Liking this discussion....

....and always liking what Sicky has to say. But I don't think NAMBLA insisted on boylove as an orientation, at least during the time I am most familiar with. Despite its reputation the group was minimalist in the sense of refusing to adopt positions that would have been divisive in the boylove community at the time. (Other than the position that there should be an open organization at all, which of course was and remains divisive.) Your stigmatization of the entire discourse of orientation as oppressive is intriguing. It does readily lend itself to a narrative of victimology. I feel I both chose and did not choose to be a boylover. I encountered feelings, and I welcomed them. I don't remember having had much choice, but I did welcome them, even if only in secret. I knew at an early age that was where my heart lay. But in an era in which VirPed -- all orientation and no autonomy, no choice, no joy in what you are -- is the new version of NAMBLA, I can see that orientation's denial of autonomy is a handicap to be reckoned with. Many of us in NAMBLA would have said we proudly chose to be boylovers. We aspired to that, perhaps. It was the fashion of the times to say such things. I think NAMBLA suffered more from a discourse of choice and autonomy -- we actually claimed a boylover was something one could be proud and happy to be! -- than from a retreat behind the screen of orientation. But the discourse of orientation expresses for us the degree of choice we did not have, and that lack of choice is an important shared experience for us. It is immature, to be sure, to cry, "I didn't ask to be born this way," but cry thus we sometimes must. I don't foresee a unifying movement of boylovers that refuses to acknowledge that we encountered sexuality and reacted authentically and in conformity with our deep natures, amounting (really) to having been seized by a truth. We became boylovers because the beauty, desirability and lovability of boys was, for us, beyond dispute. Pretending otherwise to others was a struggle, pretending otherwise to ourselves..... Yet I agree in the hands of VirPed orientation has become confession and appeal for mercy, and mercy is not forthcoming. Sicky is right. Whatever the case about NAMBLA, today's BLs can't hide behind orientation without playing VirPed's losing game. So let's get off that wagon, guys. hugzu ;-p