I’ve tried to explain my thoughts a few times about why (1) denying that “minor-attracted people” are the best people to determine the scope and nature of their relationship with children is not like (2) denying queer and trans people access to civil rights. Usually I splutter.

I’m generally pretty appalled by the people making these arguments, who seem to be in love with their own self-pity, and sure that sexual ethics begins and ends with the management of desire. And every one I’ve heard from *additionally* identifies as straight.

(One such subject, for example, describes himself as 70% straight man, 30% attracted to boys younger than 13. This person has never dated anyone their own age, nor, I suspect, ever had sex. What is his attachment to straightness as an identity?)

Str8 people figure queerness in terms of the ethical management of the self: what desire feels like if it is inconvenient or dangerous. Given such a framing, the comparison to “minor-attraction” seems reasonable: oops, I am tethered to a drive that propels me out of my ethos.

But it seems to me that framing queerness in terms of repression and its relief is the very thing Foucault cautions us against. And despite the felt violence of anti-queer/anti-trans violence, queerness is necessarily attached to a positive ends: wanting *that,* whatever it is.

Consider the film title “But I’m a Cheerleader!,” for example (a fabulous movie, obvi). From the str8 perspective, this sounds like “inconvenient desire”: I cannot help who I love, and it contradicts me, and I must manage this knowledge thru a libidinal economy of scarcity.

But we can read it the other way too, and indeed the movie does: what Natasha Lyonne learns is that being a dyke does not stop her from being a cheerleader. She succeeds in wooing Clea Duvall at the end not by suppressing her cheerleaderness, but by owning it.

It’s not “I can’t be a dyke... I’m a cheerleader!”

It’s “I may be a dyke, but I’m also a cheerleader!”

The relationship between queer desire and “minor attraction” shatters as soon as it encounters such queer joy; or, indeed, when it encounters any queer object—any conception of queerness that isn’t figured as privation and individuated management.

If “minor-attraction” has an analogue, it isn’t queer or trans people, it is religious celibates and those whose aesthetic distaste at sex has hardened into sexual morality. Both celibacy and “minor-attraction” are ethical structures that enforce the binary of abstinence and sin.

In some ways, it is outrageous and trivializing for me to waste everyone’s time arguing that sad online pedophiles are not a burgeoning civil rights movement. Nobody really thinks they are and I think they’re unlikely to be taken seriously.

It’s been a surprisingly big part of my year, as it goes, two of the larger events of 2020 were seeking accountability at Menlo Church, and defending myself against the charge of “grooming” lobbed at me by Linehan and his monstrous brood because I teach queer theory.

Except, in the Menlo case, the self-description and attendant theory of sexual ethics of a “minor-attracted” person were accepted without any serious question by his parents, their employers, and a multimillion dollar commercial church.

And I do think it’s worth walking through this. I’ve been stunned by the opportunism of the pedophilia rights brigade, but after all they prevailed in this case for a long time. Too long. Long enough to warrant a theoretical confrontation.

But not permanently. The anti-sex zealots, melancholic white str8s, and militant “minor-attracted” men were eventually confronted by an alliance of poc, trannies, faggots, dykes and freaks. I’m proud of us, I like us.