To the Reader: This file was created with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. It has been edited to correct scanning errors, though some may still remain. We regret any inconvenience. Errors in the original pages are marked inside angle-brackets (<>). Some corrections are made (<ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: >), some comments added (<ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: >), other errors, mostly typographical and spelling, are marked <sic> to indicate that this is how they appeared in the original, and a few mysteries are marked <?>. Researchers are encouraged to consult the originals or the full-page copies available here when accuracy is needed for quotes or other scholarly use. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.1 (front cover) ------------------------------------ P.A.N. Paedo Alert News a magazine about boy-love NEWS Miami, Strasbourg, Utrecht, Washington, Oslo, London SLEEPING PARTNER - a story by Ian McLaughlin THE CORAL AFFAIR (Salzmann Three), by David Chautemps BOOKS - Alan Edward's Kit BOYCAUGHT - Orgies, by Edward Brongersma THE BATTLE LINE - Interview with Brett Portmann <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Portman (see p.29 and PAN 19:9)> number 15 ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.2 ------------------------------------ P.A.N. Paedo Alert News a magazine about boy-love Number 15 March, 1983 WHAT'S INSIDE IN BRIEF Miami, Strasbourg, Utrecht, Washington Oslo, London 3 SLEEPING PARTNER a story by Ian McLaughlin 15 Salzmann Three . . . THE CORAL AFFAIR by David Chautemps 19 BOOKS Alan Edward's KIT 24 BOYCAUGHT - Orgies by Edward Brongersma 26 THE BATTLE LINE Interview with Brett Portmann 29 <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Portman (see p.29 and PAN 19:9)> All photos in this issue are by Sunland. PAN is published five times a year by The Coltsfoot Press, a division of Spartacus, P.O. Box 3496, 1001 AG Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Editor in Chief, John D. Stamford; Executive Editor, Frank Torey. ISSN 0167.4749 ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.3 ------------------------------------ IN BRIEF . . . THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS The fourth largest political party in Holland (frequently a pivotal group in coalition governments), the D-66, published in mid-December its report on the legal position of minors, Jeugdrecht, terecht! (Forward with the Rights of Youth!). It calls for the total scrapping of all those articles in the Penal Code which criminalise mutually consensual sex between people of any age. Protection, according to the D-66 report, should be provided for those being truly exploited, harmed or annoyed, child or grown-up. SOURCE: Martijn, Jan, 1983. MIAMI, FL, USA Five and a half years ago a bachelor by the name of Don Josephsen set legal precedent by adopting a 12-year-old boy by the name of Jon whose mother had abandoned him to the state at the age of three. Drifting through the Kid Industry archipelago, from foster home to orphanage and back to foster home again, Jon somehow formed a relationship of affection with Josephsen, who finally took the boy in, fought a court battle for 15 months against the state Health and Rehabilitative Services for custody of the child and actually resigned from his more lucrative job as Sporting Goods Department manager at Playworld to become a clerk there in order to have more time to devote to Jon. The change in the boy's life was remarkable. "Before, I was never really happy," Jon told a feature reporter for the Miami Herald in 1976. "I used to get in fights a lot and found it hard to make friends . . . I used to worry a lot, too, about where I was going next when I was in the foster homes." Jon's grades at school improved, from failing to solid Cs. Mildly epileptic, his attacks subsided. Last summer Josephsen was again in the news. Based upon the precedent he had established with the court case over Jon, he had adopted another son in October, 1981, this one from a Texas orphanage, a 13-year-old retarded boy with a mental age of seven. "He makes a lot of mistakes. I can't correct him just one time. I've got to stay with it," the father reported. One of the mistakes the younger boy made was to tell his teacher that he had had sexual contacts with his adopted dad. What happened next is interesting - and instructive about how both kids react to these situations and what may well be changing patterns in our thinking. Josephsen was brought before Circuit Judge Marvin Mounts. He could have been sentenced to 15 years in prison, three and one half in the Mentally Disordered Sexual Offender Program. Instead Josephsen was given seven years' probation with psychiatric counselling. The retarded son was taken temporarily from Josephsen and placed in foster homes; seven times he ran away, trying to return to his adoptive father, and he is suspected of having started a fire in one of the homes, causing an estimated $6,000 worth of damage. But the state Health and Rehabilitative Services, which had so forcefully opposed Josephsen's adoption of Jon 7 years ago (when their sole stated objection was Josephsen's bachelorhood), now actually recommended that the younger son be returned to his adoptive father -- and with the full knowledge ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.4 ------------------------------------ <photograph> that Josephsen was a confessed "sex offender" with that very same boy! "I know that most people believe that, if there's been physical abuse, the parents should not get the child back," said Judith Hill, regional HRS Supervisor (in American sociologese, "physical abuse" includes every kind of sexual contact if one of the people is a minor). "But it's been our experience that when the individual admits to being involved and gets counselling, then the family is better off together." Judge Mounts agreed; he ordered the boy returned to Josephsen. From the newspaper stories we have seen it is difficult to tell how all of this affected the older son, Jon. One can speculate that he and Josephsen, too, may have been lovers, that there might have been jealousy when the new boy came into their home, that the accusation of sexual assault and the traumatic casting of the younger boy back to the archipelago might have awakened all the old societal hatreds in Jon. Whatever the cause or causes, Jon, now 19, was convicted of breaking into and entering two residences and selling stolen property, end last December 29th he was sentenced to three years of imprisonment -- by the same Judge Mounts. SOURCES: The Miami Herald, 15 Aug, 1976, 19 Aug, 30 Dec, 1982. STRASBOURG, FRANCE At the Fifteenth Crinimological <sic> Research Conference organized by the Council of Europe and held here on 22-25 November, men who love boys appeared in a very different image from that cast by the conservatives and religious bigots in England, Switzerland and America. Dr. D.J. West of Cambridge University (Homosexuality, Homosexuality reexamined) said "The available evidence suggests that homosexual activities are potentially no more dangerous or socially disruptive than the corresponding heterosexual activities. . . . Thus in so far as the age of consent is required, it should be the same for males and females. . . ." (We also were pleased to read that, according to Dr. West, "the best source of information as to the likelihood of a homosexual tourist being arrested is not the Criminal Code of the country but The International Gay Guide, Spartacus. "). -From Homosexuality and Social Control by Professor D.J. West. An even more positive note was struck by Dr. H. Horstkotte from West Germany: "After having observed the developments in West Germany following the last reduction of the homosexual age limit from 21 to 18 years, in 1973, I think, personally, that a uniform age limit at the level of 14 years is, in spite of some apprehensions, acceptable in the interests of non-discrimination." -- From Age and conditions of consent in sexual matters by H. Horstkotte. WASHINGTON, DC, USA Just as the FBI was given carte blanche -- and a million and a half dollars -- to "break NAMBLA", another US Federal Government body, the Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives, issued its 136-page $400,000 report on the Page Boy scandal of last summer (in which ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.5 ------------------------------------ members of this same House of Representatives had been accused of having sex and drug traffic with the teenagers appointed to serve them in Congress -- see P.A.N. 13). To no one's surprise the committee concluded that there was "no merit whatsoever" in the allegations against their fellow members, which, according to committee counsel Joseph A. Califano, Jr., "resulted either from out-and-out fabrication, over-active teen-age imagination stimulated by conversations with a journalist, or teen-age gossip." Despite there being "no merit whatsoever" in all of that rumpus, changes would be made in the House Page program, said Ohio Democrat Louis Stokes, Chairman of the House Ethics Committee, to give the boys more "supervision". While the FBI busied itself arranging to torture or blackmail lurid sexual "confessions" out of imprisoned NAMBLA Steering Committee members and their boy-friends (and, in so doing, getting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of praise from Time Magazine and the gutter press), it was evidently charged at the same time with slamming the lid on the Congressional scandal. One Congressman (unnamed, of course) was found to be using and dealing in cocaine, but the Justice Department "recommended that criminal charges not be brought", according to Leslie Maitland in The New York Times. And, as for Congressional Pages Leroy Williams and Jeffrey Opp who set last summer's scandal in motion, the latter left Congress after an interview with CBS television network in June (and has kept his mouth shut ever since), while Williams, who gave the most graphic descriptions of sex and drug commerce with the Congressmen, "later recanted under questioning by the FBI", according to reporter Maitland -- all of which raises the intriguing question as to whether canting or recanting by people undergoing "questioning by the FBI" depends solely upon the instructions it gets from the nation's leaders. SOURCES: The New York Times, 15 Dec, 1982; UPI, 15 Dec, 1982. AUSTRALIA The remarkable success here of Dr. Paul R. Wilson's The Man They Called a Monster (PAN 10, page 21 ff) has the conservatives fuming. One is a certain Professor of Psychiatry at Newcastle University named Neil McConaghy, who has devoted much of his professional life to attacking gays and forcing defenseless homophile prisoners to undergo "aversion therapy" (legalized sex torture to make gays or paedophiles straight -- which doesn't work). In a recent issue of The Reporter, the official journal of the Australian Institute of Criminology, McConaghy attacked Dr. Wilson's book. Amusingly, his first criticism is that Wilson used the "case method" (studying the Osbourne <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: [Clarence] Osborne> "case" and attempting to make some generalizations from it) as being unsound, while one of the chief objections to psychiatry has always been that its "literature" is 90% carefully selected "cases" of neurotics and psychotics selectively described to justify the selected intellectual precepts of the writer. Fortunately in Australia you can't do that anymore. Campaign is no Advocate, and won't <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.6 ------------------------------------ cow-tow to Big Brother, hoping that if you feed him a weaker minority he won't attack you. Wilson fought back and published his attack on McConaghy's attack under the heading JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE . . . YES, McCONAGHY'S BACK. SOURCE: Campaign, Dec, 1982. NEW YORK, NY, USA Readers of recent P.A.N. issues and PANTHOLOGY TWO have been delighted with the short stories of American author Kevin Esser. We have just heard that he has sold his first novel, Streetboy Dreams, to Sea Horse Press, publisher of Felice Picano's An Asian Minor (see books offered in colour supplement). COLOMBO, SRI LANKA In years past Western visitors to this island republic, one of the loveliest lands in the world, were accustomed to seeing impeccably dressed, friendly members of the "tourist police" patrolling the beaches and other areas visited by foreigners, chasing away thieves and giving help wherever they could. But too many indiscreet gays and boy-lovers and a muck-raking report by Terre des Hommes (PAN 10, pages 38- 39), which has also busied itself slandering the country in the United Nations, have changed all that. Now the tourist police are instructed to police the tourists. "A special offensive against 'offending' tourists will be launched by the police next month," said the Evening Observer. "The operation which will be launched on an experimental basis in January will include 24-hour coverage of beaches by hand picked teams of police who will be well versed in the laws and regulations applying to tourists." Of particular concern will be laws against nudism (always taboo in Sinhalese society), prostitution and drugs. Age of the "prostitute" can be quite high, it seems. Just before Christmas a German visitor was arrested in the resort town of Hikkaduwa for "committing an unnatural offence" on a 17-year-old boy in a local guest house. The German said he had read about the guest house in a German publication. Information about the "moral crackdown" in Sri Lanka, which has been going on for over a year now, has not received wide dissemination in the German gay press. SOURCES: Evening Observer (Colombo), 21 & 22 Dec, 1983. LONDON, ENGLAND Once again our face is red with respect to PIE. In P.A.N. 14 we reported that Russian spy Geoffrey Prime had been discovered to be a member of Paedophile Information Exchange (this we learned in a phone call from a PIE member). Now it turns out that both we and our informant had been taken in. The truth is Geoffrey Prime's name never appeared on PIE's membership list, nor do any PIE members remember his face. The allegation was just another gutter press charge based on nothing. Of course Prime could have used an alias and received mail at a temporary address. Nevertheless the police from the Scotland Yard based Obscene Publications Squad searched the homes of two PIE members on 16 November and took away PIE documents, manuscripts and copies of Contact, an internally circulated paper. They did not look for PIE membership lists, it seems, and are still obsessed with trying to hang PIE leaders with conspiracy to corrupt public morals and pornography charges. NETHERLANDS The famous NVSH (Netherlands Society for Sexual Reform -- see PAN 1, page 16; PAN 7, page 15; PAN 11, page 13; PAN 12, page 36) which, following the Second World War, spearheaded the rapid spread of sexual enlightenment in what was then a very conservative society, has become something of a victim of its own success. In the bad old days membership had numbered in the hundreds of thousands; now, with most of the battles won, it has declined to less than 20,000. Still it is of vital importance in two continuing struggles: abortion reform and understanding of child sexuality. All of this has affected the Paedophile Workgroup which operates under the NVSH umbrella, and, sadly, the workgroup has had to stop regular ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.7 ------------------------------------ publication of its NIKS membership magazine for lack of funding. In recent years the Workgroup has been exploring new territory. The older reformist leadership, which had taken political initiatives, petitioning the Dutch legislature, speaking on television, mounting demonstrations, participating in dramatic productions, was succeeded by men more interested in childrens' rights than in the sexual contacts between young and old. The name was changed to "Workgroup for Youth Emancipation". Interest within its largely boy-lover membership began to decline and in NIKS news about child help services, growing up in Albania and protests by kids about the high content of chlorine in public swimming pools began to crowd out sexual information. All of this was accompanied by a streak of Puritanism: the leadership came down against child pornography and adopted many of the positions of the radical feminists and neo-missionaries. NIKS took Drs. Theo Sandfort to task for allowing an English translation of his book The Sexual Aspect of Paedophile Relations to be published by us (we were "filthy purveyors of paper lust objects and, thanks to the recent discussions about sex tourism in the Third World, everyone knows it." -NIKS No. 6, 1982, page 41) However, another Dutch magazine, this one really devoted to man-boy love, is making its appearance. Some two years ago a young man named Theo Gerritsen started Martijn, brought out four issues before an over-ambitious symposium on paedophilia in Den Bosch broke the enterprise financially. Following a short term in prison for sexual contacts with a boy (and a book of poetry about the experience called Een witte duif achter grauwe tralies), Gerritsen has resumed publication of Martijn on a monthly basis. It is to be hoped that many of the excellent Dutch writers on the subject of man-boy love will submit to Martijn -- and that Gerritsen will be able to fill the gap we all feel left by the disappearance of NIKS. Write: Martijn, c/o T. Gerritsen, Helios 79, NL-7904 HC Hoogeveen, The Netherlands. WASHINGTON. DC, USA As the FBI shapes up as the most active, aggressive and important enemy of boy-lovers in the USA, it can't help revealing to the press some of its thinking, and trotting out its tame "experts". At a December conference in the nation's capital a certain "supervisory special FBI agent" by the name of Kenneth Lanning surfaced to tell what he knew about "pedophiles". Lanning works in the "behavioural science unit" at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. According to Lanning, paedophiles are hooked on home computers, video-recorders, cassette tapes and CB radios. "Child pornographers, eager to brag about their exploits, often form networks with their fellows to trade information and pictures." Many are compulsive record keepers, listing and cross-referencing photos in arrangements "almost as elaborate as the Dewey Decimal System". (Apparently, all paedophiles are pornographers.) Best publicity yet for the FBI was a recent full-page Time Magazine article which, if anything, out-yellowed the infamous 3-page Newsweek story of last August 9th. The appearance of a NAMBLA spokesman on network television was, according to Time, "an appalling development"; NAMBLA was "a group devoted to child molester's lib". Approximately one-tenth of the text deals with a boy who disappeared 3 years ago and which Time later admits had nothing whatever to do with NAMBLA, or even paedophiles, as far as anyone knows. Half a column-inch is devoted, as in all American gutter stories on boy-love, to the Rene Guyon Society (which has a membership, as far as we can tell, of one!). Roland Summit (participant, with Lloyd Martin, in the famous "Nutty Nurse" symposium in Boston -- See PAN 8, page 12 -- and darling of the paedophobic Los Angeles Times) says that boy-lovers "go after children because that provides the greatest differential in power. They need a great deal of reassurance of their own power." As for the children, they are "used and discarded. . . . They are overpowered and robbed of their childhood. They trusted ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.8 ------------------------------------ someone and that trust was violated." The other FBI psychiatric expert Time quoted is A. Nicholas Groth (See PAN 9, page 3 & 11, PAN 10, page 3 & 28; PAN 11, page 11; PAN 12, pages 7, 8 & 29 ff), also a teacher at the FBI academy and director of the "sex offender program" (aversion therapy and all that) for the Connecticut state prison at Somers. Groth is a bit smarter than Summit and seems to have actually talked with many boy-lovers (nearly all of them in his prison). Despite some silly theories on the etiology of boy-love, he knows enough about the subject to distort skillfully his description of it for his own anti-child-sex purposes (and hedges his statements with respectable academic doubt): "Not every child who goes through this is traumatized for life," he says, refering, <sic> of course, to sexual contacts with grown-ups. "We hope we can get them through without damage. But if even a few children are damaged, why should we play Russian Roulette?" (We wonder if he asks this about school football!) As for those who disagree with Groth and company, they are instantly dismissed by the Time editors. Contrary information is just rationalization, special pleading by paedophiles which "has taken in some sexologists, who play down the risk of damage to the child or blame it on the outraged reaction of parents. Those who work with the victims feel very differently. . . ." Also emerging into the national limelight for the first time in this article is Lloyd Martin's successor as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department's Sexually Exploited Child Unit (PAN 2, page 25; PAN 4, page 27; PAN 5, page 27; PAN 6, page 18; PAN 8, page 10; PAN 9, page 30 ff; PAN 10, page 22; PAN 11, page 8). He is Detective Ralph Bennett, who simply says, "Wherever children go, that's where pedophiles go." SOURCES: San Francisco Examiner, 8 December, 1982; Time, 17 January, 1983. LONDON, ENGLAND One of the major problems boy-lovers have faced here in attempting to have police officers who have unlawfully harassed them disciplined has been the refusal of the Police Complaints Board to act on complaints, saying that Home Office guidelines required it to refuse disciplinary proceedings in cases where the Director of Public Prosecutions has decided there is insufficient evidence to merit criminal charges. To do so would violate the principle of "double jeopardy". Now that excuse will no longer wash, it seems. High Court Justice McNeill ruled in two cases recently that the board had been unlawfully limiting its power to recommend disciplinary charges. So boy-lovers now have more power to fight back against police attacks. Names of violent or harassing officers should be noted and instances of improper activities brought before the newly chastened Police Complaints Board. SOURCE: The Daily Telegraph, 22 Dec, 1982. ODESSA, TX, USA A 23-year-old man, interessted <sic> in getting down to the bare truth of his fundamentalist faith, stripped off his clothes in the United Pentacostal <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Pentecostal> Church at a mid-December Wednesday evening service and, before the pulpit, "performed a lewd dance that was pretty bad", according to police spokesman Rusty Baker. He was jumped by the Faithful and held down until police arrived, after which he was charged with three counts of indecency with a child -- this apparently because there were some children among the 400 members of the congregation. SOURCE: UPI, 19 Dec, 1982 NIAGARA FALLS, NY, USA The alert Gay Unity Niagara caught a delightful case of dishonest headlining in the local Niagara Falls Review. YOUTH SEX RING BROKEN, screamed the paper; the story which followed said that in Lubeck, West Germany, some 30 local boys had been having sex with men in exchange for cash, but then added that, according to the police, there was "no evidence the children engaged in the prostitution were employed by an adult, or that they were ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.9 ------------------------------------ <photograph> forced into it. They apparently learned of the activity from other youths." The boy hustling activity came to light when one Manfred, a schoolboy of 12, came home with quite a bit of cash he couldn't explain except to say he had earned it, not stolen it. His father brought him to the cops, who applied their usual gangster-inquisition tactics until they extracted a tearful "confession". Following that the police set up a hidden camera at am Katzenberg, the locality where the kids cruised, to record the faces of the young hustlers and license plates of their "johns". SOURCE Niagara Falls Review, 31 Dec, 1982; Gai Pied Hebdo, 19 Feb, 1983. HILVERSUM, NETHERLANDS On 24 December the VARA TV service (which shares with several others the two national Dutch channels) held a "small social discussion" about paedophlia. Participants were Ariane Amsberg, sexologist and journalist (especially for Dutch womens' magazines), Hans Zwerus, psychologist and brother of the former chairman of the NVSH National Paedophile Workgroup, and Anneke Visser (PAN 11, page 12), chief of the Morals and Youth police in The Hague. Amsberg emphasized that paedophile relations were mostly a male phenomenon, at least the older partner was usually male. Strangely, she emphasized the non-genital aspects of erotic paedophile attraction -- holding hands, kissing, sitting together, which she viewed positively -- and when actual genital contact was mentioned her reaction was, "Yes, that's where the problem is." Zwerus was opposed to all age of consent provisions in the law. Two things were of overriding importance, in his view: how the child experiences a sexual contact and what are the consequences of it for him. Visser felt that you should not intervene if the child actually experiences a contact positively, but this ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.10 ------------------------------------ should be ascertained, because children don't always like such contacts. And here, she felt, lay the problem: many parents, teachers, social workers still were heavily influenced by the taboo nature of the subject, so who was going to talk to the child to see how he felt? She did not want to see "protection" (against sex) denied the child by scrapping of the present laws. And then on 16 January the KRO (Roman Catholic) radio service broadcast a one-hour talk show about paedophilia - chaired by the kids themselves. Drs. Theo Sandford <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Theo Sandfort> was in the studio to answer their questions and the radio audience was asked to phone in questions, too. When one conservative listener gave his thoughts (children were innocent, adult boy-lovers were exploiters, etc.) the kids erupted with indignation: how dare he talk such rubbish; kids did have sexual feelings and sexual lives, just like grown-ups, and should manage them themselves. The boys and girls were 12 or 13 years of age. SOURCE: Martijn, Jan, 1983. <photograph> KREFELD, WEST GERMANY The once formidable DSAP, Germany's paedophile organization with chapters in many of the major cities of the land, has at last been disbanded. Idiological <sic> disputes, especially between the more radical Berlin chapter and the headquarters in Krefeld, seem to have been the cause. Both factions will probably regroup into independent entities and continue their important work. OSLO, NORWAY First there was the NAFP, the national paedophile workgroup of Norway. They put out an informative bulletin several times a year (with, usually, an English summary of the articles in each issue) and worked for Norwegian law reform. Last summer the NAFP was integrated into Det Norsk Forbundet av 1948, the major homophile association of Norway, as the DNF-48 (PG). However last October a Norwegian scandal/porn magazine called Aktuell Rapport began the sort of attack on DNF-48 (PG) and paedophilia which the English, French and Americans are all too familiar with: the aim of paedophiles is to rape 9-year-olds in order to turn them into homosexuals, most of them are psychologists who work with emotionally disturbed children whom they sexually abuse. Aktuell Rapport is owned by one Lief Hagen, who began his career as a boy prostitute, graduated into petty criminality, worked his way up from a single porn shop to become porn king of Norway, made himself a fortune, Mafia-style, out of, among other things, selling kiddie-porn to boy-lovers but was finally forbidden by the courts to run any business in the country. His magazine is in favour of incest and continues to publish contact ads for paedophiles. Aktuell Rapport named people who were supposed to be leaders in the DNF-48 (PG), although it has not yet been able to come up with evidence that there was the slightest connection between any of them and the group! The article thus violated the rules for press ethics, according to the Norwegian Press Council. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.11 ------------------------------------ While in France the gay community tends to rally behind paedophiles when they are unfairly attacked, the reverse happened in Norway: the DNF-48 panicked and effectively threw the paedophiles out of their organization. The group has kept its two former addresses (DNF-48 (PG), Boks 1305, Vika, Oslo 1 and NAFP, Boks 101, Blinderen, Oslo 3) and will try to answer letters as best it can. The organization, however, has ceased to exist. RIVERSIDE, CA, USA On 25 January a teacher here by the name of Albert Guindon was suspended from his teaching job and convicted before a three-man, nine-woman Riverside Municipal Court jury on six misdemeanour counts of -- taking photos of five boys between the ages of 10 and 13 last year with their shirts off! None of the boys were fondled in any way, asked to strip off more than their shirts, nor were the boys provocatively or erotically posed. A police raid on Guindon's house turned up "hundreds of photographs" on the walls of his room and "under a sink in the bedroom" -- none of them, apparently, pornographic. However, taking the bare-chest photos "satisfied the sexual needs and drives of Mr. Guindon," said Deputy District Attorney David Gunn. Guindon now faces a maximum sentence of three years in jail and a fine of $3,000. SOURCE: AP, 24 Jan, 1983 MANILA, PHILIPPINES The crack-down on sexual contacts between Filipino minors and Western tourists continues, Philippine style, which means with sporadic victimisation of the children by the police, occasional deportations of tourists and lots of blackmail by and bribery of the appropriate authorities (especially the officials in the Immigration Commission and their "Task Force Hookers" police personnel). It is now against the law for hotels to admit boys and girls younger than 15 unless accompanied by a close relative with proof of blood relationship. There are no longer hustlers in Rizal Park. Recent visitors tell of police round-ups of youths, some as old as 25. The village of Pagsanjan, which lives on tourism, has come under especially close surveillance; while the ferocity of spying has abated there in recent weeks there are still occasional visits by Task Force Hooker cops and rather conspicuous United Nations personnel. SOURCES: Manila Times, 26 Nov, 1982; Offseta, 23 Dec, 1982 LONDON, ENGLAND A juror's-eye view of homophobic Judge James Miskin of the Old Bailey (See PAN 8, page 8, PAN 9, page 10, P.A.N. 13, page 7) was sent to us recently by one of our readers: "He was unctuously polite to us, had a smile he switched on and off like a cold blue light and, to continue the colour-scheme, had red patches on his cheeks and pessimistically downward-slanting lines from sides of nose to mouth and from mouth to wattle. An archtypal English judge of the old hang-em-all school. Horrible." AUSTIN, TX, USA In March, 1977, just as the current Paedo Witch Hunt was getting into full swing, David Sonenschein and a few fellow Texans began something called the Austin Pedophile Study Group (ASPG). They hoped then to gain support from other sexually despised groups and understanding from the academics. Instead they were harassed so badly, especially by the feminists, that ASPG was disbanded in early 1979. Happily ASPG2 has risen from its predecessor's ashes and offers an interesting list of pamphlets of interest to boy-lovers, including What is Pedophilia Anyway? ($1) and six others on the general topics of child-sex and religious oppression in Western society. Write to David Sonenschein, P.O. Box 4755, Austin, TX 78765, USA. UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS Despite the recession, the goverment <sic> of Holland has approved a grant to Drs. Theo Sandfort to continue studying the emotional responses of boys to paedophile contacts. This project will use as study sub- ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.12 ------------------------------------ jects 100 youths between the ages of 18 and 20 who, as younger boys, had had sexual relationships with adult men. Drs. Sandfort will try to measure their feelings, now, about these former affairs. Sandfort is one of the few psychological researchers doing honest work in this area and is the author of The Sexual Aspect of Paedophile Relations published by us in English translation last year, a book which the famous Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University in America recently called "one of the most valuable works of research on the topic of pedophilia that has ever appeared in print". NEW YORK, NY USA The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, New York, has upheld a lower court's decision denying NAMBLA access to the FBI files about it under the so-called "Freedom of Information Act". The FBI claims NAMBLA is involved in interstate pornography and transporting minors across <photograph> state lines for sexual purposes lit has yet to come up with any evidence of this assertion, but the very assertion seems to justify its secrecy). Jingle-Bells Judy Densen-Gerber has recovered enough from her embezzlement disgrace (and the recent firing of her doctor husband Michael Badden <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Baden> for writing an article in a sex magazine telling readers how to murder people in hospitals) to form something called Protect All Children Today (PACT) to support a bill in the New York state legislature "to prohibit child sexual abusers from promoting activities which are dangerous to children." The bill is being introduced by State Senator Joseph Pisani and Assemblyman Anthony Semenerio. Pisani did feel that there might be a constitutional problem regarding the right to assemble and discuss topics of interest, but, he warned, "you don't have the right to assemble to promote this kind of activity." PACT also boasts as founding members one Reverend Roger Fulton, two New York rabbis and Msgr John Keane of the Brooklyn Diocese. Meanwhile, on January 28, a New York Police Department employee by the name of Arther Freudenberg was charged with 493 counts of aggravated sexual assault - on five boys over a two year period. The idiocy of American law cannot explain how, on average, each of these boys came back 99 additional times after the first time they were "aggravatedly" sexually "assaulted". At last some people other than NAMBLA members are getting angry enough to confront the government and the media. Although Advocate doesn't dare breathe a word of this most important witch hunt ever in American sexual history, The New York Native and the San Francisco Sentinel have given the scandal a full and fair airing. Even in France, Gai Pied has been full of it, gloating over the mendacity of the cops in trying to saddle NAMBLA with the Patz disappearance. At home in New York a Stop the Witchunt <sic> Committee has been formed and will be holding a public forum soon titled "Sexual Liberation, NAMBLA and the Lesbian and Gay Community". ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.13 ------------------------------------ American gays have made it inconvenient, career-wise, for cops, politicians and journalists to victimise homosexuals in America. Boy-lovers are an even smaller minority, but until they have their own Stonewall, show their anger and bloody a few cop and Densen-Gerber-type noses, they will continue to be meat for such vile publications as Time Magazine and the New York Post, such professional opportunists as psychiatrists A. Nicholas Groth and Gene Abel to grow fat on. SOURCE: New York Post, 21 fr 22 Dec, 1982; New York Times, 22 Dec, 1982 KATHMANDU, NEPAL Like many national capitals, Kathmandu has its street kids, here called "sack children" because most of them wear burlap sacks for clothing (and shelter!). A recent newspaper article described the life of one Ram Bahadur Tamang, a 12-year-old boy. When he was two his mother ran away with another man and his father moved to Kathmandu from their village to start a new life, only to find he could get no job. When Ram was four his father deserted him and Ram started his career of begging in the streets. That lasted a short time, however, for the police picked him up and put him in the Paanch Kahl orphanage. There life was better in some respects (clothes, an attempt at education) but worse in others, for he was placed in a school class for which he was unprepared and punished for poor performance. And then, too, as is so characteristic of "do-good" institutions in every country of the world, discipline was unbending and sadistic: he and the other children were frequently beaten and dunked in cold water for minor infractions such as tardiness and inattention. And the food was terrible: full of stones and worms. When he could stand the orphanage no longer Ram and two other children ran away and returned to Kathmandu, where for the last 6 years he has been a "sack boy" like many others, running around the streets playing, crying, laughing, begging and sleeping under the stars on the pavement. He would like a job but suspects that anyone who would employ him would just try to exploit him as cheap child labour. Like many others in his position, he hopes that one day a generous Westerner will take him under his protection and patronage. Despite his hard life, he prefers the Kathmandu streets to the orphanage. Ram's dream of protection by a generous Westerner is probably unrealistic, especially since Tim Bond (PAN 10, page 39-39; P.A.N. 13, page 5), gutter-press publicist for Terre des Hommes, has been spending a lot of time recently in Kathmandu and can soon be expected to issue another expose of perverted Europeans corrupting Nepalese kids. As far as we know there is absolutely no sex commerce between Western paedophiles and Kathmandu boys, but facts have never stopped sexophobics, and it will all be good publicity for Terre des Hommes. SOURCE: The Rising Nepal, 11 Jan, 1983. BALTIMORE, MD, USA It seems we are all genetic accidents, or hormonal upsets, or have bad brain waves -- at least according to Dr. John Money and his co-worker Dr. Fred S. Berlin at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. "We have found a surprising number of abnormalities in sex offenders along one or more of these biological parameters," said Berlin. "And this raises a lot of questions about the nature of unconventional sexual compulsions." It seems boy-lovers are more sexy than hets: they have more testasterone <sic> in their blood. Many also suffer from something called Kleinefelter's Syndrome: such paedophiles appear to be male at birth but 80% develop as females later on by developing breasts and not growing beards. It is sad that Dr. Money is churning out all this unscientific nonsense. During the more liberal mid-70s he actually wrote an article for Rolling Stone discussing the endemic boy-love culture of his native Baltimore, how loving men seemed not ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.14 ------------------------------------ the harm <ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: probably should be "to harm"> the kids they interacted with, and the boys in any case usually grew up to marry and beget sons who, in turn, started the cycle all over again. Berlin and Money are the world's strongest advocates of chemical castration for paedophiles who break the law. (To be fair, Money says this is more humane than the other alternatives meted out to boy-lovers by American judges.) They use an "anti-androgen" called Depo-Provera. It inhibits sexual arousal and ability to have erections in males. It also is used as a female contraceptive in many countries (a shot is good for either 3 or 6 months depending on strength) but has not been licensed for such use by the US Food and Drug Administration because it has been shown to produce cancer in two species of animals. SOURCE: Science News, Vol 122; San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Jan, 1983. NEW YORK, NY, USA A fascinating glimpse into the beliefs of American cops can always be had by reading Police Magazine. A recent article entitled "You can't buy child pornography commercially, but a shadowy traffic persists" made the following statements of fact: "Statistics showed that . . . most victims of sexual exploitation become pederasts themselves." "Because of all the publicity, judges are not likely to give (a distributor of pornography in California) a light sentence . . . . . . ..NAMBLA, which claims to have 20,000 members . . ." " . . .the number of children involved in pornography had increased since the uproar over this issue commenced in 1977." One typical boy-lover, it seems, was a scoutmaster who went camping with his victims: "While they were off together in a tent somewhere he pulled their teeth out while they slept." SOURCE: Police, Jan, 1983. <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.15 ------------------------------------ SLEEPING PARTNER by Ian McLaughlin 1. That Friday afternoon I came home rather late. Following a trail of strewn socks, flannel shorts, blazer, school tie -- all evidently belonging to my nephew -- I penetrated into the bedroom where I found my old friend Dr. Philip Poynter softly chatting with a visibly ailing Robin. Philip looked up at me. "Ah," he said, "there you are at last. How very heartless to leave a suffering boy alone without help and care. I thought you'd never turn up. God knows how many patients of mine expired while I've been waiting for you." "Good lord, Philip, I didn't know about this. Why on earth didn't you ask Robin my number and call me at the office?" "I did ask, old chap. But you never gave him your business number, though you gave him mine. How very strange!" "Really? Well, nowadays the phone number of a friendly doctor is probably more important to a boy of thirteen than his uncle's. I try to act modern, you know." "Better to act your age. Anyway, be good and get some water boiling." "Good heavens, is Robin in the midst of a Happy Event?" "No, I just want a giant cup of tea and, joking apart, Robin is ill. Let's leave the poor child alone and have a chat in the kitchen, all right?" Philip gently stroked Robin's wavy curls. Robin gratefully grinned. "Keep smiling, lad. I'm sure Ian will prove to be a nurse who leaves nothing to be desired." "Sure," Robin agreed. "Tell me," asked Philip, noisily sipping his tea, "I saw just one bed in there. Do you actually sleep with your nephew?" I sighed. "Philip, we've known each other for more than twenty years -- you're not going to be tiresome now? Besides, I haven't even learned yet what Robin's got." "The mumps." "Oh, no!" "Which you undoubtedly had as a child." "I undoubtedly didn't. Not as a man, either, and I don't want it now." "I should think not, considering your age." There was a merry twinkle in his eye. "You'd better start sleeping on the couch -- it's very catchy, as you probably know." "Of course I know. How are his, er . . . ?" "As far as I could feel there is no need for immediate alarm." "Feel? Philip, you didn't actually fumble at Robin's . . .?" "Marbles? That's what Robin called them." "It strikes me that you got quite intimate with my nephew." "Oh, come, I'm a pediatrician." "And I suppose you never advanced in your studies beyond street terminology and the art of palpation!" "Don't underestimate the physician's touch. As for terminology, I discuss symptoms with my young patients on their own level. They tell me they've got 'sore marbles', not orchitis. Robin has an inflammation of the parotid glands but so far his marbles are okay" "All right, Philip, you win. I do apologize and . . ." There was a ring at the door. A young freckle-faced person, wearing a school uniform like my nephew's, ushered himself in. "Excuse me, I'm David Spencer. Does Robin McLaughlin live here?" "Well," I said, "in a way, yes." "I'm invited to stay for the week-end," said the boy. "You are?" "Robin didn't feel very well this morning. He left the school, actually." "He's feeling worse now. So, it would be unwise for you to visit, dangerous even." Philip laughed. "It might be less ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.16 ------------------------------------ dangerous for him than for you," he said, and to David, "Young man, will you please pull your pants down?" "Beg your pardon, Sir?" "It's quite all right, David. This gentleman is a doctor, a real physician." "Are you sure?" David hesitated. "Absolutely," I said, and to Philip, "Show him your medal -- oh, blast, that's for detectives." "Are you both doctors?" asked David. I could feel the chance of seeing Robin's freckle-faced friend naked vanishing suddenly into thin air. "Honestly speaking, no," I admitted. "But I might have been one. Honoris causa, if I may say so." "You may not," snapped Philip. "Turn your back, please." Philip raised an eyebrow until I was dutifully staring out the window. So the following I relate from hearsay: "Your underpants too, David, please. All right. Thank you. That'll do. Would you mind coming a little bit closer. That's a good boy. Thank you . . ." -- etcetera, etcetera. I'm too disappointed to tell more. "Well, Ian," said Philip when the examination was over, "David is very prepubertal indeed, so the chances that he'll get orchitis are extremely low." "Oh," said David, "so that's what it is all about: Robin's got the mumps." "How on earth did you know that?" I asked. "Orchitis is the inflammation of the testicles. It is a not uncommon complication with the mumps when caught by patients after puberty and can lead to atrophy of the testicles. Before puberty the mumps is mostly rather harmless. I should know: I had the mumps -- last year." Philip left me alone at last with David and a prescription to take to the chemist's. "Shall I sleep with Robin, Sir? It's harmless for me but you'd better keep away from him." "I haven't even decided whether you can stay." Of course I had. "Now, go and keep poor Robin company while I rush to the chemist's." The next morning Philip called. "Ian? How's Robin?" "According to David's report, not too much in pain." "David? Did David spend the night there?" "Of course he did. In Robin's bed. I slept on the couch -- like you ordered." "Ian! David can't possibly go back to school now. Mumps is very infectious. I'll drop by and write him a note." I covered the receiver with my hand and said to David, who was just then tucking into a plate of eggs, "Dr. Poynter says you must be quarantined, with all those germs on you. If you returned to school you'd infect your whole House." "Isn't that great?" "Spread the mumps around?" "Oh, no! Stay with Robin and you here!" I uncovered the mouthpiece. "Philip, how long will David be with us?" "A fortnight, perhaps." "I know somebody who's going to be very pleased." "Who? Robin? David?" "No. Me." 2. Excerpts from my nephew's diary kept during his illness, published without his permission or knowledge. I haven't tried to transpose the code words and leave them to the imaginative understanding of the reader. September 25 Dear Diary: Yesterday I was too ill to write. I'm ever so sorry about that. This morning I discovered that D. had been sleeping with me. I hadn't even felt him. It seems that I have the mumps and that Uncle I. has been sleeping on the couch. He hasn't had the mumps yet. Is he afraid for his code words? I'm sorry, I feel too tired to write more. September 26 Dear Diary: Yesterday I forgot to tell you the big news: Dr. P. (one of Uncle I.'s ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.17 ------------------------------------ mates who calls himself a pediatrician) wrote D. a letter that he cannot go back to school and has to stay here for at least a fortnight because he has the mumps-germs all over him and would infect everybody. So D. will keep me company. Uncle I. is away to his office all day, thank God. But not today because it's Sunday. September 27 Dear Diary: D. squeezes my code words every morning and evening, to make sure that the mumps has not got down to them. D. says that when the mumps goes down there one cannot code word any more. D. says that one normally can do it about 30,000 times in a lifetime, but when the mumps goes down it is all finished. I still have about 29,600 times I guess. D. does it 4 to 6 times a day but nothing comes out, so he still has all the 30,000 times to go, he says. Good night, Dear Diary. September 28 Dear Diary: This morning when D. squeezed I felt some pain. I'm almost sure it was because he squeezed too hard, but we decided that it was better to be sure than to be sorry. I had some difficulty with doing it with D. staring, but nevertheless it worked, although it took an awful lot of time, which is very embarrassing. In the evening Dr. P. came round. When we were alone I asked him whether it was true that one can't do it but 30,000 times. Dr. P. laughed his arse off which I think is a very stupid thing to do when a person puts an intelligent question. Tomorrow D. and I will look it up in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. <sic> September 29 Dear Diary: No pain this morning. D. wanted me to squeeze him too and he got a code word, just when Uncle I. came in with the breakfast, which fortunately was hidden under the blankets -- the code word, I mean. When breakfast was finished D. still had his code word on and allowed me to touch it and feel his heartbeat. He told me that one can feel it better with one's mouth but right now I have great difficulty with taking anything in my mouth. The Encyclopaedia didn't help much. It doesn't even contain a decent picture of a code word. D. swears that what he says about the number of times one can do It is true. From now on I will keep a record. It's safer. Two times I did it today. But I might do it just one more time before going to sleep. <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.18 ------------------------------------ September 30 Dear Diary: I finally didn't do it last night. I fell asleep first and forgot all about it. But this morning D. kept squeezing so long that I had to ask him whether by any chance he was leading up at code wording me. He said yes and he did it well enough, in fact better than when I do it myself. Maybe I'll ask him again tomorrow. He did himself twice right after me. When he does it he has a little foam in the corners of his mouth but maybe that doesn't count. Today: 1 time. I guess I'll do it about 500 times a year: 30,000 divided by 500 = 60, so I can go on like this until I am 73, at a rate of 500 divided by 365 = 1.36986301369 times a day. If I make it four times a day, which seems more sensible, that is 365 times 4 = 1,460 times a year, which allows 30,000 divided by 2,190 = 13.6986301369 years. The end at 26! D. must be wrong. I think it should be 300,000 times rather than 30,000. For 300,000 divided by 2,190 = 136.986301369 and some people live over a hundred, especially when they live in Bulgaria and eat lots of yogurt. Or maybe most people do it not more than 1.3 times a day, who knows? Although I don't see how one can stop after having gone one third of the way. I can't even stop right after I started working on it. October 1 Dear Diary: I'm much better now and kept my promise to feel D.'s heart-beat with my mouth. But he was moving all the time and pulled my hair. I told him his heart-beat was 74 but he made me count over and over again. It changed all the time. Quickened, in fact. He said I didn't do it right and gave a demonstration on me. Gave three different demonstrations, in fact. He was not really counting, though. And I guess I have to put these three demonstrations on record. That makes 7 times in 4 days, which is 7 divided by 4 = 1.75 times a day and, Dear Diary, that's .38 times too much! October 2 Dear Diary: This morning, before Uncle I. got up, I measured D.'s code word. It swells from 5 to 13 cm in just 4 seconds, which brought me upon the idea of calculating its speed. How many kilometres per hour is 8 cm per second? (Note: Robin made a mistake there: it's only 2 cm per second.) Applying the rule of three like in the running baths problems was indicated here. The 8 cm being 0.0008 km, that makes 0.072 km per hour. D. and I were aghast that it was so slow! And then we realised that we had to take into account the size! D. measures some 1.60 m. Compared to his code word that is 320 times larger, so we multiplied 0.072 times 320 = 23.04 km per hour. That's about as fast as one cycles. (Note: It must be four times slower, as slow as walking!) So we wondered whether a grown man's code word swells as fast as he drives a car. Uncle I. usually drives at 160 km per hour but as D. and I kept quarelling <sic> about the presumable length of Uncle I.'s code word we gave up further calculations and played Scrabble. I won. October 3 Dear Diary: Today is Sunday. Uncle I. took D. with him for a walk. The walk lasted the whole bloody afternoon and evening. I had to eat cold stuff from the fridge. Uncle I. said that they'd had a breakdown with the car. Some breakdown and some walk! I didn't even ask what they'd been up to. All I know is that when I wanted D. to code word me he angrily pushed me away and said, oh come, stop these baby games -- and, by the way, you'd better stop writing all our secrets in your diary because your uncle is reading it and it's very embarrassing, that's what it is, you idiot! That's what he said. October 4 Dear Diary: This morning D. packed and went back to school. I have to stay in one more week. I'm feeling very lonely so I did it 7 times today, one time just with my code word between the pillow and the sheet. I don't believe Uncle I. reads my diary. It's not like him and even if he did he wouldn't tell anybody. Never. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.19 ------------------------------------ Salzmann Three: THE CORAL AFFAIR by David Chautemps The Coral Affair (See PAN 13, page 4 & PAN 14, page 3) seems to be petering out, to the exasperation of zealot juge d'instruction Michel Salzmann* <see footnote>. Salzmann had his heart set on dismembering a great "child sex ring" with an international traffic of obscene photos and sexually victimised boys. He counted on strengthening both anti-paedophile and anti-socialist feeling in France through well-orchestrated hysteria of the right-wing mass media, in this case more or less shared by the usually wiser left-wing papers. He tried to discredit high government figures like Cultural Affairs Minister Jack Lang (Salzmann hinted clearly, without ever naming him, that Lang was one of Coral's "boy-customers") and Secretary of State for the Family Georgina Dufoix (who was about to give a government grant to "alternative education" institutions such as Coral). He claimed Dufoix knew about paedophile practices at Coral and he tried to crush new educational methods by calling them justifications for perversion. Finally, Salzmann tried to paint the Socialists as protectors of "vice". Had he succeeded he would have considered the victory the crowning achievement of his career. To achieve those laudable ends the judge has not hesitated to strain legality to its utmost limits. Through his police he has let "news", slanderous to the accused, filter through to gullible or malignant journalists; he has used the radio and the press to ask for complaints ------------------------------------------------ <footnote:> * In the French legal system a juge d'instruction is a kind of examining magistrate. He can authorize the police to make searches and arrests, he can question suspects, issue indictments and imprison accused persons until they come to trial. Since in France this is often as long as three years, a juge d'instruction with a hangman's mentality has enormous power. <end of footnote:> ------------------------------------------------ (with no result); his police, quite illegally, carted off the subscription list of Possible, an excellent alternative education magazine (anyone interested in children's rights and happiness is, apparently suspect); he has used the full and terrifying power of his position to act promptly and forcefully on any fanciful assertion made by an apparent compulsive liar and petty thief in his employ by the name of Jean-Claude Krief, a neer-do-well who, it seems, could easily be blackmailed into saying whatever the police thought convenient to coach him into saying. But things didn't turn out quite as Salzmann wished. Complaints have been lodged against the BSP (Brigade des stupefiants et du proxenetisme -- the Vice Squad) for the dissemination of falsehoods. Krief is no longer taken seriously by anyone except Salzmann and will probably be prosecuted for perjury. The Chambre d Accusation (Court of Criminal Appeal) has overturned the decision of the judge to keep the accused educators in jail: all have now been set free under judicial supervision (which had not yet happened when PAN 14 mistakenly so stated), including Coral Director Claude Sigala and Possible editor Roger Auffrand, imprisoned because he was found to possess photos completely unconnected with Coral (and quite like those for which David Hamilton is famous and rich, except that they featured young boys rather than pubescent girls). The good judge Michel Salzmann is foaming with rage. Now that things are dying down it may be of interest to P.A.N. readers to take a closer look at the personality and methods of one of their arch-enemies, more passionate, and certainly more dangerous for French paedophiles, than the Lloyd Martins and Densen-Gerbers in America. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.20 ------------------------------------ About six-foot tall, an excellent skier and a karate champion, Michel Salzmann is a spruce bachelor of 39 whose appearance is not unlike that of some of the better class of gays -- half-long hair, corduroy trousers and a carefully studied casual look. Salzmann takes his holidays in those sunny exotic countries where, for a consideration, boys and girls galore offer themselves to cater to every taste. Malicious colleagues notice that Salzmann never comes back deeply tanned, as if, when there, he spent his time prowling at night, being a he-man in the bedroom during the day with his youthful preys. Salzmann leads one to believe that he is something of a Casanova. Salzmann's conversation, however, is obsessively about his unparalleled success in ferreting out perverts. He glories in the havoc he makes -- which he calls wiping out evil, of course. Salzmann's overweening vanity is rather burdensome to his listeners. It pleases him mightily to see his name splashed all over the national press; he can never get enough publicity. Indeed, Michel Salzmann has become a sort of hero for the Right. Reactionary weeklies, with unconscious humour, call this big, strapping fellow "le valliant petit juge" as a term of endearment, although he has chosen the most peaceful and defenceless people on earth as his prey. A man with a mission, very patient and systematic and a hard worker -- with a paranoid tendency to mistake his suspicions for fact. For seven years Salzmann has pursued his calling as a paedo specialist with such passion that he has even refused promotion in order to continue baiting boy-lovers. Salzmann has a woman cipher specialist to help him find incriminating passages in boy-lovers' diaries, for some of these are written in code. He is convinced that there is an international secret paedophile organization practicing boy-swapping: this, of course, he wants to expose and destroy. Salzmann has been overheard saying that there are two kinds of paedophiles: the timid ones and the "Gilles de Rais types". A strong statement indeed (Gilles de Rais actually murdered four hundred boys in the time of Joan of Arc) but one quite consistent with the cliche of his American counterparts to the effect that child-love is worse than murder. The frightening thing, as Mitzel has observed, is that these people really believe what they say. Salzmann's demeanour as judge varies according to the behaviour of the people who face him. With frightened paedophiles who won't talk back to him Salzmann puts on mock-compassionate airs: "My poor friend, I have very bad news for you: I must send you to jail," -- and he tries to hide his jeers under a cloak of icy politeness. With "Gilles de Rais types" (ie, all those who believe that paedophilia is just another kind of love), and with anybody who does not cringe before him, Salzmann loses his temper. The old Palais de Justice had never heard such shouting matches as those between the good judge and the indomitable Director of Coral, Claude Sigala. And then Salzmann tells his people, "Trust me: you'll soon learn I know the proper cure for paedophiles" -- meaning a maximum prison sentence -- for France, alas, is one of those God-forsaken countries where some misguided people would object to Ayatollah Khomeiny's speedy cure for suspected perverts: twelve bullets in their deviant hearts! To Salzmann, paedophiles are simply scum; he never attempts to understand the human element in the relationships he tears apart. Witnesses for the defence are always perverts trying to help out other perverts. Salzmann refused to see parents who wanted to speak to him in favour of Sigala. Salzmann refused to visit Coral to see for himself what is actually taking place down there. The accused always have to correct Salzmann's dictated summaries before they can sign them. Salzmann bristles with anger against lawyers who protest against his leading questions and draw their clients' attention to Salzmann's traps. Salzmann has been known to change the psychiatrist assigned to examine the accused if he finds the ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.21 ------------------------------------ shrink's conclusions too lenient. Salzmann appears to derive deep enjoyment from the anxiety, suffering and humiliation he creates. Perhaps it's the pleasure of the hunt which drives him: paedo-chasing is more amusing than rabbit-potting, and less dangerous. Stout hearts never come to grief when up against people who can't strike back. Thus far the "Gilles de Rais types" Salzmann has unmasked have been rather meek, and went like lambs to the butcher's fold. Salzmann isn't above spreading lies. His police said nobody had been arrested merely because of the allegations of Jean-Claude Krief. The truth is that nobody had been questioned, no parent had lodged a complaint before the Coral educators were incarcerated. The incessant police questionings of the disturbed Coral children after the arrests resulted in only three boys willing to testify against them. One was Michel, an unbalanced youngster of 16, who spun a lurid tale of being sodomized against his will by some 15 weekend guests. After leaving Coral, Michel had spent a year in another alternative school, then went to live with a family -- and during all this time he not only had never breathed a word of his supposed rape but had always said, "I want to go back to Claude's house" when he came into conflict with the people in his new environment. Another was Norredine. When Claude Sigala had welcomed him into Coral he had been a 12-year-old drug-addict and delinquent. Last September Norredine told TV journalist Henriette Chardak (who spent a week at Coral) that he would like to stay forever at Coral if he could. Finally there was Pierre. Pierre had stayed at Coral for only a fortnight -- and had run away with the money! All three young mythomaniacs: happy to horrify a policeman and a Parisian juge d'instruction with stories suggested to them by these serious and important grown-ups -- boys who quickly sensed that the most sordid details would be the most welcome. Salzmann also had high hopes for a certain 6-year-old boy by the name of Aurelien. Aurelien came to Coral at age four after eight months in a psychiatric hospital where he had been placed because his step-mother had beaten him but where the confinement had driven him to such frenzy that he had started mutilating himself. By last autumn he was a happy, quiet boy, going to school in the village. When the Coral/Salzmann affair broke out Aurelien's father questioned the boy for hours late into the night. The father was fresh out of a psychiatric hospital himself and has been twice divorced. He asked Aurelien whether things had been pushed up his anus, and whether it hurt. Yes, they had but it hadn't hurt -- his temperature had been taken rectally, by Marie Sigala when he was ill. The father than showed the boy a picture of a dildo from a sex magazine and asked if that sort of thing had been used; the terrified 6-year-old said yes. Whereupon Salzmann had a rectoscopy performed upon him. Now, it seemed that Aurelien had a roommate, Sebastien, aged nine; obviously Sebastien had been molested, too. Salzmann questioned Sebastien <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.22 ------------------------------------ without the boy's mother being present (Aurelien and Sebastien both have speech difficulties), then summoned the mother and told her that he was sure her son had been sodomised. One thing greatly excited Salzmann about Sebastien: the boy had a painful malformation of the anus (despite this he, like Aurelien, had been raped by the doctor's instruments, art excruciating experience for Sebastien). Both examinations, of course, proved negative. It turns out that Sebastien's deformity is hereditary and is shared by his sister. By way of apology, Salzmann simply said, "The evidence may have disappeared with time." So much for child-protection, Salzmann style -- and the evidence on the strength of which the judge keeps people in jail. France has a long tradition of respect for famous authors and learned professors. Open, even militant, paedophiles like Henry de Montherlant, Andre Gide and Roger Peyrefitte never suffered the indignity of the police raiding and overturning everything in their homes and carting away their manuscripts. Salzmann has shown no such restraint. Rene Scherer is a 61-year-old philosopher and specialist on Husserl (whom no one can consider lewd or frivolous). He has written books on children's liberation. More significantly, he had the courage to testify for Jacques Dugue in the first national Salzmann scandal four years ago. Jean-Claude Krief told Salzmann that he had seen Scherer and Minister Jack Lang committing "immoral acts" at Coral in his presence. This was enough for Salzmann to order Scherer's home ransacked and the philosopher himself indicted for "incitement of minors to debauchery". Scherer's indictment was important to Salzmann, for it gave a sort of sham legality to one blatant irregularity in the affair: Coral is in the south of France and thus really out of Salzmann's jurisdiction. But Scherer lives in Paris and went twice to Coral for educational consultations. This was the link Salzmann needed to take charge. And then there was Gabriel Matzneff, one of the most gifted writers of his generation. At six o'clock in the morning the police were at his door. Matzneff was in bed at the time with a 16-year-old just barely over the age of consent -- a girl! Krief, it seemed, had mentioned Matzneff also, although one suspects that the authors real crime in Salzmann's eyes was that he, too, had testified for Dugue and had written a charming book, Les moins de seize ans, defending sexual freedom for minors. Matzneff wrote a weekly column for Le Monde, which is generally regarded as the finest newspaper in France. It is of leftist persuasion, and very vocally concerned with ethics and honour. Now jealous colleagues at Le Monde began circulating paedophile extracts from Matzneff's books. Someone using the pen-name "Christian Colombani" wrote wild stories in it about Coral offering selected paedophiles their pick of "a boy for the night", of suitcases crammed with porn photos shot on location there - stories which could only have come from the fantasies of Salzmann himself or his police. Ultimately these fellow journalists pressured Editor Andre Laurens into dismissing Matzneff -- and the readers of Le Monde never read a word in it about this sordid episode. Temoignage Chretien, exercising contemporary Christian charity, chimed in with the same sort of tittle-tattle in a piece called "We accuse" -- a curious parody of what is perhaps France's most famous political tract, J'accuse of Emile Zola, wherein the great French novelist wrote in defence of an innocent person unjustly condemned. Of course the worthies in Temoignage Chretien had to "protect their sources" -- for spreading unproved stories detrimental to arrested people is a serious breach of duty for policemen or a judge. Although muck-raking journalists have been lying their heads off as usual, although the sympathies of most magistrates in France are with the reactionary elements, although people have already spent months in prison on "evidence" which would convince nobody unless in the context of paedophilia and with no other judge than sex-obsessed ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.23 ------------------------------------ Salzmann, there have been some encouraging reactions. Not one single person of intellectual eminence has supported Salzmann -- and many have expressed strong disapproval. Better still, the French gay communnity has rallied to the cause. It has clearly understood what gays in other countries don't always realize: paedopohile <sic> witch-hunting is the last activity in which homophobes can let themselves go and have a field day. Gai Pied, now weekly, was highly critical of Salzmann and the media and corrected numerous lies and misrepresentations. It published a moving confession by Bertrand Boulin (son of a former Gaullist minister, author of excellent books on children and father of two little girls) about his love affair with a man when he was under fifteen; in the article, called "Many thanks for that adult", he described the affair as the most perfect experience of his life. Gai Pied illustrated it with a beautiful picture of a prepubescent naked boy sitting in tender reclining posture on the shoulder of a handsome young man. A couple of points, sadly, have escaped comment, and would seem to be rather obvious. Most observers, including the parents of the children, agree that the programme and environment created by Claude Sigala for problem children at Coral was having wonderfully positive results. It offered a real resurrection for children dragging out day after dreary day in traditional prison-like psychiatric institutions in a sort of living death with no future and no hope. As Coral was a very public, open place, where no room was ever locked, where any visitor could see what was going on, where educators constantly came for short periods of training, it is extremely unlikely that any paedophile sex practices, apart from kisses and caresses, ever took place within its precincts. But let us suppose that they did take place. Let us even suppose they were common. Then, if loving paedophile relationships have indeed helped to work this wonder, it is a monstrous piece of iniquity to prosecute such relations automatically. It is monstrously unjust for the educators and the children alike, for paedophilia will have proved in this case that it can be a force for good, a potential it shares with all love. By insisting that paedophile acts took place in an institution which was working miracles, Salzmann unwittingly declares that paedophilia can be good therapy -- which is just what the paedophiles he pursues have been saying all along. <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.24 ------------------------------------ BOOKS For centures, <sic> in the West, Christian churches provided the intellectual basis for societal disapproval, and often murderous condemnation, of men and women who were unconventionally sexed. In recent years that role has been taken over by the mind-doctoring and mind-examining professions -- without much change in thrust as far as paedophiles are concerned. Psychiatry, which in its infancy was a radical profession, is now comfortably conservative; the followers of Freud have swapped the heady adventure of exploration for houses in suburbia, membership in the local golf club and, most insidious of all, government grants to carry on safe therapy or safe research which they guarantee will come to approved conclusions. There is little fiction which illuminates this threadbare world. Psychiatrists, by and large, are not gifted with the kind of imagination which can craft a novel, and novelists seldom know much about psychoanalytic theory and the workings of a mental institution. In Kit Alan Edward, whose past performances have shown him well able to describe love relations between man and boy, tackles this challenging theme. Kit, his 12-year-old hero, has lost his parents in a car accident which may or may not have been a suicide; a few months later he is declared "autistic" and sent to an asylum in the English country. There an assortment of quarrelling eccentrics, each wedded to a different social, political or psychiatric system, tries to bring him back to mental health. It also happens that shut up in the Adult Unit of the same hospital is a 34-year-old bachelor by the name of Paul Baxter. Baxter is not mentally ill, although he does have his hours with a psychiatrist, but has been put there in lieu of a prison sentence, for he is a convicted "child molester". Paul and Kit meet and, through the natural therapy of love and sexual pleasure, the boy begins to recover -- despite the efforts of the hospital staff. <advertisement:> <illustration: cover of KIT, by Alan Edward> Published by The Coltsfoot Press P.O. Box 3496 NL-1001 AG Amsterdam The Netherlands AUS$8, Osch 110, BFr 300, CAN$9, DKr 60, IRE 4.50, FMk 40, FFr 50, Drch 500, Llt 9,000, Yen 1800, HFl 16, NZ$ 10, NKr 50, Esc 620, Rand 8, Ptas 700, SKr 50, SFr 13, £3.50, US$8, DM 16; other countries US$ 9. Prices include packing and postage (airmail outside of Europe) <end of advertisement> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.25 ------------------------------------ <advertisement:> <photograph> Signe de Piste - Sign of the Trail A NON-PORNOGRAPHIC BOYHOOD MAGAZINE Seven years of publication Each issue loaded with photos and artwork. Articles in many languages. 1 year (10 issues) - $20 by international money order in Canadian or US funds only to: SIGNE DE PISTE Case postale 204, Succursale S, Ville Emard (Montreal) P.Q. CANADA H4E 4H7 <end of advertisement> It is a measure of the author's talent that episodes involving the psychiatrists, social workers, occupational therapists and nursing officers are very nearly as interesting as the love story itself. Alan Edwards uses the little power struggles of the staff, their conflicts in philosophy, inability to understand pubertal sexuality and the mental landscape of a boy approaching adolescence, to examine current social and psychiatric myths, and he does this with both wit and tension. Baxter argues his defense of boy-love with a wonderfully conservative yet sensitive psychiatrist. The "case conferences" over Kit often attain a high level of comedy as each participant pushes his or her pet theory or tries to take credit for the baffling improvement in the boy's mental condition. By such careful construction Alan Edward avoids the trap of a polemical novel and casts his ideas into the turbulent waters of human interaction. It is fascinating to watch. More importantly, it makes these scenes in Kit great fun to read. But the ultimate success of any such book must rest upon the love story, and here it is that Kit is strongest. The mental images of a truly psychotic person are probably not very interesting. Kit's stream of disturbed consciousness in the early part of the novel is interesting, and colours as the boy first becomes aware of Paul Baxter and then finds himself falling in love. The great flood of warmth as their love seeks and finds sexual expression is so intense, and magically described, that it threatens to blind the reader to all else. The idea of love as therapy is as old as the hills, yet psychoanalytic theory holds that the therapist must be impersonal, a sort of blank screen on which the patient can project distorted images processed from his infancy in order for them to be corrected: love, then, actual and sexually expressed, would be fatal. There is a touching scene near the end of Kit where the boy and his psychiatrist come dangerously close to expressing affection, when the man feels the danger and withdraws. Paul Baxter doesn't withdraw and that, Alan Edward is saying, like Robert Frost before him, makes all the difference. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.26 ------------------------------------ BOYCAUGHT by Dr. Edward Brongersma Professor Beemer, a Roman Catholic priest and teacher of moral theology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, wrote a most remarkable chapter on sexual ethics in Frenken's Seksuologie (1981). Beemer distinguishes between four main conceptions of sex: 1. The biological conception: Sex is necessary for reproduction of the species and serves at the same time to relieve certain tensions in the body. 2. The hedonistic conception: Sex is good because it is pleasant and the source of the greatest physical delight. 3. The cosmic conception: Sex makes us experience the stream of life, the basic forces of nature; in the divine ecstasy of sex -- which absorbs all other feelings -- in the orgy, we touch the divine; it is a deeply religious experience. 4. The personal conception: Sex is the expression of love for a person with whom the individual unites himself, gaining thereby a knowledge and insight of the other's personality unobtainable in any other way. Sex has always served procreation: if it didn't we wouldn't exist. Sex for pleasure is so consonant with human nature that this way of regarding it is as old as mankind. Sex as an expression of love is the most accepted concept in our contemporary culture, accepted even by the majority of boys and girls just starting on their sexual careers. But the cosmic conception of sex seems to be absolutely lacking in our Western society; thus it is especially interesting that a priest like Professor Beemer describes the hedonistic and cosmic conceptions as unpaid bills which will sooner or later be presented to our civilisation. We ought to give more attention to them. Cosmic sex differs from the other forms in that it is 'impersonal. In the orgy the other body is only an instrument to achieve ecstasy, for oneself and the other. This conception, then, offends our modern feeling of the importance and uniqueness of the "you" and the "I" and their relationship. In the cosmic orgy there is only an "us", incarnated in many entwined bodies. Such feelings may appear strange to many of us, the activities of an orgy rather repellant. <sic> But it is a curious fact that more and more adolescents are experimenting with group-sex -- without any mystic intentions, to be sure, and consciously bent only on lust -- and describe it afterwards as a surprisingly unique experience: through it they have touched upon something they hadn't known existed. Humans seem especially susceptible to such experiences when one phase of life is drawing to a close, giving way to another. The most striking example is puberty. In and after puberty sex is looking for a partner, but the first, rather distant phase of partner-seeking -- masturbating together in a group, in a club -- is not accidentally so universally popular: the special delight so many boys take in it derives from the ancient mythical idea of the orgy. In the open air we feel closer to nature. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.27 ------------------------------------ Couples feel this when they consumate <sic> their love in some deserted idyllic, pastoral setting. There is a beautiful passage in a book by the English author and painter Ralph Nicholas Chubb (born 1892) called The Sun Spirit, in which he speaks of a holiday he passed, at the age of eighteen, with a boy of fifteen: Idling we pass'd our sunny days bathing in sequester'd streams, sprawling with gold-brown bodies side-by-side beneath the noonday beam, Fondling, spending, silently embracing. The mounting heat, the shorten'd breath, the surging onslaught of desire, Sweet pulsing short-lived agony seeking relief, the brimming consummation and flood, The drooping languor, the heavenly listless content with bright swimming pupils gazing up seraphical at the azure vault. Often closer to nature than the adult, a sensitive boy in puberty may become aware of his union with nature in all its fundamental power during the moments when he is mounting to a sexual climax. That is why he sometimes feels a very special delight, quite in addition to the usual pleasure, when masturbating in a lonely spot in the woods or on a deserted beach. Sometimes, too, the deep emotions evoked by the riotous fecundity of spring, the joy of being alive on a bright summer day, will impell <sic> a boy to bring himself to orgasm. This is no desecration of nature; on the contrary it is a perfect abandoning of himself, a complete surrender to it. Shedding his seed over the grass, casting it in the sand may have in his mind the significance of a libation, an offering in worship. In such moments he draws close to the Hindu who venerates the male organ primarily as the instrument through which we can attain an ecstasy which brings us on level with the divine. Procreation is only its secondary function. The world is conceived of as a spark of divine gladness, the joy of its creator: in the bliss of orgasm we approach its essence. It was much the same in Ancient Greece. Here, as with many other peoples, the orgy was a religious ritual: the sexual acts could be performed in the precincts of a temple, to honour the deity. One monument to such feelings are the famous inscriptions on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini). High up on the mountain there was a temple to Apollo and monuments to other gods. Here, once a year in September, after the wine harvest, completely naked youths performed a solemn, ceremonial dance in honour of the Sun god, the protector of all that is good and beautiful. As in Sparta, where similar rituals were performed by naked boys, people came from near and far to see these "gymnopaideia". And here, seven centuries before Christ, men carved in a rock standing only fifty metres from the temple the declarations of their sexual union with boys -- and did this in praise of the god. "By the Apollo of Delphi, Krimon copulated here with a boy, the brother of Bathykles." "Krimon copulated with Amotion here." "Pheidippidas copulated." "Timagoras and Empheres and I copulated." The verb translated as "copulate" is οιψειν <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: οιφειν (oiphein)>, which, according to Professor K.J. Dover of Oxford University, is "a very blunt word for sexual intercourse". The sacral interpretation of these inscriptions finds many adherents among the experts on Greek Love, including E. Bethe (Die dorische Knabenliebe, 1907) in Germany, Thorkil Vanggaard (Phallos, 1969) in Denmark, and the finest French authority, Professor Felix Buffiere (Eros adolescent, 1980). Yet it is disputed by Professor Dover. Dover's book Greek Homosexuality is without any doubt brilliant and scholarly to the highest degree. In fact I admire it greatly and consider it a real treasure. Nevertheless I think Dover is wrong on this point. According to Dover these inscriptions are "boasts, effusions and slanders" and Krimon only wanted to insult Bathykles over whose brother he had triumphed. The invocation to Apollo means nothing, he says: the use of such oaths was common in Greek speech. ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.28 ------------------------------------ Perhaps! But isn't there a difference between the vulgar use of a holy name in spoken language and carving it "with enormous characters" (fifteen of them -- ΝΑΙ ΤΟΝ ΔΕΛΦΙΝΙΟΝ <ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: NAI TON DELPHINION> on the face of a rock? Carving it so deeply, moreover, that the text remained readable after 26 centuries? It must have been a strenuous task, not executed lightly or without serious intent. It cannot be just a thoughtless exclamation. And then, too, οιψειν <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: οιφειν (oiphein=to copulate -- see p.27 above)>, however blunt the word may be, had the special meaning of lawful copulation. Thirdly, if Krimon had wanted to insult an enemy, why not say that he had copulated with Bathykles himself? This would have attacked the honour of his supposed adversary much more effectively than by substituting an unnamed brother. To the Greek mind it could be quite all right for a boy of 12 to 18 (Bathykles' brother is called a "pais") to be a passive partner in intercourse, but an adult man forfeited his honour in doing so. There was certainly no prudery about sex between a man and an adolescent lad: famous orators in their public speeches attested to their enjoyment of these acts. Therefore how could texts like "Pheidippidas copulated", with no partner mentioned, be read as slander? In other inscriptions, as old as Krimon's, on the same site, the boy is called "agathos", meaning the good, the virtuous one. Would such a word be used in slander? But perhaps the best explanation I have found of the sense of these inscriptions is in a book by the Dutch Greek historian Dr. H . Scholte (1958). It seems that one full-moon night at the end of the gymnopaideia a staphylodromia was held, a hunt for a young boy running naked but for a garland of staphyli (raisins). He was given a head start, but then a group of older boys (ephebes) ran after him; the first to overtake the boy caught him and possesesed him. Krimon, evidently, won such a contest, and proudly proclaimed his victory. No, I am convinced that Dover is wrong here, despite his immense knowledge of Ancient Greece. By a curious coincidence I have just received a letter from a man, now suffering five years in a Belgian prison because he made love to boys who loved him. Describing some of the journeys he had made in the past, he wrote: "In Greece I never had relations with boys. How misleading the reputation of a country can be! But I did have one strange experience. Thousands of years ago there was a volcano in the middle of the sea north of Crete. One day it exploded, causing a tidal wave that destroyed the palace of Crete's King Minos. This cataclysm left one side of the volcano intact, in the form of a crescent. On top of this rock is a city. The whole of the island has different names: Santorini and Thera. Some years ago I arrived there by ship. One of the sides of the volcano island rises vertically out of the water; the other descends in a gentle slope to a beach, with three or four houses, near a village. There I experienced something I have never since felt: a terrible dizziness. I walked for two hours on this deserted beach, then, having stripped naked, fell face down on its surface of fine shingle and a mad desire came over me to make love to this island. I felt as though I was crazy or drugged (without ever having taken drugs). I had the feeling of being transported to a superhuman world, of communicating with the raw forces of nature, of having been guided to that spot by a power which I could not name. The next morning I left this strange island. On board the ship I discovered in my luggage a folder about the place I had visited. I trembled when I read it. It said that this island, with its frenzied formations, had been regarded in ancient times as the privileged site for boy-love. It was entirely consecrated to the love-cult of young boys. Today there are still ruins of a palace of 'divine children', with texts and inscriptions and drawings celebrating these forms of perfect love which today are so basely valued. I had never heard about all of this. Without any knowledge of what had happened there centuries ago, I had felt myself at home . . ." ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.29 ------------------------------------ THE BATTLE LINE Interview with Brett Portman We were arrested on the morning of December 3 (1982) at my family's summer home near Wareham, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay. I had just come back from visiting my parents over Thanksgiving vacation. I had arrived home the night before, Thursday night, the 2nd. David Groat, myself, Robert Velasquez and Brian Wilkins had all been living there for about two months. David Groat is in his thirties? David is 29 or 30. The other two are sixteen. We'd been living together in New York but left New York the day after the FBI first approached David on Times Square and said, "We can get you any time we want to. Would you like to co-operate?" So we decided to pack up the next day, when people started actively following everyone around the streets -- we snuck out of New York, moved to Massachusetts, and I'd been working up in Boston on an off and David had been in the house writing, getting his papers together. The kids were staying there. Robert had been living either with David or me for about a year. We'd met him actually in Times Square. He was a street kid who had run away from his group home in South Bronx. Is he a Puerto Rican boy? Yes. His real name is Ishmael Rodgriguez, <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Rodriguez (see PAN 19:9)> but everyone knows him as Robert Velasquez. He is also the person who stole $1,100. out of NAMBLA's bank account. He was the friend of Groat's . . . He was the friend, and that's good because it makes him fairly easy to discredit in the forthcoming trials; that's the main legal thing we've got to do. So I got back from Thanksgiving vacation Thursday night and Harold Baker was staying at the house -- he had arrived with some other people earlier that weekend and stayed on when they left. Robert was there in the house and he had a jacket on and was about to leave because he'd heard someone upstairs -- he'd heard noises. So we investigated -- we didn't find anybody, so we just stayed there that night. Nothing much happend. <sic> So, Friday morning about 9 we woke up with someone pounding on the front door. My bedroom was upstairs. I went over to peek out the back window and I saw this guy wearing slacks and sweater that just said "police detective" -- I mean, you could tell immediately what he was, from the way he was pounding on the door, and he was yelling, "Brett, are you in there? Brett?" And he kept yelling and nobody was answering the door. David had got up in the other room to put his clothes on. Finally he went downstairs to warn Robert about what was going on. The police saw him walking through the livingroom and yelled at him to open the door. And he asked to see a search warrant and told them to put it under the door They would not. They held it up to the window, and he was trying to read it but couldn't, and then they started kicking in the door. It's a very, very thick, heavy old wooden door, two or three inches thick and it held together long enough for me to go over and open it. They came rushing in the house and showed me a search warrant that was made out with me as proprietor . . . Are you proprietor of the house? Effectively. My parents own it but we were living there, so that part was okay, I think. They had a listing of the properties that were involved in the "crimes" they were supposedly investigating, and two of the items on the property list were ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.30 ------------------------------------ <photograph> year-old from New Jersey. Seems he'd gone missing. Why had he gone missing? He was one of the major witnesses to the Grand Jury which followed the July 11th raids on the homes of Swithinbank and Ahlers a year and half ago. And he'd been fighting being used as a prosecution witness from about January that year on. Probably they had him lined up for some more dirty work in court, I don't know. Was he trying to protect one of his grown-up friends? Did he simply not want to deal with it any more? Had he been to school prior to this? As far as I know. Why had Brian Wilkinson run away? Also because of harassment from . . . He is an orphan. He was living with his Aunt and he hated her. I mean, he was a friend of a friend of mine and he wanted to leave home and my friend dumped him on my hands. Of all the runaways I ever knew, he did it best. He knew what he wanted to do. He was determined. And it was legal. His love affair with David Groat was legal, wasn't it? Um, he was over the age of consent in Mass. However he was under the age of 18. Being a runaway and not in the custody of whomever he was legally supposed to be with was the problem. So the search warrant was for Eddie Johnson and Brian Wilkins and vieo <sic>-tapes and cameras, record books, telephone records, porn and materials for producing porn -- everything they expected to find for running a pornography factory in the house. So they came knocking into the house. How many police were there, do you think ? At least 8, probably 12. There were local police, Jersey City detectives and I assume that at least some of the folks were FBI. They went upstairs to get Brian out of bed. They read him a letter from his aunt about how much she missed him and how glad she was that he was going to be coming home, and he got really mad: he wouldn't tell them his name. He started packing to try to leave, at which point they put him in hand-cuffs and threated <sic> to throw him down the stairs if he didn't go with them. So they led him out and then took Harold and Robert away fairly soon. They put David in handcuffs and arrested him. He asked what the charge was and they said "an immoral act". This was before the'd <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: they'd(?)> even talked to anyone; we didn't know what was going on at all. So I sat in the livingroom as they rather methodically searched the house, going through all our books and papers. They found a cabinet with a small pornography collection, at which point they started getting very abusive. Now, was this all commercial pornography? Yes. Not sex photos of kids you knew? No. The only photographs of the boys we knew were, you know, quite unsexy, normal pictures with their clothes on. The erotic stuff was American-produced teenager porn from the middle seventies and a lot of those little sleazy paperback novels. They said there was a big volume of stuff, and they were taking pictures of that. They started asking me if I'd known Martin (Swithinbank) and did I know where Martin was and did I know what'd happened to him. Truth was this whole thing was planned, set up and orchestrated by a detective by the name of Den- ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.31 ------------------------------------ nis Aponte from Jersey City. So they arrested me. I asked what for. I was told, "Keeping a disorderly house". That's an old Massachusetts whorehouse law. How many women had they scared out of your bedrooms? None. When they found a copy of a book of poetry called Revolutionary Letters they started calling me a terrorist. A book of poetry? With that title, it was like they thought, "We've found us a commie . . .!" So, they took a couple of boxes out of the house, including all of David's papers and his records. He'd finished his pamphlet on advice to boys if they got involved with the police -- the Police grabbed the only typescript of that. And he was writing a book on the July 11th raids and their aftermath -- had the first two chapters drafted. And they found that he had copies of police reports from the July 11th investigations; they were incensed because we'd found their dirty underwear. "What are these people doing with that?" they yelled. "How did they get all these papers?" We said, "Well, this stuff was given to the defendents as part of their defense, and they gave us copies." But the police were completely bent out of shape, because we'd got information on them. Well, I was the last person taken out of the house, and by that time they were running the newspaper photographers through. Had they invited the newspapers, or had the newspapers been hanging around? When they took me out to the police car their police radio was on and I was listening to it. Our house is at the end of a very long complicated dirt road and the police were telling the photographers just what was going on and sending police cars out to escort them in. Aponte, the cop from from New Jersey, was lecturing the local reporters about people sexually abusing 8-year-olds. He's from the Hudson County Special Investigation Unit (SIU). He'd been sent out to Massachusetts a week before. What about television? TV didn't get to us until we arrived at the police station. There was a photographer waiting for me when they brought me out of the house in handcuffs. They sat me in the police car. And then the police started posing. They already had the stuff they'd seized out in their cars; now they took the boxes back into the house so the photographers could take pictures of them coming out of the door with it again. And they had to get the racial composition in the photo right: at first there'd been just a Hispanic and a black police officer, and they had to have at least one white. Then they got together to make a group picture of all the cops who were in on the raid. Do you suspect that some of these detectives were FBI agents? I suspect. No proof, though. You know for sure that some of them were Wareham town police. Yes, and some of them had come from New Jersey, at least Aponte had. They were calling New Jersey on my telephone, to report in what they had found at the house. Then we left. There is another cottage next door and the police <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.32 ------------------------------------ officer who was driving me asked me if that was our house, too, and I said, "I've asked not to be asked any questions. Please stop." At that point he said, "Well, if it was up to me I'd throw you in the middle of a pond." You don't know the name of the person who said that? No. They're not telling you who they are. And at that point there must have been two reporters' cars, two police cars, 12 to 15 people in the yard. So they drove us down to the police station. The TV cameras were there to take pictures of us -- a local network affiliate but I don't know which. I don't watch television. So they took us into the police station and I got booked on "keeping a disorderly house". And I got to a phone finally and called a friend in New York and told him I'd been arrested and was being held in jail. They transfered us over to the Fourth District Court, County of Plymouth, and put in holding cells downstairs. The other people in the cells weren't particularly hostile at that point. Around five o'clock that afternoon they took us upstairs. We saw Brian and Robert. Brian looked fairly shaken, but Robert seemed pretty cocky. So they took us upstaits <sic> in front of this judge -- David and I were each arragined <sic> on "indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of 14 -- Charles Dyson". Dyson I had met once before, in New York a week earlier, for a half hour. I had never even seen him in Massachusetts. And one charge each of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor". Presumably somebody made a complaint to the police about your having assaulted and battered or whatever this Dyson boy. Robert did. I have not seen any of his statements regarding me. In one police report I read Robert's statement which was the basis of the charges against David; it's interesting that he has the wrong people visiting our house in Wareham on the wrong day in the wrong car. Well, I assume he also made charges about me having sex with Dyson even though Dyson and I were never even there together! So bail was set at $50,000 property or $5,000 cash and we were put in a van and sent off to the Plymouth County Jail and House of Correction. When we arrived one of the drivers said as he handed us over, "We have three here for a little TLC." Which I'm assuming from what followed was the code word that we should be set up. TLC means "tender, loving care" but he was using it very sarcastically. In Massachusetts jail slang, a "child molster" <sic> is a "diddler". And the word had been passed all around the jail that there were a lot of diddlers coming in that night. Do you know how that was done? No, but it was there before we arrived. So we got processed. I requested protective custody (PC) which the person doing the processing at first refused. He just sneered at me: "But you're not guilty, are you, so why do you care?" I insisted and finally got it. They tried to take me into the PC tier about 9 o'clock. We had to go through a central room in the middle of the jail where there was this big control tower. It was as if the walls had bars <coloured box (sidebar):> The FBI, rather than coming into disrepute for the kind of activity described in this interview, seems to be riding high, at least in the eyes of President Reagan, who submitted a proposal to congress that its budget be increased 23% in the forthcoming year, putting it for the first time in history over the billion-dollar mark. <end of coloured box (sidebar)> around them -- most of the room was inside the bars, the prisoners outside where they could sort of wander around between the bars and the wall. So there I was and everybody started staring at me. Through the bars? Yeah. One of the prisoners turned to me and said, "We're going to get ya." Another black prisoner stood next to me and was motioning me to come over near him and, when I didn't, spit at me through the bars. Eventually the guards decided they couldn't get me safely through the general population to the PC tier, the prisoners were just too potentially vio- ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.33 ------------------------------------ lent, and . . . There's a level of discretion that the prison personnel have to maintain. They may be setting you up to be assaulted, to be raped, but they have to do it in a way so that they can disclaim responsibility. It would have looked bad then if there'd been an incident. I was taken back out to the holding cells till the other prisoners had been locked out for the night. Then they brought me to the maximum security tier, which was down in the dungeons underground. The corridor outside the cells was just completely covered with filth and garbage. Apparently one of the things that the prisoners on that cell block do when they are let out for recreation is clean up the mess they have spent the rest of the time making. They shove their uneaten food and its containers underneath the doors of their cells. So there was just two days worth of garbage. There were five cells in a row, each one of which had huge bars, barred doors on one side. There was also a little cot. They were supposed to have given me a blanket and a pillow; they made me sign for them even though they didn't give them to me. And they locked me in the cell. There were a couple of tiny little windows up near the top of the wall. My toilet was clogged up with cardboard. There was no toilet paper. My sink wouldn't drain. It was the most horrendous hovel I have ever seen in my life: cockroaches running all over the place. And -- I think it was intentional: the cell I was in was pink. Getting locked up in the pink cell is a way of telling the other prisoners that you're faggot. The other prisoners made a lot of the fact that I was in the pink cell. You could hear them? Yes. All of the cells in that block faced in the same direction, so you couldn't see each other, except they'd walked me down past the next cell first, then turned around to go back to the pink cell -- I don't know if they were showing who I was or they just didn't know where they were putting me. Anyhow, the prisoners started asking very hostile questions. You couldn't get away with saying you were charged with cheque forging or something like that? They'd already been told. And then 11 o'clock news came on. The guy in the next cell, who'd seen me marched past him, had a television set, believe it or not, and my arrest was on the news. He was watching me being taken into the court in hand-cuffs. The big news story was that the NAMBLA pornography ring's world headquarters had just been busted. We were everything you could think of -- sex club, prostitution ring, you name it. Well, I knew, of course, that the sex ring business was a lie, but I'd always had this sneaking suspicion, whenever I heard these charges, that maybe the other NAMBLA people were at least having a lot more fun than I was! Now all of a sudden I was learning that I and my friends, you know, the people I was living with, were a major sex ring! And everyone in the house was over the age of consent. There was nothing illegal going on even. Well the press just went mad with it. So after that the other prisoners knew what I was in for and they decided that I was a major pornographer. I was convinced that if I couldn't raise bail I might not be alive by Monday morning. One of the guys on the tier was trying to sell me protection. One of them was trying to extort my boots from me. Another started going through this long jerk-off fantasy about what was supposed to be going on in my porno films: little boys with big smiles on their faces, asses waving in the air while they were getting raped. And I slowly had the horrifying realization that all of these people were sitting there trying to decide whether to assault me, whether to kill me, whether just to beat me up, or, I don't what other possibilities there were. The thing that's so frightening is that the police and the people in the jail are part of this assault conspiracy. The only way that the word could have gotten down to the people on that cell block was for the guards to have told them. I mean, this was a locked-up dungeon. Well, there was the newscast on TV . . . They knew when I walked in what I was there for. That TV program just confirmed that I was the person they'd been ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.34 ------------------------------------ <photograph> told about. Because they'd seen you. They saw me, and then they saw me on television. The guards deliberately walked you by . . . ? The only prisoner who caught a good glimpse of me was the person in the first cell next to mine. And he was the one who had the television set. Yes. So, I finally got to sleep that night. I slept with my head away from the door. I'd heard David say that in the Pittsfield prison they'd intentionally scalded someone by throwing boiling water on him as he slept through the bars. The guards had? No, the prisoners. So, I was sleeping with my head away from the gate so that if anything happened it would happen to my feet rather than to my face. Nothing did happen that night. I stayed in the cell until the middle of the next afternoon. The prisoners kept asking to be let out for recreation, and that was where I would have been vulnerable, because I would have been mixing with other prisoners and if the guards had conveniently not been around there would have been trouble. The prisoners hadn't been let out in a day or two -- it was probably pretty arbitrary when they got to go out. Anyhow, my folks showed up with the bail that afternoon, before they let us out, which greatly disappointed everyone. Well, now what about David Groat? Okay. Harold and David had been left up in the receiving area the first night together, which was fairly good. Monday (5 December) David had a bail reduction hearing, and he was transported from the jail to the Superior Court in Brockton, Mass. He was in a holding cell there when he was jumped and beaten the first time. So he cancelled his hearing in order to get out of the cell and be immediately transfered back to jail. Thinking he would be off better there? Well, he was locked in this cell and people were actively beating him up. The first thing you think is what do you do next? Your options aren't very good. How did the others in the cell know he was to be given "TLC"? Somebody must have tipped them off. Was that just prison telepathy, or was it through the guards, or . . . I don't know any of the details. Somebody told them. Anyhow he was transfered back to jail. At that point he was still in protective custody, which puts the jail on notice that you expect to be attacked, and they're theoretically responsible to see you aren't. It's usually considered a very bad option, because you're just locked in a cell all day long. I was on PC the night I was there; I don't know whether they put me down in that dungeon to terrorize me or not: if so, it worked! I'm convinced that there was a reasonable chance I would have been murdered that weekend in jail. It turned out that David wasn't attacked until Monday and might have gotten off longer. I mean, it's not like this is an official system that runs on a schedule. When they can set you up they'll beat you up, they'll rape you and they'll murder you. By "they"; you mean the prisoners? The prisoners do the dirty work. The ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.35 ------------------------------------ guards set it up. The guards arrange not to be there. So David was put back on PC. He was taken to a tier with a row of about 5 cells, each of which was supposed to be individually locked. One person per cell? One person per cell, and then there is a door at the end of the corridor which is locked as well. And the people who are put in protective custody are the hardened murderers, sadistic killers . . .? No. They get along real well in the population. Those in protective custody are the people who have testified about other abuses and expect retaliation, or people who think they are particularly likely to be raped or attacked. Well, that doesn't sound like a very violent population. It usually isn't. I don't know who was in this tier that night or why. Well, I wonder, if the guards were setting David Groat up to be attacked, whether they made sure that a sort of special crew was there to do it. I wouldn't be surprised. There was at least one very large person who had been sent there specifically to rape him. Oh. Sent by the guards? Well, the prisoners don't send each other anywhere. They are where the authorities put them! So what happened is that when David got back from the courthouse into the jail, the guards walked him to the tier, let him through the door at the end, and then they closed that door behind him, leaving them on the outside of it, so there was no one in the tier except for himself and the other prisoners. And all of their cells were open! At which point he was jumped by four people and beaten unconscious. He woke up I don't know how much later, on the floor of the cell, missing three teeth. You saw him after this . . .? I saw him the next morning. Somehow that night he wheedled his way out of PC and into, I think, a suicide watch with whatever medical personnel there was. People on the outside kept calling up and saying he was suicidal. This was another way of putting the jail on notice that they were being really carefully watched. So apparently he wasn't to be killed; they wanted him alive and terrified? I don't know if murder is really common in that particular jail. Jumping people, raping them, you know, beating them up, knocking out their teeth -- all of this can be sort of passed off as "business as usual". A corpse is a little harder to explain. You saw David Groat the next morning. What did he look like? His face was all swollen, he was missing three of his upper front teeth . . . Totally missing? They were gone! There was a large hole where three of his top teeth used to be, from the centre out in one direction. And the other front centre tooth was so badly damaged that he is going to have it removed. So he had probably been kicked in the mouth . . . I don't know whether he was punched, kicked or what. His mouth was all swollen and bloody. The only medical attention they had given him for this was two Tylenol tablets. And the judge, you know, knew what was gong <sic> on. If there was a conspiracy to have us murdered or beaten, he wasn't part of it. The system is very carefully controlled so that the people on top can keep their nice little hands clean. It's very carefully segregated. He obviously knew what had happened. When he saw David sitting there beaten and bloody, he transfered him out of the jail. And I'm also convinced that at least somewhere along the line the District Attorney decided he wanted to go on with a live defendent. He's been helpful lately. I mean, I'm sure it isn't out of the goodness of his heart. He's just decided he doesn't have a case with a corpse and politically his career depends on convictions, not getting his defendants murdered in jail. There's also a heavy class distinction. The DAs and the lawyers and the judges all like to keep up their appearances. The guards and the police are lower middle class at best and they do the dirty work. It's very carefully segregated so that the people who keep ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.36 ------------------------------------ a public facade of humanity don't have to admit in public to the system they are a part of. At that point David agreed to take a 10-day committment in the mental hospital, on the condition that he be kept safe. They transfered him that day. I went over to see him two days later. He looked a little better then? Had he had some kind of medical, dental work done? I think so. I think I saw that one of the holes where a tooth had been had been stitched. He's not in danger of being <the above text continues on p.37> <coloured box (sidebar):> Attacks upon suspected boy-lovers in American prisons are so common, and have so much tacit support in American society, that they never are reported in the newspapers; in fact the straight press often acts as though it were up to its ears in conspiracy with local wardens to make sure suspected boy-lovers do get beaten up and raped in jail, and then cover up the evidence. The following is extracted from a news release issued on 12 February by the Free Mark Davis Committee: Mark Davis arrived (in Walpole Prison, Massachusetts) at 7 pm Friday night, 4 February . . . and was placed in a small holding area. On Saturday, 5 February, there appeared in the Boston Globe an article by Globe courthouse reported Diane Lewis. Reporter Lewis, using information from previous articles, recapitulated various police lies and slanders which have been repeatedly used against Mark Davis and his case. Walpole guards read this article out loud to the other inmates in the holding area and then incited them to beat up Davis. Mark Davis was then attacked by a gang of other inmates. Several of his teeth were knocked out in this attack. His ribs were broken and his face was lacerated. No guard attempted to halt the attack. After the attack, Mark Davis was removed to a solitary cell with no lighting and a broken window. He spent a day in the dark and in the cold winter draft. After he was beaten, Mark Davis asked for medical assistance. He received none. He was denied food all day Saturday. On Sunday he received one glass of Kool-Aid. Davis told the Free Mark Davis Committee: "It was clearly a set-up. Once they heard that Globe article, they started calling me a 'baby-blaster' and a 'diddler' and that was that. It makes me wonder why the Globe article appeared in the first place, just the day after I was sent to Walpole. . . ." On Monday, 7 February, Davis was placed in a tiny cage in the midst of other inmates. For over 24 hours, while Davis was in this cage, other prisoners spit on him, taunted him and regularly urinated on him. While Davis suffered this day-long torture, one guard came up to him and inquired: "Would you like some help to kill yourself?". . . . Several things are necessary in order for this kind of attack, and that sustained by David Groat a few weeks earlier, to take place. First there must be permission. This has to extend right up into the office of the warden. (If it didn't, people would lose their jobs.) Second, there must be communication. People at the top must pass the word down, through section chiefs to guards to the power-elite among the prisoners. Third, opportunity must be created. It is dangerous (to the warden and the people under him) if the attack can be shown to have been preventable. Fourth, there must be amnesty. The people who perform the dirty work, just as the people who pass permission and give opportunity all down the line, have to be sure that there will be no nasty repercussions for them. Amnesty, of course, comes from the boss: all bucks stop with him. This system has obviously been well worked out in the Plymouth County Prison and at Walpole. In a caring and humane society the wardens would immediately be suspended for these bestial violations of their trust. In reality nothing will ever be done to these men, except, perhaps, that, in due course, they might get a Time or Newsweek award for patriotic devotion to the survival of American society. <end of coloured box (sidebar)> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.37 ------------------------------------ <this text continued from the top of p.36> immediately attacked. But it's a particularly nasty place. He's locked up with the loonies. He's been visited several times by the FBI who offered to let him off Scott free if he'd "co-operate", help convict some NAMBLA person of kidnapping Etan Patz. I was indicted eventually on two charges of indecent assault and battery on a child over the age of 14. I assume they were involving Robert -- I don't know any of the details . . . Robert? Robert's 16, isn't he? Robert's 16, yeah. Well, he had a 16th birthday when we were out there, the first week we were there. If those charges stem from before that time, it's an age of consent problem. If they stem from after it, it's a straight indecent assault case. The same as if I went up to any adult and, you know, grabbed his crotch on the street and he didn't like it. Indecent assault is only putting someone in fear of indecent touching. So right now the entire legal case comes down to they claim that I put Robert in fear that I was going to touch him indecently. David's current charges are indecent assault on a child under 14. We suspect that that may still be a Charles Dyson charge, since he was the only person under 14 that had ever been in the house at all. One charge of indecent assault with intent to rape. We don't know any more of the details. Harold Baker was kept in the jail there a little longer than either of us. He didn't get mistreated, apparently. Why, because he was younger? I don't know whether it was the guards or himself or David, but people were basically portraying him as one of the poor helpless victims of us crazy perverts. He's only 17, could pass for 16. But at some point, after David and I were no longer in the jail, they transfered him back to the police station in the holding cells. So apparently they thought he was in some kind of danger. He was in the process of having all of his charges dropped in Massachusetts. The only thing they eventually charged him with was being an accessory to us indecently assaulting Charles Dyson. Since they were dropping the indecent assault charges against us, it was a little hard to have him an accessory to a crime that they weren't even alleging any longer. So he was in the process of having those dropped, when a fugitive warrant from New Jersey was served on him for conspiracy to kidnap Charles Dyson. Against his attorney's advice, and because of the hysteria of his sister whom the police had brought up from Pennsylvania on purpose because she's been working with them on and off for over a year, now, he allowed himself to be extradited. So he's back home in New Jersey? No, he's in jail in New Jersey. He had his charges in Massachusetts dropped. Against the advice of his attorney, he waived extradition, and was taken in custody back to Monmouth County, New Jersey, where he's in jail. What about the tremendous amount of publicity this has generated? Yes, I feel like I've been living someone else's paranoid fantasy. The local Wareham Courrier <sic> -- it's a weekly paper - had big front-page stories for two issues about this giant pornography ring, <photograph> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.38 ------------------------------------ <photograph> cracked, busted by . . . FBI? Oh, no, they were making a big thing about their local cops. One of them got a citation from the Board of Selectmen for his wonderful work. He was a sleaze. He was the one that was quoted in all the New York City papers as having found the picture that they thought was Etan Patz, and he was nothing but a puppet for the folks from New Jersey and the Feds. But the papers were reprinting all the stories they were given, that my parents' summer home was this major world-wide sex ring's headquarters, which was tied in with prostitution in Plymouth -- we didn't know anybody in Plymouth! They had this whole pre-existing fantasy they were trying to find pieces of, but the pieces Weren't there. By the third week the local paper's headline was SEX RING FIZZLES: the article said that all of the connections the police had been promising simply hadn't shown up. What was the Etan Patz connection? David had a scrap book of commercial illustrations of boys and poetry. These were photos, or were they lithos taken from magazines? Some were photos of kids he knew, but not pornographic. The others were non-pornographic lithos -- pictures of kids, and poetry. But the police claimed this was a catalogue we had been preparing of abused boys! They also claimed that one of the rooms in the house (I don't know which one) had been set up as a photography studio -- despite the fact that they couldn't find any cameras in the whole place. So, they got this one picture, from the scrap book. I didn't know which one it was. On Monday the week after our arrest, I bought a copy of the Murdock/gutter Boston Herald. The headline read DID SEX CLUB TRAP THIS BOY? And they had a picture of Etan Patz. Now, Etan Patz was a 6-year-old kid who disappeared in 1979 in SoHo, which is a neighbourhood in lower Manhattan, on his first day at school. His mother dropped him off on the corner and he disappeared between there and the school bus. He is the single most famous disappeared kid ever in the history of New York. I'm convinced that the cops intentionally planted his name in this case in order to draw for it the greatest amount of publicity. Well, they also showed the picture from David Groat's scrap book. Not until two days later. That Monday they just ran the picture of Etan Patz, and the kid's parents sitting there with a picture of their son looking very distraught. But if you actually read the articles, you found out that the parents said the picture wasn't of their kid. From the beginning they said it wasn't their kid. But that didn't stop the cops or the FBI or the press. So this story was in the paper for two days. Finally they published the picture from David's scrap book. The kid looked sort of familiar but it was nobody I'd ever known. On Thursday night I was at a NAMBLA Bulletin mailing group, putting address labels on the Bulletin, and someone there recognized the kid as a commercial model from the middle six- ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.39 ------------------------------------ ties, whose name, at least in one publication, was supposed to have been Peter Koch. So we started the great hunt for pictures of Peter Koch, and by the next morning we'd found the identical photograph. It was an illustration for the month of January from a boy art calendar published in 1968. And we got a copy of the calendar. So NAMBLA planned a press conference simultaneously in Boston and New York the following Monday, December 27. We were able to borrow the calendar from the person who owned it and make Xerox copies of it to hand out to everyone. We sent out word to the press on Sunday night. Huge crowds -- over 60 people in New York -- overflowed the capacity in the room. In New York David Thorstad and Michael Laverey and David Ingalls (new spokesperson this year). In Boston, Brian Quimby (one of the new spokespeople) and Mitzel and Bill Andriette who is 17 years old -- a highschool student from Long Island. He's absolutely amazing, but at the conference the press tended to ignore him, because they couldn't fit him into their sex-ring fantasy. They wanted middle-aged bald men in raincoats, and they didn't get them. And our press conferences basically blew up the Patz story; the police confirmed it a day or two later. The coverage on Monday night was the best coverage NAMBLA has ever had. They were running film clips on all of the local television stations in Boston and New York. On the whole it was extremely favourable. The lead-ins were a little incongruous: they had this shocked tone of "We don't really believe these people are saying these things, but this is what they said today". As the night wore on they brought in more of the professional anti-sex hysterics. In the early news the hadn't had time to do that, so we basically got run straight. They had the police and the FBI running around saying, "We don't know what's going on, will someone please tell us?" And David Thorstad was invited to be on a network talk show at 12 o'clock midnight, and he did it really wonderfully. He was on with a woman from California, from a professional anti-kid-sex group; she had this incredible sprayed-on hair-do. It wasn't Jill Haddad? Haddad -- you got it. The one who wrote We Have a Secret with Lloyd Martin. She just came out looking really crazy. She and Thorstad weren't even discussing the same thing. She was talking about adult males sexually abusing little girls and David was just saying, of course we're all against child abuse and people mistreating people, but what about gay teenagers, and what happens when the police get involved. And she just kept getting crazier and crazier. I wish I could describe this incredibly possessed look on her face. I'd never watched any of those people work before. I'd heard from Mitzel what they'd been like. He said they really want to kill you. And people were invited to phone in and ask questions. They were only able to take four phone calls during the time they were on, three of which were extremely hostile. One was some lady from the midwest asking how long did she expected America to let people like us run around loose. But the second phone call was great. It was this guy who was 18 years old. He said that he hadn't been molested, he was, how did he call it, "sexually aroused" when he was 12 by his older cousin who was in his 20s, that they'd been having an affair with each other for the last 6 years, that he was now going to move in with this guy and, you know, he thought it was the best thing in the world. <coloured box (sidebar):> It was good to hear that, by the end of February, David Groat's supporters had raised sufficient bail to secure his release. Now that he is no longr <sic> incarcerated he will be able to prepare himself for the forthcoming trial, which should take place some time within the next two years. <end of coloured box (sidebar)> ==================================== Pan, Number 15, p.40 (back cover) ------------------------------------ <full-page photograph>