(I hope I have said this properly to not give any wrong idea. And I hope I have correctly represented the factual matters; I’m not a huge expert on the subject.)
Harry Hay really dug in his heels about the whole issue. As I understand it, it caused him to become isolated from gay lib movement in the 80s and 90s after decades of devoting his life to it. I was told that his constant, loud, obtrusive advocacy on the issue served to basically call the question and he decisively lost the vote. He was constantly getting kicked out of gay stuff because he would not shut up about how great pedophilia was no matter what the circumstances. He just thought it was a bunch of loser assimilationist respectability politics. As far as I know he never reconsidered and was bitter about it til death.
Hay said that his support for “intergenerational love” came out of a positive experience he had in his early teens with an older lover who taught him how to be a homosexual man. I’ve met people who had similar stories of initiation to tell and particularly contexts of pervasive and violent homophobia the relationships are recalled overall fondly. Even though with the maturity of adulthood and more collective sophistication about power dynamics, the “good deeds” of the older party look a lot more self interested than selfless devotion to the education of the youth. But the effect was that a lot of gays had the very visceral memory that the first affirming and affectionate experiences they had were in the context of what we would now, from a distance, easily classify as abuse. I’d have to check to be certain, but in Stone Butch Blues, doesn’t comrade Feinberg have a positive portrayal where the main character who is a teenager hooks up with someone much older?
It’s one of those “ironies” that people who think they are acting to protect children from abuse by keeping the children themselves closeted and ignorant about sex are actually facilitating abuse.
Now that things are increasingly permissive of homosexuality among and between teenagers, it’s a lot more difficult to spin this sort of web around a child. But some people are still trying to do it, they are still trying to legitimize their current desires and may not be interested in re-casting their own life history to view themselves as victims of abuse rather than recipients of a special gift.
So while there are lots of anti-LGBT reasons to highlight this debate I think it has historically been a legitimate one which had to be worked through. It is also not unique to LGBT people as the majority of child sex abuse by adults continues to be heterosexual and patriarchal in nature. As with many other questions relating to sex, LGBT people collectively interrogated and reached conclusions decades before cis/heterosexual even got around to thinking about it. So therefor have a rich literature and history of engagement that can be drawn upon, vs cis/het mainstream culture which has only in the past few years been somewhat de-normalizing “liking them young”.
It is typical counter-insurgence type of stuff to take an actual conflict that exists in a movement and exaggerate, distort and misframe it in order to cause internal disunity and to make outsiders get the complete wrong idea. That’s what 4chan is doing.
(I hope I have said this properly to not give any wrong idea. And I hope I have correctly represented the factual matters; I’m not a huge expert on the subject.)
Harry Hay really dug in his heels about the whole issue. As I understand it, it caused him to become isolated from gay lib movement in the 80s and 90s after decades of devoting his life to it. I was told that his constant, loud, obtrusive advocacy on the issue served to basically call the question and he decisively lost the vote. He was constantly getting kicked out of gay stuff because he would not shut up about how great pedophilia was no matter what the circumstances. He just thought it was a bunch of loser assimilationist respectability politics. As far as I know he never reconsidered and was bitter about it til death.
Hay said that his support for “intergenerational love” came out of a positive experience he had in his early teens with an older lover who taught him how to be a homosexual man. I’ve met people who had similar stories of initiation to tell and particularly contexts of pervasive and violent homophobia the relationships are recalled overall fondly. Even though with the maturity of adulthood and more collective sophistication about power dynamics, the “good deeds” of the older party look a lot more self interested than selfless devotion to the education of the youth. But the effect was that a lot of gays had the very visceral memory that the first affirming and affectionate experiences they had were in the context of what we would now, from a distance, easily classify as abuse. I’d have to check to be certain, but in Stone Butch Blues, doesn’t comrade Feinberg have a positive portrayal where the main character who is a teenager hooks up with someone much older?
It’s one of those “ironies” that people who think they are acting to protect children from abuse by keeping the children themselves closeted and ignorant about sex are actually facilitating abuse. Now that things are increasingly permissive of homosexuality among and between teenagers, it’s a lot more difficult to spin this sort of web around a child. But some people are still trying to do it, they are still trying to legitimize their current desires and may not be interested in re-casting their own life history to view themselves as victims of abuse rather than recipients of a special gift.
So while there are lots of anti-LGBT reasons to highlight this debate I think it has historically been a legitimate one which had to be worked through. It is also not unique to LGBT people as the majority of child sex abuse by adults continues to be heterosexual and patriarchal in nature. As with many other questions relating to sex, LGBT people collectively interrogated and reached conclusions decades before cis/heterosexual even got around to thinking about it. So therefor have a rich literature and history of engagement that can be drawn upon, vs cis/het mainstream culture which has only in the past few years been somewhat de-normalizing “liking them young”.
It is typical counter-insurgence type of stuff to take an actual conflict that exists in a movement and exaggerate, distort and misframe it in order to cause internal disunity and to make outsiders get the complete wrong idea. That’s what 4chan is doing.