By the editorial collective of The Body Politic, published along with the article in issue 39.
1977 has been the Year of the Children.
The year of the children Anita Bryant wanted to "save," of the children lesbian mothers lost. The year of the one child who died in a body rub parlour on Yonge Street.
We have been sensitized.
There is some irony in this. In the lives of most gay people, children are conspicuous only by their absence. But they are not unimportant to us. We have begun to realize, for one thing, that many gay men and lesbians are parents themselves. Their battles for custody of their children have given them new visibility.
These custody cases, though, are only one part of a much broader assault. Dark warning is being given: children are to be the last frontier of heterosexist bias. Hints have been dropped that our right to be free from discrimination, when and if that right is recognized, just might not include the freedom to be a teacher, a counsellor or a childcare worker. We have been told that our magazines can't fall before their eyes and that our television programmes, if they are shown at all, can't be aired until they have gone to bed. Regardless of the nature of our real everyday contacts -- or lack of them -- with children, all of us have been branded as every child's potential "molester."
Which brings us to the article below, "Men loving boys loving men," the latest in a series on youth sexuality by Gerald Hannon.
The people you will meet in it are "child molesters," "chicken hawks," "dirty old men." They are these things just as all of us are "pansies," "lezzies" and "queers." The names are only the most visible part of an elaborate and vicious mythology. (In Toronto this summer we found that the myth includes us all as "child-killers" too.) We know how much these myths and these words have to do with our real lives.
We know about some of them, that is.
The real lives of men who love boys and boys who love men are mysterious even for most other gay people. We are not immune from the general paranoia about children and sexuality, and many of us are willing to accept that part of the straight world's homosexual mythology even when we know the rest of it for the lie that it is.
A small part of the reality is presented below.
"Men loving boys loving men" is not printed here without awareness of the potential consequences. The decision to run the article was not taken lightly nor without debate within the editorial collective. We have had it on hand, typeset and laid out, for nearly six months, but we have hesitated, sensitive to the feeling that "the climate was not right" after the anti-gay media barrage which followed Emanuel Jaques's death in August.
We know now that the "climate" will never be "right." The Jaques trial is yet to come, and when that is over there will undoubtedly be something else we could point to if we wanted an excuse to move with the tide. The tide must be resisted, the discussion must be opened up.
We know that people who are more concerned with "respectability" than with rights will groan at our "irresponsibility."
We also know that the media are likely to react as though they had just found a delectably rotten plum in a Christmas cake from a bakery they've never much liked. The issue might well be splashed sensationally across the tabloids (especially on days when there isn't much real news), lines may be quoted out of context and juicy bits read over the air to satisfy prurient interest. Columnists like the Toronto Sun's Claire Hoy will be delirious. We know about these things because they have happened to us -- to all of us -- before.
We also know this because we are aware of how desperate the enemies of gay liberation are. They are willing to hurl the bodies and minds of the very children they are trying to "save" into the fray.
The Body Politic, for instance, recently received a curious series of telephone calls. The voice at the other end of the line was that of a young boy, perhaps nine or ten years old. He asked on one occasion to speak to the author of this article (who, as we noted, has written on youth and sexuality before), asked where he might buy TBP, asked finally where he could go to have sex. At least once the prompting voice of an adult male was audible in the background. The sound of a tape recorder was not, but could be assumed: it is illegal even to advise people under the age of eighteen (and gay people under twenty-one) to have sex.
We can only speculate about the character of someone who would rather manipulate a child into an act of fraud than have him know anything real about the lives of men who love men and women who love women. But the characters of three people whom this man with the tape recorder must fear so much, three "child molesters," three men who love boys, are here to be examined.
We leave it to you. - The editorial collective