The Politics of Queer Censorship: NAMBLA’s Expulsion from Gay and Lesbian Rights in the 1990s

This paper tracks the North American Man/Boy Love Association’s (NAMBLA) expulsion from the gay and lesbian rights movement in the mid-1990s. 1993 and 1994 were particularly important years for NAMBLA as they included a couple of key events that marked the organization’s impending political death. In 1993 NAMBLA had its membership revoked from the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), a United Nations agency, after US senator Jesse Helms successfully passed a bill through Congress that threatened to cut $118.8 million in U.S. funding earmarked for the United Nations “unless the President has certified ... that no United Nations Agency or United Nations Affiliated Agency grant any official status, accreditation, or recognition to any organization which promotes, condones, or seeks the legalization of pedophilia, or which includes as a subsidiary or member of any such organization.” A year later, in 1994, NAMBLA was banned from marching in Stonewall 25 pride parade, which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. To contextualize NAMBLA’s excision from gay and lesbian rights organizing, I draw on other case studies of censorship in the 1990s to situate the organization within the wider American political landscape. I close by bringing into conversation Kadji Amin’s concept of “disturbing attachments” and Michael Warner’s concept of “queer counterpublic” to diagnose the nostalgic yet defeated affect plaguing “boy-lovers,” including Harry Hay’s admission that “maybe that expression has been used up.”