THERE WAS A time when a groomer was a predatory grown-up preparing to molest a kid. Then Christopher Rufo, the activist who did more than anyone else to inject the term into today’s politics, redefined it as a “spectrum of behavior.” Children, he tweeted in 2022, “can be groomed into a sexual identity, groomed into an ideological system, and, in some cases, yes, groomed for abuse.” The rhetorical aim was clear: It was a way to raise the specter of the child molester without having to demonstrate that any specific person is a child molester.
That specter has long haunted our culture wars. Whenever a sexual minority’s legal rights or social status seems to be increasing, someone is certain to raise the alarm that Pedo Power will surely be next. In 1994, as gay freedom was becoming a mainstream cause, the head of the right-leaning Rutherford Institute claimed that “the logical implication of American acceptance of homosexuality is the acceptance of pedophilia as simply another form of ‘sexual orientation.’” In 2004, with gay marriage a central issue in the year’s elections, the head of Liberty Counsel wrote that “Once the same-sex marriage barrier is broken, a wide range of sexual paraphilia rights are sure to follow, including, but not limited to, pedophilia.” In 2015, right after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, the prominent Texas Republican Allen West circulated an article about pedophile advocates under the header “That was FAST: Yesterday it was gay marriage; Now look who wants ‘equal rights.’” (The article was actually several years old.) In 2022, with a new group in the culture-war crosshairs, The Federalist ran a feature headlined “Why Accepting Child Transgenderism Will Pave The Way For Accepting Pedophilia.”
Each time someone tells this tale, it is less plausible than before. Nearly half a century ago, there actually were notable currents of radical opinion that wanted to normalize pederasty and abolish age-of-consent laws. The successes of the gay rights movement have not made such views more popular. If anything, they have become more radioactive. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) no longer marches in pride parades, and gay papers no longer publish extended debates about whether such groups belong in the fold. Even the small handful of activists who do talk about destigmatizing pedophilia are much more likely to claim that this will make it easier for pedophiles to get psychiatric help than to suggest they’re doing nothing wrong. And the rise of trans rights has not changed that at all. (That’s why Rufo has to fall back on phrases like “groomed into a sexual identity”—they let him conflate two very different phenomena.) In fact, the increasingly dominant view on the left today is to oppose any large age differences in romantic or sexual relationships, even when both parties are of legal age.
That isn’t simply a matter of ideological drift in the LGBT movement. There are larger sociological reasons why many people in the West were more open to tolerating genuine groomers in the immediate aftermath of the 1960s, and there are larger sociological reasons why the taboo wound up getting stronger instead. To understand that, we need to revisit that moment in the 1970s and early ’80s when it briefly looked like pedo lib might have a future.
BAY STATE GRIME
ON APRIL 5, 1978, Gore Vidal stood before a judge and suggested that statutory rape laws should not exist.
The novelist was not on trial. He was delivering a speech in a crowded Boston church, and the chief justice of the state’s Superior Court happened to be in the audience. The judge later insisted that he had merely been there to see a famous writer speak and that he didn’t realize he’d come to a rally for a controversial cause.
Specifically, he’d come to a fundraiser to defend two dozen men charged
