You're right.

I wasn't in Boston when NAMBLA was founded, but I know people who were at that famous meeting at the Arlington Street Church. And of course you're right -- NAMBLA was founded as a response to a prosecutorial witchhunt in the Boston area (if I'm not mistaken, the Boston-Boise Committee was a direct institutional predecessor -- for those of you not up on the history, a similar witchhunt had occurred some years earlier in Boise, Idaho -- thus the name.) That witchhunt itself seems to have been caused at least indirectly by gay liberation -- the cops were being cut off from getting their jollies by busting queens in toilets so they were turning to peds insteadl I stumbled recently onto an old copy of Edmund White's States of Desire. You've probably read it. For those who haven't, it is a sort of diary of "travels in Gay America" (the subtitle). Makes fascinating reading; portrait of a vanished age (pre-AIDS America). The book is organized by location -- chapter on New York, chapter on Seattle and Portland, chapter on Chicago and so forth. His last two chapters are on Boston and Washington and he goes into all the debates within the "gay" community on the emergence of NAMBLA and what to do about pederasty -- the Washington people saying that for political reasons, the gays have to dump the peds. SR