Radicalism and assimilation - the gay movement and NAMBLA

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https://www.thestranger.com/features/20 ... y-politics

Very long article dating back to 1997 about NAMBLA. Of particular interest is the discussion of radicalism and assimilation in the gay movement and how the assimilationists, by the 90s, had basically won out. NAMBLA, and MAP movements in general, are only able to assimilate up to a point. Our relationships are unlikely to follow the trajectory of adult-adult relationships and so there will always be an element of radicalism. This radicalism remained key to NAMBLA's identity through the 90s.

Yet where does MAP activism take us from now? Is there untrodden ground somewhere yet to be tread upon on the radical path? Is there any kind of assimilationist path beyond the few steps taken by the NOMAP movement?

Facing the extended moral panic about minor sexuality (especially when involving adults) what can we do to achieve results that other MAP political groups haven't been able to achieve?

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https://bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/ ... AMBLA.html

Another NAMBLA article.

NAMBLA spokespeople have traditionally provided deliberately evasive answers to these questions. The focus on inequality between men and boys is a red herring, they have protested. After all, life is filled with unequal relationships: parent-child, teacher-student, boss-employee. Another standard NAMBLA comeback is that statutory-rape laws -- originally written so that fathers could keep their daughters virginal until an appropriate marriage was arranged, thus protecting the future of their land holdings -- are anachronistic and oppressive.

NAMBLA has also muddied the waters by tacking onto its primary objective a list of position statements, including one against compulsory schooling and circumcision and another supporting children's right to vote. When faced with this hodgepodge of oddball causes, even those in sympathy with NAMBLA's goals have found it difficult to defend the group.

Familiar sounding rhetoric. And if we keep on using the same rhetoric will we achieve anything but the same results?

[PorcelainLark]

I think the internet has a conservative effect, which means it's much harder to be "radical" compared to the past. Imagine that homosexuality today in the West was still a crime. No communities or neighborhoods could form, no activism could be organized without intense scrutiny from every side of the internet. A similar thing happened with video sharing and remix culture: in the early days of the internet and before it, there was very little that corporations could do to stop people from violating copyright.
We are between a rock and a hard place: the more anarchic populists tend to support hate and vigilantism against MAPs, while the establishment has little interest in improving our conditions.

I think there needs to be shift in the moral weight we give to MAP related criminality before this could change. Drugs are treated it as a serious crime, even though a lot of the public and educated people don't give much moral weight to drug use. This has the effect of people being more receptive of ideas concerning ending the war on drugs.

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http://www.glaa.org/archive/1994/namblaoutofbounds.shtml

Article about NAMBLA from 1994 when it was being kicked out of ILGA.

A common thread running through this material is an utter inability to recognize a conflict of interest. These men really seem to believe that they have the boys' best interests at heart, despite clear evidence from their own accounts that they are taking grotesque advantage of troubled boys' need for love, attention, support, and freedom from abuse. Their subtler form of abuse directs an adult's arsenal against the innocence of children and the nascent sexuality of young adolescents and, when it succeeds, calls the result consensual love. That people so selfish should presume to lecture others about love, much less portray themselves as victims, is a supreme achievement in self-delusion and gall.

"But we love minors more than non-MAPs do" will always be seen this way. Most youth lib arguments from the mouths of MAPs will always be suspect. Most reform has a self-interest component, even from the most selfless MAP.

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https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/view ... ntext=jssw

In the face of that strong consensus, then, NAMBLA must redefine the impact of both its philosophy and its members' behavior so as to stress the positive, rather than the injurious effects of adult-child sex. Its publications, therefore, are filled with anecdotal accounts, letters, poetry and articles that proclaim the benefits and advantages to children of having a sexual relationship with an adult male. Some of those advantages are very specifically detailed. Accounts of children having been rescued from lives on the streets, of children finding a loving alternative to an abusive home, or of discovering in the pedophile someone to talk to or to help them during periods of distress are prominently featured in every NAMBLA publication. Yet when examples of the benefits to individual boys are set aside, the more general advantages of man/boy love are much less clear.

NAMBLA does not simply wish to repeal age of consent laws; rather, we have never accepted the validity of the frame of reference on which such laws are based. Under the circumstances, we cannot name an age of consent ... NAMBLA will not participate in an abstract, narrowly defined and ultimately pointless game of "pick an age" ... Sex does not require highly developed "cognitive tools;" it ought to come naturally.

Does sex require highly developed "cognitive tools"? If the act itself does not, the consent to engage in the act certainly does, so despite the organization's resistance to engage in a game of "pick an age," the age at which a child can give full and informed consent to sexual acts must be determined if this justification is going to be successful in normalizing the behavior of NAMBLA members and avoiding public censure.
[...]
In other words, the debate about whether that age should be thirteen, fourteen or fifteen may be lively, but there is little demonstrated acceptance of lowering that age, and virtually none for removing it.

Why should AMSC be permitted? What benefits are there? Is "there is not always harm" enough?

Would NAMBLA have any greater level of success if it had pushed for lower the AoC to early adolescence?

[Jim Burton]

We are speaking from a position of privilege, namely hindsight of NAMBLA's strategic failure and the toolkit given to us by preventionists and NOMAPs (plus hindsight of their strategic limitations).

Most likely, NAMBLA's failure was not rhetorical, or had nothing to do with losing an argument, but had to do with a lack of relevancy and assent from the media/elite/lawmaker class. They were of no use to anybody else at the time, and became an unwanted distraction.

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I'm definitely not ever going to consider NAMBLA a "failure". They did what they did in the context that they could. I just hope that hindsight benefits us somehow. The scary thing is, though, that the NAMBLA tried and lost with still seems to be on the lips of so many would-be activists. Surely if it failed for them in the 80s it's not going to work now.

On December 7, 1980, 25 NAMBLA members and supporters conducted a rally outside of Bridgewater to protest the incarceration of gay men for nonviolent, consensual sex with boys. 30 of the 170 people at the facility, activists contended, were gay men who had been convicted of statutory sex offenses, while at least 125 such men were imprisoned throughout Massachusetts. “PRISON IS NO PLACE FOR LOVERS,” read one of the protest signs. The organization’s protest gained ground when, on August 28, 1981, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Walter E. Steele overturned Peluso’s designation as a sexually dangerous person.

Until we get a legal victory like this we have no reason to complain about what activists in the past did.

[Pharmakon]

NAMBLA's successes, its failures, and the strategies it pursued need to be understood in the context of the activism of the 1970s and the broad social reaction against that activism that took hold in the decades that followed. All of this can be most simply termed the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. From the end of WWII until about 1980, prosperity in the US and Europe permitted concessions to the demands of working people and oppressed groups. The French phrase "Les Trente Glorieuses" is often invoked to characterize this roughly 30-year period.

A good analysis of the transition from this era to the one we remain mired in today is Michael Hardt's The Subversive Seventies. Hardt (who avoids focusing on Reagan-Thatcher and electoral politics, in part because he sees this as a global phenomenon) develops the concept of the "end of mediation" to illustrate how the gains of the postwar decades were rolled back or redirected into avenues that did not threaten ruling elites.

NAMBLA was one of many groups that at the end of the 1970s sought to sustain the subversive momentum that had seemed for about three decades to herald real change. The marginalization of NAMBLA was in many ways a fate suffered by nearly all these groups. NAMBLA's agenda was perhaps more subversive than that of most such groups, but feminist and Black activism also moved from demanding deep social change to accepting "representation" in the form of language policing and membership in the lower echelons of ruling institutions. The most telling sign of this transition was the decline in membership and political influence of labor unions. Instead of trying to buy off the working class, increasingly mobile capital abruptly changed strategies and simply moved production to postcolonial nations where labor was more easily exploitable.

Today, MAPs would probably be happy with the end of registries and almost any small level of public acceptance that age gap sex can sometimes be a valid choice for both partners. In 1979, sex offender registries were still rare and the panics about age gap sex that made "stranger danger" a weapon against us had yet to occur. NAMBLA could not foresee the strength and depth of the erotophobic reaction ahead. If it had voiced more moderate demands, these would not have resonated with boylovers as the positions it actually adopted did, and the group would have been less effective at the thing it did best, organizing our community. And moderate demands would have done nothing to stave off the broad retrenchment that has characterized the last four decades.

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Today, MAPs would probably be happy with the end of registries and almost any small level of public acceptance that age gap sex can sometimes be a valid choice for both partners. In 1979, sex offender registries were still rare and the panics about age gap sex that made "stranger danger" a weapon against us had yet to occur.

In April 1981, the 33 year-old Mark Davis, one of the defendants in the “Revere sex ring,” was sentenced to 3-to-5 years in prison for having sex with a minor male (who was 12 or 13 at the time) in 1972. On May 27, 1982, Martin Swithinbank, one of the men who was arrested in the police sting of NAMBLA and a contributor to Gay Community News, pled guilty to two counts of having sex with a 14-year-old male and to one count of producing a pornographic videotape of the same youth and his brother. Each of the three charges carried a prison sentence of between two and a half and five years, which Swithinbank was to serve consecutively. Had Swithinbank not accepted a plea deal, he could have been sentenced to 40 years in prison.

A return from sentences in the double digits to sentences in the single digits without registries or civil commitment would be amazing, too.

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Reddit post by an anti
https://www.reddit.com/r/censorshit/com ... inence_of/

Yet it goes to show, yet again, that the right have more literacy when it comes to LGBT history.

Look at this list though. For all I said above, this level of connectedness is like a dream for an organization like Mu. Imagine having this many influential people coming to speak at meetings. And this is with NAMBLA being an open AoC abolitionist organization.

I doubt even a purely anti-c organization would be able to get this level of support. Obviously not from the LGBT community, specifically. But even just in general.

We have fallen far in some ways.