PIE: from 1980 until its demise in 1985

From Brongersma
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

If PIE had not existed, it would have been necessary for the News of the World to invent us. And in one sense it's true to say that the gutter press did invent PIE - or at least, the image of PIE which had been in general coinage since 1977: that of a secretive international "cult," probably with underworld connections, certainly with influence in "high quarters"; a porn-producing syndicate of callous men intent upon nothing but their own sexual gratification. But if PIE's early strategy had been different, how different would its public image have been? Several times the idea of folding PIE and replacing it with a new pedophile grouping was mooted on committee, but we'd never have successfully jettisoned PIE's reputation by the simple expedience of a name change, and even a substantially different alignment would not for long have escaped the vitriolic attention of PIE's enemies. This rose by any other name would have smelled no sweeter. [...]

Doubtless, many pedophiles wish we'd let this particular giant sleep on, but neither they nor children can be liberated from his tyranny without at least waking him in the process.

Our greatest concentration of members had always been in London and the home counties. All but a handful of PIE's workers through the years had lived there. From August '82 we booked a private room one night a week in a series of West End pubs, inviting along all members who were known to us. The average attendance was very disappointing: always the same faces. Presumably, everyone feared that a press plant would be present, as had in fact happened once before in 1979: A known freelance operating for the NOTW, had turned up half drunk at one pub meeting and begun asking those present to produce boys for him. "I know there are kids around who'll go with you for money," he said, "but where are they? Why don't we do something instead of just sitting here?" No such investigative journalist graced any of the more recent meetings. TIME OUT reporter, John Gill, came along once or twice, but he was there at our invitation, preparing a feature on the anxieties and expectations of paedophiles living in London (a feature subsequently suppressed by the magazine's editors). Other guests present at those meetings included many GYM members and one or two representatives from CHE - one of them a woman who was entirely supportive. Discussions with these people were on the whole constructive and stimulating, and made the meetings worthwhile for us on the EC, but the objective of a social forum for members outside the committee was never realised. [...]

It was an open secret among anyone close to the EC that for four years I was employed by a firm of electrical contractors, Complete Maintenance Ltd., to monitor a control panel of alarm systems at the Home Office, Westminster. [...] Each year my security clearance was reviewed by Scotland Yard without my connection with PIE being discovered. I'd known from the start that such a marvellous snook could not be cocked forever, and sure enough the NOTW got hold of this information eventually. The paper contacted the Home Office immediately, of course, and gleefully drew this oversight to their attention. My security clearance was cancelled on the spot, my employers notified, and I found myself not sacked - but 'rendered without employment' - on the same day that reporter Alex Marunchak greeted me on my doorstep. 'Child Sex Boss in Whitehall Shock' ran the headline.

source: Article 'PIE: From 1980 Until Its Demise in 1985' by Steven Adrian Smith; From the book 'Varieties of Man/Boy Love - Modern Western Contexts'; Edited by Mark Pascal; NAMBLA Journal 8; Wallace Hamilton Press, New York; 1992; Article appeared originally in The Betrayal of Youth; Edited by Warren Middleton; CL Publications, London; 1986