THE EPSTEIN FILES

The illustrious names that threaten to show up in the Epstein Files, which include Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Anil Ambani, Mette-Marit, the Crown Princess of Norway, and a host of others, seem to give banned underground outfits like Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) in the UK; North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the USA; and Vereniging in the Netherlands the last laugh. Besides these countries, pro-paedophile groups have prominently existed in France, Norway and Germany. These organizations have for long called for a “reform of sex offender laws,” known by the acronym RSOL. Their main plea is to ask for an absolute lowering of the age of consent. As an RSOL member put it, “to make the age of eighteen the dividing line [between minors and adults] is to institute a ridiculous moral equivalence between little babies and sexually active teenagers.” They went on to accuse America and its “coalition of the willing” of evolving “draconian laws” to eliminate paedophilia. RSOL supporters included the late Tom Reeves and Alexander Cockburn.

Paedophile Information Exchange, founded by Michael Hanson and headed by Tom O’Carroll, lasted ten years, from 1974 to 1984, before it was disbanded. It called not just for a lowering of the age of consent, but for a total abolition of it. While its members were mostly male, it had a few women members as well. Its brief was that criminal law should only apply to non-consensual sex with minors, implying thereby that paedophilia could be consensual, and that it was about time minors were given agency. In fact, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), a PIE affiliate, went as far as to argue that nude photographs of children were not in themselves indecent, and should therefore be exempt from legal action. Action could only be taken if it was proved beyond a measure of doubt that the children in question had been sexually exploited.

Paedophile Action for Liberation had its own magazine, Palaver. A contributor to Palaver magazine asked rhetorically: “If all paedophiles in community or private schools were to strike, how many [schools] would be forced to shut down or at least alter their regimes?”

On the other side of the Atlantic, North American Man/Boy Love Association concerned itself with pederasty and paedophile advocacy, and like PIE and PAL in the UK, sought to abolish laws that spelled out the age of consent. It argued that the so-called crimes of men who had sex with minors had to be judged on a case-to-case basis, and could not universally be regarded as coercion. By the mid-90s, NAMBLA had over a thousand members, but it was also infiltrated by policemen. Then paedophobia quickly spearheaded its decline. Today, NAMBLA is demonized and all but defunct. What pedophiliac activity continues among its members is restricted largely to the internet by unregistered organizations, like Free Spirits.

Vereniging Martijn fought for “the social and societal acceptance of child-adult relationships” in the Netherlands. Consent was so crucial to the relationship, both of the adult as well as the child, that the child had to have the freedom to withdraw from the relationship whenever it wanted. This, the outfit believed, made their activity free from taint. Eventually, Vereniging Martijn was banned in 2012. Attempts to revive it failed, with heavy-handed raids and police arrests. One of the most well-documented cases involved a man named Edward Brongersma, a Dutch researcher who actively researched paedophilia. He was such a victim of anti-paedophile mob violence, that he was one of the first persons to be allowed to avail of the new Dutch law on euthanasia and end his life.   

All over the western world outfits like PIE, PAL, NAMBLA and Vereniging Martijn faced a backlash from women’s groups, the gay community, and civil society at large. Examples abound of the persecution they faced, which included physical harm, like being pelted with stones and rotten fruit in the case of PIE, and being called “the vilest men” and stripped of their employment in the case of PAL.

NAMBLA members were expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) that regarded them as criminals. They were prevented from participating in Gay Pride marches and also banned from commemorating the Stonewall Riot of 1969. NAMBLA members used to celebrate a day known as Alice Day, or Paedophilia Pride Day. In April 2013, a ‘hactivist’ group known as Anonymous attacked them on Paedophilia Pride Day. NAMBLA was even sued by the parents of a boy who, according to them, was “stalked, tortured and murdered, and [they] mutilated [his] body…”

It will be recalled that similar charges were levelled against singer Michael Jackson by the parents of a boy who stayed with Jackson in his Neverland ranch. But in the end, the charges couldn’t be proved.

However, support for pedophilic groups came from unexpected quarters. RSOL members have appropriated the writers Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, and they snigger at those who regard Wilde as a “respectable author,” but not a pederast. Likewise, they speak about Andre Gide’s revealing diary entries that have been “conveniently pushed into the footnotes.”  Wilde and Gide once met by chance in Algiers, and Wilde succeeded in tempting Gide to spend the night with a handsome flute player named Mohammed, who, of course, wasn’t underage. But Gide’s diaries also refer to other encounters that he had with minors, in spite of his deep and abiding faith in Christianity. Religion can no doubt create a chasm in the minds of those who find it hard to abstain. And yet there is the concept of laundebaazi in Islam, which is more or less the equivalent of the western concept of man-boy love, upheld by NAMBLA.

The most vocal supporter of NAMBLA was the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.  Ginsberg is regarded as the father of the Beat generation of poets, whose famous practitioners included Jack Kerouac and Willliam Burroughs. Ginsberg joined NAMBLA to defend free speech. In his militant words, “Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witch-hunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance…I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too—everybody does, who has a little humanity.” In speaking of man-boy love in terms of ‘humanity,’ Ginsberg gave an altogether new twist to paedophilia.

The witch-hunting that Ginsberg refers to seems to be for real. There was allegedly a crackdown in America in 2016 in which many paedophiles were arrested, though some, anticipating the crackdown, left the country just in time, only to remain in hiding forever, and resolving never to return home.

Historically, paedophilia and pederasty have been supported by leading Western intellectuals. Michel Foucault suggested in a suppressed 1978 interview that to assume that a child was incapable of giving his consent to sex with an adult male was itself “abuse.” He thus called for a decriminalization of consensual sex between men and boys. Foucault’s biographer James Miller quotes him as saying, “…to die for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful?”

In 1977, radical French novelist Gabriel Matzneff published a letter in Le Monde that called for a legalization of sex with minors, in his case minor girls. Calling the biological family ‘capitalist,’ the view was that children needed to be freed from parents who owned them, and pederasts did that. There were 67 signatories to Matzneff’s letter, which included Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Roland Barthes.

Literature and cinema have never shied away from showing adult-child love in books and on celluloid. Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is regarded as a classic and taught in universities all over the world. I have myself taught the novel at Nalanda University a couple of years ago, and shown students the film, based on the novel. Then there is the film Montreal Main that shows how an adult-child relationship can be consensual.

The two prominent Indians whose names allegedly figure in the Epstein files are Hardeep Puri and Anil Ambani. However, if this seems implausible, let’s not forget that peadophilic readings are possible of South Asian literary texts, especially Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu novel Lihaaf, and Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy. Some viewers view the relationship between the man and the boy in Aamir Khan’s film Taare Zameen Par in a peadophilic vein. A short story in the anthology Out: Stories from the New Queer India has an underage boy initiating ‘sex’ with his uncle as they watch a film together in a cinema hall. In real life, Duncan Grant and Allen Waters, the two Englishmen who ran Anchorage, a shelter for street kids in South Bombay, and were accused of paedophilia, were acquitted.

As these instances show, paedophilia is generally associated with homosexual rather than heterosexual sex. Male homosexual kids often have troubled relationships with their fathers, whose masculinity is challenged by their sons’ sexuality, as seen in Karan Johar’s Bombay Talkies short, Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh.  This drives the kids in search of substitute fathers (the search-for-father motif in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) who sometimes assume the role of sugar daddies, thereby conflating the conjugal and the filial.

Paedophilia is a damning word that belongs to the same paradigm as murder and rape. Yet, the pro-paedophilia lobby argues that paedophilia is not the same as rape. It is a word that must be weighed thoroughly before it is used all too loosely.

The Epstein Files case has rocked the world. All the media coverage of the case has been unanimous in condemning Jeffrey Epstein and all those associated with him as rogues. Epstein is even spoken of as if he’s still alive, overlooking the fact that he died by what is generally believed to be suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City over six years ago. This, of course, is not to give Jeffrey Epstein a clean chit.  

Given the moral frenzy that the Epstein Files case has triggered, it is only likely that in the months to come more skeletons might emerge from the closet in the form of Pizzagate and Q Anon.

(R. Raj Rao, a writer and professor who has taught for nearly half a century, is the author of one of India’s first openly gay novels, The Boyfriend, and twenty-five other books).