"Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit,
humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance,.. . 
I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too- everybody does, 
who has a little humanity."
  - Allen Ginsberg, poet
        
"NAMBLA Walks With Me."
  - Harry Hay, Radical Faerie & activist, L.A. Gay Pride Parade, 1986

"Sex between youths and adults is one of the most difficult issues 
in the gay movement. 

• When does a youngster have the right and the power to make his own sexual decisions? 
• How are laws against intergenerational sex used specifically to target gay men? 
• What are the issues that make the romantic image of the Greek teacher and his student in times of antiquity turn into something ugly and forbidden in the modern age? 

If you want to explore these issues, NAMBLA is the organization that 
will supply you with brochures, thought-provoking books and booklets."
  - John Preston in The Big Gay Book: A Man's Survival Guide for the
90s (New York: Plume, 1991)

"Membership in the ... North American Man/Boy Love Association is not
required in order to question whether every instance of intergenerational 
sexuality is damaging."
  - Richard Green, professor of psychiatry, University of California,
Los Angeles, in Sexual Science and the Law (Boston: Harvard University
Press, 1992)

"Youth Liberation has argued for some time that young people should
have the right to have sex as well as not to have it, and with whom
they choose. The statutory structure of the sex laws has been 
identified as oppressive and insulting to young people.  A range of 
sexual activities are legally defined as molestation, regardless of 
the quality of the relationship or the amount of consent involved."
  - Gayle Rubin, lesbian feminist, in Leaping Lesbians, Feb. 1978

"In those cases where children do have sex with their homosexual
elders ... I submit that often, very often, the child desires the
activity, and perhaps even solicits it, either because of a natural
curiosity ... or because he or she is homosexual and innately know it.
... And unlike girls or women forced into rape or traumatized, most
gay men have warm memories of their earliest and early sexual
encounters; when we share these stories with each other, they are
invariably positive ones."
  - Larry Kramer, writer and founder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT-UP), in Reports from the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1991)

"It is quite difficult to lay down barriers [particularly since] it
could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired the
adult."
  - Michel Foucault speaking against age-of-consent laws, as cited in
James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1992)

" My own initiation came long before I was legally adult. Though  
a number of males around my age offered to participate, a woman ten 
years my senior was "responsible," at my invitation and encouragement. 

The only fault I find with that part of my sexual education was the 
limit her guilt and fear put on our pleasure, the heterosexual pressure 
even she felt required to put on me. What she did "for my own good" 
caused both of us pain. If I were to improve on that experience now, it 
would not be to protect children from adult seduction but to make adults 
easier to seduce, less burdened with fear or guilt, less defended by
hypocrisy. ...

If we accepted sexual behaviour between children and adults, we would be 
far more able to protect our children from abuse and exploitation than we 
are now." 
  -Jane Rule, lesbian feminist,  "Teaching Sexuality" in Flaunting It,
Vancouver, New Star Press, 1982


"...in cases of mutual consent and mutual sexual attraction, sexual
activity itself [between men and boys] seems to produce no damaging
effects. It is to be hoped that this may put parents' minds at rest
and help them to avoid being unnecessarily upset and anxious."
  - Dr. Preben Hertoft, eminent Copenhagen sexologist, "Introduction: 
Paedophiles Don't Hurt Children" in Crime Without Victims (Amsterdam: 
Global Academic Publishers, 1993)

"I ... have a friend facing a possible jail sentence for having sex
with a couple of 15-year-olds. I love my friend; he is a good person.
At the preliminary trial, it became evident to me that the "victims"
were the seducers, who had already repeatedly had sex with each other.
But in the eyes of the court, their age is the sole determining factor
to be weighed .... From tea room to drag queen, I applaud every gay
subculture .... Discrimination among ourselves is profoundly
self-destructive. NAMBLA deserves to be heard and respected."
  - Michael Kearns in "Men Loving Boys," in the Los Angeles gay
magazine Edge (August 31, 1988)

"Our foes waved NAMBLA Bulletins at the state capitol for years
protesting the gay rights bill.  But NAMBLA has made very strong
statements and distinctions against child abuse. How many of its
opponents have really listened to what the organization actually
supports?"
  - from an editorial, "Accepting Diversity," in the Hartford,
Connecticut, gay magazine Metroline, July 26, 1991

"It is possible that the pedophile's marginal position alerts him not
only to self-interest but the pains suffered by all the outcast. This
is not a necessary consequence of pedophilia, of course, any more than
virtue is of poverty. Still, that passion for helping the child is so
strong in pedophile relations that even the police acknowledge it."
  - James Kincaid, professor of English at University of Southern
California, in Child Loving (New York: Routledge, 1992)

"Those who oppose intergenerational sex believe that a kid's life is
ruined if he or she has sex with an older person. Exactly what takes
place is irrelevant; all such sex falls under the rubric of 'child
molestation' and is irrevocably damaging. I think this idea is
patently false. A child who is raped at a very young age and a
sexually active adolescent boy who has as affair with an older man
have nothing in common."
  - Cris Guttierrez writing in Frighten the Horses (San Francisco),
issue #10, fall 1992

"Boy-lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers are the only people 
offering a hand to help young women and men cross the difficult terrain 
between straight society and the gay community. They are not child 
molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and 
parents who force their stale morality onto the young people in their 
custody. Instead of condemning pedophiles for their involvement with 
lesbian and gay youth, we should be supporting them."
  - Pat Califia, lesbian author and activist, in The Advocate, Oct. 1980

"If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely
erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the
relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally
mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way."
  - John Money, Professor Emeritus of Medical Psychology, Johns
Hopkins University, in an interview in Paidika: The Journal of
Paedophilia, spring 1991