Letters to the Editor	Letters Archive

Human rights wrongs

In Hypocrisy at the UN (August 2001), you return to the fray against the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). We must say we feel almost grateful this time around. In your April, 2000 issue, you called us Nazi sympathizers, in what may have been an attempt at humor-- although treating Kristallnacht as funny might strike many as strange [see The Guide's April Fools' feature, Press Releases We Didn't Run]. This more recent discussion of the politics of rights and identity seems positively temperate by comparison.

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There is one point with which we want to take serious exception. That's the assertion that IGLHRC "led the charge to purge radical gay groups from the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA)" in 1994. In an essay mostly about the dishonesty of a "Western homosexuality, cloaked in power, that increasingly can only lie," not identifying these "groups" by name seems disingenuous.

IGLHRC joined four-fifths of ILGA's membership in 1994 in voting to expel the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from the organization. We did so because we did not believe that a group refusing to endorse the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child-- refusing even to accept the idea that States have the right to codify a minimum age of consent to sexual experience-- could work consistently with ILGA, or with the United Nations.

With that clarified: IGLHRC does not disagree with your assertion that sexual identities are not cross-culturally or transhistorically uniform. We do not advocate for particular identities, but for a broader conception of sexual freedom in which dignity, consensuality, equality, and autonomy are key terms. But the absence of "sexual identity" isn't in itself the same as freedom. Your vision of Islamic societies as a paradise of easy availability (with the obligatory invocation of Sir Richard Burton and the Arabian Nights) smacks of colonial fantasy, that imaginary economy of exploitation in which the disempowered lose land and independence but get sexual desirability in return. Nobody but the colonizer thinks that deal fair. It only anesthetizes those of us in the West to the actual inequities of possibility and power in the world: inequities which structure and restrict the whole range of human experience, sexuality included.

Likewise, we agree wholeheartedly that sex laws enacted in many societies are hypocritical, repressive, intolerant and intolerable. We see no reason to limit the indictment, as you do, to the US and Western Europe; but panics and paranoias there, which have been particularly well-publicized, have had a devastating effect on individual's lives and on public freedoms. Laws founded on-- or feeding-- panic rather than the legitimate impulse to protect urgently need to be altered or abolished. We need a broad coalition organized around the abuses you cite, and we need it now.

Such a coalition won't come about, though, by pretending that sexual freedom can be divorced from other freedoms-- that it will develop in a vacuum, while economic and political injustice still persist from the intimate to the global sphere. Such a coalition won't come about by pretending that exploitation simply doesn't occur. We voted against NAMBLA seven years ago because they would not acknowledge that States can reasonably take legal steps to prevent the sexual exploitation of children-- as well as the economic and social conditions which make it possible; they declined to endorse even the most rudimentary protections which would constitute a basic condition of freedom. We believe that children have the right to develop their own sexuality, under healthy and supportive conditions. Protection against maltreatment, manipulation, and sexual abuse is an aspect of ensuring that right. It isn't inconsistent with sexual freedom. It's part of it.

Scott Long
IGLHRC

IGLHRC misstates facts about ILGA's 1994 purge of openly pederast organizations. For a number of years, IGLHRC had no trouble working side by side within ILGA with NAMBLA and other such groups. The move to kick them out came only after the US government, on the instigation of a1994 law authored by Sen. Jesse Helms, said it would withhold funds from any UN body the US deemed linked to "pedophilia." At the time, ILGA was seeking consultative status on a UN committee-- a status which, despite the expulsions, it failed to attain.

Not one, as Long implies, but, three longtime member organizations were kicked out of ILGA, a purge which IGLHRC, as ILGA's then Action Secretariat, helped engineer, and was a fait accompli before ILGA members voted on it. Many more gay groups would have been kicked out subsequently had ILGA not backtracked on its demand that members sign "loyalty oaths" denouncing sex involving minors.

Contrary to what IGLHRC states, the three groups expelled from ILGA did not object to UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Indeed, ILGA had previously adopted as its own-- with the agreement of the groups later kicked out-- the provisions in the Convention dealing with sexuality.

That section of the UN Convention reads: "States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s), or any other person who has the care of the child."

Contrary to what IGLRHC implies, the UN Convention makes no mention of age-of-consent laws. Opposition to such laws as arbitrary and unfair has been a position embraced by a number of figures in gay liberation. Whatever one thinks of that view, it does not entail support for coercion. Opposition to murder is not enhanced by enacting specific laws prohibiting the killing of persons of certain ages. Rape, like murder, is always wrong.

Under age-of-consent laws existing in the West, tens of thousands of gay men are imprisoned, sometimes for life, for consensual sex with teenagers. Were they alive today, the likes of Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde could be among them. Merely voicing opposition to these laws is an imprisonable offense in some countries, such as Canada. IGLHRC says it defends the human rights of gay people. How peculiar, then, that it is silent about these abuses, but so vigilant in helping silence those who point them out.

Ex-gay scene proved helpful

I just read Inside the Ex-gay Scene [February 2001]. Samuel states that he left the ex-gay group because of hypocrisy? What about his own? He could leave the "gay scene" then too, since there's just as much hypocrisy there as well.

I was involved in the Exodus (ex-gay) scene for six years. I got involved because of religious convictions. I got out because the Exodus scene inadvertently helped me reconcile my homosexuality with my faith.

Much of my involvement in the "scene" was good. I hold no bitterness towards the group; in fact, with "their" help I received years of counseling to deal with childhood issues, low self-esteem, and most important of all the mending of my relationship with my mother and father. The ex-gay "scene" gave me the initial push to come out to my family, friends and others; coming out as an "ex-gay" was still difficult, but since most people I knew were also Christians, there was a huge element of support and encouragement.

When I left the "ex-gay" scene it meant a simple phone call to my parents and siblings-- I had reconciled my homosexuality with God and was putting "recovery" on the shelf indefinitely; I came out a second time. Not all were supportive of that move, but I was beyond needing anyones approval. My parents, who to me epitomize true Christianity, were the most supportive and affirming of me when I came out as a gay man. Who knows, maybe it was because we all had time to deal with the "issue", learn about "it" and ourselves, and then realized what was important: love.

The ex-gay scene did me a favor. But I would not necessarily encourage anyone to join this group. I do have my objections and criticisms. But they do help alot of guys to sort out their problems affordably; where in the "gay scene" would I have received what the "ex-gay scene" gave me? Here's a thought: Has anyone ever considered that by making visits to churches and talking about homosexuality, that the leaders/speakers of the "ex-gay" groups are actually opening the eyes of the conservative right as to who gay people actually are?

Ron Reimer
Des Moines, Iowa

Collects Guides since 1996

I came out in 1996, and every since I have collected all of your magazines. I like The Guide because you have a fun and interesting outlook on gay club life. You guys make far away places like Montreal and London seem like they're right in front of me every time I look through your magazines: I get a bird's eye view into places that I hope to visit some day. Keep up the good work!

Jake
San Diego, California
Jakeisme99@aol.com