Vintage NAMBLA Aesthetics & Pedophilia!
The eccentric political crusade for a queer sexuality
I love the old internet! I remember my family having a Windows 98 computer and going online, using dial-up, to view “The Dancing Lobsters” on amandaplease.com. It was some animated gif of lobsters dancing for a kid’s show. Pretty harmless.
Years later, I discovered ytmnd.com. My uncle was in love with the “Blue Ball Machine” and showed it to my entire family. Later I created a ytmnd account, and borrowed my pen name, “pilleater,” from there. So I have invested myself in the internet subculture in ways Andrew Sega calls himself “Necros.” What an amazing release for 1995!
Also in 1995, an antonymous author by the name of “David Em” posted a fantastic short piece on Luc Besson’s film, Leon The Professional, and compared it with pedophilia. Woah! That’s as extreme as those Russian “anti-sexuals” who are hostile against anything to do with sexuality. However, Em’s short prose is sincere and enlightens us in many ways.
NAMBLA, or the “North American Man/Boy Love Association” is a controversial one. Not only they are focused on the advocacy of pedophilia and understanding it, but also advocate the right for pederasty, or the right for a man and boy to love each other. That leaves lesbians, older women, and little girls out of the picture. This is a gay movement. A homosexual one!
Joseph Sciambra has written a memoir on his experience in the gay subculture of San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s'90s. Sciambra was met with disappointment and converted to Christianity. Sciambra noticed how older gay men were always after younger boys. It goes to show that once gays are old and exploited, they become Dennis Cooper’s “Ugly Man,” wishing the same ills of abuse upon the young. AIDs became that death wish and soon destroyed an entire people and a subculture around this realization. But they marched on anyway! Sciambra wrote down these names, created a video, and titled it, the “Dead Gay Porn Stars Memorial.”
And where does NAMBLA fit into this? Allen Ginsburg and Camille Paglia showed support for this consensual fight. In 1977, there was a French petition against age of consent laws that featured signatures from Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Félix Guattari, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, and so on. Would NAMBLA be this avant-garde and American attempt to subvert sexual identity politics and win the argument that pederasty is valid?
Yes and no.
There was a fascination with the male bond in the 1950s through the 70s. Slowly but surely, it became “gay” (as an insult) to be intimate with another man, hence advocating a hatred for the man and his platonic attitudes. Jeffery P. Dennis tracks this transition down in his book, “We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness.” Dennis remarked how younger boys, especially white males, found talking, playing, and unconditional love common in the post-World War II era. There certainly was no issue with “toxic masculinity” at this time. It didn’t even exist! Rather, how did boys, who acted more like girls, become the toxic brutes they are today? Toxic masculinity was invented after this attack on the love between boys. These boys grew up to become homosexuals, which in turn, fought to return to this boy's love as sincere. Will Fellows argues in his book, “A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture,” that gay men are the advocates of keeping society sane, and that gay men go out of their way to do the controversial. It’s related to the martyrdom of being a “homonationalist.” And when men try and love an innocent boy, it’s exactly what the straight-edge scene tried to do with a decadent punk culture. Some homonationalists want to bring back the “Männerbund,” or, the group of boys that grow together and experience everything as one family.
If anything, NAMBLA came from this early fight from homosexuals falling in love with younger boys. William S. Burroughs documented this struggle in his novel, “The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead,” and Dennis Cooper has his nostalgic trips of boy love in “The George Miles Cycle.” We must ask if the elite practice pederasty behind the public’s back. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones calls the evil oligarchs “the vampiric pedophiliac elite” at times to associate their actions with predatory behavior. Even the popular theory being Pizzagate is about this secret ring of NAMBLA elites in hiding. Common people don’t like pedophiles because the unusual desire around children, like “loli” in hentai, is associated with sexual abuse and harm. It’s right for Justin Payne to start a trend around being a “vigilante predator hunter” and to take aim at those who could potentially harm and rape a minor. There’s even a whole fan club around Chris Hasen’s show To Catch a Predator, called the “Temple of TCAP.” The fanbase studies every possible alleged predator who came on the show, and like cultural anthropology, studies the queer culture behind each individual. And yet, there is also a sincere voice for pedophilia (pederasty included), acted upon by Todd Nickerson and his brand of being the “virtuous pedophile.” The word “pedophilia” and its meaning have a controversial history.
The Professional is one of my favorite movies. I love Jean Reno. And I have seen Leon merchandise in Nampo-dong in Busan! The film has a cult following for all the right reasons. The transgressive nature of the child learning from a professional killer is amazing in every detail. The movie could be understood as the study of traumatic abuse. David Em sees it in a different light. It is, “a must-see movie for boy lovers.” Natalie Portman is an “aesthetically bruised” character right out of a Trever Brown painting. The Professional gets every right about the edgy school shooter violence of the 1990s and wraps it up into 110 minutes. Em writes,
“…The Professional satisfied my feelings of justice. The girl's family is shown without the usual sentimentality characteristic of American films. Moreover, the forces of evil, in a movie where none of the characters are angels, are shown to be the sadistic, dope-pushing villains of the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the cops. In the end, the demonized, would-be pervert is revealed to be a hero of sorts, in a way that speaks directly to Besson's intended, young, audience.”
Here, as Todd Nickerson would say, “I am not a monster.” The desire for pedophilia is neither right nor wrong. It just is. The issue is, how does the pedophile not commit any abusive acts or crimes? Some psychologists argue that pedophiles just need robots to subdue any act against children. Then again, what is stopping anyone from listening to Zooier Than Thou, a community podcast about “zoophilia,” or a sexual interest in animals? Do they also get robot animals just so they can’t stop raping animals in the middle of the night? The thought should be upon desire, and what exactly is innocent versus what is leud, predatory, or harmful activity. Sexuality is like philosophy in many ways, where the investigation is not about wisdom, but about desire, beauty, and the attainment of reproduction. As many questions and quirks, as there are about one’s sexuality, there are many about philosophy and meaning in the world. This is what we have to understand with the pedophile.
The Japanese seem to not care about these age differences. For better or for worse, they have the transgressive and long-running Patalliro! manga and pulps like Okane Ga Nai. Where to begin with that? The NAMBLA website has the same glory as the white supremacist Vanguard New Network website, transgressive and fringe in many ways, but also beautiful in written expression. It’s something so bizarre, that you will go into denial that it exists. The “Letters” page is still updated on NAMBLA as of 2023, and it’s a great way to read about people’s inward desires and transgressions. Rather, we should understand the positions and arguments that NAMBLA is coming from, and who NAMBLA, as a subculture, appeals to. Very easy to understand, right?
NAMBLA is trying to capture a peculiar homosexual desire deemed too taboo for society, that only a few intellects like Jeffery P. Dennis could understand as a nostalgic trip of enjoying childhood as a sexual identity politics. The NAMBLA website is a great treasure trove of decades-old art around the desire of youth and becoming self-aware of one’s meaning in life. …See? I didn’t have to call them rapists or anything like that.
Ask, why do they act and write upon such desires?
-pe
3-8-2023