The NAMBLA Bulletin should be renamed Ganymedia

By: Bill Andriette

I propose that we change the name of the NAMBLA Bulletin to Ganymedia - a combined reference to Ganymede, Jupiter's cup bearer and boy lover in the Greek myth, and the word media.

I am not suggesting that we change the actual relation between NAMBLA and its monthly publication; Ganymedia should remain "the voice of the North American Man/Boy Love Association." But I believe that under a new name, NAMBLA's publication can be a more effective tool for gaining readers, NAMBLA members and activists, and for strengthening our movement.

The idea of a name change provoked strong passions among some people when it was first raised on the Steering Committee and Bulletin collective. The NAMBLA Bulletin has the distinction of being probably the longest-publishing periodical for man/boy lovers in history, after all, and the name "NAMBLA" is known around the world. The NAMBLA Bulletin and the organization that shares its name have been an important part of many of our lives and we feel strong loyalties to them as they are. In many ways this is a sign of our organization's strength, for it reflects the depth of commitment of NAMBLA's members and activists to what we have created.

But by continuing to call our monthly publication the NAMBLA Bulletin when its purpose and function have changed so much over the years we close the door to opportunities that we can ill afford to waste. More than just calling to change the Bulletin's name, I hope in this position paper to explore what these opportunities are.

The Bulletin's background

The Bulletin has evolved considerably since the days when it was a single, mimeo-graphed sheet resembling most of all a church newsletter. The Bulletin is now a full-fledged, monthly magazine with a loyal, involved, and growing readership. I work for a gay magazine with a press run of 30,000. It does not get a twentieth of the letters that the Bulletin receives with a press run of less than 2,000.

Along with its size, look, and content, the purpose of the Bulletin has changed. Like a church newsletter, the Bulletin originally served to keep informed a membership, that, because of its geographical concentration in the coastal urban gay centers, could count on regular face-to-face contact at chapter meetings. NAMBLA at various times has had chapters in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New Haven, Toronto, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. In its early years, NAMBLA's mostly coastal chapters served the metropolitan areas containing the majority of our members.

That is changed. Not only is NAMBLA's network of chapters much reduced, but our membership has grown and diffused beyond those coastal cities that these chapters largely served. Correspondingly, the Bulletin's function has changed. It has replaced the chapters as the main benefit - the primary means of communication, solidarity, and community - that NAMBLA offers its members. The growing importance of the Bulletin can be gauged by its growth in size and the increasing amount of NAMBLA's organizational resources it consumes. An outsider trying to figure out what NAMBLA was by looking at how it spends its money and uses its labor power would conclude that it is an organization for producing and distributing a magazine. From its origins as a newsletter that ornamented the activities of an organization, the Bulletin has to a large extent become the project around which NAMBLA is organized.

This shift was not so much a conscious plan, but reflects a rational response NAMBLA has taken to external realities. In a climate as hostile as the one we face, it is hard to organize chapters. Everything from finding a place to meet to advertising is fraught with difficulty. In addition, on a number occasions over the years, chapters have served as lightening rods for police attention, causing a few individuals, and to a lesser extent NAMBLA, serious problems. Unless they are carefully governed, it has become clear, chapters are a real liability to NAMBLA and those who participate in them. As a result, the Steering Committee has been hesitant to authorize their formation.

A publication avoids many of the problems chapters face. NAMBLA and its members risk much less when community and solidarity for man/boy lovers are provided via a publication. A malevolent or foolish individual can do great damage if he or she participates in a chapter; far less by reading a magazine. With a publication, individuals do not risk their security by coming together; instead the publication comes to them, through the mail or a gay or alternative bookstore. Through the pages of a magazine, readers gain access to collective experience and wisdom that would be impossible to impart as widely or effectively by any other means. Just as it was for social movements in the era before easy travel and mass communication, for man/boy lovers today, the magazine or newspaper is the ideal organizing medium. Given these realities, it is no surprise that a magazine has become the primary way we can provide information, comradeship, and hope to man/boy lovers.

Changing the name of NAMBIA's publication is justified in the first place by its shift in function from just an organizational newsletter to an actual magazine. But more importantly, with a new name, our monthly magazine would be able to get better distribution. This is not just my opinion; it is shared by the gay bookstore managers and gay magazine distributors I have spoken with. As the production quality of the Bulletin has improved, it has become realistic to look for more outlets for selling it. Small press distributors such as Inland and Bookpeople already stock a few gay and at least one man/boy love periodical, Paidika and Lambda Book Report, among them. It is possible that they would agree to distribute a Ganymedia. This would make a vast difference in our ability to reach new readers and activists. But even if distribution were to remain solely in our hands, we can expect that there are bookstores that would take a Ganymedia that would not take an otherwise identical NAMBLA Bulletin. To be sure, many bookstores will refuse to stock a publication by any name dealing with man/boy love. But for some of the bookstores that would consider carrying such a publication, the difference in name would matter. For some of these bookstores, it may simply be a policy of not stocking organizational newsletters. For others, the margin of distance that Ganymedia would create from NAMBLA would be enough to overcome their squeamishness.

For similar reasons, a Ganymedia would be easier to advertise. Just as with bookstores, there are some publications for whom the nominal distance a Ganymedia would create from NAMBLA would be enough to overcome squeamishness. Also, many boy lovers first acknowledging their sexuality would find a Ganymedia easier to subscribe to. We already have some evidence for the unmet demand out there for a publication about man/boy love. Recently we changed the text of the ads NAMBLA places in gay publications from soliciting membership in NAMBLA to offering subscriptions to the Bulletin. Our response rate went up considerably, a fact contributing to our doubling of membership in the past year and a half.

The benefits from a name change do not come at great cost. Any time one changes the name of an established entity there is temporary confusion, but that can be minimized with proper warning. Though "NAMBLA" has developed recognition value, I doubt there are many people who first become acquainted with NAMBLA by seeing our publication on a bookstore shelf and recognizing the name. In any case, the connection between Ganymedia and NAMBLA would be clear to anyone who looked on page two. It is not unusual, after all, for publications put out by organizations not to include the group's name in the title. The periodical of the American Association of Retired Persons is called Modern Maturity, for example; that of the Stanley Foundation is called World Press Review. Any time that the connection between NAMBLA and Ganymedia is in our interest to point out - in, say, an ad in a gay paper that takes no issue with NAMBLA - then we can point it out. "Join NAMBLA and you will receive our monthly publication, Ganymedia." Any time that we benefit by obscuring the connection - as in a paper that will not take an ad from NAMBLA, we can benefit by the distinction. "Subscribe today to Ganymedia, the magazine that explores relationships between older and younger males." That might not be how we would describe ourselves under ideal conditions, but it seems an acceptable compromise if it allows us to reach people that we could not any other way.

A new kind of advertising

But the most important reason why I urge a name change is because it enables us to take advantage of a new style of agitprop that takes a leaf from the tactics of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Part of the effectiveness of these groups has been their facility in using graphic images, like the ubiquitous "Silence = Death" logo. These images are powerful and get their message across by way of icons more than explicit language. The same can be said of the Queer Nation-like arts group Boy With Arms Akimbo, which used very daring (and illegal) images of adolescent and child sexuality in their highly acclaimed and controversial posters, which were wheatpasted to lampposts around San Francisco and were exhibited at the City of San Francisco Art Gallery.

This sort of iconographic communication - bundling a message into a gesture that is not explicitly unwrapped - is a tactic particularly useful for us since people's feelings about relationships between men and boys are so explosive that it often blocks rational discourse. This situation affects not least of all boy-lovers ourselves: many of us know from our own experience how much we had to go through before we could say to ourselves the simple sentence, "I am a boy-lover." Yet of course long before that moment we were responding viscerally to boys and images of boys. With a publication whose title was a little ambiguous we could create agitprop and publicity that was ambiguous, using graphic images in a creative way to gesture at, but not explicitly state, what we were about. With images that were provocative yet ambiguous, images that did not shout - This Publication Is About Sex Between Boys And Men! - we would have much less trouble getting advertising. What publication blanches at the clearly boy-erotic images of fashion photographer Bruce Weber? At the same time, we would be able to provoke a response from boy-lovers who we could not expect to reach through literal advertisements. If we deployed creatively the now largely latent artistic abilities we have within NAMBLA, we could even begin to invest our project with a sense of radical chic, as ACT UP and Queer Nation have.

I know that this approach is foreign to NAMBLA's dominant organizational culture. A good deal of NAMBLA's strength and endurance under harsh repression follows from the way it structurally resembles a leftist cell, comprised at its core of a small number of highly committed, principled activists. Part and parcel of that culture is reliance on a very linear and logical style of thinking and communication: we are out to remake the world by our reasoned arguments. This style of activism, born of unprecedented repression that closes off most other paths of living with dignity as a man/boy lover, has created a cultural legacy that I am confident will be felt for generations. I don't think we can - or should - remake NAMBLA into a new organization. But at the same time we need to be conscious of how our organizational culture limits us in a society that is prepared to censor and marginalize literal discussion of man/boy love. In particular, NAMBLA's reliance on a single way of presentation prevents us from reaching boy-lovers who are not yet ready for - or do not share - our explicit literateness when it comes to their sexuality. While we should not abandon our core strengths, neither should we shirk opportunities that simultaneously let us preserve them and embark on new paths of growth.

Like any oppressed group, boy-lovers are at an advantage by knowing both the dominant culture and the reality of our own lives. Our oppressors, by contrast, know only the terrain of their own bigotries. Living under a regime of organized and systemic terror, we have no choice but to be crafty guerilla fighters and turn to our advantage our unique knowledge; we know that the images of a Bruce Weber or Jock Sturges are so compelling to this culture because they bespeak desires ordinary people cannot even begin to name. Adopting the power of this iconographic knowledge to our cause is a strategy we should not pass up. In addition to promising wider distribution to our publication, renaming it in a way that is ambiguous when we want it to be enables us to pursue a new way of communicating with the world and with man/boy lovers. The new name need not be "Ganymedia" - anything relevantly similar would do. But making the change would, at little cost, offer us many new opportunities.

source: Article 'The NAMBLA Bulletin Should Be Renamed Ganymedia' by Bill Andriette; Nambla Bulletin, vol. 12, no. 8; October 1991