User:User4/DRAFT/THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING THE AGE OF CONSENT LAWS
I have been given (tentative) permission by a member of the NAMBLA steering committee to reproduce this article here, but I am awaiting official permission before publishing this on BW as an "authorized reproduction".
THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING THE AGE OF CONSENT LAWS
editorial in NAMBLA News (1980) North American Man-Boy Love Association
The Laws and their Purposes
What are age of consent laws? Generally they refer to a number of statutes which prohibit any kind of erotic or sexual contact between an adult and a person under a specified age (which varies widely from state to state) and even, in most jurisdictions, sexual contact between minors. Though the age at which the line of proscription is drawn differs from state to state, all states have "statutory rape" laws as well as related laws forbidding adult-minor contact. These include: indecent assault, intent to commit rape, unnatural acts, sexual abuse, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, etc.
Most of these laws are now thought to be vague in their wording, unclear in their intent, and overlapping in their scope. Increasingly, courts in some progressive jurisdictions overturn convictions on these laws.
Where did statutory rape laws come from? The concept goes back hundreds of years, but it hadn't become a matter of obsessional interest to the state until within the past one hundred years. Statutory rape laws evolved as a device for large property holders to have as a legal remedy to maintain chastity among their daughters prior to marrying them off. Virginity—which had more status in the past than today—was essential in property-arranged marriages. Daughters, as legal property of their fathers, had to be kept virginal. Many were literally locked away under horrible circumstances. The sexual purity of persons without property remained of no concern to the state. Propertyless persons of "loose" morals are still exempt from the "protection" extended their more chaste minor brothers and sisters. To this day, in some states in the American South, an adult male, if accused of a sex act with a minor female, can win acquittal at trial if he can demonstrate that his partner was previously sexually experienced or even if he truly believed her to be already "debauched."
What purposes are served by this growing number of laws today?
Liberals argue that the state is, by and large, a beneficent, if still imperfect, mechanism for best promoting a rational system of human interaction. Those who have been the traditional victims of this "rational system" certainly see it differently. The state, through its punitive agencies, has reserved for itself the right to determine which personal relations are to be allowed and which are to be punished. With the decline of the extended family and traditional church influence, the state has increased its investment in maintaining a preferred family structure, i.e., male-dominated, heterosexual nuclear variety. The state continues to have a vested interest in regulating and channeling sexual activity into the type it can best control. The greatest threat to this hierarchical and repressive system is presented by sexual and affectionate personal relations outside the approved mode. Specifically, this means the freedom of those over whom the state still has greatest control (minors) and those with whom these minors would create their own lives.
Though it is probably fair to assume that self-identified heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals in this society, and that heterosexual pedophile acts are more frequent than man-boy contacts, the state has reserved its special fury for gay men who develop friendships with boys. In Massachusetts, for example, there are far more gay men in jails, prisons, and at the Bridgewater Treatment Unit for statutory (non-violent) sex acts with boys than there are het males for offenses with girls.
Curiously, the state is becoming more permissive in some areas while simultaneously becoming more punitive in other related areas of sexual behavior. It's becoming more permissive in that some recent changes in laws in many states have decriminalized sex between adults and minors as long as there is no more than a few years' age difference between them. A proposed Washington D.C. law change would permit a five-year age span, allowing a 16-year-old to have contact with an 11-year-old without risking legal sanctions.
But the state is growing more intolerant in that, by rewriting the sex-offenses statutes, the state's grip over those to be targeted becomes that much more direct. Rather than doing away with the laws (which are partially undermined by the peer-peer "free-zones"), the more specifically written laws create a more precise, potential criminal class ...
The effect of age of consent laws is to invade both the perception of one's privacy and, in many cases, the fact of one's privacy in order to punish those who would choose to relate to one another outside the narrow and strictly defined limits of state sexuality and the pattern of authority this type of repressed sexuality maintains.
It is important to keep in mind the historical context in which these recent developments have occurred. Radical critics of modern liberal democracies (like Marcuse and Wolff) have suggested the ideas of "repressive desublimation" and "repressive tolerance." Such theorizing—though generally not in favor in American social thought and certainly not regarding sexual behavior—provides a framework for understanding twin primary events in how the state adapts to changes in consciousness and behavior among the citizenry. The state—and particularly the bureaucratic kind of state which has flourished in American states and at the federal level since the New Deal—is best characterized by its attempt to promote control through accommodation. The US role as world imperial power has only concentrated these control tendencies. Discipline and conformity can be maintained through periodic purgings of those who are perceived as presenting a threat to the National Security State.
Sexuality represents the ultimate individualism—everyone's personal sexuality, their fantasies, and their erotic potential are far more idiosyncratic than are, say, their consumer choices, voting patterns, patterns of religious or social identification—and this is why sexuality is a constant fear of those who would seek to continue administered controls. Be it women's right to reproductive freedoms, homosexual activity, or youths' rights to free expression of personal sexual preference: these are the fronts on which the battles are being waged in liberal democracies in the war of personal vs. state control of our destinies.
It is no mere odd happenstance that in totalitarian and autocratic regimes, the state first seeks to establish monopoly on approved sexual behavior, usually through establishing absolute punitive legal powers and by mobilizing popular prejudice.
The Roman Church, in its periodic attempts to establish autocratic, centralized control in Europe in the last millennium, has regularly used charges of sexual deviance to wipe out threats to its power. (And developing, by the by, the most splendid form of hypocrisy—i.e. tolerating and even rewarding personal sexual hypocrisy at the highest levels as long as outward fealty is displayed to central control; Cardinal Spellman and Paul the Sixth are recent examples.) The liberalization of sexual mores under Lenin in the Soviet Union was targeted as soon as Stalin set a course of absolute state control: abortion rights were curbed and homosexual behavior was once again proscribed. The German Nazis targeted homosexuals immediately upon attaining power.
In recent US history, the anti-red panics of the 1940s and 1950s always had a not-so-hidden undercurrent of fag-baiting. And today, we are seeing the ascendance of The New Right and the growth of religious lobbies of the most fundamentalist stripe. Yet, their success, if that is what it is, is based on the exploitation of fragmented personalities and public hypocrisy. A man who works in a gay rights lobby in Washington, DC, has said that the offices of New Right groups are filled with closeted gay men and boy-lovers. They exploit popular prejudices for financial gain and political power while at the same time engaging in the very kind of behavior they publicly denounce.
No better example of this could be available than the recent case of US Rep. Bob Bauman, who was arrested six months after blowing a 16-year-old hustler in the Capitol. Bauman, a new-right leader and head of the American Conservative Union, regularly denounced homosexuals and those who threatened The Family while he himself would rush from the Hallowed Halls of Congress out to a boy-bar to buy some dick for his face. If there's one Bauman on Capitol Hill, there's probably another hundred.
Liberal democracies cannot play the control game the way the totalitarian countries do. Homosexuals in the Soviet Union, for example, arc tolerated by the system and even promoted in the areas of their skills until it becomes convenient, for whatever internal reasons, to purge them and make an example. The recent case of Sergei Paradjanov demonstrates this.
The West, and particularly the U.S., is committed to a kind of empirical scientific method in research (with weak emphasis on theory), and this bias has made the concept of sex-science research tolerable. The US, being one of the last of the major Western democracies to develop the practice of centralized, administered governmental control, has not really established its prerogative of regulating all sexuality as of yet, though the spasms of the past few years are certainly strong indications that it has every intention of doing so.
The sex science movement in this century, and the revolution which it has fed, lacks a formal history and needs broader popular consciousness of its importance. Radical agitators and sex revolutionaries like Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey lack proper appreciation in this culture.
Kinsey, who began as a typical American empirical scientist, documented, in undeniable ways, the schism between accepted sexual morality and actual sexual practice, thereby exposing the gargantuan hypocrisy that riddles our culture.
Gay liberationists in general, and boy-lovers in particular, should know Kinsey's work and hold it dear. We should recall that Kinsey's work was attacked at the time of its release. The New York Times, for example, refused to run ads for this breakthrough book. When it was published, liberal (and safe) paragon Lionel Trilling was called in to do a hatchet job. Sadly, Kinsey's volume on male sex behavior has been long out of print. Contemporary sex researchers seem to tilt to "counseling" rather than discovery and agitation.
But implicit in Kinsey is the struggle we fight today. Should the state be empowered to punish—on a selective basis—persons who, as part of a massive biological phenomenon, engage in sexual behavior, in consensual ways, that does not meet the approval of hypocrites and self-designated moralists who influence law-writing, and law enforcement? Within our very own lifetimes, boys "caught" masturbating—perhaps the most frequent form of male sexual release in our culture—have been sent to reformatories or assigned to punitive agencies. Extremely anti-sexual religions (like the Mormons) still today proffer devices to male adolescents to keep them from engaging in auto-erotic release. To what end? To channel, dictate, and control the ways sexual release will be allowed.
The liberal state can no longer deny sexuality, nor can it refute the importance of sexual research or deny the import of the increasing data on how we behave as sexual citizens. Yet it cannot abdicate its desire to control and its need for increasing state power over our lives. This is why it is engaging in this obsessive binge of law-rewriting in the past ten years permitting sex with age peers but prohibiting adult-minor connections. It backs off its attacks on youth sexuality but increases controls over age ghettoism—another form of control.
Simultaneously, pro-control agents step up their attacks on sexual education, discussion, public display of erotica, in order to continue the ignorance which can be mobilized for periodic assaults on those who deviate from the recommended norm.
Age and Consent
The concept of age and the concept of consent are malleable things. They change with the fashions. In the American colonies the vague concept of age of consent was legally ten—for females only. Since that time, the age has inched upwards, usually as the result not of any change in behavior but in reaction to moralistic crusades launched by self-aggrandizing types who use sensational issues to increase legal penalties upon a targeted group.
One of these, the great anti-white-slave campaigns of the late 19th century, did little to halt young female prostitution. They were moralists' responses to overcrowding of cities, the exploitation of labor, and the attempt to scare women into dependency relations either in a family or in employment under a boss.
The Kiddie Porno Panic of 1977 was another chimera. The objection was to kiddie porno (which I would guess less than 1% of the US population had ever seen or heard of). But charlatans and opportunists created this panic in order to cripple and set back the gay liberation movement after its phenomenal growth in the 1970s. Each panic creates a new batch of laws that give the state more power to regulate and interfere with people's private behavior. Yet the State's power—once citizens have acceded power to it—adapts itself while still maintaining control. In the 1960s a trend developed among state legislatures to lower ages of consent.
In many states, we saw sexual enlightenment—and/or criminal code revisions—which revised ages of consent in progressive moves. Curiously, the state of California, in which more sex acts take place of all types than in any other state, has an age of consent of 18, the highest in the nation.
But what we want to note is how social attitudes develop. To us it is a given that this society is anti-sex and homophobic to an enormous degree.
When it goes unchallenged that a murder is a lesser crime than sucking the cock of a 15-year-old boy—as Det. Lloyd Martin of the Los Angeles Police Department as well as several judges have stated, to no objection—then we are already in such a degenerate moral condition that trying to bring some rationality to the discussion of human sexuality may be like the lost figure on the island casting off appeals-in-bottles upon the waves. The conspiracy of silence which surrounds the injustice done those who love boys is a crime for which society's owners will one day have to answer.
In the 19th century, the absolute obsession with preventing boys from touching their cocks and masturbating resulted in the popularity of strange chastity-type belts, elaborate alarm systems that set off bells if a boy's hands reached under his bed-covers, etc. Today, it is hard for us to take such an obsession seriously, even though the battle over the right to privacy (in order to masturbate) was a long and furious one.
Youth sexuality, despite Freud, despite Kinsey, despite overwhelming observable phenomena, remains the diciest of topics. Yet the state—long the foe of acknowledging youth sexuality—is smart enough to co-opt progressive developments of the past 20 years. Instead of recognizing its repressive acts of the past and abdicating its role of interfering in private sexual behavior, the state reluctantly accepts youth sexuality and then creates "peer-peer" free zones where no penalty will be allowed. But adult-youth relationships remain proscribed. Increasingly, those within the women's and gay liberation movement who denounce pedophiles will reluctantly acknowledge that "children" are sexual, but instantly insist that youth only "experiment"—always their favorite word—sexually with other youth. Such thinking is characteristic of the worse ageist ghettoism that saturates our culture and stains our movement. Such distinctions—and the mentality which entertains them—are exactly those which tolerate the expanding National Security State.
Youth requires the same freedoms for personal choice in establishing relationships as adults have. This freedom for adults and minors is currently crippled by age of consent laws. Statutory rape laws serve age ghettoization and keep those who want to reach out across these artificial barriers from doing so. Statutory rape laws are the current equivalent of 19th century legal punishments for masturbation.
Consent is a much talked-about thing, be it in these matters of pedo relationships, within the bounds of marital sex (as in the recent Rideout case), or in the sexuality of our S&M brothers and sisters. Even within emerging law, consent is a "hot" issue.
Less explored is the idea of "age." One of the control mechanisms the liberal state has developed is the concept that we should be stratified by chronological age. This development is something wholly new in our cultural tradition within the past 100 years and is a function of advanced industrialism's need for specific "markets" which support a developed capitalistic culture. Admittedly, other historical cultures, ignoring such artificial age distinctions, relied on other kinds of control: class, monarchy privileges, wealth, etc. The very fact of age has come under control within the last century. Most US citizens can, on average, expect a life expectancy of more years than any of our ancestors. Historically, because of high infant mortality and the high number of childbirth deaths, women were put into breeding service as soon as they could conceive. Child betrothals, usually for political and/or property reasons, were not uncommon even within the modern period. Some cultures recognize pubescence as the threshold of adulthood, and this is usually a time for celebration, not punishments.
Yet in our culture, we face the odd anomaly: we are living longer, the general health of our citizens is better serviced, children—particularly those born after World War II—reach sexual maturity at younger and younger ages, overall sexual awareness is increasing through the population. But at the same time, the state seems determined to bar sexual options for this age. While the trend appears that the culture is growing more sexualized and less restrained by taboos, police and courts step up sexual surveillance and make enforcement against sexual non-conformers a high social priority.
Encouraging state control of sexuality is a particular burden to young males. The years of greatest sexual capacity and actual need are those years which the state still targets as times of denial.
The President's Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, in its numerous backup workgroup reports, time and again documented that erotophobic attitudes at home and denial of sexual expression in adolescence had a high correlation with adult crime and particularly sex crimes. Denmark—often unfairly maligned by reactionaries and Rape-ideology proponents—was time and again cited in these reports. As the first Western European nation to decriminalize the sale and possession of erotic materials, Denmark noted a dramatic and immediate decrease in sex-related misconduct: from voyeurism, to "flashing," to rape. Cross-cultural comparisons always involve risks, but it seems both unscientific and inflammatory to blame gay liberationists, boy-lovers, and "pornographers" for the increase—if, in fact, any—in this nation of "sex crimes." (The quality of the commercial erotica produced for profit today is a separate matter and one we think fairly open to criticism. Current porno is by and large a function of heterosexual domination and pandering, not an outgrowth of sexual liberation movements.) We all should remember that even the commercial erotica presently produced is still made, distributed, and sold in a legally-hostile climate, with those in the business more selectively harassed, indicted and imprisoned than, say, manufacturers and retailers of commercially defective drugs, foods, and services. A disproportionately large number of gay men work in sexually-related industries—visit any porno store or theatre and you'll find gay men working there—and we should keep in mind that these guys are on the front line for official attack.
Age ghettoism is central to plans for contemporary control. The existing combination of official sex-negativity, semi-tolerance, hypocrisy and medical controls has exacted a ghastly price.
Inequality
The issue of alleged inequality between a man and a boy in a pederastic relationship is always raised by those hostile to the phenomenon. It is more apparent than real, and it is raised purely as a canard. We would challenge critics to identify just one example of any kind of relationship which involves two or more persons that isn't characterized by a structured or a de facto imbalance of power. Student-teacher; boss-employee; superstar-fan; doctor-patient; retailer-consumer, etc. Nothing could be more foolish than to advocate that approximate equality of power should exist in every and all human relationships. The diversity and spontaneity of the majority of voluntary associations would be instantly destroyed. Yet it is the demand of pedocritics. In fact it's more than a little ironic that it is the pro-gay pedo-advocates who are upfront about demanding legal equality between adults and minors—thereby removing oppressive areas of legal jeopardy.
The anti-pedo advocates don't really object to the fact of inequality in an adult-minor relationship. Relationships they hold dear are full of inequalities: husband-wife; parent-child; government-citizen. What these critics dislike about their perceived idea of inequality in man-boy affairs is that they think it exactly duplicates the coercive and socially-imposed inequality in existing heterosexual and intra-family relationships, i.e., such relationships must only occur as the result of force or the threat of force.
Behind this prejudiced view, of course, is that old classic superstition: that no one would rationally engage in homosexual activity unless corrupted, depraved, etc. Therefore, since no one would elect such behavior, the older man always uses his power (which must be based on the idea of force) to get the boy—who is completely depersonalized in this view, without will, desires, or ambitions—to be the "victim" of the man's sexual lusts. This view ultimately stems from that old bogey, the "homosexuality-as-contagion" school. That some people are so repressed they cannot accept the idea of homosexual sex as pleasure indicates the measure of homophobia still extant. This inequality-of-power line of attack is just a ruse to keep adult gay men scared enough to make them less available to the boys who seek them.
The idea of equality is a pervasive one in our society and, certainly, among progressives, held up as an ideal. Alas, the ideal is far removed from the reality of life in this land. Inequality of wealth is a scandal beyond compare. Access to services and opportunities is grossly discriminatory and getting worse. Yet suddenly, equality in sexual matters has become a foremost concern among legislators and courts in the 1970s.
Extending civil rights guarantees to everyone regardless of sex seems like a positive—if statist—solution to overt sexism. But other developments, ostensibly progressive, are of the shallowest sort, confusing a bad situation with all sorts of pop medical-legal fashions.
Here in Massachusetts, for example, an effort succeeded in 1974 to reform existing statutory rape laws. The motivating idea was to be sex-egalitarian, to provide the same extent of legal protection to boys as to girls. The intent seems benign. The effect has been to step up indictments of boy-lovers and the sentencing of them to outrageous terms in prison (including life terms in Bridgewater).
The real question is: in a time of greater rights, increasing education, and legal awareness of expanding zones of sexual and personal conduct, do "boys" need added legal protections to punish those who might engage in affairs with them? Do girls even need them? In what capacities are legislators fit to decide on such personal and private matters? Are we to be blind not only to differences in biological behavior but to socialized behavior as well? Is the banner of sex equality to march forward by making punishments equal rather than freedoms?
And shouldn't the notion of ending discrimination on a sex basis—so central to the feminist movement—inspire increasing freedoms rather than being perverted into setting up women as allies of the state in expanding denials by the state upon youth?
Inequity
Enforcement of age of consent laws has a class and status bias. All laws in this country at this time serve proprietary interests. Unlike more rigidly authoritarian nations, they are enforced through numerous, and somewhat differing, sovereign states. Yet, the law works in this country in favor of the rich and powerful and against the poor and uneducated. Dealing with pedophile relations, the law occasionally likes to snare a few higher-ups—it makes good press, wins popular approval, etc. The boy-lovers who routinely go to jail in uncelebrated cases, unpoliticized trials, and lacking contacts in the gay community, happen daily. Most never receive any attention in the straight or gay press.
When DA Garrett Byrne indicted 24 men in Boston on sex charges with teen boys, a few were well-to-do professionals; most were middle-class or working-class. The one who finally went to trial was an MD and a psychiatrist and the press followed every day of his ordeal. Such attention would never be permitted a working-class boy-lover. This gent was found guilty of four acts of blowing a 15-year-old hustler; he got probation. Another man, a NAMBLA member, went to trial in 1980, and was found guilty of one sex act with a 15-year-old boy. He got two years in prison. Another case NAMBLA has taken up, that of Richard Peluso, has a man doing life in prison after he pleaded guilty to blowing a 13-year-old boy on four different occasions.
In recent years, two Congressmen in Washington, DC have been accused of sex with teenage boys. Fred Richmond (New York) and Bob Bauman (Maryland) both faced courts on statutory sex charges. In the District of Columbia, for first offenders in such matters, a person can have charges dismissed by agreeing to attend a counseling program for six months. If age of consent laws must exist, this is a sensible way to handle these matters. Yet we maintain that private consensual sexual conduct should not be a criminal matter. NAMBLA hears of cases every week in which extreme penalties are handed out for simple affectionate sex acts. Yet Congressmen accused of the same thing walk out the door...
When the law can only justify itself as a terroristic mechanism, all its authority—on which government is supposed to be based in this country—is drained. Its legitimacy ceases and it should be abolished. Age of consent laws demonstrate this clearly.
Conclusion
In arguing in favor of abolishing all age of consent laws and for releasing all persons currently doing time for violating such laws, NAMBLA offers two primary arguments, though in this editorial we have also touched upon other important developments in social history and judicial practice which effect the way we are treated today.
Of immediate importance to us is the release of men in prison and in treatment centers who have been railroaded, or found guilty of non-violent sex offenses. It is our position that the legal and correctional treatment assigned these men is a scandal that can no longer be tolerated. The continued incarceration of these men (at least 125 in Massachusetts alone; over several thousand nationwide), and the continued abuse of their persons in the name of medical experimentation, must stop. These men have done nothing more than commit a private act of affection and/or sex with another male who happened to be beneath the age of consent in that jurisdiction. These men have been made victims to conventional statist panic over pedophilia; have been offered up by officials in the panic over homosexuality, and have been denied redress, appeals and sympathetic hearings by gay and straight bigots who would prefer to banish this mammoth injustice from their minds and from public awareness at large.
Of similar importance to NAMBLA are the rights of youths. Young people in this society, who are, ostensibly, the "protectees" of these laws, often find themselves brutalized and manipulated should their private sexual behavior become an issue of the state.
Here in Boston, when we were in the midst of the "Revere Sex Ring Panic," one teenaged boy was taken from his mother and held over one year against his will by police and coerced into conforming with their wishes. When he showed signs of resisting state brutality, cops informed him that he would be charged with "sex crimes." So much for "child protection."
Youth are brutalized by the state in almost every capacity in which they will turn for help. Ironically, the state reserves its severest penalties for the men who love boys, to whom the boys turn for affection and support without any required obeisance. The larger issue, of course, is that by breaking down these artificial walls of fear and terror, and by allowing the natural impulse for youth and adults to connect in the myriad ways they themselves will choose and for whatever diverse pleasurable reasons, the system of erotophobia and homophobia will be diminished (and, one hopes, will collapse). NAMBLA is, truly, fighting for the future of the youth of today. We refuse to accept that they/we must be assimilated into repressed straight sexuality, that they/we must be processed into consumerist pathology, that they/we must accede to control-programming by some of the most life-denying and pleasure-hating authorities any society at any time has ever endured. Though each and every NAMBLA member accepts that we are on the front line of this battle, that each and every one of us prospectively faces life in prison, chemical castration, and our murder, we have come to the understanding that the time is now to begin a resistance. We will no longer bow to state terror. We will no longer acknowledge the ageist, heterosexist brutality of which we and our brothers have been victims for too long. We will fight back!
Which brings us to a central distinction between NAMBLA and other pro-pedo groups, one which has to be dealt with. These other groups—Paedophile Information Exchange in the U.K., Childhood Sensuality Circle in the U.S., and Belgium's Studiegroep Pedofilie—all fight the panic against pedophile relationships. All keep in touch with NAMBLA and, in general, we all implicitly support each other's work. Yet these other groups do not make the pivotal distinction between hetero (usually adult male-minor female) and man-boy relationships, even though, as with RLE. especially, they understand this. The implication is that the only issue is of age.
NAMBLA has a double duty. Not only is age an issue; we join with the rest of gay liberation in our open and positive advocacy of homosexuality. NAMBLA, after all, is an evolution from the Boston/Boise Committee which itself led the resistance to a political attack on gay boy-lovers here in the Boston area. Having emerged out of a resisting, confrontational and activist nexus, NAMBLA is dedicated to the kind of work that will affect change: keep men out of prison, free those who are there, put a check on prosecutorial and judicial homophobic and anti-BL abuse which continues to process men like us into the legal machinery, and by our example, make the issue of relationships that cross legal lines so public, so common and so accepted that we will bring a halt to the terror that exists today.
Those of us in NAMBLA today who were active in other gay liberation groups ten years ago recall the whispers and the confidences back then that, sooner or later, some persons or group would have to take on the overwhelming task of breaking down the false adult-youth dichotomy so precious to the child-haters and the sex-repressed in this culture. That time is now.
NAMBLA has emerged out front. We are not totally surprised at the venom and viciousness we see and hear in attacks on us—from reactionaries or from (usually scared) members of sexual liberationist groups. Change never comes cheap.
Implicit in men and boys loving each other is this: a commitment to a safer future through human affection, combined supportive action and constant agitation. Action aimed to benefit our brothers in prisons, boys fighting hostile families and the men daring to share affection. This is the stuff that moves mountains. As NAMBLA calls to arms (human, warm, and sexual arms—not the patriarch's cold, metallic, killing arms), the spark is ignited. No doubt there will be a price to our resistance—the oppressors do not crumble without conflict.
But we in NAMBLA are certain: despite opposition, change will come. Conditions will improve. We will triumph. Happiness and eros will out.
We are not afraid. We will not be deterred. We shall be free. Every last one of us!
