August 28, 2015.
Regarding the New York Times article “Raid of Rentboy, an Escort Website, Angers Gay Activists”:
What many people who have been in the movement to gain equal rights for homosexual Americans, long before LGBT, etc, warned is that if we only worked on tangential issues, we would sooner or later have to confront the issue of those who simply fear sex — usually for “religious” reasons or personal insecurities.
I assume that is why when, among others, the Homosexual Information Center, led by main co-founder Don Slater, advocated legalization of prostitution, or the ending of laws invading our individual rights to privacy, other individuals, organizations, publications did not understand this relevance of this issue.
One reason was that if you were willing to “work” with government agencies, and, for instance, work to stop male prostitution, you got grants.
Another obvious reason was clearly covered in the first public discussion of homosexual marriage — see ONE magazine articles in 1953 and 63 — recently covered on the Box Turtle Bulletin Web site — if we appeared to be good monogamous people, we would be accepted. How is that working for heterosexuals today?
We issued a statement prostitution in the late 1960s as I recall, paid for by The Playboy Foundation. It got no coverage by the media — any media.
Yet it explained why psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, and civil rights workers, favored legalization, with some restrictions, because there are men and women who, for various reasons, are unable to find volunteer/consenting sex partners yet deserve that form of therapy and human contact.
(The word hypocrite comes to mind. The people at Rentboy asking for sympathy after giving nothing to the movement remind me of Josh Duggar — a great pusher of “family values” even as he hired prostitutes.
