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. His piece Boiled Lollies and Band-aids: Gay Men and Kids, published in the Spring edition of the Australian quarterly journal Gay Information, has recieved the most attention. In it, 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, Dowsett wrote:

Many mothers and some fathers will agree that children are sexual and generate sexual responses in their parents. Cuddling, breast feeding, bathing together, playing, kissing and fondling kids are immensely pleasurable activities for them and for us. And it is not uncommon to feel sexually aroused by that closeness, that touch and that love. How different then is the gentle, tentative sexuality between parent and child from the love of a pedophile and his/her lover? [...] That kind of love, warmth and nurture is an important part of the paedophilic relationship.

I'm not saying that mothering/fathering is paedophilic; but I am saying that they are not mutually exclusive. Nor is the social parent so different from the child-lover. A perfect example [...] is that of J.M. Barrie - the author of Peter Pan - and the boys he loved. To argue that such a relationship is paedophilic or non-paedophilic is irrelevant. [...] We should argue for the re-introduction of sex, its re-integration into social life rather than its privatization. [...]'

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.

A year earlier, Dowsett had written on the topic with 'Old Traps for New Players' (1981), published in the same magazine. According to Steven Angelides, in this piece, Dowsett "declared that [...] the official Australian debate on paedophilia had been launched" after the publication of criminologist Paul Wilson's (1981) book on Clarence Osborne. Two years later, Dowsett authored 'Monsters or Mentors' (1983) in the gay journal Outrage.

Dowsett has been cited by multiple scholars critical of the age taboo, including Richard Yuill (2010), and Terry Leahy, the latter being a fellow Australian academic whose empirical research on positive age-gap sex Dowsett has noted. Yuill cited Dowsett's (2000) book chapter Bodyplay: Corporeality in a discursive silence, which quotes from interviews Dowsett conducted with two homosexual men who recalled having male-male sex both before and after "gay" became legible to them as an identity category. Dowsett wrote:

Many other men I have interviewed over the last ten years of research reported similar childhood experiences — regular sex games with neighbors, with schoolmates, sometimes with older men. [...] Some reported learning from schoolmates of places (called in Australia "beats," and usually public parks or toilet blocks) to find sex with grown men and with other boys. Such sex play was not furtive, but was carried on away from the gaze of parents and adults. It was also a very sociable activity, collectively pursued, yet free from the preponderant discursive definition to which sexuality is often prone.

For him,

We need to look beyond these crude categories, which overlay sexuality with a paradigm of inevitable power, often invoked against empirical evidence (as in specious debates on pedophilia and pornography).

His book Practising Desire (1996, reprinted 2020), draws at-length on his interviews with homosexual men. The interviewees often refer to their first sexual experiences in their youth; often with peers or older schoolboys, but sometimes with older males. Dowsett details the nuanced, full spectrum of negative, mixed, and positive sexual experiences across the age spectrum. With many young males seeking sex in public parks, toilets, bars and places where boys could go to be picked up by men as “rent boys” (i.e. prostitutes), Dowsett documents the stigma and danger of being arrested or physically attacked by homophobes which came with these experiences. As the book includes males who had same-sex experiences prior to the 1960s, interviewees discuss being alienated and scared of the reactions of friends and colleagues, experiences of being beaten and raped by homophobes, rejected and even chased at knife-point by parents, and seeking therapy to cope with a hostile society.

Under a section titled ‘Understanding the Sexuality of Boys and Young Men’, he cites PIE Chairperson Tom O'Carroll’s book Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), Theo Sandfort’s research on positive man/boy sexual relations, Daniel Tsang’s The Age Taboo (1981) and Li, West and Woodhouse's (1990) book. He also cites Thore Langfeldt (1981), Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and discusses the Kinsey Reports. The chapter notes the dominance of pederasty prior to the 1950s, referencing Greek myths such as Ganymedes, and early homosexual figures such as John Addington Symonds and Wilhelm von Gloeden.

Dowsett uses Gilbert Herdt's research as evidence of support for age-gap same-sex eroticism in non-western cultures, and argues that stigma and harsh legal penalties in Australia failed to prevent non-normative sexual activity; the participants just learnt to hide it better. On Harriet, for example, Doswett writes that "It did not prevent an even more open exploration of sex from age six or seven, again on a neighborhood scale and across generations for "ten cents a poke. No, hang on, a shillin'," with boys banging on his door demanding sex, particularly older boys, and as well as one of his father's mates." Through Barney's experiences, Dowsett challenged the 'abuse' label:

It would be tempting to cast the incidents with the school teacher, for example, as sexual abuse; an interpretation favored at present as the only way to understand intergenerational sex (see Maasen 1990). But there is a strong element of voluntarism in Barney's account; he was willing and he was able. What's more, he did not remain passive for long. He sought similar contact after school. [...] Barney's is not a classic example of a passive young man being "done"by exploitative adults. [... A]s he indicated, he went looking for it. [...] Barney's experiences may represent those of a significant minority of men and boys, most of whom do not become or remain homosexual.

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