In 1989, in an article in Parade, Andrew Vachss wrote, "Pedophiles are not 'homosexuals.' We would not call a man who molested a five-year-old girl a 'heterosexual.' Whatever the sex of the adult and the child, the proper description is simple: the adult is the perpetrator, the child is the victim."

Those words were radical at the time, but are simply logical now. So what's the difference? In 1989, if there were a lot of people thinking it, they weren't saying it very loud. Now the gay community is shouting this fundamental truth, and exposing child rapists for what they are. In 2002, when the New York state senate unanimously voted in a bill requiring church officials to report child sex abuse involving clergy, Sen. Thomas Duane, the senate's only openly gay member, said the target of the law must be pedophiles, not gay people. "Gay people are not pedophiles," he said. "Pedophiles are pedophiles, and the vast majority of them are heterosexuals." [N.Y. Senate Approves Clergy Bill," Advocate, March 28, 2002]

Later that same year, victims of predatory pedophile priests stood side by side with gay activists in Provincetown, Mass., in protest of the Vatican's claim that the child sexual abuse problem in the church is the fault of homosexual priests, according to The Boston Globe. "This has to do with justice," said Steve Lewis, 45, an abuse transcender who joined the protest. "This has to do with the rape and molestation of kids and young adults. [The protest] was to show a unity with the gay community so they didn't feel [the abuse] is a homosexual problem that has to be rooted out."

Even as far back as 1998, XY, a magazine about gay youth culture—and which advocates for the lowering of the age of consent—published an opinion piece by Karen Ocamb that included the following: "I watched the NAMBLA creeps rub their hands in glee. … These men aren't gay, and we mustn't let them co-opt our movement. … They are simply perverts who like to fuck children, using the gay community as a Trojan horse to storm the barricades of legitimacy." So what's the result of all this talk? According to Boston Magazine, "There are no more annual [NAMBLA] conventions, no more public appearances, no more city chapters, no more NAMBLA contingents in gay-pride marches, no more eager new recruits." ["Boy Crazy," Boston Magazine, May 2001]

It used to be that child abuse received no press coverage. It does now, and that leads some people to believe that "things are getting worse," that "society is going to hell." If the foregoing is any indication, we'd say things are getting better. Predators are [finally] being exposed for who they are. As Vachss wrote in Choice of Evil, "pedophiles have camouflaged themselves as 'gay activists' in order to use the old 'First they came for the Jews' canard to terrify gays into some 'common cause' nonsense." But the gay community isn't falling for the line. They've stood up, spoken out, and in so doing exposed the criminals to the truth. And the more we all speak the truth, the better things will continue to get.