Since 2020, anti-LGBT groups have been expounding the myth that education and support programs for queer youth in schools are part of a larger conspiracy to sexualize or “groom” children on behalf of perverted predators. Many will recognize this as a reboot of Anita Bryant’s 1970s rhetoric that “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.” Not only is the "recruitment" canard untrue, but this tactic of stigmatizing or even criminalizing queerness and sexuality under the smokescreen of protecting children also has its roots as far back as the middle of the 18th century.

When John Cleland’s notoriously bawdy erotic novel Fanny Hill was first published in 1748, British law had no specific statute against pornography or obscenity. Instead, authorities resorted to the vague common law offense of “corrupting the King’s subjects” in order to both ban the book and prosecute the author and publisher. Yet even Cleland’s renunciation of his work did not prevent pirated editions from being printed and sold for well over a century. Interestingly, the “subjects” the authorities feared of being “corrupted” were not the upper-class men who dominated government and commerce, but women and lower-class men who were deemed less capable of reason and moral restraint — and of course, the youth. One critic of the Society for the Suppression of Vice opined that they should be renamed the “[Society for] suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum.”

This was even more the case with Fanny Hill, as it was an inversion of the “conduct novels” of the day. Instead of preaching virtue as the path to happiness and fulfillment for women, it portrayed the heroine luxuriating in the pleasures of illicit sex. And with the earlier rise of anti-vice organizations such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, it was no wonder that the British ruling class would not tolerate such erotica being made available to their inferiors. Indeed, a major reason given for passing the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, in the words of the Lord Chief Justice at the time, was that explicitly sexual literature was “Written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind.” He melodramatically described it as “Poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine, or arsenic.” This analogy of all things considered sexually deviant with poison or contagion would persist through the generations, jumping from one “threat” to the next — from sexual freedom to same-sex relations and now to trans issues.

Meanwhile, a similar moral panic was unfolding across the Atlantic, led by a pious clerk obsessed with eradicating “objectionable” print materials from lurid dime novels to racy postcards. Anthony Comstock, whose surname would become a byword for censorious prudery, founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873. Comstock pushed for federal laws banning the distribution of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious materials'' through the US Postal Service and served as an unpaid postal inspector (also known as a “nut job”) until his death in 1915. His crusade even led to the seizure and destruction of artworks, medical texts, and contraceptives. A staunch opponent of women’s suffrage, Comstock took aim at Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin — both notorious as suffragists and avowed “free-love” critics of 19th century marriage law. His agitations led to the sisters being arrested by US Marshals for printing articles and cartoons deemed obscene, including an expose of the adulterous affair of the influential preacher Henry Ward Beecher. All this was done in the name of protecting youth: “The world is the devil’s hunting ground, and children are his choicest game.” Won’t somebody please think of the children!

Comstock and other prudish crusaders heralded a more organized effort, this time led by women — the Social Purity Movement. It was not just that women had been more active in political and social matters in the 19th century, but that the perception of women’s sexuality had changed considerably. As Alyssa Goldstein explained in her 2016 article, “When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men”, women were once considered the more libidinous of the sexes in the Western world, and this was, in turn, used to justify limiting their role to the domestic sphere where their passions could be contained and directed toward raising children. This began to change during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century when a new image of femininity emerged — one virtuous and untainted by lust, thus making women morally equal or even superior to men.

This new conception of “True Womanhood” provided the motivation and justification for these women to champion moral improvement campaigns such as abolition, temperance, and the “protection” of young women and girls from the evils of prostitution and sexual immorality. The Social Purity Movement focused on changing men through evangelism and demanded that local authorities enforce laws against anything “lascivious.”

The flip side to this new construct of women’s sexuality and moral character was that men were now seen as “naturally” libidinous and aggressive, which was seen as necessary for their success in the public sphere — trade, politics, sports, and even war. The sexual double standard of allowing men greater license while shaming women who did so persisted, despite the Social Purity Movement’s efforts to have men behave with “chivalrous respect for womanhood” and even refrain from masturbation. These stereotypes also explain why the laws against homosexuality passed and enforced during this time focused on male conduct while virtually ignoring sexuality and relationships between women. Gay and bi men were perceived not just as sexual deviants, but as sexual predators. These essentialist attitudes persist to this day, with priggish, anti-trans rhetoric fixated on the tropes of “perverted men in dresses” looking to prey on women and children, leading to armed right-wing protesters and bomb threats in the name of “protecting” innocent women and children.

Protecting children is, of course, perhaps the single most universal value in society, and rightly so. That makes it a particularly potent angle to exploit in order to justify repression and bigotry. Few things are resilient enough to withstand charges of being harmful to children without incurring serious damage. As effective as this age-old tactic is, however, it has always been based on a premise that is causally backward. The current “groomer” panic ignores the fact that the cultural changes we are seeing around gender and trans issues are, in large part, the result of youth activism. Whether one agrees with every aspect of these cultural shifts is another matter, but queer youths are not being “recruited” by cabals of older “perverts”; rather, this charge is being led by young people themselves.

It goes without saying that the young should be protected — both from external dangers and from themselves. But they also need the freedom to explore. An environment of total safety stifles more than it safeguards. That doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions, that we have to agree with every point, or that there should be no guardrails. These concerns, however, should be grounded in the historical awareness of how easily they can be used to fuel repressive actions around sex, sexuality, and gender. There is no higher good than defending children — and no more convenient pretext for attacking the vulnerable.

Published Apr 18, 2023
Updated Apr 20, 2023