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 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