This is a message to Michael Jackson. It is also a message to Bill Andriette and NAMBLA. And it is finally a message to all of us involved in the new men's movement, fathers and non-fathers alike, who care deeply about the human destiny of the wonderful children in our lives.
Let me set the stage by placing these reflections in historical context. Something foul is festering in the progressive gay/lesbian/bisexual community. It smells of 1950s witch hunts. It smells of the sacrifice of our own people on the altar of political expediency, and of the muzzling of free, open and vigorous debate on some cutting edge political and social ideas.
In autumn of 1993, action was begun to expel NAMBLA (The North American Man/Boy Love Association) from membership in the coalition of gay, lesbian and bisexual groups known as ILGA, or the conference of International Lesbian and Gay Associations. This action was taken to appease external political forces (forces outside the gay/lesbian/bisexual community), which demanded it as the price to pay for preserving ILGA's United Nations NGO status.
Obviously, the political opinions of NAMBLA were considered too hot and too "non-PC" for a panicked and paranoid GAY/LESBIAN/BISEXUAL community to handle. Those who wrestled with the controversial issues NAMBLA raised were simply pitched overboard as outcasts. And the reason was obvious. Put the words "kids" and "sex" together in the same sentence, and all rational thought in this society immediately ceases. You lose everyone in the discussion - gay and straight, progressive and conservative, male and female, parent and non-parent - if you even dare to speak those two words in the same breath.
Not coincidentally, during this same time period, Michael Jackson was being probed, prodded and pilloried by the tabloid press and by police investigators for the high crime of having gotten romantically involved with a teenager. On January 25, 1994, lawyers for both sides announced an out-of-court settlement in the civil suit under which Jackson was charged with "unlawful seduction." The settlement was reputed to be in the "tens of millions of dollars."
Meanwhile, NAMBLA found itself so stigmatized, so demonized and ethically discredited by both the gay and the straight press, that even an open-minded journalist, who concedes grudgingly that the organization may just have a valid point to make when it calls on us to ponder the issue of trans-generational bonding, would never dare to communicate directly with the organization, let alone risk being placed involuntarily on a mailing list which predatory postal inspectors might seize at any time.
I am, I hope, an open-minded journalist. I am outraged by what was done to Michael Jackson. I am outraged by ILGA5s gutless cave-in to exogenous political expediency in moving to expel NAMBLA. But paradoxically, I am outraged most of all by my own difficulty in cutting through the media-driven demonization, as I struggle to weigh fairly and dispassionately what Michael has done, as well as what Bill Andriette and NAMBLA are trying to tell us.
The brute fact is that the acronym "NAMBLA" has become radioactive. It sits there like a lump of deadly plutonium, capable of inflicting lethal damage on the good name and reputation of anyone who touches it or even comes near it. However unfairly, the name immediately conjures up the sickening image of a gay man forcibly sodomizing a helpless male child. And probably nothing that can be done at this late date will rescue the name from an involuntary, spontaneous evocation of this inflammatory image in both straight and gay communities.
I said at the outset that, this message was directed to three constituencies: to Michael Jackson; to Bill Andriette and NAMBLA; and to socially conscious men in the new men's movement, gay and straight, who care about fostering strong emotional bonds with all our brothers across generational boundaries. Perhaps the best way to proceed is to address each of these constituencies in turn, while the others have a chance to listen in. Let me speak first to Bill Andriette and NAMBLA.
I've heard enough of the interviews Bill gave when NAMBLA was targeted for expulsion from ILGA (a final vote is still pending at this writing), to understand that he in no way condones the sexual penetration of a child by an adult. Rather, he calls on thoughtful people to consider the complex emotional needs of younger men, especially those transiting between boyhood and adolescence, as they turn inevitably toward older males in quest of nurturing and appropriate role models.
It is completely natural for younger men to crave the praise, the esteem, the affection and the emotional validation of older males. Robert Bly has illuminated the trans-generational connection in several breakthrough books on the phenomenology of the deep masculine. However, what is often missed but urgent to understand is that different kinds of emotionally nurturing male support will be sought by young men with different sexual orientations.
It is predictable that younger heterosexual adolescent males will turn for images of manhood to identifiable and (presumably) heterosexual heroes in the culture, whether they be sports stars, astronauts, rock musicians or movie heroes - in short, the whole pantheon of contemporary idols.
Closer to home, there will be school coaches, favorite teachers, scout leaders, male family friends and relatives, all of whom add a diversity of creative, caring masculine inputs to the basic intimate bond with a boy's own father; or who help to replace that bond and give the boy someone to lean on if a natural father or stepfather is absent.
Nonetheless, there are also gay and bisexual children and adolescents. The religious right will sputter in outrage at the allegation that gay children exist. Let the religious right sputter. Gay children exist. Time and again, we have heard gay men and lesbians testify in their memoirs that they have known "who they were and what they were" from age four or five.
Much more frequently, as writers Edmund White and Paul Monette point out in separate interviews, gay and bisexual adolescents discover who they are when they reach puberty. They also discover at that time an innate hunger to make a deep emotional connection with adults who understand and speak the language of their own hearts.
To tell gay or bisexual adolescents that they have no natural right to form emotional bonds with gay or bisexual adults is to do two things. First: It is to stigmatize their innate, emerging sexual identity as something inferior, something damaged, something prohibited, something morally and socially discreditable if not downright despicable.
And second: It is to give them the message that the process of emotional identification with strong adult role models which is permitted to heterosexual youngsters is nonetheless forbidden to them, as gay children or adolescents, because the role models who speak their natural emotional language are all perverts, pederasts, pedophiles and child rapists, from whom they must at all costs be protected and forcibly segregated. The very process of imposing derogatory, arbitrary psychological labels like "pedophile" and "pederast" on all gay and bisexual adults who have a natural human care for young people is purposefully intended to stigmatize gay people as social monsters. It is an outrageous situation, bordering on a human rights atrocity.
Those of us who have been through a gay or bisexual adolescence know the cost of having our noses and our psyches perpetually rubbed in these devastating social messages. Little wonder then, if many of us feel a moral obligation to go out of our way to be present and available in the lives of today's gay and bisexual young people - the young people we once were - so that their own time of passage will be much happier, more deeply supported and far less traumatic than ours. We want these young people to feel known and loved and appreciated and valued and honored for who they are=2E We want to make sure they have available to them the qualities of wise, knowing and compassionate support that we craved when we were their age.
It is from this platform of understanding that I feel moved to speak to Bill Andriette and NAMBLA. To the extent that Bill expresses the true message of NAMBLA when he invites us to weigh the complexity of younger men's emotional needs as they grow into adolescence, and the very different languages of the heart spoken by straight kids and GLB kids which cause them to be drawn to different kinds of adult role models he presents us with more than just a valid point of view. He presents us with a voice of mature wisdom from which we can all benefit.
However, NAMBLA'S burden of guilt by association with child rape, and with other sexual abuses of innocent children by predatory adults, makes it imperative for Bill Andriette to draw some very bright moral lines and to rethink the whole concept of NAMBLA. If his intention is as wise and as honorable as I've credited it to be in the scenario outlined above, let me simply suggest for him two of those bright lines that need to be drawn.
Bright line number one: There is never any valid excuse or moral justification for the active or passive sexual penetration of a child by an adult=2E Or by another child for that matter. Period. End of discussion. Oral, anal or vaginal penetration of a child by anyone with sexual intent (we're not talking about the necessary cleaning of poopy or pissy kids, obviously) is beyond all norms of decency and adult moral responsibility. The experience of sexual contact with an adult is much too disorienting and potentially traumatizing for a child. So take the pledge, Bill - and make damned sure NAMBLA takes the pledge as well: There is never any valid excuse or moral justification for the sexual penetration of a child by an adult.
Bright line number two: Adolescents in deep hormonal change are neither children nor adults in the moral universe. But they remain uniquely vulnerable, and must be treated with unique sensitivity and responsibility by any adult to whom they have turned for love or counsel or emotional support. This speaks directly to the Michael Jackson affair, which we shall be visiting very shortly. The issues Michael raised cannot be swept under the rug by a monetary settlement which smacks of extortion.
Let me suggest a useful demarcation between childhood and adolescence. Young people who are deep enough into their change of life to be capable of masturbating to orgasm, and especially those who have already begun masturbating fairly frequently, are no longer children in a moral or ethical sense, in spite of the legal hooks which can implicate them in a charge of statutory rape if they become romantically involved with an adult. But their natural right to form romantic attachments with adults who care deeply about them, attachments which may well have a sexual component that adolescents find exciting or stimulating or nurturing or revelatory rather than threatening, is a right which must be handled by adults with something close to fear and trembling.
It is not impossible, and it is not absolutely unethical, for a 13 or 14 or 15 year old in his or her hormonal change of life to crave sexual intimacy with a much-admired adult. It is, after all, quite normal and predictable for the adolescent to hunger for sexual intimacy with someone close to his or her own age. This is why we've begun grudgingly to make condoms available to kids starting at the junior high school level.
Given this fundamental hormonal awakening, the desire to make love with someone across generational lines is not such an improbable stretch. But the risk of emotional damage from such involvement due to the inherent instability of adolescent hormonal passions is very great. This natural instability puts an enormous burden of responsibility on any adult to whom the adolescent may be sexually attracted, or who may be sexually attracted to the adolescent.
And there is the unsettling fact that even though an adolescent who has begun masturbating enjoys a obvious natural right to start making his or her own private decisions about romantic partnering, he or she remains technically under parental legal control through age i6, 17 or 18, depending on local laws. (In Britain, the age of legal consent for intimacy between males is an insulting and biologically ridiculous 18.)
It seems quite clear that from age 16 up, a young person is ethically entitled to make his or her own free and authentic decisions about partnering, regardless of what the law says. It is an absurd situation to have a young person legally empowered to make love at age 16 in one state, while being a juvenile delinquent by virtue of abetting statutory rape if the same lovemaking with the same partner occurs ten feet away, across the line in a neighboring state.
As we search for bedrock ethical norms to undergird the squish of such ridiculous legal non sequiturs, the age of 16 feels like a very solid foundation on which to build an edifice of consent. Of course there are young adults who are emotionally immature at age 16, and who really have no business engaging in sexual intercourse. There also happen to be many so-called "adults" in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who are just as emotionally immature, and who have even less business engaging in sexual intercourse! (Tell me we haven't all crossed paths with a few in our lives.) A legal line still needs to be drawn at some point, beyond which the government takes a "hands-off' attitude toward predictable human sexual activities, however spiritually misguided, however emotionally immature.
If age 16 is itself a bright boundary from which one can acknowledge the dignity and the ethical empowerment of a young adult's romantic and sexual choices, and if age 12 is clearly too close to the cusp of childhood to postulate any conceivable good coming from sexual intercourse between a near-adolescent and an adult (Jerry Lee Lewis and his cousin notwithstanding), we are left to deal with the natural needs and the natural rights of 13, 14 and 15 year olds.
We are in perilous and turbulent waters here. And I believe Michael Jackson just hurled past us, clinging for dear life to the driftwood shards of his career. All I can suggest is that romantic relationships between an adult and a 13-to-15 year old are very ad hoc as to questions of consent and maturity, very fraught with risk to the emotional well-being of the younger adolescent, and very prone to irresponsible self-deception on the part of the adult, who may easily rationalize that the adolescent partner has sought and has craved and has enjoyed what was really sought and craved and enjoyed mostly by the older partner.
It should go without saying that children are not consumable commodities. Maneuvering or manipulating or enticing or cajoling a younger adolescent to have sexual intercourse is fundamentally an immoral and predatory act=2E However, as already mentioned, some distinguished writers have noted an indisputable fact of our human experience: many 14 or 15 year old adolescents actively seek out the sexual company of attractive adults, to learn how their sexuality works and to quench their awakening hunger for warmth and intimacy.
Let me take the risk of sharing a personal anecdote. As a bisexual man in my late '30s, I was courted in a most flirtatious way by an absolutely gorgeous 15 year old lad who lived in our extended household. He found repeated occasions to hug me and kiss me on the lips; to undress for the shower in front of me; to whip out his dick and take long pisses very close to me when we worked or played together outdoors; and generally to make it perfectly clear that he would have been in Seventh Heaven if I had simply swept him off his feet into my arms and French-kissed him while I stroked his handsome young cock to an explosive climax.
I can say without a moment's hesitation that we truly and dearly loved each other, and that sharing sex with him would have been one of the most delicious events of my life. But I resisted the temptation, both because it would have wrecked my cordial relationship with his mom (his dad was long absent), and because I felt an underlying neediness in his attraction to me which made it difficult to see where we could have gone with our lovemaking in the long haul. I didn't think having sex with him would have been good for either of us, though I can tell you that the times I pumped off to the thought of making love with him were beyond counting. I suspect he did the same.
My point is simply that 13-to-15 year olds do pursue and do crave intimate, nurturing sexual relationships with adults. The charge of the religious right that gay men in particular are filthy predators who pursue and recruit and cajole and seduce vulnerable adolescent boys into these relationships is insulting and ridiculous. Not to put too fine a point on it: it's an ignorant, heterosexist crock.
My own experience affirms the fact that a deeply caring, morally responsible relationship with a strong sexual component can occur between a 15 year old and a mature man in his 30s or 40s. And it often occurs at the instigation of the younger man.
The fact that I chose not to consummate our friendship by having sex with him does not alter the fact that if we had slept together, it would have been a blessed and beautiful and tender intimacy which neither of us would have forgotten for the rest of our lives. It also would have constituted statutory rape. So much for the relevance of the law to sexual ethics or higher morality. (My young friend, who is also bisexual, turned 16 in the course of our friendship. He eventually served a stint in the Coast Guard, and is now married to a woman who brought several children to their relationship, making him an instant dad!)
It appears to me that the closer an adolescent is to the bright line age of 16, the more plausible it is that his romance with an older partner will find a responsible, nurturing, non-exploitative footing. Relationships closer to the "13" side of those three troublesome crossover years are much more problematic for all sorts of reasons.
Returning to our immediate topic, my counsel to Bill Andriette and NAMBLA is very simple. First, they need to lose the NAMBLA name, which is by now as stigmatized and as compromised as the Exxon Valdiz. Thoughtful people who extend their good will and open-mindedness cannot register anything but a negative emotional hit when either name comes up in conversation.
Second, NAMBLA needs to clean up its act. It needs to reconsider the moral purpose of an organization which has become associated in the public mind with the sexual exploitation of children by predatory adults. Those of us involved in the contemporary men's movement know that there are many varieties of affectionate bonding, emotional nurturance and vigorous role modeling which can and should take place across generational lines. Counseling a boy about the use of his masculine equipment is traditional, helpful and perfectly appropriate. However - say it one more time - the sexual penetration of a child by an adult is never appropriate, under any circumstances.
Finally, as Bill Andriette weighs the reasons for resuming under a new name and with a newly clarified moral purpose the project that was NAMBLA, he needs to align himself with the positive ways in which all mature and caring men can become loving, nurturing, supportive, non-sexist and non-heterosexist role models for younger men, without involving the high emotional risk or moral trespass of sexual exploitation. Gay or straight, married or unmarried, family relatives or family friends: we all face the same obligation to act as mature and responsible adults. But we all deserve as well precisely the same dignity and respect for the concern with which we have reached out in support of young people, regardless of our sexual orientation.
I don't necessarily mean that as male mentors, we ought to limit our nurturance solely to conservative activities like taking the boys hiking or fishing or shooting hoops with them. There's certainly nothing wrong with sharing any of that good stuff. But the deeper fact is that there is a body of archetypal male wisdom which needs to be communicated by older men to younger adolescents in an empowering and permissive way, to help them feel good about their emerging male sexuality. It's not only a perfectly natural and human thing to do. It's also a kind and loving thing to do.
As mature men, for example, we can make sure that boys at puberty know how to use and to maintain their male equipment when it begins to grow before their eyes. We can make sure they know how to masturbate, and know that it's perfectly O.K. to do so, in defiance of the reactionary sexual guilt trips that the fundamentalist religious right will try to lay on them. The simple truth, whether the religious right likes it or not, is that all teenage boys masturbate. They're supposed to. It's genetically programmed and it's perfectly healthy. It happens to be Mother Nature's natural home remedy for horniness, and a prophylactic against the temptation to premature adolescent intercourse. In that context, we can also make sure they understand the risks of unwanted pregnancy and AIDS, and how to prevent both.
Of course, in the best of all possible worlds, it's the function and the right of a loving father to mentor his son about these things. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with a family friend or relative functioning in loco parentis (that is, "in the place of a parent"), as long as he has the blessing of the boy's own parent to maintain a supportive masculine friendship. As Robert Bly points out, male adolescents sometimes want to share things with older male mentors that they would be embarrassed to share with their biological fathers - let alone with their mothers. That's what older friends and mentors are for.
There are many variations possible in this scenario, especially where the boy's own father is absent, uncaring or abusive. For example, a gay adolescent whose own father (or mother) has rejected him emotionally, or thrown him physically out of the house, or condemned him for "religious" reasons because of his sexual orientation, has every moral right to attach himself to a caring gay or bisexual adult who loves him and who wants to help him, even against a parent's wishes and objections. A parent relinquishes his or her moral right of guardianship, no matter what the law says, when he or she rejects a child because of who the child is.
As a general rule however, it's a troublesome sign if a mature friend and mentor feels that he needs to have an overly secretive relationship with a boy who already enjoys the presence of a loving and competent dad in his life. These supplementary friendships really ought to take place in the bright sunshine of the boy's own family ties. At least until the empowerment age of 16 is reached, it's fairly clear that an older friend must defer to the wishes and to the superseding authority of the boy's parents where external family friendships are concerned. But in those situations where a father is absent or hostile, all sorts of strong outside interventions become morally justifiable, since the supervening goal is to salvage the boy's own life and self-esteem rather than to placate the lords of legal nicety.
Single or separated mothers of adolescent boys are in a difficult position, and pose some thorny issues for good male mentors. On the one hand, the boys have suffered paternal abandonment to some degree, and thus have earned a natural right to strong male support and friendship from other sources. On the other hand, the mother retains technical custodial rights, but is sometimes unreasonably possessive and hostile where her son's friendships with older males are concerned. Angry and embittered as she may be with her former partner, or with men in general, she often does not appreciate the critical importance of strong male friendships in bringing support and comfort to the boy. She thinks her love ought to be enough for him.
Those dysfunctional situations need to be dealt with very much on an individual, ad hoc basis. Fortunately, some single mothers can be quite wonderful in their wisdom. One boy to whom I felt (and still feel) very close actually got his mom's blessing and permission to move in with his lover - a girl several years older than himself - at age 15. I gave him several boxes of condoms as a celebratory rite of passage gift!
My point is that an adolescent has a natural moral right to form his or her own nurturing relationships, outside of a parent's neurotic domination or control if it comes to that. And this natural right grows stronger, in its ethical underpinnings through ages 14 and 15, until virtual emancipation is reached at age 16. But ethical soundness does not make the legal tangles any easier to manage during those transitional years.
Enter Michael Jackson. Or should I say, exit Michael Jackson? I certainly hope not. Michael could be a great national consciousness raiser on the subject of appropriate and inappropriate bondings across generational boundaries. I think his ability to recover his career will be a measure of our society's willingness to bring a new maturity to its view of trans-generational friendships.
In light of the enormous good will Michael enjoyed prior to the tabloid tempest over his romantic involvements with younger teens, he is uniquely positioned to reclaim the hearts and minds of ordinary folks in our society - if he can explain credibly that what he brought into their young lives was an exceptional kind of love and support and nurturance, rather than sexual penetration or abuse.
To be sure, Michael skated close at times to the thin edge of sound ethical judgment. This does not mean, however, that his friendships were intrinsically or necessarily exploitative. Everything depends on the degree to which Michael was acting in loco parentis. That is, his friendships need to have been built with the clear blessing and permission and consent of the boys' own parents, who found him to be a caring and helpful male mentor for their sons.
Part of the privilege of acting in loco parentis is that a family friend is honor bound to share with younger boys only those sorts of actions and behaviors that their own father could share with them as perfectly appropriate intimacies. Right off the top, Michael needs to acknowledge some familiar bright lines. If he has ever sexually penetrated a child, then he has committed a grave offense. He can be forgiven and counseled, but he will need first to acknowledge his ethical mistake, and move on from there. Take the pledge, Michael: There is never any valid excuse or moral justification for the sexual penetration of a child by an adult.
That much said, however, there is an entire range of nurturing intimacies which Michael reportedly shared with his young friends, which have set off a feeding frenzy of sordid speculation in the press, but which are really perfectly appropriate parental intimacies that could be extended to a family friend in loco parentis.
They say Michael "bathed naked" with his young friends. Excuse me ... but at our local YMCA, as well as at the University swimming pools in the academic town where I live, it's routine and commonplace to see dads bathing naked in the communal shower rooms with their young sons, generally in the presence of dozens of other naked men and boys. Nobody ever questions it or finds anything amiss with it.
In fact, until a few decades ago, bathing suits were prohibited in most YMCA pools. Nude swimming was the norm, being considered more hygienic because it curbed most boys' mischievous tendency to piss in their wet suits on the sly instead of running all the way from the pool to the bathroom!
In cultural perspective, bathing together is something human beings have traditionally loved to do. The Romans and the Greeks worked it up to a fine social art. To the extent that a loving dad has a completely natural right to shower or bathe with his own young son, thus bonding them in happy and playful memories of one another, Michael could claim that same permissive right in loco parentis.
The crucial issue is that Michael's younger friends were not being coerced into disrobing in his presence, but actually wanted to bathe with him because it was an enjoyable thing to do. There is not the remotest ethical problem presented by adults and children bathing together. It's one of the oldest and warmest and loveliest of human social institutions.
In fact, there's a whole laundry list of perfectly natural intimacies which might be extended in loco parentis to a family friend. Dads often pee together with their young sons, particularly introducing them to the use of the urinals in men's bathrooms - which is something a mother will never be able to show a boy, for obvious reasons. An uncircumcised boy who is having trouble managing his foreskin (experiencing balanitis or paraphimosis) can come to his dad for help with the problem. And, of course, prepubescent daughters are mentored very lovingly, even physically, by their mothers at the onset of their first moon tide.
Some parents allow kids to hop into the bathtub with them if the kids want to, so that they can spend some delightful bonding time together. And it is considered perfectly acceptable, in many families at least, for the kids to jump into bed and snuggle up with mom and dad, especially on a weekend morning, when a day of rest from school and work schedules permits the rare luxury of unhurried warmth.
Kids simply love to cuddle with caring adults. It is a mark of the moral bankruptcy and ugliness and cynicism of our society that these nurturing intimacies are viewed by child protection authorities as "probable sexual abuse" of children. Anyone who cannot see the difference between the sexual penetration of a child, and the warm nurturance of a child, has no business holding a position of authority in child protection services.
Our difficult questions are these: To what extent did Michael enjoy these same legitimate rights of nurturance and intimacy in loco parentis? Did he betray the rights conveyed to him by responsible parents who allowed their kids to visit with him and develop such close friendships? Or did he simply run afoul of our society's wildly irrational paranoia about any display of natural warmth and affection tendered to a young person by a non-parental adult?
Only Michael knows the answers to those questions. But it should be obvious that our tendency to presume the worst in any media-driven situation where the words 2child" and "sex" occur in the same sentence is highly prejudicial and inflammatory to Michael's reputation. Ours is not a sane or compassionate social environment.
In fact, there is plenty of ethical leeway for Michael to have been acting in loco parentis as a nurturing adult, no matter what his personal sexual orientation might be. It's also clear that he might have pushed the ethical envelope to the maximum and skated off the thin edge of nurturance into some problematic behavior. One source indicates that Michael liked to share his bed with his young friends, to cuddle up with them, and to press their penises together as part of the natural whole body contact of cuddling - an intimacy he supposedly referred to as "rubba".
Insofar as this cuddling might have taken place with a loving, consenting and probably adoring 14 or 15 year old teen, I think Michael's situation is very close to the one I described involving my 15-year-old friend, who quite obviously hungered to make love with me, and who set out to cock-tease me into taking him in a moment of passion.
If Michael's cuddling in fact took place with a young person above the age of 14, I think the ethics of the relationship would pass muster as considerably more valid and justifiable than invalid and unjustifiable. A 14 or 15 year old has a natural right to decide whether he wants to be cuddled. He is big enough and strong enough to get out of Michael's bed under his own power if he doesn't like it!
However, insofar as this cuddling might have taken place with a vulnerable lad of 10 or 11, we're looking at a whole different ethical scenario. For Michael casually to press his penis against a 10 year old boy's penis while they snuggle together is at the very least highly controversial behavior, verging on an act of sexual intercourse with a child.
For all of that, I believe Michael's deepest intentions were fundamentally innocent. As sexually hot as his dancing may be, I suspect that Michael's own sexuality is itself a paradigm of child-like innocence, and that he never intended to be anything but a caring and nurturing friend. I suspect the crucial problem is that Michael does not know the deep roots of his own sexual feelings and identity. He probably needs to do some intensive counseling to clarify his own motives, before he can reach out legitimately as a loving mentor for younger adolescents.
I also believe Michael's lack of adequate sexual self-knowledge has blindsided him and left him vulnerable to exploitation by people with the most corrupt, cynical and destructive motives imaginable. The father who set his sights on breaking loose a huge chunk of Michael's bank account, and achieved that aim in an out-of-court settlement under the thoroughly hypocritical cover of being "shocked" and "outraged" by Michael's romantic behavior with his son, strikes me as anything but an admirable role model.
I hardly think a normal 13-year-old adolescent boy would be traumatized by Michael's gentle affection, regardless of whether the boy was straight or gay. But I think the boy might well be traumatized by his father's vindictiveness and rapaciousness and greed and heterosexist arrogance, masquerading as moral indignation over a minor romantic indiscretion.
Only in a sickened world view, where love between human beings of the same gender is reviled and stigmatized, and where a higher legal penalty is demanded of a man who loves and nurtures young people than of a man who violently abuses them, could such a ridiculous legal situation arise. When is the last time a man who violently battered and abused a child was threatened with anything close to tens of millions of dollars in legal forfeitures?
If Michael made some serious mistakes in judgment, particularly as to what constituted age-appropriate behavior with young friends who were not yet in their teens, he certainly needs to be called to account, and summoned to therapy so that he can get a better insight into the roots of his own troubled childhood. I think therapy would be very good for Michael. If nothing else, it would enable him to clarify the responsible and appropriate ways in which he can fulfill his admirable wish to be a caring adult mentor for the kids in his life.
In the end, I hope it's clear that the last thing in the world Michael deserves is to be pilloried and ostracized from the human race for the high crime of offering young people his love and support. Michael's judgment may need clarification, and his narcissism may need therapeutic exploration. But I, for one, remain convinced that his heart is pure. God knows, this world needs many more adults who treat children with gentleness and kindness, and many less who hurt and harm and maim and kill them.
Finally, I want to speak to the constituency of all caring men, grandfathers and fathers and non-fathers, gay and straight and bisexual, old and young and middle-aged, who realize that to love deeply across the lines of the generations is to celebrate one of the strongest and proudest links in our human civilization. To all such men, I issue the challenge of gentle warriorhood: Go forth and do battle against the ignorance, the paranoia, the homophobia, the twisted and misguided religious hypocrisies, and the political and legal atrocities that seek to sever the bonds between loving adults and the young people they mentor.
Several retrograde social attitudes work against trans-generational intimacy. The first is that our society casts an immediately cynical interpretation on all contact between children and non-parental adults, except for the most conservative 2acceptable" bonding such as doing competitive sports together. A worse problem is that the politicians, bureaucrats and administrative officials who supervise child protection in many states are pathologically unable to credit the difference between a healthy, loving, thoroughly human intimacy with a child, and the legally actionable sexual penetration or abuse of a child.
Let me share with you just a few of the actual "child protection agency" horror stories that have been reported by direct victims or their friends in the past few years. These are not paranoid fantasies. These are things that really happened.
* A parcel delivery service route man making a delivery saw a two year old toddler playing peacefully inside a well-kept middle-class home. The child happened to be playing in the nude. The route man filed a complaint with authorities, and child welfare officials visited the home, admonishing the parents that the naked child could be taken from them if another such complaint were ever filed.
* In a closely related situation, many families who profess naturism as a lifestyle in the privacy of their own homes have been subjected to sexual abuse investigations by child protection authorities. Both the state authorities and prying neighbors have made the preposterous charge that to allow a child merely to see his or her parents unclothed constitutes, per se, sexual abuse of a child.
* The neighbors of a family who owned a swimming pool once saw a young girl jump into her father's lap and playfully start to unbutton his shirt. The neighbors filed a complaint of suspicion of child sexual abuse, and a full-scale investigation was launched by child protection authorities. After grilling the parents, and after the girl was in fact temporarily seized and removed from her parents, custody, authorities discovered that the little girl was at that time simply learning to button and unbutton her own clothing, and loved to practice her new art on anything at hand that had buttons. The parents were shocked and mortified by this invasion of their family privacy, and by the totally unfounded accusation that the father had been having abusive sexual relations with his daughter.
* In numerous disputed court custody cases, the parent seeking custody visitation rights has had flung into his or her face by an opposing attorney the charge that he or she had brought the child to a National Rainbow Family Gathering, an annual counterculture celebration in which many people routinely swim or sunbathe naked without sexual intent. Once again, it has been charged that exposure of a child to the mere presence of naturally unclothed human bodies, even in the protective company of his or her parent, constitutes sexual abuse of a child.
* A recent article in our local newspaper pointed out, almost casually, that the sexual abuse prevention programs in a number of schools are being conducted by the same local police officers who oversee the D.A.R.E. drug abuse prevention program. According to this article, part of the subtly nuanced, humane role modeling that these young children receive from the local police is the advice that if an unknown adult presumes to speak to them in a public place, they should scream as loudly as they can and "try to kick the perpetrator in the groin."
* Just recently on National Public Radio, a writer who also serves as a guest commentator told an outraged tale of invaded family privacy. His four year old son had asked to follow some tracks into a snowy wood near the writer's home. Father and son took off into the woods together to spend some time studying the winter behavior of the animals. After about 15 minutes, an armed policeman appeared on a ridge above them, shouting at them=2E It turned out that a neighbor had called the police after seeing 2a suspicious looking man leading a little boy into the woods." Clearly uncomfortable, the cop apologized and left. But father and son were left deeply shaken by the event, and by a sense that their innocent playing together had been interpreted in a sinister way by a meddlesome neighbor. As the writer expressed it, a woman with a child in an unconventional setting is presumed to be the child's mother. A man with a child in an unconventional setting is presumed to be a child molester.
* Care givers in day care centers now routinely require signed parental consent forms to permit such natural physical tasks as helping a child put on or remove his or her coat. Another worker generally must be present as a witness when "the act" is performed. And God help the day care teacher who would ever hug or kiss or physically comfort a crying child. These are prosecutable sexual offenses in some states.
I could continue to pile up the stupidities and the outrages that have been brought to my attention. But these will suffice to identify the nature and the scope of the problem. A society that can't tell the bright line difference between the kind and loving nurturance of a child, and the predatory sexual penetration or abuse of a child, is at grave risk of raising a generation of children who are cold, angry, hostile, violent, paranoid, uncaring, and probably damaged beyond all hope of repair.
Putting parents and family friends on notice that if they roughhouse with a kid, if they tip him over and swing him by his legs, or wrestle him to the ground and tickle his tummy, or play bongos on his butt until he squeals not in pain but in sheer delight, they could be charged by a meddlesome neighbor with sexual abuse, is to shackle all of us with the same soul-numbing paranoia that devastated Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. If you think government informants are everywhere, and if you think that your simple, natural, spontaneous humanity is going to be interpreted as a sexual crime, you begin to live in a state of perpetual fear. Unless you are very strong, you also start to internalize the messages you're getting from the paranoids who have usurped control of your life.
Enough is enough. Our acknowledgment of the legitimate and addressable problem of child sexual abuse has sent us careening off the deep end toward the suppression of all but the most brittle, fear-driven and emotionally constrained adult child relationships. And it has thereby set us well on the road to destroying the traditional warmth and playfulness of trans-generational bonding.
This is simply no way to run a healthy human planet. It's high time we rescued our right to nurture children from the cynical clutches of government bureaucrats. It's high time we gave our kids a sustainable human future. It's high time we all grew up.
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Writing some weeks after the body of this article was first circulated for review and comment, I've decided to append a few relevant follow-up notes. The tabloid press is currently reporting that Michael Jackson's settlement with the family of the teenager whose father brought suit against him was actually 60 million dollars - not 10 million as originally claimed=2E Michael chose to pay what amounts to extorted hush money, rather than testify in a sworn deposition about his intimate personal relationships.
This situation amounts to nothing less than a crass exploitation by the boy's family of our national bogeyman complex about friendships across generational lines. If Michael had been willing to own his affectionate feelings for young people as a point of pride and integrity, and as an affirmative human resource, he never would have fallen prey to such blackmail. But his refusal to explore the subconscious domain of his perfectly natural human feelings has left him twisting in the wind.
It has also left to fester without resolution the preposterous stigma which our society attaches to close friendships across the lines of generations. The issue of strong emotional relationships between adults and kids will not disappear. It needs to be illuminated and faced boldly. If Michael will not face it, then someone else must, or this same morally bankrupt blackmail will be practiced on others.
Several points have been raised in discussion which I'm happy to revisit. They bear directly upon the ominous intrusion of a police mentality into our private lives. Some people might be shocked by my suggestion that it is not safe even for an innocent journalist or researcher to be found on NAMBLA's mailing list, which "predatory postal inspectors might seize at any time." I would simply remind everyone that a few years ago, federal agents seized the private mailing list of a company that sold - horror of horrors - wide-spectrum indoor grow lights, which might be used to cultivate anything from an indoor tomato crop to an indoor marijuana crop. Every individual consumer who ordered those lights in good faith is now subject to probable cause for visitation by a D.E.A. search party, under suspicion of being a home marijuana cultivator.
6rom such a totalitarian platform of government behavior, it is not much of a stretch to presume that anyone on NAMBLA's mailing list may be subject to search by federal marshals trawling for so-called child pornography. "Child pornography", we should note, has been held in some quarters to include family snapshots of naked kids emerging all-adrip from the bathtub. Parents have been reported to government authorities for investigation on suspicion of "child pornography" by photo lab technicians who printed such innocent photos.
Just as ominously, a vicious and transparently unconstitutional campaign to abridge the natural right of communication across the lines of generations is taking place at the moment. It involves police surveillance of conversations between adults and young people on computer networks such as Internet, Prodigy and CompuServe.
Through some diabolical twist of logic, our government agencies have decreed the following ad hoc norms for on-line computer conversations:
A. Adolescents (under 18) may talk among themselves about things like wet dreams, masturbation, and various ways of having sex, without committing an illegal act thorough their conversations;
B. Adults (over 18) may also talk among themselves about their sexual feelings, experiences and practices; but...
C. It is considered illegal and prosecutable for individuals over 18 to discuss sexual subjects with individuals under 18 - even though all the individuals within each group may discuss sexual matters intramurally amongst themselves!
This situation is so bizarre, so demented in both law and logic, and so clearly unconstitutional in its pummeling of both freedom of speech and freedom of association, that it would be utterly laughable, except for the fact that adults are being pursued by federal and state police under suspicion of "child pornography", for the high crime of talking about sexuality across the boundary which our government posits as a Chinese wall barring open communication across the generations.
There has seldom been a more ominous intrusion of the police state mentality into our personal lives than is represented by such invasive probing into private conversations. Once again, it is only the climate of public hysteria which is invoked whenever one mentions "kids" and "sex" in close proximity that provides social cover for such invasive behavior. Lost in this hysterical overreaction are some rather basic and obvious truths:
ONE: It is impossible to sexually abuse anybody over a computer modem. It simply cannot be done.
TWO: Adolescents have lots of questions about their sexuality which they are most eager to discuss with caring and knowledgeable adults, especially in the safe environment which teleconferencing affords. I can well imagine that this would be particularly true for gay, lesbian and bisexual young people, who may lack compassionate adult mentoring in their own immediate relationships. To forbid these young people fair access to the wisdom and mentoring of adults who really do understand what they're feeling is to subvert the historical premise of human education. Where, precisely, do we want kids to turn for reliable, uncensored information about their emerging sexuality? To each other, in locker rooms and bathrooms, without mature adult input?
I have seen wonderful, wise, in-person presentations by sex educators like Suzi Landolphi and Dr. Jim Abel, who speak with a bold, impassioned, no-holds-barred attitude to audiences of younger and older teens. The notion that they could be arrested for saying the very same things to the very same kids over a computer network is so chilling that it ought to snap everyone to attention, and make us look long and hard at what this cynical police mentality is doing to our fundamental humanity.
THREE: The notion that any subject matter exists under the sun which may be talked about by kids amongst themselves, but which may not be talked about by kids with adults, is so patently absurd that it would be laughed out of court, if it did not arise in this context of social hysteria which will tolerate every manner of constitutional trespass when "kids" and "sex" are mentioned in the same sentence.
Adults who are preyed upon by police snooping into their private conversations find themselves in the same posture as Michael Jackson. Simply because they may not have given adequate reflection or voice to the perfectly sound ethical basis for bonding across the generations, they have been victimized by an official government attitude, insultingly homophobic in its underlying premise, which equates all expressions of natural caring with predatory behavior and sexual abuse.
In fairness, there have been reported instances in which adults with malevolent intent have tried to set up in-person meetings with minors via computer. This is a separate and highly addressable issue. Kids certainly need to be warned by parents never to arrange social dates with people they don't know. But to use this rare and easily preventable risk as a blanket excuse to prohibit adults and young people from speaking openly with each other about any topic is simply outrageous.
As a point of information, I've had a most rewarding time mentoring a group of teens over a local ham radio network. Adolescent sexual questions raised by the kids are not excluded from network conversations. Far from being upset or traumatized, several of the kids have been so delighted to have a trustworthy, hip adult whom they could really talk to about their feelings that they've asked for personal telephone consultations in which they could speak more freely. There is no reason to believe that young people on an international computer network - a cutting-edge technology which is quickly replacing the long-time function of ham radio - will relate any less positively to adults who truly care about them.
At the other extreme, I've already cited a local newspaper article which said that police from the D.A.R.E. program are "mentoring" kids to "scream" and "kick the perpetrator in the groin" if an adult whom they don't recognize presumes to speak to them in a public place. These cynical, monumentally violent, macho-infested police attitudes, revealing a basic contempt for natural human rights and civility, reached a nadir of infamy under Attorney General Ed Meese and the Reagan and Bush regimes. But they have not disappeared from the scope of our constitutional concern simply because two neo-liberal baby boomers now rule the roost in Washington.
We must come to terms as a society with a simple natural human warmth which bridges the emotional chasms that divide generations. Our children will not be fully humanized unless we give them the gift of our nurturance, our mentoring and our care. Letting cops teach kids to kick adults in the groin for speaking kindly to them in public, and letting cops bust adults for speaking kindly to kids over a computer modem, are not strategies designed to produce a decent human civilization. --Dave Drake