The Paedophilia Debates: Feminism, Gay Liberation, and NAMBLA

(This is a version of a talk I gave at the Recovery Histories Network, led by Dr Ruth Beecher, at Birkbeck, University of London, in May 2025. Please note, this blog includes profanity.)

This is a difficult topic to think about, let alone discuss. In this blog, I explore debates about intergenerational sex between older and younger males from the 1970s onwards, with a focus on the largest U.S. organization supporting such sexual activity, NAMBLA or the North American Man/Boy Love Association. I am deliberately using the term ‘intergenerational sex’ rather than the earlier concept of ‘pederasty’ or the historically later one of ‘paedophilia’ because these terms have distinct trajectories within the history of sexual norms, ideologies, and practices. The meanings ascribed to ‘pederasty’ or ‘paedophilia’, as well as their normative status (that is, ideas about how ‘normal’ something is), have changed dramatically over time and place.

Furthermore, I am only looking at intergenerational sex between males, since they incited very different narratives from those focussing on sex between adult men and younger girls.

This is important because, first, the age at which a boy (as opposed to a girl) could legally be said to be capable of ‘consenting’ to heterosexual activity has rarely excited moral panics. It is no coincidence that, when concerns about age of consent of males arose, it was in relation to the age at which a male person could ‘consent’ to sex with another male person. It is important to note that panics about male-on-male sexual activity took place (largely) in a context where all sex between male persons were criminal offences.  

Second: historically, intergenerational heterosexuality between a very young girl and much older man has, in fact, been the norm, even institutionalized in marriage. In the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, the difference between the ages in which a girl’s “yes” was legally deemed to be meaningful could be as young as seven in Mississippi and Alabama and as high as eighteen in Kansas and Wyoming. Simply by stepping over a state line, a person status as a sexual subject was dramatically different.

Crucially, debates about intergenerational sex reveal a great deal about the ‘production of power’, including the social construction of childhood. Indeed, as distinguished scholars such as Rachel Hope Cleves, Danielle Egan, and Gail Hawkes explain, the ‘production of the category of childhood’ was ‘inextricable tied to the education, regulation and normalization of its sexuality’ (see Rachel Hope Cleves, ‘The Problem of Modern Pederasty in Queer History’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (spring 2020) and Emma Renold, R. Danielle Egan, and Jessica Ringrose in their (eds.), Children, Sexuality and Sexualization (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015).)

Intergenerational sex between men and boys has a long history as normal, not aberrant. We just have to think of ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, the classical Ottoman Empire, and samurai-Era Japan. In modern times, queer icons such as Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, and Michel Foucault (to name just three) routinely engaged in sexual activities with males considerably younger than themselves, with little or no disapproval until recent years. Numerous historians of homosexuality (for example, Matt Houlbrook) have shown that, before the 1920s, working-class boys in Victorian London openly traded sex with wealthier, older men for money and other favours. In understanding such activities, we need to acknowledge that, while today, our emphasis is on age, in the nineteenth century, it was on class. This is one reason why we need to be wary about talking about ‘consent’, a very modern idea burdened with ideas about some kind of (often imaginary) equality. Looked at historically, it is more accurate to ask whether sexual partners were ‘willing partners’ rather than ‘consenting’ ones (this is also a point made by Cleves).

Once way I can illustrate this is by turning to Rachel Hope Cleves’ important biography of an early twentieth century British writer Norman Douglas (see her book Unspeakable). Although Douglas was well-known to be a pederast, this was not considered disreputable. The reason for this was the boys he had sex with were willing partners. Indeed, Douglas’ archive allows us to hear the ‘child’s voice’; Cleves has analyzed the loving letters they wrote to him, sometimes spanning their entire lives. For these boys, intergenerational sex was personally, intellectually, and financially productive, not inevitably traumatic, as is assumed today. Language matters. There are major differences between ‘pederasty’, which had positive (as in, the older man playing a mentoring role) as well as negative connotations, and ‘pedophilia’, which, although coined by Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), developed from the 1950s and is wholly negative, and, since the 1980s, monstrous. In other words: framing nineteenth century avowals of love between boys and men as ‘false consciousness’, or, in their medicalized versions, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ or ‘Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome’, simply does not make sense of the lives of nineteenth century boys. Cleves encourages us to take the views of people in the past (such as the young boys Douglas had sex with) ‘at [their] word, not because [their] word is synonymous with the truth, but because [their] word is a reflection of a historical set of norms’.

Of course, this is at the heart of the historians’ dilemma: does placing intergenerational sex in its varied historical contexts (by unpicking the meanings that it had at the time) serve as a form of legitimation? Absolutely not. Context is not justification, Cleves emphasizes. But it does serve to help us understand the lives of people so very different from ourselves, and, therefore, it contributes significantly to knowing how and why we got to where we are now.

When did the moral repugnancy for intergenerational sex between urnings (the word that used to be used for what we call ‘homosexual men’) develop? We can see signs of this from the late nineteenth century, as gay men were beginning to organize politically and socially. They saw pederasty as a barrier to respectability. However, this repudiation of intergenerational sex between boys and men dramatically increased from the 1970s, with the rise of self-identified gay organisations such as NAMBLA, and came to a head in the 1990s.

NAMBLA was founded in 1977. They wanted to eradicate age of consent laws, arguing that sexuality should be based only on sexual attraction. The age of consent laws, they maintained, were moralistic, archaic, and damaging to all parties involved. They insisted that they were not deviant, but ordinary, middle-class (white) men who enjoyed noncoerced sex with willing young boys. They maintained that

Children need more than sexual freedom; the need the right to control all aspects of their lives and bodies, without the interference of adults, whether the family, the state or the church. They should be treated like full human beings, not as the private property of their parents and the state.

NAMBLA admitted that age makes a difference, so they tended to focus on adolescents rather than younger children. They claimed to abhor non-consent. They argued that the different ages of consent for straight versus gay men was unfair, pointing out that boys develop sexual awareness at younger ages to girls. They pointed to the pervasive homophobia behind many criticisms of intergenerational male-on-male sex, implying that a young man who was ‘seduced’ by an older man would suffer ‘the most horrible of consequences – the boy will turn into a little “queer”’.

And, for a period, they were part of the mainstream gay culture. They paraded openly and proudly in Gay Pride marches. Members of NAMBLA stood in student elections at universities. Gay bookstores routinely stocked The NAMBLA News and had entire sections devoted to paedophilia. In the words of ‘A Different Light’ bookstore,

We do believe that each and every group of the very diverse Gay and Lesbian community should have a forum, a place where discussion and communication and dialogue can take place. We have a pedophilia section, an S/M section, a Lesbian Poetry section, a Gay fiction section, a Lesbian porn section, a transexual section, etc…. Our bookstore believes in celebrating the diversity of our community.

Their ads were ubiquitous in gay magazines and newsletters, where they were seen as simply another ‘alternative’ sexuality, like leather-men. Even the Gay News devoted a front-page feature on the love of two gay men, one of whom told readers that

I’ve heard gay people attack gay minorities such as NAMBLA or the S&M scene as if they were somehow not a part of our community…. I personally think that any consensual relationship should be respected. As long as boy-lovers don’t employ force… they should be openly accepted into the community.

 By the 1990s, NAMBLA was said to have 25,000 members. Because (as I will turn to briefly in a minute) they were seen as similar to other minorities within gay and lesbian communities, when, in October 1980, NOW [the National Organization of Women] passed a resolution condemning S&M, public sex, pornography, and pederasty, some gay spokesmen understood that this was an attack not only on gay communities, but the lesbian population (especially lesbians B&D communities and pro-porn radical lesbians) as well. David Thorstad (a founder of the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and representative for NAMBLA) warned that

Many gays fear that raising the man-boy love issue at a time when the right-wing is organizing against the movement is, at best, bad strategy; in addition, these people say, it plays into the hands of Anita Bryant types who portray all homosexual men as child molesters. The gay movement is not going to go anywhere as long as it tries to clean up its act so that only the respectable… ones are… to be promoted…. Why should we… turn our backs on tranvestites, transsexuals, leathermen, and pederasts?.... Sure, the [respectable types] will say NAMBLA just confirms the worst fears that heterosexuals have about us. [But] the persons who really know that we’re not child molesters are the boy-lovers and the boys [themselves]. The gay movement has to defend all of its segments and if it does not do that – if it allows the heterosexual dictatorship to implement a king of satanic tactic where you cut off bit by bit – eventually they’ll all go.

Many in the gay community of the 1980s simply urged NAMBLA to ‘tone it down’. New York-based gay activist Steve Ault published ‘Man/Boy Love Can be Defended, But So Can Some Limits’, which was generally favourable to their ideas, especially about problems with age of consent laws, and urged LGBT groups not to exclude them from gay and lesbian coalitions simply on the belief that ‘man/boy love is inherently coercive’. However, Auly also urged NAMBLA to change their position of age of consent laws because children were often incapable of making the ‘right decision and were suggestible to the urgings of older men. He worried about the impact of NAMBLA on popular opinion about gay communities. The Guardian. Independent Radical Newsweekly had a similar line. They claimed to being opposed to intergenerational sex given ‘disparities in power, experience and physical and emotional development’, but warned readers that ‘witch hunts such as that directed at Nambla must be combatted in defending the democratic rights of even an unpopular groups; such witchhunts are indiscriminate and can be directed at the gay community at large’. In later decades, oral histories from gay men (and I am quoting from an interview with J* D*) looked back nostalgically on a period where ‘the movement’ consisted of

screaming lesbians and every kind of gay person you ever thought of—you know, gay witches, NAMBLA, Parents of Gay, PFLAG. You name it. Sage, Senior Action in a Gay Environment. It's fantastic. It's not quite as tumultuous as it was – [this was] before gay marriage and before gay people were kind of stylish.

This was a world about to be lost. A newly emboldened Right in the US – including a powerful coalition of evangelicals, conservative Republicans, and anti-pornography radical feminists – launched campaigns against a large range of ‘American enemies’, including pornographers and BDSM groups.

NAMBLA was attacked on the same grounds and in the same sentences as all other sexual minorities. They were accused of attempting to destroy marriage, of undermining the ‘natural’ distinction between men and women; and of promiscuity. In the words of Jerry Falwell (founder of the Liberty University and co-founder of Moral Majority) in 1999, ‘I remember the days when NAMBLA was thought of as a fringe group of weirdos with hideous ideas about sex with children. Now it appears that the academic world [by teaching the history of sexuality] has lowered itself so far that it is now wallowing in the filth of NAMBLA… and calling it normal’. Many critics equated Gay rights with paedophilia; some, with bestiality. Simply using the term ‘sexual orientation’ was construed as an implicit condoning of paedophilia. Homophobia was rife. Take the following:

Why shouldn’t I fear Queer Nation, whose members brazenly march under the banner, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re coming for your children’? What is not to loath about NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association), which has conducted some of its meetings in public libraries? It is irrational to conclude that Queer Nation’s pressure on various boards of education has established compulsory courses which legitimize, even glorify, homos and lesbians as the heads of ‘families’?.... This is no oppressed minority. It is powerful enough to make a fatal plague AIDS, a politically correct and, more importantly, a politically protected disease.

The crisis came to a head in the early 1990s when the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) applied for consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Although membership of the ILGA was originally blocked by some Arab states and the Philippines simply on the grounds that homosexuality was an abomination, by July 1993, they had been admitted. Within only two months, the fact that NAMBLA was affiliated with the ILGA led to questions about whether ILGA should be expelled. The ILGA found themselves in a no-win situation. As anti-gay conservatives gloated: ‘If it kicks out NAMBLA, it’s hypocritical; if not, it supports sex between boys and men’. The ILGA’s consultative status in the UN was suspended in September 1994, despite the ILGA expelling NAMBLA in June 1994 and, in 1995, issuing a statement saying that they did ‘not in any way seek to promote or seek the legalization of pedophilia’. Even the Humans Rights Campaign Fund (America’s largest gay advocacy group) issued a statement stating that NAMBLA is not a gay organization’. Indeed, in the fight for rights and mainstream respectability, some gay groups rejected other ‘deviant’ groups (such as polygamists) as well. ‘Queer’ was increasingly defined in narrow terms.

But, already in the 1980s, one section of the feminist movement had launched a furious attack on NAMBLA. A section of American feminists either supported NAMBLA or were wary about rejecting its members outright. But NAMBLA became a central plank in divisions within feminism between those in support of and those violently opposed to pornography, lesbian sadomasochism, and ‘politically incorrect sex’. As Sarah Schulman explained, in an article entitled ‘What We’re Fighting About When We Fight About Sex’, (1982 and published in WomaNews), there was a clash between the diametrically opposed needs of different feminists. On the one side were a powerful section of radical feminists who believed that sexual freedoms were inherently ‘patriarchal’ while, on the other side were those who believed in sexual expression so long as it was consensual. The former group saw NAMBLA as another example of male sexual entitlement; while the latter group warned that if you policed/outlawed one sexual identity (again, so long as not abusive), the police would inevitably come for others.

Women in SAMOIS, the first lesbian B&D group in the U.S., were similarly ostracized. As a representative protested when they were linked to NAMBLA, while SAMOIS did not support repeal of the age of consent laws, it did write to the FBI protesting against the persecution of NAMBLA because they believed in the rights of people to autonomy and self-determination, including in the sexual arena. In the words of one:

We aren’t sick, we aren’t fascists, and we aren’t rapists. We’re not going to ‘go back underground’. We have a right to our sexuality, our relationships, and a place in the women’s community.

Or, as feminist Gayle Rubin asked,

Will feminism join the Moral Majority, the Teen Chastity Program, and Morality in Media to raise the costs of sex? Will the movement help to maintain sexual ignorance, fear, and persecution.? Or will it come to its senses, update its sexual education, and recall that sexual liberation was one of our earliest and worthiest goals?

The ‘sisterhood’ should not only include ‘women who closely resemble the women of OOB’ (the influential feminist newsletter Off Our Backs).

By the early 1990s these debates were especially belligerent in OOB. The spark was the publication of an ad for NAMBLA, in Changing Men [C-Men], the magazine of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS). In December 1992, Nikki Craft responded to their promoting NAMBLA in her article ‘So Much Slime. So Little Time. The Transgression of Pro-Feminism’, meaning men who were feminists. Craft rightly argued that ‘taking responsibility for men’s violence and sexual abuse, for real pro-feminists, is not optional’, adding that feminists should not align themselves with gay men ‘who refuse to be critical of power relationships – especially when it comes to sex’. It was nothing short of ‘traditional, unaccountable libertarianism’ and in direct opposition to pro-feminist, progressive, egalitarianism. She noted that NAMBLA was almost exclusively made up of white, adult men who ‘seek legitimacy by association with feminist/pro-feminism/gay and other so-called “progressive” movements’. Addressing C-Men directly, Craft wrote:

So you guys want to really transgress? Want to really break some fucking rules? Try bucking hard up against male power and dominance. One way to do that is to challenge, in any way, men’s rights to sexual assess…. If you can succeed in grappling [grabbing?] just a little bit of that prick entitlement away from them, then you will be making the world a safer place for all living entities.

Craft conjured up two fantasy discussion groups, NAMBLAH and REPKA, which had been ‘lovingly created to expose the double standard of First-Amendment Fundamentalists and “progressive” publications that support the “rights” of pornographers and pedophiles to exploit women and children’. NAMBLAH stood for New Activist Men Berating Liberal Ass Holes while REPKA stood for Regional Pedophile Killer Association, whose motto was ‘Don’t fuck with children, or we will fuck with you!’

In April 1993, the editors of Changing Men admitted that they had made a mistake in printing the ad for NAMBLA, urging ‘all men to live a positive men’s sexuality and to take a powerful stand against sexual assault’. But it was not enough. Prominent spokeswomen like Patricia Barrera called NAMBLA ‘scum’ and accused Changing Men of betraying the movement. She lamented the ease with which ‘a pedophile agenda works itself into pro-feminist (supposedly) organizations and publications’. She admitted to being ‘sick’ of ‘leftist men (and women)’ who were nothing more than ‘traitors… users… liars, and… leeches’ in the feminist movement. She admitted that

My disgust has reached the boiling point, the point at which I get ready to wreak some vengeance. These men do not belong in our movement. Men, or women, who want access to young women, men, boys, and girls, cannot work under the rubric of feminist thought…. They had better be careful. Some feminists just can’t stand being dicked around, if you know what I mean. And god help them if a REPKA [Regional Pedophile Killer Association] member finds them.

These feminist views all contributed to the rise of carceralism which was a movement, as many historians have shown, led by prominent radical feminists of the period (take a look at the brilliant book by Aya Gruber entitled The Feminist War on Crime. The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration). A common refrain was that anyone accused of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ should be locked away and prison warders ‘should lose the key to his cell forever’. This was the case even if the younger male had clearly consented and was over the age of sixteen (the age of consent for females when the age of consent for gay males was between 18 and 21). Thousands of gay men were being incarcerated for life for paedophilia – which, in the vast majority of cases, was for consensual sexual activity with teenagers. In 1981, it was estimated that there were at least 5,000 men in U.S. prisons for non-violent (statutory) sex offenses with males over the age of sixteen but under the age of consent for gay sex. Gay men who violated age-of-consent statutes with consenting minor males were treated much more severely than heterosexual men who had sex with minor females.

Psychiatrists were very much involved with such punishment. Gay men who had sex with younger gay men were forced to undergo chemical castration, to alter their sexual behaviours to become ‘more compatible with existing social tolerances’. This was successfully promoted by sex therapists such as John Money of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and physician Dr Gagne in Quebec as treatment for ‘paraphiliacs’. As the Philadelphia Gay News dryly reported in 1981, ‘there is no surprise that a man convicted for affectional sex with a minor male, given the “option” of forced drugging over the prospect of long-term prison victimization, will agree to the former’.

So, what is the ‘take home’ history? As an historian as well as a non-carceral feminist, I am keen to urge attention to be paid to the processes and power regimes that have led us to where we are today. We owe it to those people in the past who struggle, as we do today, to live full lives in contexts not of their own making. In the process, they undoubtedly harmed other people. By reflecting on their lives, however, we can move towards a greater understanding of the ways we currently understand childhood, inequity, and abuse, perhaps allowing us to think more robustly not only about retributive justice or even restorative forms of justice, but transformative regimes as well.

You might also be interested in my review of a controversial book by Steven Angelides, here, as well as a counter-response to my views by Dr Ruth Beecher, here.