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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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There were five commonly proposed mechanisms :

  • Normalization of homosexuality could make it possible to discuss abusive homosexual relationships without admitting to illegal or taboo interests as part of the complaint. The extreme case is something like Dahmer, where police literally handed an underage victim to a serial killer (though Dahmer lived in Wisconsin, where adult homosexuality was legal at the time, he'd been booted from bathhouses for drugging people and the police in question had largely been driven to a policy of not asking questions). But a lot of stuff well below that level should have gone through the courts, and was instead handled through whisper networks that were plainly not up to the task, because the victims or witnesses could have faced liability or stigma.
  • The separation from Actual Abuser and just homosexual would have made the stigma on the former more significant. Most of the documented stuff from Keynes involved people over the age of consent or who were plain adults and just younger than him, with the more serious allegations looking to be misunderstandings by more recent readers of the common terms of the time. Contrast Gajdusek or Breen's clear and known abuse of young children. But in the lingo of the day and even into the early 1990s, most public discussion (even in gay spheres!) would not distinguish the two fields, leaving far less pressure on the marginal bad actor to behave better.
  • There was a common failure mode where an outed (or afraid-of-being-outed) teenager would flee or be kicked out from their normal community, and find that a combination of personal interests and business discrimination and native contacts would lead them to crash with various unrelated gay adults, often for pretty lengthy periods of time. Sometimes these were full-blown group houses, more often they were just rooming with friends-of-friends-of-friends, whatever. Sexual relationships in these conditions would be prone to abuse even without the age disparity, but it also meant they were people who had perfectly healthy (and above-age-of-consent-the-entire-time) relationships that looked really skuzzy from Traditional Perspectives. Cleaning this process out would both reduce temptation for marginal bad actors, and more critically also remove an avenue of normalization.
  • Demographics are (and were) a bitch. For a heterosexual person, there's about one het member of the opposite sex in a five-block age range of your age for every thirty people. For a gay person before the Internet, that number was probably closer to 1:600 or 1:2400, depending on who's numbers you trust. And given the covert nature of efforts, gay men were limited in how they could go looking. While some approaches were able to concentrate all possible sexual partners, sometimes even into one room, in practice the real answer required looking very wide in one way or another, and opening that age bracket was often the only available choice. Young adults in particular have particular problems with complying with the standard rule for hets, both because of the more narrow slices and because those present were far less likely to be able to be out, be mobile, and be trying to match publicly. ((And the AIDs crisis blew up a large slice, too.))
  • For... mechanical reasons that straight people aren't going to want to hear about, there's a lot of more awkward stuff that can happen between two gay virgins than two heterosexual ones, barring pregnancy. And while that's a very big 'except', it at least involves months before the emergency room visit. Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses. Increased information availability in public spaces, the growth of sex toys as an available industry, and more one-to-many discussions of gay sex mechanics, all did genuinely reduce that.

A lot of this was predicated on most abusers selecting their victims by opportunity or mild preference, rather than strong preference or as obligate parts of their sexuality, and that wasn't always true. And there remain awkward edge cases that neither the gay community (nor society as a whole thinking about the het versions!) really want to handle as rules rather than on a case-by-case basis.

But it wasn't wrong, either, nor clearly wrong at the time.

A lot of that still sounds like hope.

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