Is Michael Brown A Pedophile, Drug Abusing, Counterfeiting Thief From Albania?

Michael Brown admits that very few LGBT people condone predatory sexual behavior, especially against children, so I’m wondering what exactly was his purpose in conflating homosexuality and pedophilia in his blog post JERRY SANDUSKY, GAY ACTIVISTS, AND “CONSENSUAL” PEDERASTY. And why would he subject LGBT heroes and role models of the past to a kind of scrutiny that celebrated and well known heterosexuals aren’t generally subjected to?

Brown talks about Harvey Milk exploring the secret gay life of NYC starting when he was 11, and how he became sexually active at the age of 14. But Brown refuses to even consider what life must have been like for a gay kid going through puberty and adolescence in the 1940s. Would Milk have been interested in the shadowy underworld of quick sex with men if he could have openly admitted to his homosexual attractions and talked about his feelings with family and friends? Would he have elected to have anonymous sex in the bushes of a city park if he had been permitted to date boys from school openly and without shame? Brown also slams Milk for having a 16-year-old boyfriend when he was in his early 30s. What Brown fails to mention is that the 16-year-old ran away and traveled to NYC because it was impossible for him to express and explore his sexuality in his hometown in the south. Milk did not molest the young man. For a time they were in love, and they lived together. And they remained friends even after they broke up. Having a committed relationship with a 16-year-old who took it upon himself to leave home in search of a relationship with a man is hardly the same thing as raping a 12-year-old.

And so what if Walt Whitman admired young men? So what if he wrote poems about their beauty. Did he rape any? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

I wouldn’t care if school kids learned that Oscar Wilde employed the services of teenage male prostitutes if they also learned about the huge number of heterosexual men who employed female prostitutes in England at the time. Educators could have a discussion about how the prostitution problem was the result of prudish Victorian England suppressing and compartmentalizing open expressions of sexuality and how the poor and the marginalized were exploited as a result. And who were these teenage boy prostitutes? Gay boys who were thrown away by their Christian families?

Very few people are saints, and if you start looking for reasons to dismiss and criticize someone, you’ll quickly hit pay dirt. It may be true that very few of our LGBT heroes of the past led chaste lives. But then again very few of our heterosexual heroes led chaste lives. We don’t celebrate them for their misdeeds, and taking isolated incidents out of context isn’t fair.

What if we looked at celebrated heterosexual men of the past in the same way Brown is looking at gay men? John Adams was 29 when he married his wife Abigail who was 17. Edger Allen Poe was 26 when he married his 13-year-old cousin. It is widely believed that Thomas Jefferson had a relationship with Sally Hemings who was his slave, and she may have been as young as 14 when he took her to his bed.

As for Jerry Sandusky, I have no way of getting inside the man’s head, so I have no idea of what his sexual orientation is, but Jerry Sandusky has never identified as a gay man. He has been married to a woman for a number of years, and he claims he’s straight. He’s also a churchgoing Christian. Psychologists tell us that we can’t determine the sexual orientation of a sexual predator who victimizes minors by the sex of his victims. They say that a man can be heterosexual and still have the urge to rape and molest young boys. I don’t pretend to understand how that works, but Sandusky may very well be an example of that pattern. In any event, one could argue that Michael Brown has far more in common with Jerry Sandusky than most gay men, even gay heroes like Walt Whitman, so if we’re going to use Sandusky as an excuse to foment paranoia and distrust of certain individuals and groups, then maybe Michael Brown and those like Michael Brown should be at the top of our watch list.