Our line should be simple enough to grasp for any self-described Marxist: Government out of the bedroom! But Gilman joins forces with purveyors of the truly twisted “morality” of the capitalist rulers and their state. Gilman’s smear of NAMBLA gives the game away. NAMBLA is an organization that supports the sexual rights of youth, including those in relationships with older men, and opposes laws that punish consensual relationships, such as reactionary “age of consent” laws. For this it has been the target of a vicious, decades-long witchhunt by the capitalist state and media. Gilman’s cheering on the crusade against NAMBLA is lamentably common for pseudo-socialists and establishment gay rights groups, serving as a measure of their proximity to bourgeois “family values” hypocrisy and their great distance from the class line, let alone from the remotest concept of real human freedom.
Sounding like the Victorian judges who imprisoned Oscar Wilde not only for homosexuality but also for “corrupting the morals of youth,” Gilman rants about NAMBLA supporters’ alleged “power over youth through their pocket books” and echoes the bigotry of the RCP in slandering NAMBLA as “child molesters.” To bolster his refusal to defend NAMBLA, Gilman asserts that “children cannot be expected to give ‘effective consent’,” period. Millions of sexually active teenagers can tell you differently, not to mention thousands of years’ worth of anthropological evidence, including literature, paintings, sculpture. “Age of consent” laws are aimed not at “protecting our children” but at imposing abstinence on and promoting guilt in youth who wish to have sex—and at locking up adults who “deviate” from the sexual “norms” that the ruling class tries to foist on the masses while they themselves, more often than not, honor those norms in the breach.
The Victorians put under lock and key all the artwork portraying sex, paganism and naked bodies that Britain had looted from ancient civilizations in the lands they conquered for their Empire. They also locked up Oscar Wilde. Gilman’s position draws from this well. Perhaps he thinks that the three topless women who carried an ANSWER Coalition banner in the “Free Bradley Manning” contingent at the recent gay pride parade in San Francisco were exploiting themselves. At any rate, his anti-porn nonsense and anti-NAMBLA screed play into the hands of a contemporary, very real anti-sex witchhunt by the capitalist state.
