so cool! Damn! I
wish we were old enough to get in!!" says one of the boys. "Damn those
politicians! Damn them all to hell!!" replies the other.)
For a final example of how pedophilia is being defined down, consider XY
magazineówhich would doubtless have run afoul of the obscenity laws
until very recently. Started just four years ago, XY is now, according
to its founder and publisher Peter Ian Cummings, the "third largest gay
magazine in the U.S., selling over 60,000 copies per year and hav[ing]
more than 200,000 readers." (These numbers are unaudited, but would put
XY on a par with the Advocate in circulation, though lower than Out
magazine's 120,000.) Cummings also reports that "you can find XY on sale
in Borders, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble,
Waldenbooks, and many others."
What gives XY its unprecedented niche is that here, for the first time,
is a mass-market magazine "officially targeted toward 12-29 year old
young gay men," every issue of which, as one admiring journalist puts
it, "features scantily clad young men in several photo spreads and on
the cover." Then there is the non-photo content. The first issue was
stamped "Underage." Another issue included a sympathetic pro-and-con
interview with a prominent member of NAMBLA. An article in another issue
was titled "Fó the Age of Consent." There is also a smattering of
self-help that can only make minors easier to findófor example, advice
about what kids should do if their parents install a filtering system
that prevents them from reaching gay cyberspace (answer: get around it).
In sum, if one had taken on the challenge of designing a magazine for
pedophiles, it would probably look a lot like XY, which is why its
market niche and evident reader support invite reflection. So too, for
obvious reasons, does the public (gay) reaction to all this. On the one
hand, Out magazine referred to XY's debut as a "dubious achievement" and
suggested that it was equivalent to child pornography. Similarly, Philip
Guichard complained in his Village Voice piece (headlined "I Hate Older
Men"): "Mainstream gay culture dresses up its kiddie porn in a pretense
of serving teens. As nice as it is to believe that magazines like XY and
Joey [a recent competitor] are actually consumed by gay teens, it's
obvious to me that the shirtless kids in provocative poses who fill
their glossy pages are there for older men." What's more, XY's publisher
has complained of "pedophobia" on the part of his gay critics; and most
advertisers, by Cummings's account, including those popular with the
male gay market (Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap), have
demurred from buying space in its pages. Apparently, the fear of
supporting child sex, or the fear of appearing to do soóor bothóremain
potent corporate motivators.5
At the same time, however, to judge by the endorsements on XY's website,
numerous other observers have weighed in favorably. The San Francisco
Examiner says that of all magazines, XY is "the one most on the cutting
edge of change." The Ft. Lauderdale Express Gay News calls it "the most
courageous magazine in America." The general-interest entertainment
guide Time Out New York observes that "XY has boldly established itself
as a unique publication that tackles sex, romance, and other issues
facing gay teens and men." But perhaps the most accurate indication of
XY's community standing comes from the business publication Advertising
Age, which noted: "XY is playing a significant role in mainstream online
media. . . . The magazine's site can be accessed directly via America
Online, and the magazine is also providing content to the 'youth
channel' on PlanetOut.com." This success is a sign of the times. Some of
the largest and most respected gay organizations in the country now list
XY, of all things, as a "resource" for gay youthóthis, alongside a
burgeoning number of websites also aimed at minors and replete with
personal ads, chat rooms, "pen pals," and other forms of anonymous
contact rife with the potential for subterfuge.
IV
It is tempting to throw up one's hands on reading a litany like this
one, and to blame it all on our anything-goes postmodern life. But this
is determinism masquerading as pessimism, and a determinism that does
not fit the facts. Today's pressures to normalize pedophilia are not the
result of some omnipotent and unstoppable taboo-devouring social and
moral juggernaut; they are occurring one bookstore, one magazine, one
publisher and advertiser, one author and editor and consumer at a time.
Case by case, given a more enlightened public, it is not hard to imagine
these decisionsólike the one that led to Penguin's putting its
imprimatur on a pedophilic sex scene, or like the misguided efforts by
some gay organizations to refer teens to unsavory and perhaps even
unsafe websitesóbeing made otherwise. Such a turnaround is particularly
imaginable in the case of chain bookstore merchandisers, who routinely
place pro-pedophile works on the gay-interest shelvesóa phenomenon that
thoughtful movement activists must find outrageous.
It would help immensely if those members of the gay rights movement who
have not realized what is being committed in their nameóalong with those
who do realize what is going on, and who deplore itójoin forces against
this trend. Here too, one can imagine progress being made; decent
people, by definition, tend ultimately to do what decency requires. When
"Pedophilia Chic" appeared four years ago, for example, a poignant
response soon came from Paul W. Simmons, the political director of the
Log Cabin Republicans in Houston. He feared that the piece would leave
readers with the "erroneous impression that the gay male community
endorses sexual exploitation of adolescent males." The letter continued:
"Unfortunately, the homosexual community's political leadership, which
is dominated by radical leftists, has failed to denounce loudly the
North American Man-Boy Love Association and other nefarious groups. But
on this issue, as with many others, the leadership is removed from the
constituency it purports to serve. For a sizable majority of gay men,
sexual relations with children are viewed as morally appalling, and the
adult practitioners of it are seen as pathological deviants."
These are words with which any reasonable person will agree. They also
raise the question of whyóparticularly in light of the astonishing
political and social victories of the last several yearsóleaders of that
movement have not been more scrupulous about some of its ranks.
In an interesting pro-movement 1996 book, Perfect Enemies: The Religious
Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s, authors John
Gallagher and Christopher Bull propose an answer of sorts to this
question. Most national gay groups, they note, opted for respectability
as the movement grew, particularly by passing resolutions denouncing
NAMBLA and all it stood for. At the same time, according to the authors,
pedophilia advocates did enjoy lingering protection among parts of the
movement because "many thoughtful activists who opposed NAMBLA's goals
could not escape the suspicion that to denounce the organization would
be to mimic society's condemnation of their own sexual orientation."
Whatever its origins, the reluctance by some activists to draw such
lines means this: Today, instead of standing foursquare with the rest of
the public against this evil, the gay rights movement appears divided. A
few proclaim boys to be sexual fair game. Influential others disavow
pedophilia per se, but tolerate its advocacy on grounds of political
solidarity with persecuted groups. Still others, in the relatively new
development noted earlier, appear to have opted for a kind of
anti-anti-pedophilia, according to which the "real" problems for the
movement are somehow Dr. Laura and the religious right, rather than the
facts to which such critics draw attention: e.g., that efforts are being
made to destigmatize the sexual exploitation of boy children; or that
positive portrayals of "inter-generational sex," which are extremely
rare in the rest of the culture, are not rare in gay literature and
journalism. And, once again obviously, there are the many, many other
peopleórepresentative of that "sizable majority" of which the Log Cabin
Republican wroteówho must be as distressed by such advocacy as he is,
but appear undecided what to do about it.
Today's gay rights advocates preside over what is probably the single
most successful domestic political movement of the post-Cold War era.
The sine qua non of its dramatic advance has been the tolerance of the
civic majority, for whom the movement's most stirring appealsóto equity
and fair treatment and "a place at the table," as Bruce Bawer put
itóhave turned out to resonate more deeply than even most activists
could have imagined. This is not to say that public unanimity reigns
here, any more than it does over the agendas of other special interest
groups. Reasonable people, both inside and outside of the gay rights
movement, disagree in good faith on profound pointsófrom the
interpretation of Judeo-Christian teachings, to the implications of
civil unions, to the appropriate public health measures in the wake of
AIDS, to the judicial propriety of hate-crime laws.
But it is not and will not be the case that this same tolerance can be
parlayed into support for predators. About pedophilia there remains one
and only one proposition that commands public assent. It is this: If the
sexual abuse of minors isn't wrong, then nothing is.
1These included, among other events and soundings, a much-publicized
Calvin Klein ad campaign that paid homage to the conventions of child
pornography; the publication by a reputable publisher, Prometheus Books,
of a book advocating "intergenerational intimacy," i.e. pedophilia; a
still-notorious piece in the May 8, 1995, New Republic praising NAMBLA,
the North American Man-Boy Love Association, for its "bravery" and
suggesting that we lower the age of consent for boys; a sympathetic
profile in Vanity Fair of a convicted child pornography trafficker; a
sympathetic profile of a pedophile in a celebrated book by author Edmund
White; and a review of the writings of several prominent gay authors,
all published and acclaimed in mainstream circles, whose books featured
sex scenes between men and underage boys. Literary critic Bruce Bawer
was a minority voice objecting to the latter trend. See "Pedophilia
Chic," The Weekly Standard, June 17, 1996.
2The antinomian and arguably malignant exercise of Nabokov's Lolita,
written 45 years ago, has not only not been surpassed, but remains so
controversial today that the latest Hollywood version of the story was
not even released in movie theaters in the United States.
3In response, Drabelle wrote that he "supported the laws that protect
children from the sexual advances of predatory adults," that nothing in
his review "says or implies otherwise," and that the reader is "entitled
to his opinion" about whether "any such affair would inexorably result
in wreckage."
4Drake's own answer: "Even as the homo culture of this fin de siËcle
seeks to puritanically clamp down on boy-love advocates, it riddles
itself with a fixation on lithe, boyish sexuality and smooth-chested
youthful attractivenessóand the perpetration of same as the physical and
erotic ideal apparent in clubs, online profiles, porn films and
mainstream advertisements. It is nothing more than blatant hypocrisy."
5According to the publisher, Virgin records, Tower Records, and Smith
Kline Beecham have been among XY's few paid advertisers.