#nambla

many gay writers and thinkers of the time would publish about this problem (the first documented condemnation fo NAMBLA was made at the Gay March on Washington in 1979) and how to combat the use of the homosexual pedophile stereotype by pedophiles attempting to adopt the queer rights movement to justify their abuse of children.

there was a real problem in the queer community of gay men who would abuse child "prostitutes" (usually impoverished black and brown children in large cities who were forced into survival sex work) and they had begun to use the actual legal persecution of LGBT people through age of consent laws of the time (many states still have laws criminalizing sodomy on the books, and thus many queer teens and young adults were being prosecuted on local levels for consensual sexual exploration between their peers) as a way to advocate that their fully grown adult asses should not face social or legal persecution for it.

this, naturally, did not work. queer people are more likely to be a victim of child sex abuse than they are to be a perpetrator. the term "chickenhawk" was being used as early as 1972 to deride these people for the way they openly exploited children and teenagers. NAMBLA had been utterly politically abandoned by the time the AIDS epidemic hit its peak, and that's where everything went wrong.

because of the suddenness with which the aids epidemic set into the gay community, the collective traumatization of many queer elders who were not prepared for the digital age, and the further radicalization of the public against homosexuality when the government finally began publishing about the transmission of AIDS required the shifting of the entire community towards focusing on proving to the american people that anybody could get fucking AIDS left us completely unable to address the absolute human toll. 324,029 people died between 1987 and 1998, with death rates only dropping by 1995 and effective medication being introduced in 1996.

in 1993, the first gay rights organization to be recognized by the united nations, ILGA, still had connections to NAMBLA. the moment it happened, gay organizations across the US were calling for ILGA to dissolve ties. by 1994, ILGA had banned not only NAMBLA, but two other pedophile activist groups that had attached themselves to the organization.

the republican party used the fiasco to create legal precedent to wilthold UN contributions in an attempt to have ILGA's recognition revoked.

in 1995, Stonewall 25 officially banned NAMBLA from their organization, which also banned them from joining their march to commemorate Stonewall. this decision led GLAAD to adopt the "Position Statement Regarding NAMBLA" that declared them for what they were - adult men advocating for the removal of legal protections for children in the event of sexual abuse and using the queer movement's success to do it. the National Gay and Lesbian Task force also condemened NAMBLA with a thorough refutation of everything they stood for.

however, still to this day, pedophiles continue to assert that they're a part of the community by trying to revive the NAMBLA model, simply using modern queer slang and leaving out the part that the NAMBLA website is only maintained by a bunch of very dedicated enthusiasts and all resultant pedophile advocacy groups that splintered off from them look similar because it's not as prevailing of a political front as the internet makes it look.

this website's pedophile problem, while masquerading as a form of trans liberationist thought (and by extension maps, radqueers, and other groups which use queer liberation rhetoric to cloak their pedophilia) is not an actual political bloc worth our investment beyond the work necessary to eradicate child sex abuse in all its forms, which is an actual part of modern queer liberationist doctrine.

these people do not exist outside of online spaces because we have successfully done the work to make them ashamed to show their faces, and the ways in which online media is proliferated has created a misconception that pedophiles are unjustly punished because of their association with queerness, and not the actual point of LGBT liberationist advocacy: that anyone who is comfortable with the devaluation of human life necessary to abuse a child has the capacity to devalue queer lives when it becomes politically expedient.

that's why their current tumblr-specific iteration are such sore losers, so desperate to use their queer identity to escape scrutiny, so willing to twist leftist ideals to make caveats for their desire to abuse children. they got caught. and just like NAMBLA did when they got caught, they abandon actual queer people to face the increased hostility caused by the conflation of queer rights with the perception of queer people as pedophiles.

we have got to stop letting it work.

we need to start telling each other the truth. that we lost an entire generation of people. that those people knew about the damage pedophiles were doing to our community. that their works and their political action was lost because of the same conditions that allow for child abuse to happen - their lives were not valued enough by the people who could have done something to stop it.

that pedophiles have risen to prominence in our community in their absence because of survivorship bias - the pedophiles got to the internet first, and made the first impressions in online queer political discourse.

we need to start telling each other that being abused as a child is not what makes a queer person queer, that they did not invite their abuse by being queer, that queerness is seperate from child abuse, and that anyone trying to convince you that your abuse made you who you are is trying to use it against you.

we need to stop letting the beautiful history of the queer community be tainted by the lies of pedophile activist groups and we need to move towards the actual future our elders wanted to see for queer people.