Cheers for putting the links up Schomberg.
So the timeline goes like this...
Jan 1997 An American academic based in Amsterdam publishes a book called 'Dares to Speak' exploring the history of man-boy love. We know these relationships occur, and they are repeatedly explored in literature, so he is hardly exposing a new phenomenon. But the difference with this book is that it is exploring the possibility that some of these relationships are positive rather than automatically abusive because of the age of the participants. I have not read the book in question but you can still order it on Amazon.
June 23rd 1997 Ros Coward writes a short article in the Guardian questioning the decision of the Gay Men's Press to publish this book and pointing out that the focus on boys suggests the authors have made some underlying assumptions about young male sexuality (that they are less vulnerable than girls and better able to protect themselves from exploitation).
June 26th 1997 The Guardian publishes a letter from Peter Tatchell in which he draws a distinction between paedophilia (which he doesn't define but states is impossible to condone) and beneficial sexual relations between older and younger people and cites the experiences of his friends in defence of the latter.
I do not think it is a particularly good letter, but Tatchell is not saying he thinks sex with children should be endorsed in our society, only that it is not automatically and irrevocably harmful. That is uncontroversial - we know that some people below the age of consent in our society are having sex and do not experience this sex as abusive. My difficulty is that I am sure young people as a whole are more vulnerable to abusive and exploitative relationships, which is why we discourage them from engaging in sex until they are more mature.
Anyone in authority who wants to abuse that power to coerce children into sex is unlikely to feel more motivated to do so after buying a subscription to ProQuest, or to the Guardian archives, searching for a letter to the editor written more than 14 years ago and then finding Peter Tatchell making a fairly minor point about whether it is acceptable to publish material which provides only a partial perspective on the harms and benefits of man-boy love. And if you want to make it hard for paedophiles to track down this mildly equivocal piece stop quoting it on Mumsnet!
Hitchens article is just so much blether. He seems to be saying that we are now innured to child sex in our society. But since Tatchell's letter was written we've passed the Sex Offences Act 2003 which actually creates more offences relating to the sexual exploitation of people under 18. We've tried to improve the conviction rates for all forms of sexual abuse including statutory rape. We've reduced (albeit not enough) the teen pregnancy rate. We still have ludicrously high levels of teen sex but that trend was already apparent in 1997. And we've had the Portsmouth riots indicating that many people are frightened and angered by child sexual abuse.
Hitchens seems to be suggesting that Tatchell's view on the sexual revolution is that it should just become a wholly unregulated free-for-all, and that in the future we will no longer be shocked by sex with children. But that is not what he was saying in 1997, and in any event the last 14 years have already demonstrated that Hitchens is spouting nonsense.