JERRY SANDUSKY, GAY ACTIVISTS, AND “CONSENSUAL” PEDERASTY

Every gay and straight person I know deplores the terribly abusive acts of convicted pederast Jerry Sandusky, since he used his position of power to sexually abuse boys and young teenagers. But would gay activists condemn Sandusky if the acts had somehow been consensual?

Consider the example of Harvey Milk, the pioneer gay politician who is celebrated in many schools on Harvey Milk Day and who was memorialized in the Academy Award winning film “Milk.”

According to the acclaimed gay journalist Randy Shilts, at age 11, Milk began attending performances of the New York Metropolitan Opera where he met with “wandering hands” and soon was engaged in “brief trysts [with grown men] after the performances.” While still in junior high, he “dove headfirst into the newly discovered subculture,” and by the age of 14, Milk was “leading an active homosexual life.”

Were the men who were sexually involved with Harvey Milk any better than Jerry Sandusky? And can an 11-year-old give truly informed consent to such acts?

As Milk grew older, the pattern reversed itself to the point that, at age 33, Milk hooked up with a 16-year-old named Jack McKinley, one of a number of younger men with whom he was intimate. Does this not tarnish his legacy?

The school lessons supplied by GLSEN (which in practice stands for the Gay and Lesbian Sexual Education Network) contain tools like “North American History Game Cards,” where children learn that famous Americans like Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman were gay. What the children don’t learn is that if Whitman was, in fact, a homosexual, he was also a pederast while Ginsberg was a defender of NAMBLA, the notorious North American Man Boy Love Association, of which he infamously said, “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.”

An even more celebrated gay icon, Harry Hay, considered to be the founder of America’s gay liberation movement, was also a friend of NAMBLA. When a gay pride parade in Los Angeles banned NAMBLA from participating, Hay decided to march with a sign that said, “NAMBLA walks with me.”

From 2001-2006, Yale University’s LGBT program was greatly helped by the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, named after the famous gay activist and author. In a 2004 speech in New York City, he spoke of a “sweet young boy who didn’t know anything and was in awe of me. I was the first man who f----d him. I think I murdered him [meaning, by infecting him with AIDS].” Where is the gay outcry over this?

During a radio interview last year on the Rick Amato Show, Jimmy LaSalvia of GOProud stated, “I happen to think that a good school teacher, when they’re teaching literature, would mention that Oscar Wilde, when they’re teaching his work, would mention that Oscar Wilde was locked in an asylum because he was gay.” Would they also mention that he was a boy lover and that he wrote about his passionate sexual encounters with young teens no older than some of the boys molested by Sandusky?

As noted by Jim Kepner, formerly curator of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, “If we reject the boylovers in our midst today we’d better stop waving the banner of the Ancient Greeks, of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, [and others]. We’d better stop claiming them as part of our heritage unless we are broadening our concept of what it means to be gay today.” (There is, of course, dispute about the sexual orientation of some of the men on this list, but if, in fact, they were homosexuals, they were also pederasts.)

And where is the world condemnation of David Norris, the Irish gay activist, Senator, and presidential hopeful? While stating that he abhors child abuse and that offenders should be fully prosecuted by the law, he has also declared, “I don’t believe in an age of consent.” Norris told the magazine Magill, “There’s a lot of nonsense about pedophilia. . . . I think there is a complete and utter hysteria about this subject.” He insisted that children were capable of giving informed consent to sex, saying, “The law should take into account consent rather than age.”

Lifesite News also reports that in a September 2011 letter in which he clarified his views, Norris confirmed his support for consensual pederasty, “saying that from his own experience as a young gay man in Dublin, he would have preferred to have engaged in such a relationship as his ‘introduction to sexuality.’”

This is reminiscent of a statement made by Larry Kramer and proudly quoted by NAMBLA: “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 knows it.” He even claimed that, “. . . 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.”

Tell that to the victims of Jerry Sandusky.


(For an earlier version of this article, see HERE.)