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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".

<B>THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING THE AGE OF CONSENT LAWS</B>

editorial
in <I>NAMBLA News </I>(1980) <I>North American Man-Boy Love
Association</I>

<I><B>The Laws
and their Purposes</B></I>

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 &quot;statutory rape&quot;
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&mdash;which had more status in the past than
today&mdash;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 &quot;loose&quot; morals are still
exempt from the &quot;protection&quot; 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 &quot;debauched.&quot;

<B>What purposes
are served by this growing number of laws today?</B>

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
&quot;rational system&quot; 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 &quot;free-zones&quot;),
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
&quot;repressive desublimation&quot; and &quot;repressive tolerance.&quot;
Such theorizing&mdash;though generally not in favor in American
social thought and certainly not regarding sexual behavior&mdash;provides
a framework for understanding twin primary events in how the state
adapts to changes in consciousness and behavior among the citizenry.
The state&mdash;and particularly the bureaucratic kind of state which
has flourished in American states and at the federal level since the
New Deal&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;i.e.
tolerating and even rewarding personal sexual hypocrisy at the
highest levels <I>as long as outward fealty </I>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 <I>New York Times, </I>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
&quot;counseling&quot; rather than discovery and agitation.

But
implicit in Kinsey is the struggle we fight today. Should the state
be empowered to punish&mdash;on a selective basis&mdash;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 &quot;caught&quot;
masturbating&mdash;perhaps the most frequent form of male sexual
release in our culture&mdash;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&mdash;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.

<I><B>Age and
Consent</B></I>

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&mdash;<I>for females only. </I>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&mdash;once
citizens have acceded power to it&mdash;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&mdash;and/or criminal code
revisions&mdash;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&mdash;as Det. Lloyd Martin of the Los
Angeles Police Department as well as several judges have stated, to
no objection&mdash;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 <I>overwhelming
observable phenomena, </I>remains the diciest of topics. Yet the
state&mdash;long the foe of acknowledging youth sexuality&mdash;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 &quot;peer-peer&quot;
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 &quot;children&quot; are sexual, but
instantly insist that youth only &quot;experiment&quot;&mdash;always
their favorite word&mdash;sexually with other youth. Such thinking is
characteristic of the worse ageist ghettoism that saturates our
culture and stains our movement. Such distinctions&mdash;and the
mentality which entertains them&mdash;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&amp;M brothers and
sisters. Even within emerging law, consent is a &quot;hot&quot;
issue.

Less
explored is the idea of &quot;age.&quot; 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
&quot;markets&quot; 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 <I>fact </I>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&mdash;particularly those born after World War II&mdash;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&mdash;often unfairly maligned by reactionaries and
Rape-ideology proponents&mdash;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
<I>immediate </I>decrease in sex-related misconduct: from voyeurism,
to &quot;flashing,&quot; to rape. Cross-cultural comparisons always
involve risks, but it seems both unscientific <I>and </I>inflammatory
to blame gay liberationists, boy-lovers, and &quot;pornographers&quot;
for the increase&mdash;if, in fact, any&mdash;in this nation of &quot;sex
crimes.&quot; (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&mdash;visit any porno store or theatre and you'll find gay
men working there&mdash;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.

<I><B>Inequality</B></I>

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 <I>one example of any kind
</I>of relationship which involves two or more persons that isn't
characterized by a structured or a <I>de facto </I>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 <I>every
and all </I>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 <I>between </I>adults and minors&mdash;thereby
removing oppressive areas of legal jeopardy.

The
anti-pedo advocates don't really object to the <I>fact </I>of
inequality in an adult-minor relationship. Relationships they hold
dear are <I>full </I>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 <I>coercive </I>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 <I>must </I>be
based on the idea of force) to get the boy&mdash;who is completely
depersonalized in this view, without will, desires, or ambitions&mdash;to
be the &quot;victim&quot; of the man's sexual lusts. This view
ultimately stems from that old bogey, the
&quot;homosexuality-as-contagion&quot; 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 <I>equality </I>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&mdash;if statist&mdash;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 <I>intent </I>seems benign. The <I>effect </I>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 &quot;boys&quot; 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 <I>by making punishments equal
rather than freedoms?</I>

And
shouldn't the notion of ending discrimination on a sex basis&mdash;so
central to the feminist movement&mdash;inspire increasing freedoms
rather than being perverted into setting up women as allies of the
state in expanding denials <I>by the state </I>upon youth?

<I><B>Inequity</B></I>

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&mdash;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. <I>Yet we maintain that private
consensual sexual conduct should not be a criminal matter. </I>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&mdash;on which government is supposed to be based in this
country&mdash;is drained. Its legitimacy ceases and it should be
abolished. Age of consent laws demonstrate this clearly.

<I><B>Conclusion</B></I>

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 &quot;protectees&quot; 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 &quot;Revere Sex Ring
Panic,&quot; one teenaged boy was taken from his mother and <I>held
over one year against his will </I>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 &quot;sex
crimes.&quot; So much for &quot;child protection.&quot;

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 <I>will fight back!</I>

Which
brings us to a central distinction between NAMBLA and other pro-pedo
groups, one which has to be dealt with. These other groups&mdash;Paedophile
Information Exchange in the U.K., Childhood Sensuality Circle in the
U.S., and Belgium's Studiegroep Pedofilie&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;not the patriarch's cold,
metallic, killing arms), the spark is ignited. No doubt there will be
a price to our resistance&mdash;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 <I>shall </I>be free.
<I>Every last one of us!</I>