Paedophile Alliance: An Uncomfortable Past for Gay Rights

It would be welcome if a British newspaper did a similiarly honest analysis of the same situation in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s.

But for now here is an excellent article in Germany’s Spiegel Online International.

Many thanks to RB !

In the 1980s, gay rights groups in Germany formed an alliance with pedophiles who advocated the legalization of sex with minors. It’s a dark period few care to talk about now.

In July 1981, the gay interest magazine “Rosa Flieder” published an interview with Olaf Stüben. Stüben was one of the most infamous paedophiles in Germany at the time. As a writer for the leftist newspaper Die Tageszeitung, he openly advocated for people to accept paedophilia as healthy and moral.

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In the magazine interview, Stüben is asked why it should be acceptable for adults to have sex with children and youths. He talks of quickies with young boys, and declares it backwards to maintain the taboo around inappropriately touching children. “Childlike innocence is an invention of the bourgeoisie of early capitalism,” Stüben says.

The interview in “Rosa Flieder” was not a one-off lapse. On the contrary — in the 1970s and 80s, numerous gay-oriented magazines brazenly promoted sex with children, even running pictures of naked boys. The magazine “Don” presented five sympathetic reports on the experiences of paedophilic men. The headline read, “We’re not child rapists!”

In recent months, many in Germany have been discussing the extent to which the Green Party in the 1980s allowed itself to be manipulated by paedophiles. The party came under such intense pressure that it hired political scientist Franz Walter to look into its own history relating to the issue.

Yet it’s now clear that the gay movement in Germany must also come to terms with this chapter of its history. Anyone who searches through archives can find ample evidence of the alliance between gay rights organizations and pedophile activists. If pedophiles got into trouble with the law, they could rely on legal advice from a group called “Gay Lawyers.” Many politicians in the Green Party also made sure that calls for legalizing sex with children had an audience.

A Beneficial Alliance

Nowadays it seems puzzling why gays would get themselves mixed up with people whose sexual obsessions were downright illegal. The tolerance for pedophiles was fueled by several different sources. For one, many gays at the time knew all too well what it was like to be discriminated against by the state. Consensual sex between adult men was officially a criminal act up until the end of the 1960s. Only in 1969 did lawmakers in West Germany dismantle the infamous “Paragraph 175” of the German Criminal Code. At the same time, the sexual revolution was breaking out, and many men finally had the courage to come out of the closet.

Thus many gays didn’t want to be the ones to judge others for their deviant sexual inclinations. In a climate of general tolerance, the movement lost its moral compass. The gay movement did not distance itself from men who acted on their desire for children; rather, it took them under its wing.

Then there was the remarkable idea that underage boys should not be denied the chance to have sexual experiences with grown men. Even today, the Association of Lesbians and Gays in Germany (LSVD) claims on its website that in the 1980s, the only men who spoke up were those who had enjoyed sex with adults in their youth.

For the paedophiles, the alliance with the gay movement was nothing but beneficial. They had a platform from which they could formulate objectives.

The gay movement helped pedophiles in entirely practical ways. In the pamphlet “Justly gay. Legal advice for gays,” there is a one-and-a-half page “argumentation aid.” It’s an instruction on how men who are charged with child sexual abuse can best escape punishment.

More at Spiegel Online