Here's what happened

as best I can recall. NAMBLA was always spectacularly controversial, a sure fire lightning rod, and it became increasintly so throughout the 80s as things got ever more viciously repressive. Eventually in the early 90s there occurred a string of incidents that made it simply too intimidating for members to participate in events in any public forum. For instance, a meeting of a chapter that had been gathering regularly in a city library was burst in upon by a television crew with cameras and microphones shoved in people's faces who suddenly found themselves targets of such hostile attention and their images broadcast that evening on local TV in most negative possible light. It turned out that some mole had snuck a hidden camera into the meeting shortly before it was so invaded and much was made of the secret "evidence" consituted by the resulting footage, after the manner of America's Most Wanted and other such sensationalist rubbish. Around the same time the "gay community" decided that the political price of permitting NAMBLA contingents to march in gay parades was too high. Crowds began to throw empty beer cans at the contingents as they passed, with the fairly clear threat that were they to march again the beer cans would no longer be empty. I myself witnessed such a parade, and you could follow the tiny contingent of NAMBLA marchers by the cloud of beer cans flying over people's heads in their direction. Gay parade committees decided to ban NAMBLA from participating in parades in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and I suppose elsewhere. NAMBLA continued to publish its Bulletin thereafter, but later issues have been few and far between, and I don't know whether they're still publishing. The (more or less) annual NAMBLA Journal ceased publication altogether years ago, so far as I am aware. Chapter meetings and national conferences were always first rate opportunities to be put on an FBI watch list and become the object of continual surveillance, and after the foregoing incidents no one in his right mind would dream of attending one nowadays even if there were any. The organization was effectively killed by brute intimidation, media lies and distortion, and a passionate commitment on the part of society to ensure that free speech and the rights of association and assembly effectively mean nothing. To my mind the fate of NAMBLA demonstrates beyond any rational doubt that traditional activist-style politics will not work for boylove. It has been tried and failed miserably, catastrophically. Some other strategy is required. (The subject of this painting is not me.)