Intergenerational sex was a hotly contested political issue within gay and lesbian activist circles throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. For many years, as evidenced by its membership in the ILGA, NAMBLA’s presence was begrudgingly tolerated, and even those who fundamentally disagreed with its positions often still supported its right to freedom of speech. The ILGA controversy in 1993, however, marked a turning point for many US as well as international gay and lesbian rights activists. The hostile political climate of the 1990s, which tended to conflate “pro-pedophilia” with radical activism around “man/boy love” and challenging age-of-consent laws, made tolerating NAMBLA not only untenable but akin to committing political suicide. And even for those sympathetic to NAMBLA, the risk of the ILGA losing its U.N. consultative status within ECOSOC now far outweighed the right to freedom of speech, especially given that it was the first and only international organization representing gay and lesbian interests at the U.N. While many gay and lesbian leaders acknowledged that NAMBLA was simply being used as a prop to push forward a larger homophobic political agenda, their official organizational stances were overwhelming supportive of NAMBLA’s expulsion from ILGA. NAMBLA’s expulsion was more broadly indicative of the growing intolerance and incommensurability of gay, mostly male and white sexual liberationist ideals, with the more mainstream, increasingly respectability-focused, LGBTQ rights movement. The demise of gay liberation as a viable politics in the late twentieth century United States thus explains much of the hostility towards NAMBLA’s radical positions and the reason that it was eventually expunged from gay and lesbian politics.[1]

The NAMBLA fiasco left a permanent stain on ILGA’s reputation: it was denied reinstatement of its U.N. ECOSOC consultative status multiple times and as recently as 2006. At that time, ILGA reported in a press statement that “no reason has been given to deny ILGA ECOSOC status other than an unfounded allegation from more than a decade ago.”[2] Finally in June 2011, nearly seventeen years later, the ILGA was able to regain its U.N. ECOSOC consultative status.

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[1] Sociologist Joshua Gamson has argued that the ILGA controversy and NAMBLA’s expulsion marks the shifting of symbolic boundaries of gay and lesbian rights organizing in the late twentieth century. Likewise, sociologist David Patternote argues that the growing intolerance of groups perceived as pro-pedophilia in the 1990s is indicative not only of the shifting priorities of LGBT rights organizing, but the broader demise of gay liberation ideals. See Joshua Gamson, “Messages of Exclusion: Gender, Movements, and Symbolic Boundaries,” Gender & Society 11, no. 2 (1997): 178–99; David Paternotte, “The International (Lesbian and) Gay Association and the Question of Pedophilia: Tracking the Demise of Gay Liberation Ideals,” Sexualities 17, no. 1-2 (2014): 121–38.

[2] Press statement, “ILGA and the ECOSOC Status Controversy,” Jan. 30, 2006, https://ilga.org/news/ilga-ecosoc-status-controversy/.