The Double Standard

by Richard Goldstein

This brief excerpt is the beginning of an article in the August 20, 2002 edition of The Advocate

If you've been following the scandals involving priests and boys, no doubt you've heard a Roman Catholic Church official or two argue that most of these predatory clerics aren't actually pedophiles since they're not attracted to prepubescent children. Teen are their temptation, and that makes them ephebophiles. Say what?

If you can't place this word, it's probably because it isn't part of the official psychiatric lexicon. You won't find ephebophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the thick volume most shrinks consult when they want to identify a patient's condition. Ephebophilia isn't listed because it's a newly invented term that describes a very old obsession. It's derived from the Greek word for youth - but not just any youth. An ephebe is a boy in the throes of puberty. The ancient Athenians certainly didn't regard an attraction to such lads as a disease, but we do. Indeed, ephebophilia is today's hot-button homosexual pathology.

Even in this seemingly gay-friendly era, sex between adult men and teenage boys remains taboo. It's also a crime if the teen in question is under the age of consent (which remains 18 in most states where gay sex is legal). But you don't have to act on this desire in order to qualify for the diagnosis. Just having the hots for teens is enough to make you an ephebophile, according to some therapists. They regard this attraction as the sign of a stunted sexual development - and so it is, if it becomes a fixation that retards intimacy or damages a child. The problem with this diagnosis is that it can easily be applied to any gay man who finds teenagers sexy. That's when a newly minted mental illness becomes an instrument of oppression.

When the right-wing Family Research Council recently released a report claiming gay men commit "up to one-third of the sex crimes against children," the group tapped into the age-old idea that homosexuals are a threat to kids. Te myth of the predatory pervert is a building block of homophobia, bolstering the belief that all same-sex desire is evil. Indeed, in many languages the same word may be used to describe both a boy-lover and a homosexual (in English the word is pederast).

[...]

Goldstein basically makes a case for the ideas that heterosexual attraction for teens (be it man-girl or woman-boy) is not seen nearly as negatively as it is for man-boy attraction, that sexual attraction for any adults to teens is neither uncommon nor at all bad, but he avoids saying anything at all about whether actual sexual relationships between adults and teens are ok.