I was surprised to find that someone uploaded their somewhat janky vhs copy of the documentary Chicken Hawk to YouTube. The film offers a decidedly rosy introduction to the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). It was shot in the early 90’s, when the group was at its most public, and was trying to glom on to the ascendant gay rights movement. It opens with interviews with several of the members taken at gay pride parade in Washington DC where the group is kind of skulking around at the periphery. It’s interesting to see how queer civil rights activists react to them with this really aggressive ambivalence. No one’s telling them they have to leave, but they certainly aren’t letting them join the party. Some years later, the LGBT community would see what a liability it is to let the NAMBLA guys hang around and would come to openly condemn them, but back then no one really knew what to do when they would just show up out of nowhere with their unconscionable agenda—that society should let them have sex with children.

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I will say, where the film succeeds and manages to show us something really unique that we can learn from and empathize with, is when it shows us the lives of the pedophiles and what they’re like as people. These are peculiar people that we meet. They live their lives alone, in dingy little apartments, watching children from afar and feeling what they feel but being more or less powerless to do anything about it. We see one man leaving messages in young adult books in the public library. Others draw pictures for themselves of pre-adolescent bodies because owning and exchanging photographic imagery would be impossible. In the handful of times in their lives when they actually do get the opportunity to be intimate with a young person, it’s such an utter breakthrough for them that they talk about it in terms of spiritual transcendence. They carry the memory with them, clear and vivid, wherever the go for the rest of their days. Of course it isn’t beautiful, but it’s genuine, and it’s sad: The grim and ghastly respite of a mangled soul.