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Book reviews
Though Sonenschein focuses on American twentieth-century popular culture, he covers a great
deal of historical ground. His may be the most detailed examination ever of the construction of
child molester. For this reason alone, it is an important contribution.
Sonenschein notes homosexuals have been just one in a long list of child threatening figures. He
shows what had been a homosexual threat to youth became in the late 1970s a pedophile threat
as the moral right shifted its energies to easier targets.
Although Sonenschein observes gays and lesbians were among the first to protest the child-sex
panic originating with Anita Bryant’s campaign, he does not point out how those analyses—e.g.
by Gayle Rubin (1978, 1984) and Pat Califia (1980)—turned out to be the high-water mark in
critical assessment, or how, by the end of the 1980s, the gay community's ambivalence as seen in
Der Kreis had become hostility.
Der Kreis' editorial against Eros paidikos came about halfway through its life and coincided with
one of the U.S. child-sex panics described by Jenkins. It marked a change in how the North
American homosexual-rights movement, still in its infancy, viewed sex with young people.
Hubert Kennedy's study shows Der Kreis had earlier published numerous short stories and
poetry about men and youths in sexual relationships, including drawings of pubescent boys.[iii]
Indeed, pederast themes had been present in gay publications since the beginning of the modernday
struggle for homosexual rights.
The world’s first homosexual publication, the German journal Der Eigene (The Self-Owner),
regularly extolled pedagogical eros (Oosterhuis & Kennedy, 1991). Sonenschein cites Friedrich
Kröhnke as showing many homosexual activists in 1930s Germany were pederasts. The editor of
Der Kreis quoted at the outset of this review reacted against Eros paidikos precisely because it
had been an acceptable topic for discourse among homosexuals and lesbians.
Up to the early 1980s, gay / lesbian publications in North America and Europe echoed this
heritage. Widely read and/or critically regarded newspapers and magazines such as The
Advocate (San Mateo, California), Gay Community News (Boston), The Body Politic (Toronto), Gay
News (London), Gai Pied (Paris)—all but the first no longer published—went beyond child-sex
scandals to explore ethical and cultural issues around youth and adults in relationships.
Nowadays only a few publications such as The Guide (Boston) and Anarchy (Columbia, MO)
critically cover political issues relating to adult-child sex. Eros paidikos has faded into
obscurity.[iv]
Both Jenkins and Sonenschein conclude the laws arising from child-sex panics are based on
ideology more than science and do more harm than good. They try to step outside the Western
proscription against children as sexual to illuminate how and why this ideology succeeded. The
two books are a worthwhile complement for anyone seeking a more informed view of the
cultural forces at work around these divisive issues.
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ipce/newsletters/e_14/reviews.htm (5 of 9) [10/16/2002 5:34:25 PM]