The Gay Left's Paedophile Romance
In the 1970s a section of the Left embraced paedophilia as a social justice cause. The intellectual roots of that dalliance have now burrowed deep into the LGBTQ+ movement.
Part One
In the old days, before yesterday, when the subject of paedophilia hit the headlines it was dressed in shame and deception. You know…priests unfrocked, sports coaches denying everything, angry crowds daubing paint. Now by contrast it seems every few months paedophilia strolls into the spotlight with a placard emblazoned with a logo from a centre of academic excellence. Last year a Manchester University post-graduate published a paper in the Journal of Qualitative Research that described how he had “researched” a genre of Japanese comics featuring young boys …by masturbating to them. It later transpired he was a publisher of under age boy porn with the not at all disturbing title of ‘Destroyer’.
Six months before that, in the United States, Professor Allyn Walker, (they/them…naturally) released a book defending paedophiles entitled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. When her University suspended Walker she bleated, “I really think it’s a coordinated effort about attacking the LGBTQ community.” It’s not, girlfriend!
Her complaint may not have cut ice with you and me, but it did with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore which a few months later appointed her as a research fellow. She’ll be working at its….Centre for the Prevention of Child Sex Abuse. Obviously.
Walker counselled we should use the term “minor-attracted people” lest we stigmatise paedophiles. We can but hope no one will ever introduce themselves to decent people with the words, “I am minor-attracted” and not be ostracised. The sense that universities might do better to pay attention to the public’s view of child abuse rather than that of paedophiles was crystallised last year when Jacob Breslow was appointed as a trustee for Mermaids despite the fact his research into “the queer life of children’s desires” was openly displayed on the website of the London School for Economics.
Notoriously, his book, ‘Ambivalent Childhoods’ opens with an extensive description of his own experience of watching an under age boy dancing in an overtly sexualised fashion in front of some gay men at a club. Breslow was “excited” he hastens to assure us as if we want to know but was also upset… not by the boy dancing but the fact the other gay men seemed troubled by this performance. They’d shamed the boy, he opined. This from a man who in a lecture in 2011 compared having sex with a child to ejaculating on a shoe.
Is this sudden association between paedophile justification and activists in the LGBTQ+ lobby a random event? I wish it was. Last year an article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (edited by eminent academics from Oxford and Princeton) argued that paedophiles are a sexual minority that the LGBTQ+ movement should represent.
As the author of the article suggested,
[Paedophiles] face the same problems of stigma, discrimination and social isolation as other members of the LGBT+ community, albeit to a greater degree. If the community is to be inclusive, then it must live up to the meaning of the ‘+’ in its acronym.'
Ahhh…the mysterious plus sign.
It would be comforting to think the emergence of paedophile apologia is perhaps just an unfortunate virus with which the LGBTQ+ lobby has been infected. It’s more worrying than that. The dodgy stuff including paedophilia is part of its DNA inherited from its intellectual forbears.
If you want to find the moment when that troubling DNA mutation expressed itself clearly for the first time in the UK then the best place to look is the magazine published by the Gay Left, a collective that sprang out of the Gay Liberation Front and included a roll-call of pioneers of the gay movement from Simon Watney and Ron Peck to Jeffrey Weeks. It’s hard to exaggerrate how influential the group has been in shaping the LGBTQ+ movement. Its contributors included David Fernbach, David Widgery and Ken Plummer, the giant of sociology, and author of The Making of the Modern Homosexual, which helped create the field of British academic “queer” studies, as it is now known.
In issue number 7 published in 1978 the Gay Left’s magazine considered the issue of paedophilia. At the time the Paedophile Information Exchange, or PIE, was being assailed (quite rightly) by the tabloids and in Parliament. Any overt support for the group by the journal would have landed it in hot water. Despite that strong disincentive the team’s editorial uses many of the arguments the paedophile lobby churns out whenever they have the chance.