“Today, we are seen as worse than murderers,” says long-time NAMBLA member Bill Andriette, who sits, unshaven and shoulders hunched, across the table from Socrates. Its members live in fear, victims in their own minds, captives of their political blunders, their misreading of popular sentiment, and a sustained, multi-pronged attack from right-wingers, feminists, homophobes, gays, abuse survivors, police, politicians, and the media. It has achieved nothing except brand recognition.
Twenty-two years after forming in the Community Church of Boston, NAMBLA finds itself close to extinction.
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We began to believe the rhetoric that the revolution was coming, that we were going to create a free society.” “We were at a time when things were changing, when our voices could be heard. “The '70s were an incredible time,” says Socrates. To NAMBLA's greater surprise, it found that even many straight people were willing to discuss adult-youth relationships without resorting to name calling and finger wagging. It was a more permissive time, a time before AIDS, and during NAMBLA's infancy in Boston (it would later move its headquarters to New York), the group enjoyed the support of a vocal minority in the gay community, who believed that attacks on boy-lovers were veiled attacks on all homosexuals. Age should not be a consideration in anything, especially sex and love, and age-of-consent laws should be repealed. In 1978, NAMBLA was just another oddball sexual group proposing another oddball, radical philosophy: Kids should have more rights, particularly the right to have sex with whomever they please. It's a story that began unremarkably enough. “I mean, really, what's the point? It may be naive to think that an article that is really honest about NAMBLA can be published in any major magazine in America. “Everyone's telling me not to talk to you,” says one, a gray-haired, 62-year-old NAMBLA founder who goes by the pseudonym Socrates. Two boy-lovers sit at a small table in a boston coffee shop. The other, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, would soon become the most despised group of men in America. One, the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, is still a respected legal organization. They formed a committee to defend the suspects in Revere and rally against police harassment. Staffers at Fag Rag, a now-defunct Boston-based radical gay paper, decided to fight back. In Toronto, police raided the city's gay newspaper after it published an article entitled “Men Loving Boys Loving Men.” From coast to coast, states began enacting tougher laws against child pornography, alluding to the need to protect children from the clutches of homosexual adults. In Florida, beauty queen Anita Bryant was pushing her “Save Our Children” campaign, spearheading the repeal of budding gay-rights ordinances. That moment aside, there was little to chuckle about that year for gays in general, and men who liked boys in particular. “I had sex when I was 8 with a man in the back of my grandfather's candy store in Revere, and I turned out okay,” Ginsberg declared before being hurried off-stage as the station cut to a commercial. During an interview on a Boston television station, poet and outspoken boy-lover Allen Ginsberg joked about the scandal. “It's surprising that no one has stumbled onto a 'sex ring' in Revere before this,” Frank Rose wrote in a 1978 Village Voice piece about the scandal.Įverybody was talking about the case, which led to the indictments of 24 men. Revere Beach, on the eastern fringes of this working-class city, was a notorious cruising ground for men and boys. In fact, man-boy relationships had been flourishing-not particularly secretly-for years in Revere.
And Byrne had a way to catch them: A hotline people could call with anonymous tips about molesters. It was a stretch to call it a “ring,” but Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne declared that the arrests were just “the tip of the iceberg.” There had to be other perverted people in other wood-shingled houses. In June 1977, police arrested the house's owner and announced that it was the national headquarters of a sordid, pornographic sex ring. It was a normal house, the neighbors thought, until they learned that it wasn't. There were no naked boys loitering in the doorway, no drunken men stumbling in the back yard, no obvious signs of depravity. All of this was done quietly, because neighbors would later say that they didn't see or hear anything unusual coming from the house.