Gary Dowsett

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Gary Dowsett, PhD, FASSA, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia. In 1982, like many gay academics and writers of the time, Dowsett wrote on pedophilia and positive age-gap sexual relations, in the Spring edition of the quarterly journal Gay Information. Titled Boiled Lollies and Band-aids: Gay Men and Kids, Professor Dowsett argued that "The current paedophilia debate [...] is crucial to the political processes of the gay rights movement: paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our own terms." In 2016, this document was raised in Australian parliament by a right-wing politician, in an ultimately failed attempt to undermine a 'Safe Schools' anti-bullying program that Dowsett worked with. La Trobe University released a statement: "We are appalled that a respected academic has been attacked using parliamentary privilege [...] We stand by the important work of Professor Dowsett and his team."

In that same 1982 piece, he also wrote:

We need to protect the youthful partners in paedophilia against the legal and social management systems which treat them as delinquents. But for all kids there are rights to be won, and struggles to be waged against institutions which deny them power and their sexual rights [...] use their power as adult's to confine and restrict children's lives.

Dowsett is a colleague, and associated with, Professor Steven Angelides. An early leader in the theoretical field of Critical Sexuality Studies, Dowsett co-founded the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society and served on the editorial board of Ken Plummer's Sexualities journal. After the emergence of the HIV epidemic in the early 1980s, Dowsett became active in the community-based response to HIV. He was one of the founding members of ACON (formerly the AIDS Council of NSW) in 1985 and, from 1986, he coordinated the first of many social research projects on gay men and HIV in Australia. He continued to work in the fields of education, health, sexuality, and gender, with HIV/AIDS becoming the focus of much of his research for the next 40 years.

External Links

• University Profile - La Trobe
• Researchgate Profile