1978-1983: Architects of PIE infiltrate Islington gay youth group to lobby MPs directly with Heath & Mandelson’s help

In 1978 Peter Righton and PIE Manifesto author Micky Burbidge team up to exert control over grassroots gay youth groups, establishing the umbrella Joint Council for Gay Teenagers (‘JCGT’)
Righton & Burbidge take control of the London Gay Teenage Group (‘LGTG’) liaising with the Greater London Council and ILEA for official recognition and relocating the LGTG to Islington, Manor Gardens Community Centre
In 1980 Chair Edward Heath and his Youth Affairs Lobby (‘YAL’) meet with Burbidge and the LGTG
With the assistance of YAL Liaison member the British Youth Council (‘BYC’) and its Chair Peter Mandelson, Burbidge gets to take a group of gay teenagers to lobby a group of cross-party MPs directly with Clement Freud MP (Lib), Charles Irving MP (Con) attending with 4 Labour MPs
By 1982 JCGT and PIE’s Micky Burbidge have been invited to meet with Islington Councillors Bob Crossman, Sandy Marks, Derek Hines and Keith Veness at a Gay Groups meeting – the access to Councillors lobbying groups had was later deplored by Council Chief Executive Leisha Fullick in her report Modernising Islington
JCGT teamed up with the National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC) to form GYM (Gay Youth Movement) in time for GYM to campaign for the defendants of the second PIE trial during September-October 1983

1978: Righton & Burbidge devise an umbrella steering group to infiltrate gay youth movement

The backlash against Tom O’Carroll’s publicity stunts such as the public meeting to debate the age of consent in September 1977 did much to paralyse PIE. Mindful of the advice of Dutch MP and lawyer Dr Brongersma, Peter Righton and Michael Burbidge began to change direction, leaving behind the paedophile pride PR of O’Carroll and Hose. Instead Righton and Burbidge focused on energising and organising a gay youth movement supportive of paedophile rights, working with and through regional gay youth groups.

A London Gay Teenage Group (‘LGTG’) had already been established in 1976, for under 21s by under 21s, meeting at Grapevine on Holloway Road. Burbidge and Righton got together to find a way to exert control over a few gay teenage groups that already existed nationally, but particularly focused on the LGTG in Islington, as this was where Burbidge lived and Righton worked.

They came up with the idea of the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers – a permanent umbrella body that would gather any organisations dealing with gay young people under Burbidge’s wing – and influence.

October-November 1978: Peter Righton & Michael Burbidge co-found the JCGT

The first meeting of the ‘Conference on Young Gays’ committee with Burbidge and Righton had taken place on 7 October 1978. At the second meeting on 25 November 1978, (at Grapevine at 296 Holloway Road, London N7) the suggested title of ‘Joint Council for Gay Teenagers’ was adopted.

“Nettie – for information – M”, JCGT 2nd Meeting Agenda 25 November 1978, Burbidge wishes to update PIE Member #70 Nettie Pollard with JCGT developments, LSE/ HCA/ JCGT

Righton spoke at the JCGT second meeting on how to develop relationships with relevant professions involved in the welfare of young people – such as social workers and teachers – in order to achieve JCGT’s aims.

“To counter the sexual and emotional fulfilment of gay teenagers by countering the bigotry that denies them the right to it.”
Draft aim of Burbidge & Righton’s Joint Council for Gay Teenagers, 25.11.78

Burbidge kept Nettie Pollard (PIE member #70) in the loop on how he and Righton were progressing with establishing the National Joint Council for Gay Teenagers. Copies of JCGT minutes in archive are addressed to Nettie in Burbidge’s handwriting.

During this period Burbidge was also active in lobbying for the legal defence of PIE by meeting with Dutch youth parliamentary people (as introduced by the British Youth Council), at Burbidge’s Department of Environment offices to discuss options for Dutch support to report back to CAPM. CAPM’s third meeting was attended by (Lord Justice) Adrian Fulford, (Islington Chair of Social Services Committee) Sandy Marks, and two PIE members and NCCL Gay Rights Committee members Nettie Pollard and Tom O’Carroll. As Burbidge was already keeping Pollard appraised of how far progress was being made in pushing his pro-paedophile rights agenda in the gay youth movement, particularly in Islington, it is unsurprising he would document his attempts to network on behalf of CAPM.

1979-80: Burbidge’s booklet ‘I Am What I Am’ lobbies MPs on abolishing the age of consent

Burbidge co-drafted a booklet with which to lobby MPs on the age of consent fronted by gay teenagers. – “I Know What I Am”. While gay teenagers were happy enough to aim for parity in the form of a reduction of the age of consent for homosexual males to 16 – the PIE luminary steering the JCGT was intent on using the opportunity to lobby MPs on the age of consent to argue for its abolition.

For anyone aware that Burbidge was also the co-author of PIE’s response to the Home Office CLRC in 1975, JCGT’s position on the abolition of the age of consent would have come as no surprise.

Burbidge’s “I know what I am” concluded unequivocally in arguing for the abolition of the age of consent, stating that “the only civilised answer… would be to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law.”

The two polarised ideological extremes of the revolutionary socialist stance of gay is good and gay paedophiles are equally as good vs the right-wing christian evangelism of all gays are bad but can be good with enough aversion therapy and prayer meant it appeared as if there was no one in the centre, campaigning for an equal age of consent AND the protection of children from abusers looking to exploit teenagers and children sexually.

LGTG, ILEA and the GLC

Around May-June 1978 Mary Whitehouse’s National Festival of Light (NFOL) Nationwide Bulletin reported their objections to ILEA’s discussions with LGTG. The language used was pejorative (gay youth should be encouraged to integrate to become ‘normal’=’heterosexual’ or mixed youth clubs and to allow gay youth groups was not only socially divisive but also ‘morally corrupting’), and featured alongside a request for funding from christian fellowships to place adverts offering evangelical counselling to those who “struggle painfully with a homophile nature.”

In 2017 the former Chair of LGTG, Steven Power, wrote for School’s Out of Burbidge’s support. The stress and confusion about whether Power would be privately prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light played well for Burbidge, during two especially crucial years of campaigning prior to the first PIE trial of January 1981.

During 1978, Gay News was in the process of appealing their sentence to the Court of Appeal. This Bulletin shows that Whitehouse was concerned to block official recognition or funding from the Greater London Council to London Gay Teenage Group

“I was up for ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ (section 5(3) Criminal Law Act 1977). If prosecuted, I faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison” … “I was next. But with significant support from a variety of donors, including some prominent MPs, we sought a Queen’s Council (sic) ruling which established the right of young people to meet regardless of their sexuality. A number of people supported me, including Micky Burbidge of Icebreakers, politicians, and others involved in the LGBT community. Without them I would have ended up in prison.”
OUTburst magazine / School’s Out UK Official Guide to LGBT History Month February 2017 p54-55 ‘A Brief History of the London Gay Teenage Group’ by Steven Power

It’s unclear as to what Steven Power was persuaded by Burbidge and others to be in fear of at the time – in another place he talks of Law Lords (as opposed to Queen’s Counsel being paid for a legal opinion) ruling on his case, although he was not prosecuted.

Bearing in mind Power was only 17 at the time who was telling him he was going to be next to be prosecuted? Was Power being used as a human buffer / potential test case fodder by manipulative older PIE luminaries in their forties working through the gay youth movement in Islington such as Burbidge?

OUTburst magazine / School’s Out UK Official Guide to LGBT History Month February 2017 p54-55 ‘A Brief History of the London Gay Teenage Group’ by Steven Power

Young People, Inequality and Youth Work
edited by Tony Jeffs, Mark Smith p.115 ‘Sexuality & Youth Work Practice, Peter Kent-Baguley

Young People, Inequality and Youth Work
edited by Tony Jeffs, Mark Smith p.116 ‘Sexuality & Youth Work Practice, Peter Kent-Baguley

PIE’s Manifesto objectives

The PIE Manifesto of November 1975 had proposed a “new non-criminal legal framework for determining whether a child’s consent to sexual activity could have been communicated to an older partner, and for prohibiting the older partner from continuing the sexual activity”.

Just as Burbidge’s PIE Manifesto written 5 years earlier had proposed “the abolition of ages of consent, and the removal of consensual sexual activity at all ages from the criminal law”, Burbidge’s 1980 JCGT booklet “I Know What I Am” sought “to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law.”

Both had been written and submitted to the Home Office, the former as ‘Evidence on the law relating to and penalties for certain sexual offences involving children – For The Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee’ aka ‘The PIE manifesto’ and the latter in response to a Home Office Working paper on the age of consent in relation to sexual offences.

As Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins had set up the Policy Advisory Committee to advise the Criminal Law Revision Committee to review the law on sexual offences. It was in response to Jenkins’ creation at the Home Office that Burbidge addressed the PIE Manifesto and JCGT’s I Know What I Am.

PIE’s faith in Local Authorities and Islington Council’s ‘tradition’/’family secret’

Burbidge and Hose envisaged paedophiles as liberated from the constant fear of prison and all its horrors, with all complaints of sexual assaults on children routed through a new council complaints system. As Burbidge and Hose struggle with setting out a process by which the Local Authority will determine children’s consent to sexual activity with an adult without it become a mock trial or kangaroo court, they find themselves granting local authorities the power to issue injunctions and prison sentences with no right of appeal.

PIE’s proposed legal framework, with its tiered age groups raising rebuttable presumptions of capacity to consent to sexual activity with adults, was to be administered and judged entirely by a Local Authority (council) complaints system. PIE wanted to grant local authority employees the right to act under Children and Young Person’s Act / Children’s Acts powers.

Instead of the police it was to Local Authorities complaints that unwanted sexual activity with children was occurring should be made and it was Local Authority employees as ‘administrators of the Children’s Acts’ who would decide if and how to act to protect the child. Note, PIE defined the issue as “could have been communicated” — the Local Authority would now be the judge of a child’s capacity to consent, which would be presumed possible for all children of 4 years and older. Only for babies and toddlers up to the age of 3 would there be a rebuttable presumption of incapacity to consent.

For PIE to achieve partial implementation of this particular manifesto aim at a local level only three things had to happen:

(1) A council (local authority) had to agree to deal with all allegations of sexual abuse against an employee without involving the police.

(2) Local branches of Trade Unions such as NALGO and NUPE had to be persuaded to adopt a non-discrimination clause including the term ‘sexual orientation’ which pro-paedophile activists would argue to be interpreted as inclusive of all sexual minorities

(3) Pro-paedophile rights activists had to gain positions on the council to ensure policy remain either neutral or positive to pro-paedophile objectives, formally or informally

Interestingly, by 1992 Islington social worker Dr Liz Davies noted NALGO’s response to her as:

“11.5 Although I went to my union NALGO for representation they did not support me and at one time were threatening. The branch secretary called my home number late one night and demanded I meet him outside the union office and that I came alone. Of course I was scared by the call and did not go.”
Personal correspondence with Dr Liz Davies

After 1977, when the legislative change objectives of PIE as a pressure group were proving difficult to obtain public support for and then the Protection of Children Act had whizzed through Parliament suddenly banning indecent images of children, local lobbying at local authority level intent on influencing council policy opened up places for paedophiles where the degree of local community acceptance created a welcoming climate for sexual offenders against children.

Islington Councillor and Deputy Council Leader Valerie Veness (1974-1986) went on to work as Jeremy Corbyn’s political assistant for 17 years between 1991-2008
Valerie’s husband Islington Councillor Keith Veness (1982-1986) was Corbyn’s electoral agent from 1984-1992
Keith Veness recruited Sandy Marks to the Labour party in 1975 and is currently campaigning for her suspension to be lifted following Morgan QC’s Review determining Marks was more likely than not a Fallen Angel and involved with Conspiracy Against Public Morals, campaigning for PIE

In July 1984 Valerie Veness, Islington Council’s Deputy Leader stated that the ‘traditional’ approach of the Council when an employee was suspected of a criminal offence was for the Chief Executive, Leader and Chair of the Personnel Committee to decide whether to involve the police or deal with the matter as an internal disciplinary concern.

In February 1993 Tunnard & McAndrew’s first report into Islington Council’s failings of its children in care wrote of the Council’s “Family Secret” where staff suspected of criminal offences were allowed to move on with references rather than being investigated by police.

These two pieces of information almost a decade apart tell us that Islington Council had developed an informal policy (or a ‘tradition’ or ‘Family Secret’) of not involving the police where council employees were suspected of criminal offences.

If this ‘tradition’ or ‘Family Secret’ applied to residential staff accused of sexual offences against children as council employees, the number of abusers who found positions with Islington in residential childcare would have been extremely difficult to remove, until the Evening Standard expose of October 1992 led to an exodus of staff almost overnight.

PIE Manifesto, September-October 1975, co-authored by Islington resident and civil servant Michael Burbidge and PIE Chairman 1975-1977 Keith Hose

Only if an abuser, having already abused a child and been subject to a restraining order preventing further contact with the child, breached the order and contacted their victim would they be subject to a fine and/or imprisonment.

“In the event of breaches of prohibition, fines or terms of imprisonment could be applied.”

So despite promising to liberate paedophiles from the fear of prison, the PIE Manifesto had merely argued for moving the seat of decision making away from the police to the Local Authority, cutting the Director of Public Prosecutions (1985 onwards CPS) out of the decision to prosecute also, apparently granting councils the power to impose prison sentences en route!

The faith that paedophile rights activists had in the will and ability of Local Authorities to become the sole adjudicators of whether children were being sexually assaulted en masse must have been incredibly strong to suggest placing all this unaccountable power as some form of a kangaroo-court in their hands (right of appeal anyone?)

What gave Islington resident Burbidge his deeply-held belief that were local councils to become solely responsible for adjudicating on the capacity of children to consent to sexual activity with adults they would exercise their power to the benefit of paedophiles is unclear.

Where “sexual activity with a child of this age occurs”, e.g. babies and pre-schoolers 0-3 years old (note there is no subject in this sentence such as a paedophile assaulting a child, sexual activity just spontaneously happens), a complaint should be made to the Local Authority who employs “administrators of the Children’s Acts” who could then seek a civil injunction/restraining order imposed by the “administrators of the Children’s Acts”. If the Local Authority fails to prevent the adult from contacting or assaulting the 0-3 year old child again, the Local Authority get to step in and take the child into care.

Local Authorities already had designated officers and members with delegated Children’s Act powers, the officers working in the Social Services Department as Social Services Directors (SSDs), Assistant SSDs and senior social workers all had certain delegated powers as did elected members (councillors) serving on the Social Services Committee of the Council.

Only where a Local Authority could promise never to involve the police in an allegation of sexual offences committed against children and investigate and adjudicate themselves, could the criminal law be almost kept at bay in the same way as if paedophilia had been decriminalised through legislative reform. Changing legislation at a parliamentary national level to decriminalise sexual assault and rape of children became secondary to PIE’s objectives.

Where possible, through a combination of change in policy and practice by local authorities, communities of paedophiles fought for the space to breathe and grow in confidence and pride, supported in small localised safe havens.

Note: Burbidge & Hose are only interested in establishing rebuttable presumptions of capacity to consent

Burbidge’s evidence of harm of is drawn from a single anecdote from a client of one of his counselling group ‘Icebreakers’ – using a paedophile client’s one-sided account of his relationship with a 16 year old boy.

PIE’s “new safeguard” was giving the ability to the Local Authority “administrators of the Children’s Acts to issue a prohibition injunction preventing further and continuing “sexual activity” (now surely capable of being defined as sexual assaults and rapes even according to PIE’s crime-free lexicon) with the child.

It was with a very clear strategy that Micky Burbidge and Righton had started making inroads into Islington’s gay teenage group, plotting a path to Parliament and a direct and public platform from which to pressure politicians over the age of consent.

April-July 1980: JCGT’s success Burbidge goes to Parliament with the help of Mandelson and Heath

Burbidge’s triumphant if little-reported arrival in the House of Commons with an entourage of teenagers was facilitated by the Youth Affairs lobby, an early version of the Youth Parliament, chaired by Edward Heath MP, with the help of a YAL Liaison Group Committee member – the British Youth Council, chaired by Peter Mandelson.

Notes for Jo Richardson MP, Chair, Youth Affairs Lobby-JCGT presentation to MPs

Notes for Jo Richardson MP on the joint JCGT and YAL presentation at the House of Commons billed Burbidge as the main author of the JCGT response to the Home Office Working paper on the age of consent in relation to sexual offences — titled “I Am What I Am”.

On 11 April 1980 representatives from JCGT met with a Liaison Group from the Youth Affairs Lobby (‘YAL’), the Chair of which was Edward Heath MP. As a result of that meeting, YAL felt very strongly that they should assist with getting Michael Burbidge’s group access to Parliament. The next meeting with more MPs was originally scheduled to take place on 20 May 1980 at 5.30pm.

The YAL was chaired by Edward Heath MP with Liaison Group Membership of the British Youth Council (BYC)

Former national President of the National Union of Students (1975-1978) Sue Slipman, aged 30, had taken up a position as an area officer with the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) while she also served on Heath’s Youth Affairs Lobby Liaison Committee as a volunteer.

Steven Power, former Chair of the LGTG attended the first meeting with YAL as the LGTG youth worker and in 2017 he wrote of Edward Heath MP attending this first meeting on the age of consent

By July Burbidge’s group had the access to lobby MPs directly that Edward Heath and his Liaison Group from the Youth Affairs Lobby had felt so strongly about.

7 July 1980: Burbidge’s audience of MPs at the House of Commons

Gay News covered JCGT’s next event at Parliament where Burbidge was able to publicly apply pressure to MPs – it was the first time a lobby of MPs had been called together on homosexual rights, not by a gay group, but by the “non-aligned” Youth Affairs Lobby. More than 30 people attended – a delegation of about 15 from the JCGT and its supporters appeared in the photo posed for outside the House of Parliament. Burbidge was hopeful that through changing direction and organising for pro-paedophile rights within the gay youth movement further access to lobbying MPs would be possible:

“After the meeting, Micky Burbidge, a member of the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers and co-ordinator of the lobby, said: “The next step is that there should be a meeting of interested MPs to work out what we can do now.”
YOUNG GAYS DEMAND ACTION, GAY NEWS, July 1980

Notes prepared for the YAL/JCGT Lobby Presentation gave Jo Richardson MP a brief introduction to each attendee

Any MP known by the Paedophile Information Exchange members to have a sexual interest in either
(a) children under the age of 16 ; and/or
(b) young men aged 16-21
was now in danger of being publicly put under pressure to abandon their hypocrisy and give support to abolishing the age of consent or at the very least parity for the age of consent with heterosexuals.

11 July 1980 letter from Michael Burbidge giving his views on which MPs should be invited to the JCGT Lobby Meeting

Throughout 1979-1980 Burbidge and the JCGT had been trying to find a way in which they could publicly raise the issue of gay youth and the need to abolish the age of consent by sending a deputation to the door of the Home Secretary (at the time Willie Whitelaw)

Burbidge felt that if he could just gather together the MPs who had shown the most interest, David Steel, Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun, Neil Carmichael and John Wheeler, he could capture their interest and gain their support for JCGT.

Despite the success of having achieved an audience with MPs, their response was disappointingly unfair in relation to their own private lives, and for some individual MPs we can now see it was outrageously hypocritical in view of their own sexual preferences.

As indicated by Burbidge’s last paragraph in his update to JCGT Members above, the JCGT were being offered support for a two-step approach to achieving parity of age of consent – equality with heterosexuals – but the MPs could offer little else.

Burbidge and his JCGT entourage met with 6 MPs: 4 Labour, 1 Liberal and 1 Conservative and 1 future Labour MP: Peter Mandelson, who was then the Chair of the British Youth Council.

Only one of the MPs noted as attending is female – the Chair, Jo Richardson MP (Lab: Barking).

Through her close involvement with the NCCL Jo Richardson MP had become the go-to representative for ideas on how to lobby for paedophile rights in Parliament. Richardson’s biddable responses to Nettie Pollard’s requests are recorded in NCCL Minutes, whether it be complaints that press reporting on criminal trials involving PIE was prejudicial or the impact of the protection of children bill by outlawing paedophile positive imagery (otherwise known as images of child sexual abuse), Richardson was always willing to see if there was a way she could assist.

In 2012 Nigel West wrote that Richardson had been named in 1985 by Oleg Gordievsky when he’d defected – she had been identified as a “confidential contact” of his embassy. West asked “But were they simply “agents of influence” peddling the Kremlin line on any particular topic, or something more sinister?”

If you consider the inside track Richardson had on which MPs in the Commons to speak to for a positive approach to issues concerning paedophiles, even as an “agent of influence” pushing for the normalisation and decriminalisation of paedophilia in plain sight, Richardson’s role throughout 1974-1984 with regards to PIE is deeply sinister and was surely treated as a threat to national security. Was Richardson under the same kind of surveillance by the Special Branch as activists of all kinds have found in the impetus to launch the Spy Cops Inquiry?

Clement Freud (Lib: Isle of Ely) In June 2016 it was revealed that Freud’s name had been given to Operation Yewtree in 2012 and that at least three women had come forward to report rapes and sexual assaults by Freud against them as children during the 50s, 60s and 70s. As a heterosexual ebephile sexually interested in grooming and molesting females aged 10+ Freud was particularly susceptible to pressure had it been known he’d moved a young girl he was sexually abusing from the age of 10 into his house as an au pair to his children. Telegraph

Ian Mikardo (Lab: Tower Hamlets, Bethnal Green, Bow) was criticised for his threats to block the Protection of Children Bill two years earlier. Richardson was very much his protege having started life as Mikardo’s secretary to the Tribuneites

Allan Roberts (36) (Lab: Bootle): At the time of meeting Burbidge and his group, Roberts was a recently elected MP just over a year in his seat, having failed to get elected in 1974 in [ ]?. A senior social worker with Lancashire County Council, (initially trained as a teacher at Didsbury Teacher Training College and Manchester University) and a former teacher in primary and secondary schools, Roberts had experience in and connections to the professions Peter Righton had identified as so important in supporting JCGT in their aims back in 1978.

As Chair of Manchester Housing Committee, while a councillor, Roberts also had strong opinions on housing which echoed the views of Burbidge. In his Tenants (Consultation) Bill of 1982, which failed, Roberts embraced everything Burbidge could have hoped for in an attempt to legislate for tenant democracy and to enshrine in law the right of tenants to take over the management of estates (with government funds).

The year after attending Burbidge’s parliamentary lobby the News of the World revealed Roberts had attended a party in Berlin’s Buddy Club (organised by the Motorcycle Leather Club), at which he had donned a dog collar and been whipped by a man in SS uniform before a crowd of S&M enthusiasts . The man who had paid his medical bill when he had required medical treatment for the whipping was none other than Charles Irving MP – his fellow attendee at the JCGT Parliamentary Lobby orchestrated by Burbidge and Heath.

Charles Irving (57) (Con: Cheltenham since October 1974) As above Irving had paid for Roberts medical bills in Berlin. A large eared broad faced millionaire hotelier from Gloucestershire, Irving’s attention to detail in hosting would serve him well managing the House of Commons Select Committee on Catering 1979-1992. A discreet adviser to the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality for years, in 2014 Irving was alleged of having been involved with a clique of Conservative MPs who sought out young men and teenagers to sexually exploit. [July 2014, Mirror]

July 1982: Islington Council invites JCGT to the table

In July 1982 the nominally National “Joint Council for Gay Teenagers” was invited to a roundtable “Gay Groups Meeting” convened by Islington Councillor Bob Crossman.

Crossman had been outraged that the toilet on Richmond Avenue had been reported as unsafe for children and demanded that if more resources were given to gay groups gay men wouldn’t have to “wave their penises at each other” in toilets in order to meet one another. No mention was made of that fact this particular public toilet was located not far from the Hemingford Arms, a well known gay pub, but also where PIE held meetings upstairs. The Richmond Avenue toilets were often used by children playing in Barnsbury Gardens.

“One reason why gay men go into lavatories and wave their penises at each other is that it is the only way some people in the population have of meeting other people and making friends.”
Bob Crossman on concerns for safety of children visiting Richmond Avenue public toilets, Islington Gazette 11.7.82

The Gay Groups Meeting Crossman convened was as a direct result of his demand that more resources be provided to gay and lesbian organisations. A number of the invitees to the Council’s Gay Groups Meeting were of the same view as the Fallen Angels, the pro-paedophile rights group Councillor Sandy Marks had been involved approximately 18 months before becoming elected, namely that paedophile rights to liberation such as the abolition of the age of consent should be embraced by and campaigned for within the mainstream gay rights movement.

Hailed as a PIE supporter by PIE chairman Steven Adrian Smith, Eric Presland, was invited to the meeting by Cllr Bob Crossman and met with Cllr Sandy Marks and Cllr Keith Veness. Veness, who was soon to become Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral agent for the next 9 or so years, has since defended Sandy Marks’ various denials of her involvement with Fallen Angels and following her suspension has demanded her reinstatement to Islington North Constituency Labour Party. In September 2017 in the Islington Tribune a friend of Sandy Marks observed she was being made the fall guy for those who shared her pro-paedophile views. However, with Marks’ return to a complete denial of involvement to Morgan QC’s review of November 2018 it remains to be seen whether Islington Council can follow through on a commitment to understanding the politicisation of paedophilia within the Council.

Eric Presland ran Consenting Adults, an Islington based mixed gay community theatre group putting on a weekly drama workshop. The year before attending the Islington Council meeting Presland had contributed a chapter on “Whose Power? Whose Consent?” in a book edited by North American Boy Lovers’ Association (NAMBLA) luminary Daniel Tsang on “The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power, and Consent”.

1983: JCGT disbands; Old Fogies forms

At last Righton and Burbidge had produced the kind of front the National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC) could work with publicly and together NAYC and JCGT organised an annual conference for the Gay Youth Movement. Once GYM was established as an independent group of its own JCGT announced their disbandment in summer 1983. However within 6 months it was felt appropriate to set up an organisation called the Older Friends of Gay Youth (The Old Fogies) to inter-relate with GYM.

At a GYM weekend workshop in Southampton at the end of November 1983 planning for an Easter conference was underway. Jimmy Savile with his long connections to NAYC and sexual interest in children, was to be invited to sit on a panel with other celebrities.

By the time of the second trial of PIE defendants during September-November 1983, Righton and Burbidge’s infiltration of the Gay Youth movement had proved so successful Gay Youth magazine (GYM’s magazine) had its support for PIE declared on the front page with accompanying obligatory cartoon.

How far PIE’s luminaries succeeded with their attempts to persuade Islington to rally to support PIE during its second trial after CAPM and Fallen Angels’ failure of 1981 remains to be explored in more detail.

But by November 1983 Chapel Market traders were organising a petition against PIE which Council Leader Margaret Hodge signed. If the majority of Islington’s Councillors appeared unaware their borough was being targeted by PIE, Islington’s residents were attempting to alert them.

1975-1980: Islington Council helps fund voluntary organisation promoting PIE

White devotes an entire chapter of his 1995 report to History, Context, and Culture of Islington.

Nowhere is it mentioned that a decade previously the small inner London borough had served as the headquarters of the national pro-paedophile rights activism between 1975-1984.

If White had been aware of the press coverage of the Paedophile Information Exchange’s activities in Islington he doesn’t mention it.

Leisha Fullick, the Chief Executive of Islington Council appointed in 1996, stated in her report ‘Modernising Islington’ that one of the risks identified as the Council being ‘vulnerable to lobbying groups.’

Which lobbying groups? If these ‘lobbying groups’ were lobbying for pro-paedophile rights, what does the Chief Executive’s admission of the Council’s vulnerability mean?

Vulnerable in what sense? Capable of being influenced by? Ideologically? Financially?

For five years, between 1975 – 1980, Islington Council helped fund a voluntary organisation — London Friend — enabling its move from Paddington to Islington. This voluntary organisation proceeded to vigorously promote, support and defend PIE from its HQ located only a few doors down (305 ft to be exact) from Islington Town Hall

During 1975-1980 London Friend’s two General Secretaries were quoted in the press as vocal defenders of PIE, both of whom also served on the NCCL Executive Committee and on the NCCL Gay Rights Committee alongside Paedophile Information Exchange stalwarts Micky Burbidge, Nettie Pollard, Keith Hose and later Tom O’Carroll

In May 1977, London Friend’s support for PIE extended to hosting PIE’s Annual General Meeting at their Islington premises with 31 paedophiles and pro-paedophile rights activists gathering for four hours to elect Charles Napier as Treasurer, Tom O’Carroll as Chair and accept Peter Righton’s resignation as Community Liaison Officer.

In October 1978 Peter Righton co-founded a new gay youth group in Islington with PIE Manifesto co-author Micky Burbidge along with Roland Jeffery attending. The Joint Council of Gay Teenagers (JCGT) was hosted by London Friend and Grapevine – both voluntary organisations also in receipt of funding from Islington Council. JCGT was conceived of and convened as an umbrella organisation under which pro-paedophile activists could gather existing grass roots gay teenage organisations to prey on and use as a front for lobbying purposes.

From 1983 Islington Council was also funding the sending of groups of children from Walter Sickert Court, Rosemary School (Prebend Street) on vacations to the Islington-Suffolk Project based in Thornham Magna, where Peter Righton fled to following his conviction in 1992.

In looking past the fact PIE operated in Islington, a central question is avoided:

To what extent did the Paedophile Information Exchange recruit Islington Council’s social workers and residential child care staff as members?

Peter Righton, as an Executive Member of PIE, was identified and published under his own name (possibly because Righton felt safe to say he was counselling paedophiles in either his role of Community Liaison Officer or Prison Visitor) despite most of PIE’s Executive Committee using pseudonyms. Any social worker or residential care staff joining PIE who recognised Righton’s name (from Social Work Today, Community Care articles or training he’d delivered) would have felt reassured. Any conflict between personal interests in lobbying for paedophile rights and their professional duties such as acting in the best interests of children’s welfare were surely negligible if Peter Righton, the person responsible for training residential childcare staff, didn’t see a problem.

1970: Father Trevor Huddleston launches Islington’s Council of Social Services

Four years before the DPP declined to prosecute Father Trevor Huddleston of molesting school boys in his role as Bishop of Stepney, he launched Islington’s Council of Social Service – a voluntary body established to serve as the focal point in coordinating voluntary services to supplement and extend statutory social services.

Trevor Huddleston & Others: Mr X and the Rule of Law

Huddlestone

1974-1975: Home Office Urban Aid scheme applications for Islington

While PIE was busy putting a call out, recruiting social workers to the cause of promoting paedophilia as acceptable …

….On 11 February 1975 Islington Council voted in plenary on whether to contribute to voluntary organisations for which 75% of funding had already been raised through the government Urban Aid Scheme.

Just prior to being appointed Islington’s Social Services Director, John Rea Price had been working for the Home Office on the Community Development Project & Urban Programme in Southwark, out of which the Urban Aid scheme had evolved.

Letter to the Editor, The Guardian, [date 1973]

Islington Council Minutes, 11 February 1975

The ‘Homosexual Centre’ Councillor Denton was at pains to make clear he disapproved of was the Greater London & Home Counties branch of ‘Friend’, a national counselling and befriending organisation which had so flourished establishing various local Friend groups that it had spun off from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) as a separate concern.

Originally based in a shopfront facing onto the busy market of Church Street, W2, almost equidistant between two national railway stations at Marylebone and Paddington, London Friend had been conveniently based to deal with some of the fall-out from Playland Trial 1 but by late 1974 the voluntary organisation was due to become homeless and was casting around for funding and somewhere to put down roots.

Mike Launder, an Islington resident and social worker activist had co-founded Friend and it was to Islington that Friend’s London HQ would move.

Islington Social Services Committee had come to the rescue with an Urban Aid application for funding and shop premises at 274 Upper Street, a few doors down from Islington Town Hall.

Islington Gazette, ‘Government money for Islington Gay Centre’, 21 February 1975, p.15

Despite Islington Gazette’s robust editorial reiterating Social Services Committee Chair Mrs Patricia Brown’s points about discrimination, a homophobic tirade from a Baptist Pastor from Highbury Place made it into the local press,

Note the use of “child molestor”, a term that PIE would erase from news reporting’s lexicon once paedophile became the accepted descriptor.

London Friend 28 February 1975 good news for the gay world

Islington Gazette, 1975

London Friend was given £7,900 per year over 5 years, which would be a total of £39,500 except for some reason the Gazette put the total at approximately £35,000 (possibly due to the Urban Aid grant being received part-way through financial year of 1974-75?)

25% of the total was provided by LBI council, 75% from Home Office urban aid

Using the Bank of England Inflation Calculator, in today’s money London Friend was due to receive £315,003.71 over five years (c. £63,000 p.a.)

LBI was scheduled to contribute somewhere between £7,900 – £9875 (in today’s money £63k – £79k)

“The organisation operates awareness groups and hopes to link up with other homosexual advice and information services to share resources.”

PIE wasn’t exclusively homosexual but it did consider itself an ‘information exchange’ and service to its members.

Islington Gazette, March 1975

“The Committee has pursued a policy of submitting urban aid applications on behalf of voluntary organisations. This has resulted in a great deal of central Government money coming into the borough to help solve pressing social problems. It is not our policy to exclude any groups seeking urban aid grants.” (Mrs Pat Brown, Islington Council Social Services Committee Chair)

May 1975: London Friend recruits first General Secretary

Having secured premises in Islington but not moved in yet, London Friend was ready to advertise for their co-ordinator, offering a salary of up to £2,500 (c.£20k p.a.). Without a permanent office address London Friend had to advise job applicants to write care of Peter Righton (PIE luminary and social work trainer and residential childcare policy): 48 Barbican Road Greenford Middlesex

“We are about to move into new premises in Islington, and are looking for a man or woman to run the office, coordinate the work of brefrienders, and build up effective communication and relationships between London Friend and the community at large.”

How far Peter Righton’s influence seeped into London Friend’s recruitment process beyond offering a postal address for prospective candidates to apply to is unknown.

London Friend’s 1st General Secretary

(September 1975 – September 1977)

Roland Jeffery was the lucky applicant who wrote into Righton’s address, was interviewed (by whom?) and bagged the job, starting in September 1975.

At Oxford University (1971-1974?) Jeffery had been a student CHE convenor and so was able to demonstrate previous experience in a voluntary organisation related to London Friend.

During 1975 he began volunteering with the NCCL Gay Rights Committee, campaigning alongside some of PIE’s most vocal and influential pro-paedophile rights activists: Micky Burbidge (PIE Manifesto author with Keith Hose), Keith Hose (PIE Chair 1975 – 28 May 1977), and Nettie Pollard.

At PIE’s AGM Charles Napier became Treasurer (sentenced in 2014 to 13 years for sexually abusing 23 boys between 1967-1983). By the time London Friend hosted PIE’s AGM in May 1977, Roland Jeffery had been working with Charles Napier for 6 months, drawn together by the former National Association of Youth Clubs chief Harold Haywood and his Earl’s Court Nucleus project.

NCCL Executive Committee Elections Ballot April 1978: Candidate biographies – Roland Jeffery

Throughout Jeffery’s tenure as London Friend’s General Secretary (September 1975 – September 1977), London Friend continued to receive PIE Newsletters.

PIE publications in archives bear ‘London F

It is partially courtesy of London Friend’s subscription to PIE and their newsletters and their subsequent submission to the LSE archives, that there is an archive of PIE’s publications.

October 1975: ‘Befrienders tackle sex with clients’

Gay News reported a debate at the National Friend conference on 25 October 1975.

At the conference, as well as a workshop and discussion on paedophilia, a discussion took place on whether Befrienders should or could have sexual relationships with clients who had approached the voluntary organisation for help.

Despite elsewhere reporting a percentage of under 16s as contacting Friend, any concerns that a sexual relationship between a Befriender and a lonely isolated adult contacting the organisation was a potential abuse of power or at all exploitative were disregarded. There were apparently no concerns that paedophiles could abuse this leniency to access vulnerable minors offering ‘counselling’ or ‘befriending’.

Roland Jeffery suggested Befrienders could offer ‘sex therapy’ and have sex with clients or “use education and porno films” in cases of sexual dysfunction.

Would paedophilia be considered a sexual dysfunction Befrienders should try to alleviate the loneliness and frustration of? Would ‘befriending’ a paedophile in such a case have included the provision of child abuse images or films in the case of lonely isolated and sexually frustrated paedophiles? The Protection of Children Act 1978 was not yet in force.

May 1977: Islington Council funded voluntary organisation hosts PIE’s Annual General Meeting

31 members of PIE travelled to no 274 Upper Street Islington N1, representing over 13% of the reported PIE total membership of 227. Postage costs were up to £25 per month.

Nettie Pollard of the NCCL Gay Rights Committee was keen to advertise NCCL as an emergency port of call for paedophiles seeking legal advice or to choose a defence solicitor or barrister.

“Nettie Pollard from the NCCL gave the meeting a short, but very helpful speech about homosexuality and the law, and about arrest. She outlined several aspects of some of the cases involving paedophiles which had come to her notice in her work as Gay Rights Organiser of the NCCL.”

“Care should be taken in the choice of a lawyer — NCCL maintained a list of suitable lawyers, and that organisation should be asked for their advice.”

Gay News No 126, September 1977

London Friend’s 2nd General Secretary (1977- 6 March 1980)

Richard McCance

When Richard McCance took on the position of London Friend’s General Secretary following Roland Jeffery’s departure, the enthusiastic and vocal support for the Paedophile Information Exchange — 25% of which was being funded by Islington Council over five years — continued.

CHE 1977/78 Executive Committee Biographies

Social Worker Richard McCance’s support for PIE extended beyond his tenure as London Friend’s General Secretary, before and after.

A keen trade unionist and member of the British Association of Social Workers, McCance was eager to harness support for Tom O’Carroll, chairman of PIE, by using the Anti-Discrimination Clause he had successfully campaigned for adoption by a number of Trade Unions during 1976-77.

Just prior to joining London Friend, while on the CHE Executive Committee Richard McCance gave the view (‘Gays join PIE fight’) that since the National Union of Journalists’ anti-discrimination clause included sexual orientation, the NUJ would take up Tom O’Carroll’s suspension by his employer the Open University.

The implied assertion being that a paraphilia like paedophilia was a sexual orientation like heterosexuality or homosexuality and therefore capable and deserving of being protected against discrimination in employment.

Guardian, September 1977

In January 1981, while giving evidence for the defence at the PIE Trial of 4 of the Executive Committee, McCance said that as General Secretary of London Friend he received the magazine Magpie but without the contact page. He read it because elsewhere there was so much misinformation about paedophiles and Friend often had to help gay paedophiles who are “having to cope with all the hostilities of society.”

Gay News 22 Jan – 6 Feb 1981, Judge Orders PIE Re-Trial

Gay News, Judge Orders PIE Re-Trial, 22 Jan – 6 Feb 1981 p.

When Richard McCance penned an Editorial for CHE’s in-house publication Broadsheet (August 1978) denouncing “the virulent hostility towards paedophilia and paedophiles” and criticising Gay News for their betrayal of paedophiles who had supported their legal defence against Mary Whitehouse’s private prosecution for blasphemy, other CHE members felt strongly there should be more editorial consensus reached before allowing individual’s free reign for opinion pieces, and so an insert disclaiming McCance’s opinion as representative of CHE was included.

CHE Broadsheet, August 1978

McCance’s conflation of gay rights with paedophile rights was an essential and well-used approach to blackmailing gays and lesbians into feeling intolerant if they weren’t willing to campaign for the rights of adult to have sex with children:

“The virulent hostility towards paedophilia and paedophiles is not dissimilar to that encountered by the gay movement not so many years ago when CHE and GLF tried to hold their first meetings in public halls.”

Gay News 149 August 1980 p10

Roland Jefferies (sic) of the NCCL said:

“When PIE is under attack we should support them. Dropping the listing of PIE from the Gay News Guide may seem to them to be bad faith on our part.”

CHE Vice-Chairman slams Gay News, Gay News, September 1978

1978: PIE organising Islington’s gay youth

Following Dr Brongersma’s attendance at CHE’s annual conference in Nottingham, PIE’s Executive Committee past and present were repositioning their campaigning to more closely resemble the Dutch paedophiles approach. Instead of paedophiles campaigning for the right to have sex with children, paedophiles must create or infiltrate youth organisations so it appeared to be teenagers campaigning to abolish the age of consent and their rights to have sex with adults.

During October 1978 Peter Righton co-founded a new gay youth group with PIE Manifesto co-author and Islington resident Micky Burbidge: the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers.

1979-1980: London Friend suffers Council funding cutback

Over Christmas 1979 London Friend was “fighting a last-ditch battle to save its council grant.”

In 1978-79 Islington Social Services Committee had granted London Friend £14,350 but during 1979, despite Friend’s application for an increased grant of £17k, the Social Services Committee had voted to grant only £5,500.

However it soon became clear that there may be no money to be found for the borough’s funded help services and now all grants will be examined again before the final decision on January 29 1980.

Gay News 181, 13 December 1979 – 9 January 1980

Gay News March 1980

Within 3 years of leaving London Friend, Richard McCance had moved to Nottingham to be elected as a Labour Councillor.

Peter Righton’s Haven: Council funding for the Islington-Suffolk Project

Islington Council Minutes, March 1983 – Agenda Item 5.

Over the course of five years, funding from Islington Council to the Islington Suffolk Project had jumped from an annual ‘Capital Grant’ contribution of £3,233 to approximately £27.5k per year.

Despite being billed as a philanthropic venture by Lord Henniker, Islington Council was picking up the tab to send selected Islington children from schools, day centres and play schemes to spend 4 day weekends camping at the Project’s Thornham Magna campsite.

However, by March 1988 the Project faced losing £5,000 in Council funding cuts, a reduced contribution of £22.5k meaning that £50 per group (£25 of which was a deposit for camping gear) would be charged.

David Pare, Director of the Project based on St John Street in Clerkenwell spoke to the Islington Gazette about the council’s funding cuts.

Islington Gazette, March 1988

London Gay Activists Alliance: Caged Anger. The Prosecutions of Paedophiles (August 1979)

Written for and circulated at the Campaign for Homosexual Equality annual conference held over the August Bank Holiday in 1979, this double sided A4 ‘leaflet’ bears the sentence “p&p by the London Gay Activists Alliance”.

However, judging by the writing style and common idiosyncrasies of typewriter keys, the author is one third of the Fallen Angel team that attend the IGA Conference in April 1980 – Tim Brown.

“Children. Caged by adults. Powerless objects of parental desire, trapped in a society which legislates against assertions of their being – and audits their owners.

“Child molestors”, “perverts”, “monsters”, roaming the streets wearing dirty old macs concealing evil intent and bags of sweets. In search of prey — “our” children.

So who do the oppressors blame for all the harm they do to “their” children? Why Paedophiles silly. Who else?

The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) is a small – about 150 members and falling thanks to persecution. But there are millions upon millions of “paedophiles” in this tiny island of 56m people — in fact every nuclear family is teeming with them. From the exquisit privileges of being boss-man of the family to the sweet dreams of Motherhood where amongst the nappies and garbage bins lies the true reward of being able to hold ones loved “little one(s)” in a tight and seemingly everlasting embrace.”

p.1 (front)

The mere fact of a kid relating to someone outside the family who is an adult is too much for the nuclear screws. The dungeon doors are creaking open, they are escaping, we can’t control them any longer, call the police, the vandals, help!

And whoever is doing the creaking of the dungeon door gets the shit. PIE is getting that shit because it is a support group for adults who offer an alternative source of love to kids imprisoned inside the nuclear family and the heterosexist state.

But PIE deserves your support for another reason. It is a contradiction in terms for CHE to shout about the oppression of women and gays in heterosexist society — if — by dint of inactivity alone, it does nothing to combat the oppression of children, including theirs.

That’s what its all about. No Age of Consent laws = no prosecution of Paedophiles.

SUPPORT PIE!
ABOLISH THE AGE OF CONSENT!
AFFILIATE TO THE “CONSPIRACY AGAINST PUBLIC MORALS” CTTEE!

p.2 (reverse)

Conspiracy Against Public Morals: Paedophilia & Public Morals (October 1980)

CAPM eventually published their planned pamphlet on ‘Paedophilia and Public Morals’ (P&PM) in late October/ early November 1980, a few weeks after Tom O’Carroll published his book on the ‘radical case’ for paedophilia. P&PM had taken longer to get out due to a delay in raising £2,000 to print and distribute the pamphlet, and then problems in persuading their distributor to actually distribute it. In Fallen Angel Tim Brown’s view the glossy A5 covered booklet superseded the Fallen Angels Manifesto of April 1980 “Corrupting Children” in priority of publications for the IGA’s Information Secretariat to assist with getting distributed to IGA membership.

Eighteen months under Thatcher and CAPM’s fear of a right wing populist backlash against gay liberation, women’s and children’s liberation was that the PIE trial would provide the perfect reporting storm for the press, led by the News of the World, to whip the public into a fury, demanding punitive action from politicians.

However, the pamphlet had been finalised before Private Eye first broke the news of Sir Peter Hayman in their first Beast of Berlin column. Their failure to consider how Hayman’s involvement may impact on the court ordering reporting restrictions to apply or other aspects preventing better publicity for their cause was extremely politically naive.

“The CAPM pamphlet covers much of the areas ignored by O’Carroll. Written by a collective of paedophiles and other gay men, it gives a detailed account of the development of law on children’s sexuality in Britain and relates it to a theory of patriarchy in capitalist society.”^⁠Gay Noise no 6 Thursday 23^rd October 1980,p.4

“CAPM disagreed strongly with the approach Tom adopted, and were trying to publish a leaflet which would give the “true” radical case. CHE had been asked to help with the distribution of this leaflet.”^{⁠ CHE Executive Committee minutes 25 October 1980}

“Campaign moves into full swing

Paedophilia and Public Morals is the title of the new 60 page pamphlet soon to be published by the Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM). With only three and a half months to go before the show trial of PIE members at the Old Bailey publication of this pamphlet is a bold initiative on the part of CAPM members.

Without kowtowing or apologising, the pamphlet sets out to provide a basic framework for an informed public debate on patriarchy and the suppression of children’s sexuality. Concentrating at some length on the role of pornography and the manipulation of medical model of paedophilia this pamphlet will play an important part in the battle for a positive restructuring of the way the women’s movement, the gay movement and the socialist left views the position of children in general and child/adult sexuality in particular.

The members of CAPM feel that it is only by mounting the most widespread debate will lit be possible to organise tangible displays of support on the streets during and after the PIE trial; a trial that will be used, make no mistake, against all homosexual men and women.

Already the International Gay Association has committed itself to an international support campaign – but it is we who will translate it into action. It is up to Gay Noise and its writers, readers and supporters, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, Gay News — in fact the entire gay movement — to take up and support the initiative of CAPM. For more information, and to send messages of support, large sums of money (while Lotte’s back is turned) and requests for CAPM speakers, contact CAPM BM 1151 London WC1V 6XX”^{⁠ Gay Noise No 4 Thursday 25th September 1980 p2.}

By the time of the first trial in January 1981 PIE had gone from questioning whether the Fallen Angels were Heaven Sent? to calling them ‘Risen Apes’ in a scathing update. Denouncing them as a ‘small handful of political theorists and hydrophobic feminists’ who ‘took control during last year of CAPM’ PIE declared ‘This clique of leftover intellectuals have spent the remainder of the year working to achieve those (CAPM’s) aims by a series of hysterical and vicious attacks on PIE, and in particular on Tom O’Carroll…in their own booklet PAEDOPHILIA & PUBLIC MORALS – replete with “sexist pin-ups” – and elsewhere. It is clearly their aim to use the trial as a vehicle for their own naive political ends, whatever the cost to the defendants.” PIE clearly identified the Fallen Angels Collective as having taken over CAPM, at some point during July 1980-October 1980, to publish “their own booklet”, as set out below.

“The Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM) exists to defend the PIE defendents (sic), and alert people to the dangers surrounding that trial. This pamphlet has been written to encourage some debate around the key political issues of the trial. To this end, certain arguments and positions have been put froward (sic) which are the view of the particular authors and the basis for the unity of the campaign as a whole. Involvement in CAPM does not necessarily mean agreement on such questions as the Age of Consent, the right of children to an independent income or other such questions. The authors believe however that these are vital to be argued for.” [P&PM, p.59]

PIE Bulletin (January 1981) p.3

A far cry from six months earlier when PIE had awaited news of Fallen Angels’ IGA lobbying developments with ‘keen anticipation’.

PIE Periodical (July 1980) p.4 ‘Heaven sent support?’

However following O’Carroll’s imprisonment, an article by new PIE Chairman Steven Adrian Smith giving an overall favourable review to CAPM’s Paeodophilia & Public Morals, it appears some form of a rapprochement was in process between PIE proper and its radical socialist revolutionary Angels:

“It is a pity that CAPM, in common with people such as Roger Moody and the editors of GAY NOISE (a welcome newspaper giving extensive coverage to paedophilia and the PIE trial), have pitched their arguments exclusively towards a very narrow, albeit very active band of the political spectrum — the radical left, an audience to which Tom O’Carroll’s book was specifically not addressed, and the many valid and important assertions they make will consequently be lost on a wider readership.” (‘Public Morals: Weaponry of Repression’ by Steven Adrian, Magpie No. 15 Spring 1981, p.16)

“Finally, it should be noted that visually the booklet has been put together with great imagination. The selection of illustrations and graphics which amount to half the content of the book displays an inventiveness and resourcefulness which are sorely needed in MAGPIE. To draw an unfair comparison, Tom O’Carroll’s book is presented in an austere and formidably academic format which is hardly calculated to inspire one to read it, the CAPM booklet is visually exciting and attention grabbing and is cleverly designed to draw one into the text. A pity then that the text is peppered with more typographical errors than commas.” (‘Public Morals: Weaponry of Repression’ by Steven Adrian, Magpie No. 15 Spring 1981, p.22)

Certainly by 1986, PIE defendant John Parratt (Warren Middleton) and Fallen Angel Tim Brown were still on friendly enough terms for Middleton to thank him (formerly of CAPM) in the foreword to Betrayal of Youth.

Paedophilia & Public Morals Front page [Qn: Is this a child’s writing & drawing or are either faked by an adult to look as if by a child?]

p.2 – 3 (inner cover)

Introduction: The Show Trial & The Populist Offensive

p.5

CAPM cannot say too much about the content of the charges:

“This is not out of coyness. It is because the rest is sub judice and we would be in legal trouble ourselves if we were to go into them in any more detail. We will however endeavour not to avoid the many controversial issues which are likely to come out at the trial, even if we cannot specify the context in which they come up.”

CAPM considers the PIE trial will be a “show trial”

The popular press led by the News of the World will report on the PIE trial relentlessly and unfavourable, whipping up public fury which in turn will place pressure on an already right-wing populist government under Thatcher, a year into her first term.

“The present government have merely made a virtue out of necessity. For the significant period prior to taking government, the Tatcher/Joseph wing appreciated the climate and adopted an aggressive ‘right populist’ stance. In the run up to the elections they seized every opportunity to champion the bigotry of the people against each other. Once in government they have continued this approach escalating the already existing internecine warfare. Classic examples of this have been their stand on immigration and on social security ‘scroungers’.”

p.6

On why the Fallen Angels are defending PIE when they don’t agree on politics:

“We are not defending the five because we agree with their politics. Many of the arguments in this pamphlet run counter to what some of the defendents (sic) believe. We are not defending them because they are wonderful right on people with inpeccable (sic) revolutionary socialist credentials. We are defending them because they are on the front line where they are likely to receive the fiercest blows of a generally barbaric offensive. This we cannot tolerate.” (P&PM, p.6)

p.7

Chapter 1: Patriarchal Power & The Oppression of Children

pp. 8 – 9

pp.10 – 11

“In the 80’s this is all in flux again. The welfare state is being significantly dismantled. Women are bein driven out of the labour force to be full time mothers again. Capital cannot afford the national extended family. The definition of childhood has however remained much the same. For a period it was not defined so much in terms of the mother. Now it will be again. Either way, children are at the bottom of the patriarchal pile. What is important however, is that in this period the state has to intervene directly to re-establish the centrality of motherhood. It will do this by raising the question of ‘vulnerable children’. It will attack all expressions of autonomous actions by children. It is in this context that the question of the age of consent is so important, a question which will be forced upon us by the coming show trial.”

Commenting on an article press cutting on a BBC2 Horizon programme ‘A touch of sensitivity’ discussing research of the effects of a mother’s touch on growing children, CAPM asks:

“Can the state entrust to woman the socialisation of children, while avoiding any emotional/physical contact that might imply sexuality?”

pp 12 – 13

Chapter II: Control, Protection & Corruption

pp 14 – 15

CAPM try to avoid defining ‘Women under the age of 13’ as children, female children or girls, preferring to use the term ‘Women’ which means adult female [p.14]. Even female babies, all female children, must be referred to as ‘women’. This causes them linguistic difficulty and is shown up by their need to refer to the Indecency with Children Act: “c) Women of any age may legally consent to non-penetrative sexual relations with men, but in practice a charge of Indecency with Children would be brought.”

pp 16 – 17

“Take the famous ‘theory of maternal deprivation’. This ‘theory’ created by pseudo-scientists and propagated by the media, claimed that children would grow up deprived and hence deviant if separated from their biological mother. Hence mothers should not go out to work etc. While an ideology of protection, its function was clearly the control of women and children. It was to discourage women from entering the waged labour force and to define their role as full time mother, which not only oppressed women, but strengthened the repressive role of the nuclear family on children.”

pp 18 – 19

pp 20 -21

“The PIE trial is going to be a noisy trial. The DPP and the police have the chance to legitimate the law through ideology of protection, just like in the Angry Brigade case, only this time its the ‘protection of children’ which is at issue. If they can get away with this, the law will be applied more generally against gay organisations, lesbians and men, just as the conspiracy laws were applied against Trade Unionists in the early seventies, after the Angry Brigade trials. The gay and lesbian movement cannot afford to make the same mistake that was made in 1972.”

pp 22 – 23

“Chapter III: Paedophilia

“The popular image of paedophiles is contradictory, but always hostile and condemning. In fact these images are intimately related to the contradictory attitudes adults have towards children and child sexuality. On the one hand, paedophiles (women and men) are seen to be marauding, predatory males, prowling around the streets, spitting blood, lust and perversion and in search of innocent children to corrupt, deprave, rape and destroy.

The contrasting stereotype is of the failed macho who cannot ‘pull the birds’, who hasn’t grown up and can only identify emotionally and sexually with someone of equal ‘immaturity’, but one whose age matches the supposed ‘maturity’ process.”

…

“Perhaps these images lie behind some of you who are at present reading this pamphlet. Perhaps you are thinking that only men are paedophiles because paedophilia is about harming children.” *

* “Just as homosexuals have adopted the word ‘gay’ amongst many others, so some paedophiles have suggested ‘kind person’ as a positive description of paedosexuality. It at least has the advantage of being equally applicable to women paedophiles as well as to men.”

pp. 24 – 25

“The first thing which we must state categorically is that there is a massive inequality of power between adults and children, this is incontrovertible and is one of the central theses of this pamphlet. It must also be the case that this power structure will tend to be reflected in paedophile relationships. Those paedophiles who attempt to dispute this have missed the point and cannot analyse the cause of their own harrassment by the state.”

CAPM take a sideswipe at PIE and the five defendants awaiting trial as blind to the cause of the state’s action by them.

“However the mere fact that a particular relationship tends to reflect a general oppression tells us very little about the place the relationship has in that structure of dominance. If we were to outlaw all those human relationships which reflect an oppressive structure in this society we would end up banning every human, interaction, sexual or otherwise! We have to ask whether such relationships add or detract from the overall oppression. Given the family, the school, the police, social workers etc, are paedophiles just another brick in the wall imprisoning children? We say determinedly NO. They are a crack in that wall.”

pp. 26 – 27

“Finally, there is quite a different kind of argument advanced in radical circles. This is the ‘physiological’ argument. Namely that sex with prepubescent children in physiologically harmful. This argument says more about adult orientated concepts than it does about physiology!

In the first place, there is no way a child will consent to do something which is physically hurtfull. The child will scream the house down! There is no need to legislate against the possibility of some mistaken consent, as the possibility simply does not exist. In the second place there is a tacit assumption that all sexuality is orientated towards penetration and/or orgasm. This is a very adult notion. There are plenty of other expressions of genital sexuality and it will be precisely those other ways which are included in the substance of a consenting paedophile relationship in these cases.”

CAPM think it is impossible for paedophiles to make a mistake as to the consent of a child to sexual activity so there is no need to legislate against the possibility of mistaken consent. How could CAPM be so sure? The idea that paedophiles wish to have penetrative sex with children is dismissed by CAPM as (a) the product of a dirty mind and (b) negated by CAPM’s assertion that paedophiles in the majority choose ‘other expressions of genital sexuality’. How would CAPM know?

“In summary then, we do not see that paedophilia adds to the oppression of children; rather the reverse. We do not therefore support the existence of any anti paedophile legislation.”

Chapter IV: Three Sides of the Coin

“Reprinted in the pamphlet are two articles and a letter, the first of which appeared in the American pamphlet Growing Up Gay. It’s written by a young lesbian called Sky, who left home at 15 to come and work with the American organisation Youth Liberation.”

pp. 28 – 29

pp. 30 -31

p. 30 Letter written to the Leveller (which didn’t publish) – A man writes about being 10 and having a relationship with a 24 year old school teacher at primary school.

At the end of Allan’s letter a cartoon of a blackboard declared ‘children’s power means paedophilia now!’

p. 31 Interspersed with headlines:

“Girl, 12, lured ‘shy’ man to bed’

‘Judges free ‘victim’ of sex temptress, 11″

‘Sex temptress aged 12 made advances he couldn’t resist’

‘Court hears of schoolgirl temptress”

CAPM appears to view men who have sex with 11 and 12 year old girls as blameless, their anger is reserved for the child protection ‘racket’ which sends the girl into care:

“Note the similarity between the reporting of these cases and that of rape against women. Whilst it is OK that the men should get off, it is the girl who gets sent into care. Patriarchal age of consent laws receive eloquent expression through the mouths of judges and magistrates.” [p.31]

pp. 32 – 33

pp 34 – 35

pp. 36 – 37

The news cutting at the bottom of page 36 (see above) is concerning the case of William Pate, a Finsbury Park man who was a sadistic abductor and rapist of young boys. During 1978 a cross-party group of MPs had successfully campaigned for his release.

pp. 38 – 39

pp. 40 – 41

pp. 42 – 43

pp. 44 – 45

“Our case therefore adds up to a demand for the abolition of the age of consent in conjunction with major changes to rape laws. There are obviously special considerations that should be taken into account in terms of the trial of rapists of young children. It might be thought that a child of five would be unable to withstand cross examination in the witness box before a conviction can be secured, but freed of adult pressure, children of all ages are quite capable of deciding what constitutes rape. It is after all a violent and painful experience, and one way of alleviating unpleasant and unneccessary pressure, would be to have the court run by children. If it s a case of justice for children, then it is they who should be instrumental in its procuration. Many adults claim children to be incapable of such action. Those same adults who claim children are innocents in need of protection also call for a ‘short sharp shock’ to deal with those nasty youth who disobey adults. If five year old children can take on the militarily superior forces of the occupying British Army in the streets of Belfast, or Apartheid in the ghettos of Soweto, then the only people who have anything to fear are the oppressors.”

pp. 46 – 47

pp. 48 – 49

pp 50 – 51

PIE’s Practice

CAPM critique of PIE was that instead of seeking alliances with the sexual political movements and the left it was focused on demanding “a series of reforms” through:

(a) “rational argument”; and

(b) “vigorous lobbying of the powers that be”

“Blinded by its optimism towards the state and their attachment to the most awful kinds of publicity, they were unable to perceive that from the state’s point of view, they were easy meat.”

p.50 Gay News front page covering ‘The Vilest Men in Britain’ Sunday People headline with ‘They used deceit to smash men’s lives’

pp. 52 – 53

“Clearly then, pornography and obscenity laws play an important role in the way in which the state brings cases against paedophiles. This applies to the coming trial of the PIE five. Despite the fact that none of the defendants have been accused of playing any part in the production or distribution of pornogrpahy, pornographic material will play a central part in the trial, both at the level of evidence and media coverage.

Pornography is distinguished from other representations of sexuality by its function rather than by its content of social effects. This function is to make profit from the production and/or distribution of images by virtue of their powers of sexual stimulation. Clearly pornography is not restricted to illicit magazines or blue films. It is to be found in the popular press, on advertising hoardings, films on general release, television and so on. Sexual stimulation is a central motif of the market place.

This transformation of a part of human existence and activity into a commodity, a saleable object, is clearly reprehensible. It stands condemned along with capital as a whole, by virtue of the part it plays in dehumanising social relations.

Pornography material can, however, have social effects which go beyond those defined by its function as a commodity or vehicle for commodities. These effects are determined by the relationship between the particular images and the hierarchical sexual power relations which exist in society. Thus there is a vast difference between the social significance of straight porn, gay porn, paedophile porn and the precise nature of the representations involved.

The significance of straight porn, for the consumption of heterosexual men has been well documented by the Women’s Movement. Its role in reinforcing male dominance is unquestionable and there much evidence to suggest that its incidence can be directly correlated with that of rape. There should be nothing very surprising about this.

So now we come to the question of paedophile pornography. To start with a distinction has to be made between those pornographic representations of children produced for general popular consumption and those which are produced for people conscious of being paedophile.

The former is more rampant than people admit and normally untouched by the state. From films like Pretty Baby and Little Darlings through ads like Elliot boots, to a million, apparently ‘innocent’ adverts adorned with pretty children. The danger lies in the fact that the sex objects are presented simultaneously with the social taboo on child sexuality and paedophilia.

Pornographic material designed specifically for paedophiles, is of course, illegal. While it does not share the same dangers as does the daily barrage of ‘normal’ child pornography, it remains sexist and negative. When consumed by adults it is not essentially subversive even if it conflicts with the value of the status quo. Nevertheless it must be pointed that adult consumers of this material cannot be regarded in the same light as adult gay or straight porn consumers. Sex between adults is legal to a point. The motivations of these consumers is therefore immediately suspect. The charge of unquestioning sexism is immediately suggested and is (probably) justified. For paedophiles, pornography may represent the only assertion of identity, the one confident statement in an otherwise silent world, that child-adult sex can be a reality. It is a disgraceful tragedy that the porn merchants have a monopoly of the paed-positive expression, and that this is therefore grounded in commodity sex objectification.” [Chapter VII Pornography – pp. 53 – 55 – underline emphasis mine]

p.54 – 55

Two birthday cards are placed opposite one another with the comment “‘Nuff said”: A 5 year old’s birthday card and a birthday card saying “Happy Birthday Stick to Sex…it keeps you young!”

pp 56 – 57

“Right to an Independent Income

Over the past few years, many feminists have argued strongly for the rights of prostitutes. We unreservedly support this position. It is natural to ask whether or not these arguments can be extended to women how earn a living by posing for pornographic magazines and films, and if also, whether they apply to children.

The feminist defence of prostitutes has never been defence of prostitution. However, given the nature of this society, where women are expected to be sex objects with no autonomy, being house slaves into the bargain, and perhaps earning pin money from sweated labour as well, the life prostitutes takes on a different complexion from that of the institution of prostitution. Prostitutes demand money for services rendered, exercising some control over their sexuality even if that control is constructed wholly within the context of the market. They are using their sexuality to gain a degree of autonomy, of independence, potentially sabotaging the financial structures of male privilege.

It seems to us that the very same argument applies to women who sell their images to porn merchants. But it might be countered that by appearing in porn, those women are betraying all women in general; by participating in an operation which degrades women and encourages sexist attitudes and behaviour. In fact that argument can be used against prostitutes too. The men who use prostitutes have their sexist attitudes and behaviour reinforced. The fact that prostitutes are known to exist reinforces the predatory assumption of men in general.

Ultimately in this society, survival involves complicity between the oppressed and the oppressors; wages labourer and capitalist, the claimant and the state etc. The question is how, in the process of survival, do the oppressed obtain some autonomous space from which they can potentially challenge that social order? By being a housewife, by being a prostitute, or by being a pin up? All involve complicity with the oppressors, but the latter two, at least have the merit of establishing a relatively large independent income.

If these arguments are acceptable, then it is difficult to see why they don’t apply to children. Legally, children are not supposed to have any independent income whatsoever. It is crazy therefore to condemn the child prostitute or porn poseur, to say that those children should be in care or whatever. These children have struck out for independence. Of course, it is abhorrent that these are the only routes open to them. That only goes to show how oppressed children are at present.

Now there are grave dangers in this argument, of course. The logic might appear to lead towards a complete acceptance of child labour. Though we believe that the abolition of child labour in the 19th century to be the result of ruling class interest rather then genuine philanthropic liberalism, we have no wish to advocate a Dickensian world. Children should not have to be prostitutes, pin ups, or chimney sweeps to obtain an independent income. Money for material needs of children is available without there being child labour to make up for it. It is presently channelled through the family, either from the adult wage or by the state. It should be directly available to the child. The problem then, is not lack of resources but the capitalist social order, a problem whose familiarity faces all people. In the meantime however, we support any attempts by children to obtain an independent income.”

[Despite quoting statistics which said of 450 PIE members only 14 were women CAPM refuse to acknowledge that the majority of self-identifying paedophiles were also ‘predatory’ men]

pp. 59 – 60

“The Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM) exists to defend the PIE defendents (sic), and alert people to the dangers surrounding that trial. This pamphlet has been written to encourage some debate around the key political issues of the trial. To this end, certain arguments and positions have been put froward (sic) which are the view of the particular authors and the basis for the unity of the campaign as a whole. Involvement in CAPM does not necessarily mean agreement on such questions as the Age of Consent, the right of children to an independent income or other such questions. The authors believe however that these are vital to be argued for.” [P&PM, p.59]

Outer back cover

Little Angels? A letter to Socialist Challenge from Fallen Angel Tim Brown (October 1979)

The entire issue of Socialist Challenge can be found here . In 1986 Tim Brown would be thanked by Warren Middleton (John Parratt), PIE Executive Member, in the foreword of his book ‘Betrayal of Youth’ as ‘Tim Brown (formerly of CAPM)”. This letter was published during the month after Brown had attended the third meeting of Conspiracy Against Public Morals with Sandy Marks, Nettie Pollard (former NCCL Gay Rights Officer) and Barry Prothero (the then current NCCL Gay Rights Officer) who was Brown’s housemate at Davenant Road, N19 at the time.

Little angels?

In an article generally favourable to kids, David Holland’s “Whose Consent?” (20 September) was remarkably weak on paedophilia, To say that ‘cross generational sex is a side issue…’ (rather a silly euphemism for paedophile sex, aren’t sexual relations between a girl/boy of 16 and woman/man of 60 cross generational?) is plainly incorrect. Daughter/father relationships, lesbian/feminist custody cases, and child/mother relationships all in their various ways proclaim the prolific nature of paedophile relationships.

I find it amusing that David Holland should quote Lewis Carroll or Peter Pan as a ‘little angels idyll’ in contrast to the ‘savage’ attacks on children’s sexuality taking place outside the playhouse. Both J.M. Barrie and Carroll were paedophiles, and tolerated as such as the medium by which the Victorian middle classes came to terms with the existence of, and their cravings for, sexual children. Under age sexuality was recognised and wrapped up in a cloying innocence. Embedded in Peter Pan is the image of the paedophile as an immature adult, ‘the person who never grew up’, and that image embodies many deep felt – but denied – fantasies that adults have for children.

Paedophiles are adults who love children. The number of adults who love children is immense. But the number of paedophiles…?

Well, just stop for a moment and muse over parent/child relationships. Pretty mundane, you might say. But if I were to turn up on your doorstep dear (adult) reader, and strike up a similar relationship with ‘your’ child, how long would it be before I was being carted off to the local nick with perhaps ten years (or much more) inside after the court case?

And what if dear ‘little x’ decided to go to Paris with me for a dirty weekend? Or forever? So much for biological parenthood. (This paragraph constitutes a Conspiracy Corrupt Public Morals, so please regard it in a hypothetical light… until it happens.)

Show me an adult who is not a paedophile. Then I’ll join Mary Whitehouse and believe in immorality. Sex with children is wonderful and can be highly recommended to all SC readers. (Oops! Another Conspiracy to Corrupt.) Children are wonderful they should not be subjected to any kind of guilt trip or legal shit about their bodies and their sexuality. It is theirs and nobody else’s. Tim Brown, London N19

Fallen Angels: Paedophilia – Summary Submission to the ILGA Conference, Barcelona 1980

In their shorter paper the Fallen Angels want to persuade ILGA’s Second Annual Conference they must overcome a crucial barrier to “the emergence of an effective sexual-political practice” between adults and children. The Fallen Angels view themselves as here to provide a corrective intervention to the gay rights and women’s liberation movements on their support for paedophiles.

‘The emergence of an effective sexual-political practice’ appears to refer to the lack of inclusion for paedophile rights and children’s rights by the gay rights and women’s liberation movements. Without paedophile rights and children’s rights (defined as two sides of the same coin by the Fallen Angels) there can be no cohesive ‘sexual-political practice’

This ‘barrier’ to including paedophile rights had been created by:

(A) a more general/overall failure to develop a critique of adult-child relations,^⁠ and of the historical construction of the ‘adult’ and the ‘child’ coupled with^⁠

(B) the reluctance of the gay movement to establish solidarity with young people in their struggles against ageism^⁠

So the Fallen Angels took it upon themselves to call the Gay Movement to account, their final three sentences underlined concluding their case.

“The question is whether gay complicity in the oppression of children and pedophiles is to persist”
“The ILGA must acknowledge adult-child relations as crucial to the development of a coherent sexual politics.”
“We demand the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations.”

The age of consent should not be accepted as related to puberty in any sense.

“What we are saying is that the gay movement can no more accept physiological maturity as determining sexuality than it can afford to accept biological gender as determining social destiny.”

p.1

“It is no longer sufficient to take refuge in the denial that the origins of homosexuality are anything but imponderable or irrelevant. Our gayness is invalidated through the concepts of childhood and of the corruptibility of children. It is time we asserted the validity of the choices and refusals we made as children. It is high time we began to defend the right of all children to sexual self-determination.”

A recurrent theme for the Fallen Angels (appearing in CAPM Paedophilia & Public Morals and their longer submission to ILGA, as well as Tim Brown’s individual writings) was that despite CAPM asserting PIE’s female membership as at only 14 in total amongst 450 men, women are the most isolated of paedophiles and that they as mothers, lesbian or heterosexual, can be paedophiles too. Women should make common cause with paedophiles because it would assist with breaking down expectations of and stereotypes surrounding women and motherhood which hold back women’s liberation.

1. Mother and Child

We want to suggest ways in which paedophilia bears on women’s struggles: –

i) ‘Legitimation’ of children’s sexual desire (i.e. pre-genital). In opposing male penetration sex. In opposing the ’tyranny of orgasmic sexuality’

ii) In breaking down the male image of the woman as mother. In asserting the sexual component in mother-child relations

iii) In understanding the structural role of the mother in reproducing social gender divisions, and the whole sex-gender system

iv) In examining how age of consent laws do not ‘protect’ children, they operate to isolate ‘promiscuous’ girls and justify their ‘treatment’.

v) In denying the corruptibility of children. (Concern for the fate of male children – and the laws are mainly intended to insulate boys – requires that the ‘overbearin’ or ‘possessive’ mother be invented, virtually acknowledging the sexuality of women, and that she be guilty, by a kind of active negligence, of what the male paedophile achieves by direct intervention, the corruption of the child.

Fallen Angels consider that the gay movement has have drifted from its early inclusion of paedophile rights as gay rights. They are holding a self-righteous mirror up to the gay movement and accusing them of hypocrisy: “gay men have effectively betrayed children, they have betrayed their own childhoods, and they have betrayed the possibilities of the early gay movement.”

The Albany Trust’s lacklustre victory in only achieving partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 with the age of consent set at 21 is perceived as ‘selling-out’ — not for failing to achieve parity with the heterosexual age of consent — but for any age of consent being imposed at all.

“In frantically disassociating themselves from ‘child-molestors’, once the price of toleration had been made clear to them (in Britain through the 1967 Act), and in their anxiety to deny the characterisation of homosexual desire as infantile or fixated, gay men have effectively betrayed children, they have betrayed their own childhoods, and they have betrayed the possibilities of the early gay movement. The hypocrisy of that betrayal is demonstrated by their subsequent selective appropriation of pedophile culture, by the images of children still typically reproduced in gay male press, and by the continuing fetishising of youth. The child survives only in the form of the youth whose submission to the strong man amounts to the assertion of the patriarchal principle unalloyed.

Gay men have disassociated themselves from those who would prey on little boys; unfortunately it is not so easy for those of us who are male pedophiles to disassociate ourselves from those gay men who aspire to be ‘good’ fathers and ‘good’ teachers, whose complicity in the oppression of children, in fulfilling the paternal or didactic functions, cannot be neutralised by any alternative practice within those established roles. But there are no doubt gay men who are sincere in denying any interest in children. How else could that particular strain in gay male culture have arisen, that celebration of gayness as hedonism and the unrestricted pursuit of pleasure, had not a substantial number of gay men been prepared to abandon to women — alone and together — the task of re-examining child-rearing practices and the painful exploration of alternatives?”

The Fallen Angels’ own commitment to male paedophiles providing child care is reflected in their call to Conference (which was passed) to provide a men-only staffed creche at the next IGA meeting.

3. The Child Protection Racket

The Fallen Angels criticise the National Children’s Bureau (where astonishingly Marks is briefly a Director from 29 November 1994 – 1 July 1995 for 7 months) for, in their view, increasingly denouncing the Women’s Movement and joining sides with the reactionary moral forces who ‘adopt the ideology of protection to defend the institutions of control’ under the guise of what the Fallen Angels call ‘the Child Protection Racket’.

“3. The Child Protection Racket: The racket is not confined to the emergent or growing organisations expressly concerned with the protection of youth; it also involves longer established groups who are similarly prepared to adopt the ideology of protection to defend the institutions of control. In Britain, where for example the National Children’s Bureau and ‘Families Need Fathers’ increasingly denounce the Women’s Movement as posing the principal threat to the family and to the child, the co-ordination between reactionary moral forces is perhaps particularly disturbing, but we are aware of parallel development internationally. It is important to remember that these groups are not anxious to end the general exploitation of child labour nor of course to challenge the oppression of children without existing institutions, but simply to isolate and eradicate what they see as posing a threat to the existing mode of exploitation.”

Five members of the Pedophile Information Exchange in Britain, who have already barely survived a virulent campaign of denunciation from the yellow press, are now facing charges under an archaic conspiracy law, not because they have committed any offences ‘against’ children — in fact the police are overlooking several substantive offences in order to obtain witnesses to the supposed conspiracy — but because the existence of a pedophile organisation cannot be tolerated. But even the existence of self-identifying pedophile groups has not deflected antagonism from the gay movement. It seems evidence to us that any effective interventions by gay people in support of the child’s autonomy and contrary to orthodox socialisation, contrary to the rigidification of gender roles let alone straight sexuality, will be deemed by the right a corrupting and depraving interference . And yet, to secure the objectives of gay liberation we make such interventions.”

The Fallen Angels viewed the press exposes of PIE as ‘a virulent campaign of denunciation from the yellow press’ and claim knowledge of inside information of prosecution witness deals with ‘police overlooking several substantive offences’ to provide statements as to the ‘supposed consiracy’.

Before demanding “the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations” Fallen Angels finish by attempting a rebuttal to three criticisms made of paedophilia:

“i) Pedophilia is dismissed as inevitably exploitative, given the power of adults over children. But, given that power, we insist that adults examine their existing relations with children, and the ways in which all adults rationalise their own pedophilia, while dismissing and silencing the child’s eroticism.

ii) Pedophilia is ageist and obsessive. But this is patently absurd – unless gayness is seen as ageist and obsessive. Pedophilia is expected to account for its origins, but a minimum account of the ‘origins’ of homosexuality must involve coming to terms with the forms of pre-genital desire, of non-reproductive sex, which entails a challenge to the differentiated sexualities of adult and child

iii) Integrating pedophile demands is likely to be too costly to the gay movement. But how can an effective strategy be formulated in opposition to the whole sex-gender system and the reproduction of capitalist patriarchal relations, if we persistently evade the adults responses to, and construction of, the child’s sexuality.”

IGA Conference April 1980: The Fallen Angels take PIE’s fight to Barcelona

Building on the articles published in May 2017 by the Islington Gazette, this post (and others to follow) give further detail on the documents Fallen Angels produced. First read (and watch) below:

In 1994 the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) would eventually vote to remove three paedophile rights groups (from the US and Netherlands) from their ranks. The UN had threatened to revoke ILGA’s NGO status and funding along with it. But 14 years earlier it had been a British group of pro-paedophile rights activists calling themselves the Fallen Angels that had first demanded IGA (as it was then) defend paedophiles rights and abolish the age of consent.

In April 1980 at the IGA’s second annual conference the Fallen Angels had a choice of sessions to attend at which they could raise their arguments for gay and women’s rights campaigners to back paedophile rights before attempting a push in plenary for an overall vote. At the time, five PIE Executive Committee members were awaiting trial and had handed in their passports as part of their bail conditions and so were unable to appear in person to rally international support.

Eight months’ prior to the IGA Conference in Catalonia, a PIE legal defence campaign had formed almost as soon as the arrests had taken place. Future Fallen Angel Tim Brown, then of the London Gay Activists Alliance, wrote a lurid defence of paedophiles titled “Caged Anger. The Prosecutions of Paedophiles.” and circulated it at the CHE Annual Conference.

With sufficient promotion by various individuals at CHE’s Annual Conference (held over the August Bank Holiday in Nottingham) the movement to defend PIE’s Executive Members blossomed into the Conspiracy Against Public Morals (CAPM – also referred to by members as the Campaign Against Public Morals Committee) but divisions over publicity and campaigning style between the PIE defendants and the more militant members such as Fallen Angels would eventually lead to PIE denouncing the Fallen Angels.

Some members of the Angels had their roots in the Gay News Defence Fund and its successor Gay Activists Alliance which meant they wanted to focus their energies on public demonstrations and ‘zaps’, which jarred with the reporting restrictions placed at the three PIE committal hearings and the legal advice to the accused to defend the case on a civil liberties basis: freedom of association and speech for paedophiles. Here’s a letter from Tim Brown to Socialist Challenge written shortly after CAPM’s third meeting.

The IGA newsletter covering the Conference provided a report from the Workshops – one specifically on Pedophilia and Age of Consent and others on Political Action (Pending & Forthcoming).

To support their proposals to conference they circulated 3 documents:

A summary submission “We demand the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations.”
A 10,000 word paper entitled ‘Corrupting Children: Children, Paedophilia and the struggle Women’s and Gay Liberation’ (blog post to follow shortly)
’Tots on the March’ – the London Gay Activists Alliance submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (RCCP) dated August 1979, signed off with “Gay love and paedophile kisses, or paedophile love and gay kisses to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, from the London Gay Activists Alliance.” (blog post to follow shortly)

The Angels won the support of conference to call for the abolition of age of consent laws as oppressive and for the discussion on ‘pedosexuality’ (as paedophilia was now being called to further enhance its legitimacy as a sexual orientation rather than a paraphilia or child abuse) to progress within the member organisations to report back to the IGA Information Secretariat run by Edmund Lynch in Dublin.

p.14 PLENARY SESSIONS

6. Workshop C2: Pedophilia and Age of Consent

After reports from the Women’s Caucus’ discussion on the subject and from the Workshop the meeting discussed on the following draft resolution, which is an amended resolution as put forward by F-48 and COC:

1. Believing that all individuals should have the right to sexual self-determination irrespecitve of gender or age;

Considering that age of consent laws operate to oppress and not to protect;

This Conference calls for the abolition of all such laws.

Note: the concept of self-determination requires and demands laws to ensure that no individuals are coerced into sexual relations against their will.

2. Considering that paedophilia is, within member organizations, seen as a very complicated, highly emotive subject with far-reaching implications, about which is it not easy to reach a simple consensus;

Considering that our opponents use arguments concerning pedophilia against the idea of homosexual liberation;

Considering the possible consequences of a legal age of consent for the development of a gay and lesbian identity;

Considering that the legal use of the concept of ‘age of consent’ is often a fiction because it suggests that real consent cannot be given under a certain age;

Considering the need, especially for women, for protection against sexual violence;

Considering the place liberation of pedosexuality takes in the whole of sexual liberation;

Considering our distinctive ability, derived from our experience of oppression as gay men and lesbian women, to contribute to the discussion of the liberation of pedosexuality

3. It is resolved to continue discussion on the subject within IGA and to ask members to pursue a discussion on pedophilia within their own organization. Member organizations are requested to teel (sic ) the Information Secretariat (or other member-organization) directly of results of discussions and actions.

Bill George (COC/CHE) proposes to insert the word ‘fictitious’ before ‘age of consent’, discussion about this resulted in the line:

‘Considering that the legal use…’ Considerations of the draft-resolution are accepted.

Discussion of 1 “Believing…’ Shane Enright (SHRG) proposed this recommendation be for the study of the question of age of consent. David Russell (NGRC- NZ/COC) proposed: This Conference urges member-groups to study whether or not to adopt the policy of abolition of all such laws” The Chair then proposed a straw-vote on “Whether or not to study and adopt the policy…”

The proposal was supported with a large majority, four people voted against and Peter Ashman (CHE) asked to record in the minutes that CHE voted against. It was resumed that COC will gather information and sent it out in order to continue the discussion on pedophilia.

The Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s (CHE) refusal to vote for the age of consent as a fiction or embrace ‘pedosexuality’ was noted by attendees, and not just for the record at IGA. It would later cause ructions amongst CHE and a push back from within the ranks for a more paedophile positive approach from CHE’s reluctant Executive Committee who rightly feared embracing paedophile liberation would damage CHE’s legitimate campaigning for parity with the heterosexual age of consent.

Fallen Angels were particularly scathing of groups like CHE and Albany Trust who they regarded as ‘reformist’ for lobbying piecemeal reductions in the age of consent when they considered it as oppressive to paedophile liberation and children’s liberation, campaigned for by them as two sides of the same coin.

7, Workship D1: Political Action (pending) and Workshop D2 (forthcoming)

Tim Brown (Fallen Angels) proposed a motion on the PIE Trial; Accepted

Barry Prothero (GAA) called for demonstrations outside British embassies abroad when the European Court of Justice’s decision on the NIGRA case is announced.

Following Barry Prothero’s successful February 1980 application for the paid role of NCCL Gay Rights Officer (replacing Nettie Pollard, PIE Member No. 70 who’d been voluntary since the lapse of the Penthouse grant) he was attending the IGA Conference as a representative of NCCL and the London Gay Activists Alliance. He and Tim ‘Paedophile Love & Kisses’ Brown shared a house together at Davenant Road, where Fallen Angels listed its HQ as on the delegates address list.

It is the last proposal from the Fallen Angels that strikes me as the most chilling. They demanded that at the next IGA conference a creche should be provided, staffed only by men, for the full participation of women in the conference. Coming from a group

[p.15]

CRECHE FACILITIES

1. The Second Annual Conerence of the International Gay Association notes the complete failure of the organisation to provide adequate creche facilities for children, together with the male expectation that women would be responsible for those children that did arrive.

2. Conference therefore censures the organisations for their example of outrageous sexist and ageist behaviour against children and women.

3. Conference therefore contacts the organizations of the next IGA Convention:

a) To provide a creche which is attractive to children and which fully provides for their needs; so that all potential delegates are able to bring children with them to thenext IGA Conference;

v) That the responsibility for the creche must be that of only men, so enabliing all women to fully participate in the Conference

Fallen Angels

After some discussion, the Convention accepted Proposal 3, but did not adopt Proposals 1 and 2

P. 15 IGA

1971-1975: Ivor Street, Icebreakers and PIE

Ivor Street, Icebreakers and PIE

A key clique to emerge out of the explosion of energy and activism created by the Gay Liberation Front during 1970-72 was The Counter-Psychiatry Group, emulating US West Coast groups formed in reaction to gay men and women treated as if they had a medical or psychological condition which could be expunged or made heterosexual with ‘treatment’ such as aversion therapy. Icebreakers, a gay counselling/befriending group would emerge from the Counter-Psychiatry group during 1972, under the leadership of 35 year old sociologist and lead Housing Development researcher at the Department of Environment, Michael J Burbidge.

One third of the founding twelve members of the NCCL Gay Rights Committee established in September 1974 already knew one another through Icebreakers:

Micky Burbidge (PIE Manifesto co-drafter);
Keith Hose (first PIE Chairman);
Nettie Pollard (NCCL Gay Rights Officer responsible for PIE and PAL’s affiliation with NCCL and PIE member); and
Anna Duhig

“In London the group formed around Elizabeth Wilson, herself a psychiatric social worker with previous experience of the anti-pysychiatry theories and writings of RD Laing. The original lists of GLF members interested in the group survive and show twenty-eight names including Elizabeth, Mary, Jeffrey Weeks, Micky Burbidge and David Hutter, all of whom were to be centrally involved in its writings, actions and spin-off groups.” [No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.42]

“Version therapy (usually electric shock treatment) was such a major issue because it was the publicly accepted way of dealing with homosexuality. I knew that I was gay in 1962 and decided that I didn’t want to be. I read an article about a man who did aversion therapy for homosexuals and I wrote to him asking for therapy. He had a long waiting list, so nothing happened. Then I read a story in the paper about a man who had aversion therapy to make him fall out of love with the wrong woman and I suddenly realised that it was awful to think of switching off loving feelings by shock treatment. There had to be another way of dealing with it. That totally changed my mind and I decided that I wanted to be what I was, after all.” (Micky Burbidge, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.93)

Nettie Pollard and Micky Burbidge

“I was in the Counter-Psychiatry Group with Micky and others. I helped to organise a conference at the London School of Economics in Autumn 1971 — Homosexual Oppression? Freedom? Mary McIntosh spoke on abolishing the age of consent and people from outside, like doctors, came along.” (Nettie Pollard, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.97)

“My best friend who was called Jake read about it in the Daily Mirror in April 1971 and we went along. It was in Middle Earth. I was straight then. Bruce Wood was there and Ted Brown, Micky Burbidge. Elizabeth Wilson got up and told everybody about the Women’s Group and what they were doing…The second week I went, there was an argument about intergenerational issues. It was seen as an issue of solidarity — people wanted to help anyone oppressed by the state. I felt that I could identify with it even as straight, because it was about sexual liberation and not gay rights, it was involve with women’s liberation and gender roles and so on. There was lots of debate about what gay meant — did it conclude transvestites and transsexuals, anyone who didn’t fit in.” (Nettie Pollard, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.69)

“I knew some other gays through cottaging. People I met this way would ask ‘are you active or passive’ and there were a lot of self-denigrating attitudes. I was very relieved when I finally found out that you didn’t have to be one or the other. I saw a poster in Compendium for the first meeting and I thought it was incredible, I wanted to go but I was afraid to walk into a room full of openly gay people. It was Jeffrey [Weeks] who insisted I go to GLF, we were friends.” (Micky Burbidge) [No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.24]

During 1971, at the height of GLF’s wave of liberation, Micky Burbidge could fill the neo-gothic rafters of All Saint’s Church Hall in Notting Hill with an outraged crowd, sickened to hear of electric shocks and chemical castration.

By 1972 the Counter-Psychiatry Group had become a regular Sunday evening meet-up at 24 Ivor Street, Camden, NW1, where Micky shared a house with a 24 year old Scottish soon to be drama student Angus Suttie and 27 year old Jeffrey Weeks.

“Counter-Psychiatry Group later after long vicissitudes went in different directions. Mary got involved in the Manifesto Group, so that was like the theoretical bit of the group. Some us, myself, David Hutter, set up a small group who produced the pamphlets…Another wing moved in to what became Icebreakers. We worked on Psychiatry and the Homosexual from September 1971 into 1972. The group moved around and part of the rota was Ivor Street where Micky, Angus and I lived at the time. One particular meeting, I remember, we discussed the way forward and I suggested the pamphlet. One subgroup formed to do that, another talked about the helpline which became Icrebreakers and we just evolved in different directions and went on meeting separately. The group as such faded away and its energies went into the subgroups.” (Jeffrey Weeks No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.99)

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On occasion the Counter-Psychiatry Group would meet elsewhere, as when Nettie Pollard (who 2 years later would become a founding member of NCCL Gay Rights Committee alongside Micky Burbidge; and PIE member #70) hosted it at her home, as on Sunday 8th October 1972:

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In line with the Counter-Psychiatry Group’s thinking on and rejection of medical experts’ opinions on homosexuality, a new counselling/befriending group called Icebreakers began to emerge who believed there were no better or additional qualifications necessary to counsel gay people other than the counsellor being gay and out themselves. This put the group’s attitude to counselling at odds with the Albany Trust’s more conservative approach and Antony Grey’s emphasis on professionalism and concern to associate himself professional counselling bodies.

On Tuesday 7 March 1972 the first few members of a proposed Ice Breaking Group gathered at Micky Burbidge’s address at 24 Ivor Street to discuss how best to help the most isolated gay people to come out.

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1973-74: Phoney Bishop of Gleaves once housed Icebreakers

During 1973-1974 the Icebreakers crystallised into a collective of just over 20 gay men and 2 women on a rota answering a phone every evening between 7.30pm and 10.30pm. Keith Hose [PIE’s first Chairman] became a ‘prominent member of Icebreakers‘ and Anna Duhig, another founding member of NCCL Gay Rights Committee also joined Burbidge’s Icebreakers.

Surprisingly, considering Icebreakers had formed out of the GLF, the Icebreakers phone wasn’t at the GLF centre on Railton Road but instead was installed at one of the Bishop of Gleaves’ hostels on Branksome Road in Brixton [see further on the murder of Billy Two-Tone and TV documentary Johnny Go Home, Gleaves’ associate Malcolm Raywood as co-defendant with Charles Hornby in the Playland Trial].

Gay News

However, it soon became apparent that Gleaves was answering the phone himself and directing teenagers and young men looking for support from Icebreakers to come and stay at one of his hostels. Lambeth Council had started asking questions about a ‘male brothel run by priests’. Only 3-4 years previously in November 1970 had a group of men been found guilty of prostituting and sexually abusing children in a flat on Solon Road, moments from Branksome Road. Gay News reported Icebreakers had swiftly severed links with Gleaves and moved in to the South London Gay Centre on Railton Road, Brixton instead.

Gay News No 76 p.4 [1976]

By Icebreakers 3^rd year it reported it had received 4, 417 calls –

1 in 7 were women; [631] 14.2%

1 in 11 married or divorced; [402] 9.1%

1 in 9 were under 21; [490] 11%

Just under 1 in 20 were transvestites; [220] 4.9%

19 calls were from transsexuals; 0.43%

52 calls were from paedophiles = 1.18%

March 1975 Ivor Street, Camden: PIE’s London Inauguration

Three years after Icebreakers’ first meeting, the first official London meeting of PIE also took place at an address in Ivor Street. Michael Hanson resigned and a young graduate from Hull University who had led the university’s Sexual Liberation Society, Keith Hose, was elected as Chairman.

During autumn that same year Micky Burbidge and Keith Hose would work together swiftly to produce the Paedophile Information Exchange’s response to the Criminal Law Revision Committee consultation. Together Burbidge and Hose would propose the abolition of the age of consent and the decriminalisation of ‘consensual’ sexual activity with children. Despite deploring the trauma of courtroom appearances for children as a reason for decriminalisation, the civil system of injunctions they proposed to replace it meant children (with no distinction made for pre-verbal and non-verbal children in their lack of ability to voice consent) would still be required to give evidence in court, the only difference being that it would a civil court rather than a criminal court.

It is unknown whether PIE’s London inauguration gathered at Micky Burbidge’s address at no 24 on Ivor Street in Camden or whether there happened to be another house on this short street where a gathering of pro-paedophile activists would have been welcomed.

“It was Martin also, who along with Keith Hose presided over the PIE gathering at London’s Ivor Street in March – with the object of initiating London PIE meetings.”

PIE Newsletter (No.6) 1975, p.4

In just 2.5 years Micky Burbidge had nurtured Icebreakers into a small clique who met regularly for consciousness-raising sessions in between taking calls from mostly men and boys aged 14 to 70.

Within six months of Keith Hose’s election as PIE Chairman and PIE’s inaugural London meeting at Ivor Street, Burbidge wrote into the Guardian to defend Hose against John Torode’s London Letter column of 28 August 1975. Torode had obtained a copy of the PIE leaflet circulated by Hose at the Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s 3rd Annual Conference in Sheffield and commented:

“In short we are talking about poor, sad, perverted adults who take pleasure in having it off with children too young to know what they are doing and why. People who need medical treatment rather than sneering persecution, no doubt. But above all, people who need to be kept away from your kids and mine.”

The suggestion of paedophiles as needing medical treatment conflicted with Burbidge’s belief that the categorisation of paedophilia as a psychiatric disorder was as wrong as homosexuality’s categorisation as a psychiatric disorder and should be campaigned for alongside homosexuality under the umbrella definition of ‘sexual orientation’. Instead, Burbidge argued,

“The ‘harm’ which sometimes is associated with paedophilic (sic) relationships is real enough: it stems from the bigoted reactions of adults, from the hounding and interrogation of younger partners by the police and others, and from the intense feelings of guilt and anxiety which distort relationships.”

The Guardian, Letters to the Editor Sep 3, 1975 p10

On 3rd January 1976 Keith Hose, when writing to Mary McIntosh (a Home Office policy advisor) to offer an early copy of the PIE Submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure he and Micky Burbidge had drafted, emphasised that mutual friends Jeffrey Weeks and Nettie Pollard had advised him to get in touch.

In spring 1976 Angus Suttie, Burbidge’s housemate at Ivor Street, wrote an article for Gay Left (launched as “A Socialist Journal produced by Gay Men” the previous autumn): “From Latent to Blatant: A personal account”. Suttie’s partner and housemate Jeffrey Weeks, [then Chair of the Charing Cross Branch of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS)] had co-founded the journal.

‘The branch and Tony Kelly’ by Jeffrey Weeks, Letters to The Guardian ” 5 May 1976 p.12

In his personal account of coming out, Suttie wrote of the ambivalence he felt towards his sexually predatory scout master who molested him when he was only 10 years old; “to be gay or paedophile was to be a pariah and delight would be taken in making one aware of one’s outcastness”. For Suttie, despite recognising he’d felt no sexual attraction towards the scoutmaster as a 10 year old and that the experience was not ‘mutually pleasing”, the iniquity of society’s treatment of gays and paedophiles was suffered side by side.

“I at this time hadn’t reached puberty yet and all that was involved was tickling and stroking one another’s genitals, but on every occasion I felt dirty and guilty, so much so that I left the scouts and joined another troup. I had received enjoyment from the contact but I felt no attraction from the scoutmaster and I would think longingly of some of the other scouts with whom I would have much preferred a mutually pleasing sexual relationship.”

Perhaps for Weeks, it was the combination of his lifelong friendship with pro-paedophile activist Micky Burbidge with whom he lived for many years and his romantic relationship with Angus Suttie, which blurred his vision when writing of paedophilia ‘and its controversial, if contested, overlap with child sex abuse.’

Paedophiliac ‘relationships’ were only ever contested as not abusive by pro-paedophile activists arguing for the abolition of the age of consent and the decriminalisation of sexual activities children had ‘consented’ to. Unfortunately those activists or apologists never really got round to explaining how non-verbal or pre-verbal children could consent, or indeed, prove that they hadn’t, without a statutory age of consent to protect them.

Sexuality by Jeffrey Weeks, p.76, first published in 1986

3 PIE Founders Righton Coulson & Dunn help launch NUS Gay Rights Campaign [20.10.1973]

On Saturday 20th October 1973, 12 months prior to founding the Paedophile Information Exchange two of its earliest members — Peter Righton – #51 and Dr Michael Coulson – #2 — came together to help the National Union of Students (NUS) launch its Gay Rights’ Campaign at its inaugural conference in Bristol.

In the audience of the Anson room, ready to join the afternoon’s workshops to inspire a new generation of University Gay Society leaders was Ian Dunn, another pivotal PIE founding member (and partner of Dr Michael Coulson) and, although no individual names are given, Hull University’s Sexual Liberation Society is listed as sending delegates. Keith Hose, who would become PIE’s first Chairman mid-1975, was the contact point in 1972’s first edition of Gay News for the SLS at Hull.

Almost a year to the day before the first advert for PIE would appear in Gay News, Bristol University’s Student Union President Trevor Locke had managed to gather in one room at least three, (Righton, Coulson and Dunn) if not four (Keith Hose) pro-paedophile activists who would shortly become PIE’s leading lights.

NUS Gay Rights Conference, October 20th 1973, Trevor Locke’s 2nd Edition, September 1973

Although Trevor originally billed Righton as speaking on behalf of ACCESS on the topic of ‘Counselling homosexuals’, by the 3rd and final edition of the delegates’ pack Righton’s title appeared as ‘Head, Children’s Centre, National Children’s Bureau’

While the CHE Legal Reform Committee was seeking students studying Law or Sociology (Locke’s area of study) to assist with their work, Locke was keen to offer his own legal assistance to students directly: “Additionally if you are in trouble with the law please contact me as I might be able to help you.”

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Locke’s offer of support for those in trouble with the law was much appreciated by Peter Chapman, a 45 year old Bristol man charged with indecent assault on a 15 year old boy. Chapman wrote into Gay News to thank him and report he had received a £50 fine appearing at Bristol Magistrates’ Court on 3 December 1974.

Gay News No 63 Jan – Feb 1975

Although Locke had pencilled in a lawyer to speak on Law Reform to the NUS Conference, at some point during September/early October it was decided that Edinburgh University’s Professor of Sanskrit Dr Michael Coulson (1) would speak on law reform, and Coulson raised an important point about how it would be achieved:

“The removal of legal injustices towards Gays can only be achieved by Parliamentary enactment, and that is only possible if MPs want it. In the last resort, therefore a law reform campaign is a campaign of pressure upon MPs, whether in their private capacity or as members of a government.”

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Did other PIE members agree with PIE Member No 2 about placing pressure on MPs in their private lives before his abrupt suicide in October 1975?

(1) Further reading on PIE Member No. 2: Dr Michael Coulson, Professor of Sanskrit at University of Edinburgh, Chairman of Scottish Minorities Group (responsible for campaigns and lobbying) and Ian Dunn’s first adult relationship, who commits suicide on 16 October 1975 and in a PIE Newsletter obituary is revealed as PIE member No.2