A Gay Sullivan Reader Gets It

From the Letters page at AndrewSullivan.com

EPHEBOPHILIA AND THE CULT OF YOUTH:

I must disagree with your disavowal of any homosexual complicity in the Church scandal. Here, your use of pedophilia acts as a propaganda tactic to dispel attacks on homosexuals or homosexuality’s distinctly ephebophilic culture. As a gay man who has never looked “boyish,” who is not “smooth,” I have grown up knowing that most of my fellow gay men are not interesting in fully developed, post-pubescent adults, but are interested in men who look like, or are, younger than 18. Until all queers are able to face the fact that we have created for ourselves a culture that values youth and beauty above all else, and to realize that this obsession creates, in at least some gay men, a deviant and abusive tendency toward sex with minors, we are doomed to continue to create victims as surely as the atrophied Church.

Dunno what’s “atrophied” about a 2000 year old Church of a billion people that shows no sign of mass defection over the sins of its clergy and in fact continues to grow, but the rest of the analysis is right on.