Pierre Verdrager

Pierre Verdrager (b. 1970), is an independent sociology researcher. His research has focused on homosexuality, the epistemology of the social sciences, and the sociology of culture. His 2013 book L'Enfant Interdit ("The Forbidden Child"), published in 2013, studied how positive, non-sensationalist and non-condemnatory discourses around pedophilia were tolerated in the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. To our knowledge, he is a part-time librarian, and a volunteer associate researcher at the Centre for Research on Social Links (CERLIS) at the University of Paris-Descartes.

"The Forbidden Child" initially received little response outside of the MAP community and academic outlets. In 2020, however, when the Gabriel Matzneff affair erupted, the historical fact of dissident, critical, and open-minded thought among French intellectuals and French LGBTQ+ groups towards the social construction of pedophilia, pederasty, and child sexuality that the book documents, became widely known and discussed. The book discusses influential thinkers such as Michel Foucault, philosopher René Schérer, his former loved-boy and lifelong companion co-author Guy Hocquenghem, and the writer Tony Duvert.