23 Sep, 2024: Our collection of material documenting harassment, doxing and allegations of illegal behavior against MAPs, on the part of a purportedly "MAP" group, is now complete. A second article documenting a campaign of disinformation by said group is nearing completion, and will be shared here.
Gary Dowsett
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."[1] 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."[2]
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.[3] 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.[4] Two years later, Dowsett authored 'Monsters or Mentors' (1983) in the gay journal Outrage.[5]
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.[6] 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. The interviewees recalled sexual experiences in childhood. 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.[7]
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.[8]
External Links
- University Profile - La Trobe
- Researchgate Profile
References
- ↑ Boiled Lollies and Band-aids: Gay Men and Kids - PDF Copy on External Wiki. Also readable as images elsewhere online.
- ↑ Christensen links Safe Schools to pedophilia under parliamentary privilege - SBS News (March 2016). See also, George Christensen labels academic a 'pedophilia advocate' over controversial Safe Schools anti-bullying program - Daily Mail (March 2016).
- ↑ Gary Dowsett, 'Old Traps for New Players', Gay Information, no. 8 (1981): 26-8.
- ↑ Dowsett, 'Old Traps for New Players', 26. Quoted in Steven Angelides, (2005). The emergence of the paedophile in the late twentieth century, Historical Studies, 36:126, 272-295 (290).
- ↑ Garry Dowsett, ‘Monsters or Mentors’, Outrage, 2 May 1983.
- ↑ Connell, Davis, and Dowsett. (March, 1993). A Bastard of a Life: Homosexual Desire and Practice among Men in Working-class Milieux. ANZJS, 29:1, p. 117. Quote: In the endless discussion of teenage sex, remarkably little is said about homosexual experience. Researchers, too, have been coy about this issue, partly because of moral panics about ’paedophiles’; Leahy’s (1992) recent contribution in this journal being a notable exception. Our interviewees reported patterns of childhood or adolescent sexuality in which male-to-male contact was common.
- ↑ Dowsett, G. (2000). 'Bodyplay: Corporeality in a discursive silence'. In R. Parker, R. Barbosa, & P. Aggleton (Eds.), Framing the sexual subject: The politics of gender, sexuality and power. University of California Press: 2023 Reprint Edition (pp. 31-32). (Libgen link).
- ↑ Celebrating the career of Professor Gary Dowsett - La Trobe University (2019).