"Let the Children Save Themselves": Adolescent Sexuality and 1970s Familial Politics

In January 1977, pop singer and commercial spokeswoman Anita Bryant initiated a national campaign to rescind local ordinances that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She argued that in advocating for protective legislation, homosexuals really wanted the legal right to corrupt children morally and physically. In the years to follow, gay activists offered a variety of responses to Bryant’s allegations of child endangerment. Some insisted that straight men—not gay men—were the primary perpetrators of pedophilia. Others trumpeted the rights of adult men to have sexual and romantic relations with children, whatever their age. This paper will explore how writers from two of Boston’s most prominent gay periodicals—Gay Community News and Fag Rag—challenged conventional notions of child sexual agency and appropriate adult relations with children in articulating defenses for man-boy love. Common in their arguments was the insistence that the gay child was not the product of "recruitment" as Anita Bryant claimed: he—and it was usually he—had the capacity to choose what was in his best interests. In encouraging readers to rethink traditional bounds of child sexual agency, writers challenged two pillars of late 1970s familial politics: the divide between "adult" and "child" upon which conventional notions of "family" centered and the notion that heterosexual parents could provide what was best for children—whether straight or gay.