north american man-boy love association

The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a U.S.-based group that calls for the elimination of age-based restrictions on sexual behavior. It labels itself a "support group for intergenerational relationships," and has adopted "sexual freedom for all" as its slogan. NAMBLA's primary interest, as it indicates on its website, is to "support the rights of youth as well as adults to choose the partners with whom they wish to share and enjoy their bodies." Sympathizers and supporters contend that the group endorses a comprehensive youth rights platform of which sexual freedom is only a small portion. At its peak, NAMBLA boasted hundreds of members, as well as famous supporters like Gore Vidal and Allen Ginsberg. However, decades of public outrage has all but dissolved the group. Its national headquarters now consists of little more than a private mail box service in Tenderloin, San Francisco.

Purpose

According to NAMBLA’s web site, the organization is a “political, civil rights, and educational organization” which aims “to end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” by building understanding, educating the public, cooperating with other advocacy groups, and fighting ageism. Ageism affects more than just youth sexuality, so NAMBLA extends its call for youth empowerment so that it encompasses non-sexual issues as well. NAMBLA strongly condemns the sexual abuse and coercion of youth, but maintains that age of consent laws are so broad that they rubber-stamp non-coercive relationships as harmful. Moreover, the group claims neither to encourage nor engage in illegal behavior. Detractors contend that NAMBLA is a thinly veiled alliance of sexual predators who reinforce each other’s depraved desires. The interaction of the members creates a climate that emboldens them to enact their sexual fantasies, these critics assert.

History

In order to understand NAMBLA's establishment and early history, one must realize the radical and highly charged political atmosphere of the late 1970s. Just a few years earlier, in 1969, the gay community -- especially the gay street youth -- in Greenwich Village in New York ignited the modern-day gay rights movement by rioting at the Stonewall Inn bar. It was from this defense of alternative sexualities that NAMBLA emerged. On December 8th, 1977, police raided a house in the Boston suburb of Revere. Twenty-four men were arrested and indicted on over 100 felony counts of sex with boys aged eight to thirteen. Eighty-year-old Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne announced that the two-dozen men used drugs and video games to lure the boys into a house on Mountain Avenue. There the men allegedly photographed them as they engaged in sexual activity. Byrne, who was facing re-election the next year, declared that the men composed a "sex ring" of which the arrest was only "the tip of the iceberg." The local newspapers immediately seized on the hysteria, publishing the names and personal information of the accused men. The gay community surprised Byrne by fighting back(http://www.lib.neu.edu/archives/voices/gl_sexual2.htm). Staff members of the newspaper the Fag Rag sensed that the bust was politically motivated. They believed that Byrne repeatedly used the strategy of exposing sensational "vice rings" in order to garner publicity before elections. On December 9, they organized the Boston-Boise Committee, a name chosen to reference a similar reign of hysteria that gripped Boise, Idaho in the 1950s. The committee served its purpose: Byrne's exaggerations were largely dispelled, and all but three of the accused were acquitted. But more importantly, it was this committee that led to the formation of NAMBLA.

The Beginning of NAMBLA

To committee members who had an exclusive attraction to teenage males, the Revere incident was a reminder of their vulnerability within the larger gay community. The Boston police also recognized this and routinely used age of consent laws to harass them. Their gays teenage lovers (the sorts of young people that protested at Stonewall) would disappear in police custody. Then days later, they would reappear battered and bruised, having had the names of older sexual partners coerced out of them. Tom Reeves of the Boston-Boise committee decided the time had come to address the situation. On December 2, 1978, he convened a meeting called "Man/Boy Love and the Age of Consent." Roughly 150 attendees discussed the problems of boylovers. At the meeting's conclusion, approximately thirty men and youth decided to form an organization of their own. The name they chose was the North American Man/Boy Love Association (or NAMBLA). At first NAMBLA hoped to ride on the coattails of the successes of other gay rights groups. After all, the sexual liberation of all minority groups -- youth included -- was a common plank in the platforms of most major gay rights groups at the time. New York's Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) opposed age of consent laws and hosted a forum on the topic in 1976. The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition held a similar position. Yet most gay rights groups paid little attention to the pederasts in their ranks. To them, the idea of "boylove" was just another variation of gay love that was sharing in the struggle for liberation. Thus gay rights groups granted tacit acceptance of NAMBLA's platform at the time the group formed. This changed when the work of one woman effectively ostracized NAMBLA.

Controversy

"Save Us From The Anita Nightmare" was the headline that appeared on the cover of the April 20, 1977 edition of the gay magazine The Advocate. Former beauty queen Anita Bryant was indeed a nightmare to the gays nationwide. With her "Save Our Children" Crusade, she had begun to harness the growing anti-gay backlash that would months later manifest itself in the Revere sex scandal and other similar antics across the country. "The recruitment of our children," she argued, "is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality." The idea that homosexuality was a threat to children, transforming perfectly normal kids into deviant sex machines, had a chilling effect on the gay rights movement. Instantly the issue of gay liberation shifted out of the arena of civil rights and into the realm of child protection. The notion of "recruitment" was so absurd to gays that initially the charges caught them completely off guard. By the time it recovered, a pro-gay law in Dade County, Florida had been overturned, and gays were convinced that the only way to stop the bleeding was to distance themselves from anything even remotely related to youth sexuality. The next several years saw a rift develop in gay rights circles between a small faction of radical gays and "boylovers" who championed the sexual rights of youths, and a much larger group of pragmatists. By the early 1980s almost every well-known gay organization adopted the latter position and jettisoned NAMBLA. The promotion of sexual rights for youth created a lightning rod with which other gay rights groups were unable or unwilling to cope. Consequently, NAMBLA descended to its current state of disrepute, invoked more often by its enemies than by its supporters.

Isolation

In the early 1990s, the International Lesbian and Gay Association sought consultative status as a non-governmental organization to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The U.N. admitted the group, after which time news surfaced that ILGA had ties to NAMBLA. ILGA expelled and disavowed any affiliation with the NAMBLA, but to no avail. Amid what many have dubbed a witchhunt atmosphere, the U.N. later reversed its decision and revoked ILGA's special status. Despite repeated attempts, ILGA has not been able to reacquire consultative status with the U.N. although it does enjoy consultative status with the European Commission. Some conservative Christians in the United States have exploited NAMBLA's infamous reputation to attack more conventional gay rights groups. With the outbreak of the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal in 2002, this practice intensified. The television airwaves were filled with Christian organizations repeating claims that homosexuality is a perversion that contributes to child sexual abuse (http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=1629&print=yes). Critics of such organizations have pointed to statistics which indicate that most sexual molestations are crimes of opportunity committed by otherwise normal heterosexual men who use children as a substitutes for same-age partners.

Criminal Cases with Alleged NAMBLA Links

Speculation over NAMBLA's ties to criminal activity has been recurrent from the moment of its founding.

Rev. Paul Shanley, a priest convicted of abusing children as young as six years old over a period of three decades, allegedly participated in early movement workshops and advocacy, according to contemporaneous accounts of the events obtained by the Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/documents/shanley_0279.htm,http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-05-06-shanley_x.htm

Charles Jaynes, also allegedly a member of NAMBLA, was convicted of murdering a 10-year-old boy then having intercourse with his body; the parents of the boy sued NAMBLA, alleging that Jaynes wrote in his diary that participating in NAMBLA helped him overcome his inhibitions about having sex with young boys http://www.soc-um.org/nambla3.html,http://www.courttv.com/archive/verdicts/sicari.html. The ACLU stepped into defend NAMBLA and won a dismissal based on the specific legal issue that NAMBLA is organized as an association, not a corporation. The Curleys continued the suit as a wrongful death action against individual NAMBLA members and NAMBLA Steering Committee members. http://pacer.mad.uscourts.gov/dc/opinions/otoole/pdf/curley%20mem%20ord%20mot%20to%20dism.pdf

John David Smith, a San Francisco man convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy he was babysitting, unwittingly spoke of his crimes to an undercover investigator who had infiltrated NAMBLA. Upon obtaining a warrant, the investigator also found guns and child pornography in Smith's apartment http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1996/09/05/MN43587.DTL,http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data2/virginiastatecases/1546974.wp.

Johnathan Tampico was convicted of child molestation in 1989 and paroled in 1992 on condition of not possessing child pornography. After moving without informing authorities of his new address, he was found after a broadcast of Americas Most Wanted. He was arrested and convicted on child pornography charges. In his sentencing, the court stated that Tampico was a member of NAMBLA, and that Tampico and others frequently traveled to Thailand in order to have access to young boys. The court cites a number of Polaroid pictures, provided by Thai officials, depicting Tampico with young Thai boys sitting on his lap as evidence of the latter claim http://www.soc-um.org/nambla2.html,http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/2001/0responses/2001-0571.resp.html, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=5th/0020178cr0.html.

James C. Parker, a New York man who, according to court records, told the police that he was a member of NAMBLA, was arrested in 2000 and convicted in 2001 of committing sodomy with a young boy http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/slips/16023.htm.

Trivia

In 2000 NAMBLA was featured in an episode of South Park called "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" in which NAMBLA also stood for "North American Marlon Brando Look Alikes."

Sources

Cohen, Art. "The Boston-Boise Affair, 1977-78." The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Vol. 10, No. 2. March-April, 2003.
Denizet-Lewis, Benoit. "Boy Crazy: NAMBLA: The Story of a Lost Cause." Boston Magazine. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=27 May 2001.
Mitzel, John. 1981. The Boston Sex Scandal. Boston: Glad Day Books.
Thorstad, David. 1991. "Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement," pp. 251-274 in Male Intergenerational Intimacy edited by Theo Sandford, Edward Brongersma, and Alex Van Naerssen. New York: Haworth Press.