Targeting Practice

Homosexual Men Have Long Sought Out Children for Sex

As I write, Pride Month 2023 (formerly known as June) is coming to a close. This year was a bit unusual, in that a few corporations finally crossed the line and incurred enough public disgust to suffer some financial setbacks. First, Bud Light and Nike both made the bizarre mistake of partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in commercials. (Nike had the gall to use Mulvaney—a male—to advertise its female sportswear, including sports bras.) Conservatives, especially men who drink beer, promptly launched a massive boycott of the beer giant, and Bud Light fell from its place as the top-selling beer in America, giving way to Modelo Especial.

Just a few weeks later, Target suffered a similar fate. Two swimsuits in the Target Pride collection bore circular tags reading “Tuck-Friendly Construction” and “Extra Crotch Coverage” (presumably for males who identify as females).¹ A swarm of social media activity then ignited a new debate. Was Target selling such “tuck-friendly” swimwear to kids? A Target spokesperson told the AP that, no, the extra-crotch-coverage swimsuits were for adults only. But the same AP story admits that a Brooklyn, New York Target the AP visited did indeed have a black swimskirt for children with a tag that read, “Thoughtfully Fit on Multiple Body Types and Gender Expressions.”

Another boycott ensued, and this one, too, did its damage. By early June, Target’s stock valuation had plummeted by about $15 billion.² Scrambling to avoid a Bud Light situation, Target execs actually pulled some of the Pride items, and relocated the Pride sections to the back of the store in certain geographical areas.

Not the First Time

What seems to have repelled potential Target customers this year is the store’s focus on children. But Target isn’t the only one focused on the kids. Drag Queen Story Hour has for years pushed an extreme sexual ideology on children, and sex ed classes are urging gender nonconformity at ever younger ages. This focus on youth is part and parcel of a historic LGBT push for drawing children into their spheres, and there’s some dark history here that the modern LGBTQ+ movement doesn’t like to talk about.

In December 1977, the Boston police broke up what then-District Attorney Garrett Byrne described as a “sex ring” of older men who were preying upon boys. A total of 24 men were indicted on charges of statutory rape of boys ranging in age from 8–13.³ Many gay activists believed the charges were trumped up, and they formed something called the “Boise-Boston Committee” to defend the men. Others joined the emerging pedophile defense movement, and the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was formed in 1978. NAMBLA still exists, and its stated goal is “to end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships.” Ending the “oppression” includes abolishing age-of-consent laws: “NAMBLA is strongly opposed to age-of-consent laws and all other restrictions which deny men and boys the full enjoyment of their bodies and control over their own lives.”⁴

For “Everyone’s” Sexual Liberation

David Thorstad, MA, one of the group’s founders, has written extensively in defense of “cross-generational love.” Such elements have always been a part of the homosexual movement, he writes. Thorstad describes what he calls the “pleasure-affirming impulses of the ‘Stonewall generation’”: “Sex is fun, homosexuality is fun, boy-love is fun, gay liberation is a movement for everyone’s sexual liberation.” Such are “the joys of an outlaw sexuality in the face of the outmoded moral norms of the dominant society.”⁵ This was a vision Thorstad believed was worth fighting for.

But sometime in the 1970s the public began to awaken to the idea that homosexual men preyed upon children. Central in this awakening was singer Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, which sought to overturn a Miami, Florida ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals in several realms, including housing, employment, and public accommodation. Bryant opposed the ordinance on the grounds that Christian schools (like those her children attended) would be forced to hire openly homosexual teachers. The movement she launched touched off many like it in other states, and homosexual activists began to band together to fight these groups.

It was in response to this popular pushback, Thorstad explains, that the gay rights coalitions “sanitized” the image of homosexuality by claiming that gays wanted nothing more than what Christian heterosexual couples already enjoyed and by actively distancing themselves from more radical versions of “free love,” including the pedophilia movement.⁶

But while it may have been pushed to the background, the predatory “boy-love-is-fun” contingent didn’t go away. On the 20th anniversary of NAMBLA’s founding, Tom Reeves, co-founder of NAMBLA, wrote,

Gay rights has been a very white, very middle-class, very urban movement. As the American mainstream/right-wing . . . reeled from the events of the sixties, including gays marching in the streets, the new “gay leaders” quickly betrayed those on the margins—especially poor and working class and black and Hispanic queens and boy-lovers.⁷

Not Just in the 70s

We may (and should) recoil with horror at such evil. But we shouldn’t assume that arguments for acceptance of pedophilia have been left to the dustbins of history. Conservatives have long warned that once gay marriage was normalized, pedophilia would be next. In May of this year, the Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill to ban discrimination against “minor-attracted persons”—i.e., pedophiles.⁸ A 2018 TEDx talk (since taken down) featured a German medical student arguing that pedophilia is a sexual orientation, just like any other, even if it should not be acted upon.⁹ And a whole slew of academic literature argues for the rights of the “minor-attracted” and asserts that labels like “pedophile” unfairly malign those who have such impulses but don’t act upon them.

In many ways, such sentiments are more similar to today’s queer movement than to the gay rights movements of yesterday. The gay movement won its demands for nondiscrimination, marriage, adoption, and nearly everything else. Now, the “queer” movement seeks complete annihilation of all limits surrounding sex, age, and “gender.” If a mere child can consent to taking hormone blockers, or to having radical, gender-altering surgery, then it is not a far stretch to claim that a mere child can “consent” to a sexual relationship with an adult.

David Thorstad was right. NAMBLA is right. There has always been an element within the gay movement that sought for the “right” to have sex with children. To gain legitimacy, the gay-rights movement of the 1970s and beyond sought to silence such voices. But now, the queer movement is bringing them back. And tuck-friendly swimwear for boys is only the beginning.

Notes
1. https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-target-swimsuits-transgender-pride-collection-892500330955.
2. https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/target-market-cap-losses-swell-15-billion-shares-drop-woke-backlash.
3. https://glreview.org/article/the-bostonboise-affair-1977-78/.
4. https://www.nambla.org/welcome.htm, accessed June 19, 2023.
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J082v20n01_15.
6. Ibid.
7. https://www.nambla.org/tom_reeves_writings.html.
8. https://catholicvote.org/ct-passes-bill-discrimination-minor-attracted-persons/.
9. https://www.metroweekly.com/2018/07/tedx-speaker-argues-that-pedophilia-should-be-accepted-as-an-unchangeable-sexual-orientation/.