Two boy-lovers sit at a small table in a boston coffee shop. The other, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, would soon become the most despised group of men in America. One, the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, is still a respected legal organization.
They formed a committee to defend the suspects in Revere and rally against police harassment. Staffers at Fag Rag, a now-defunct Boston-based radical gay paper, decided to fight back. In Toronto, police raided the city's gay newspaper after it published an article entitled “Men Loving Boys Loving Men.” From coast to coast, states began enacting tougher laws against child pornography, alluding to the need to protect children from the clutches of homosexual adults. In Florida, beauty queen Anita Bryant was pushing her “Save Our Children” campaign, spearheading the repeal of budding gay-rights ordinances. That moment aside, there was little to chuckle about that year for gays in general, and men who liked boys in particular. “I had sex when I was 8 with a man in the back of my grandfather's candy store in Revere, and I turned out okay,” Ginsberg declared before being hurried off-stage as the station cut to a commercial. During an interview on a Boston television station, poet and outspoken boy-lover Allen Ginsberg joked about the scandal. “It's surprising that no one has stumbled onto a 'sex ring' in Revere before this,” Frank Rose wrote in a 1978 Village Voice piece about the scandal.Įverybody was talking about the case, which led to the indictments of 24 men. Revere Beach, on the eastern fringes of this working-class city, was a notorious cruising ground for men and boys. In fact, man-boy relationships had been flourishing-not particularly secretly-for years in Revere. And Byrne had a way to catch them: A hotline people could call with anonymous tips about molesters. It was a stretch to call it a “ring,” but Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne declared that the arrests were just “the tip of the iceberg.” There had to be other perverted people in other wood-shingled houses. In June 1977, police arrested the house's owner and announced that it was the national headquarters of a sordid, pornographic sex ring. It was a normal house, the neighbors thought, until they learned that it wasn't. There were no naked boys loitering in the doorway, no drunken men stumbling in the back yard, no obvious signs of depravity. All of this was done quietly, because neighbors would later say that they didn't see or hear anything unusual coming from the house.