On Friday, Representative Marge Roukema (R-New Jersey) and Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-North Carolina) introduced a bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934, to ban ISPs from granting Internet access to convicted sex offenders. The bill, H.R. 2791, states that "an interactive computer service may not provide an account or otherwise provide for the use of any information service, system, or access software of such service to a sexually violent predator," and imposes a fine on ISPs of US$5,000 for each day that a registered sex offender uses their services to get online.
"Some will argue that this infringes on the First Amendment. But if a felon can be denied the right to vote," Roukema declared in a press release, "a violent sexual offender can certainly be denied the right to 'cruise' the Internet looking for victims."
Roukema and Faircloth couldn't have picked a more opportune week to introduce this bill. On Friday night, 20/20 framed the tragic case of Sam Manzie - the New Jersey teen who allegedly raped and killed another boy - with a segment called "Danger on the Internet," featuring Tom Jarriel and Hugh Downs solemnly intoning statements like, "While you're warning your children about the dangers lurking outside, some of the most vile ideas and the most depraved people are reaching right into your home and touching your child."
In 20/20's view, Manzie "snapped after a homosexual affair with an older man he had met in an Internet chat room" - with the Internet as much implicated in the tragedy as Steven Simmons, a "convicted pedophile."
Never mind that Sam Manzie may have been driven to the breaking point by his participation in a criminal investigation of the man he had sex with four times.
Never mind that, under the sweeping language of the Roukema/Faircloth bill as proposed, the ISP of your neighborhood copy shop or library could be fined $5,000 a day for allowing a convicted sex offender to browse the Web.
Get "convicted pedophiles" like Simmons off the Net, the reasoning goes, and boys and men will safely swim their own parallel courses through the bitstreams, never intersecting, and no one will get hurt.
A risky initiation
No one can realistically deny that certain online venues - notably the "member rooms" on AOL - facilitate eroticized interactions between people of different age groups. Back in 1995, I visited rooms where older men cruise for young men and boys and vice versa (like "BarelyLegalM2M") for a week when I wrote a feature for Wired magazine on gay and lesbian teenagers online.
The rooms are a theater of archetypes, of men with names like "HedCoach" and "LuvDad" exchanging horny messages with "SwmrDude" and "MusclKid." Many of the names that advertise youth, of course, are inhabited by older men. But there are boys there too - boys like Sam, and not like Sam: boys who play the games of boyhood successfully, winning at sports, excelling at school, admired by young women, well liked by their peers. And there are hundreds of men and boys in those rooms, every night of the week.
Almost every one of the boys I interviewed for my article informed me that they were regularly propositioned by older men on AOL. At first, when I asked them what they thought of that, they'd wrinkle up their noses and say things like, "Gross."
Then, often, later in the conversation, if the trust level got high enough, a teenager might admit to me that he himself had met an older boy or man online, and saw him in real life. Sometimes the two became friends. Sometimes they had sex. Sometimes meeting offline had turned out to be an uncomfortable experience, but sometimes the young man perceived it in a positive light - an introduction to a larger circle of friends, or an entree to the wider gay world. For some of these highly intelligent, articulate young men, an offline rendezvous with an older male was a risk that had turned out to be worth it.
The truth is, gay teenagers and older gay men have always found ways to meet, despite every law against it. Those interactions, fraught with risk on every side, comprise a kind of initiatory process for young gay men - one made necessary by the scarcity of believable gay role models for youth in films and on TV, and the fact that it's not cool to walk down the hall of high school with your best buddy, holding hands and going steady.
If it was possible for gay kids to court one another openly, teenagers would have a lot less incentive to seek out older men for the kind of adoration, engagement, and yes, sex, that they can't get from their peers. Most, though not all, teenagers would rather sleep with someone their own age anyway.
In the past, a gay kid might go to considerable lengths to ferret out the location of the local gay bar, and park himself on the sidewalk outside on a Saturday night, trying to look relaxed, hoping to be noticed. If he was lucky enough to live in a city where there were gay youth organizations, his chances of finding a kindred spirit his own age were better. For every gay teen who has gotten into an uncomfortable situation online, there are thousands of kids for whom the act of building a community with other gay kids online has been literally life-saving. The online connection has made it much easier for teenagers to reach their peers via such resources for gay youth as the Be Yourself mailing lists and Oasis magazine.
What our kids really need
If we really wanted to protect kids from those who want to hurt them, we'd make sure that every gay teenager in the world had access to a Net connection, gay students' organizations, supportive adult mentors, and the Net-savvy to differentiate between hurtful scammers and potential allies.
We'd make sure that gay kids had the same opportunities for joy and the open display of affection as straight kids: the chance to stroll down Main Street with the one you dizzily love, sporting a hickey or two; proud to be part of a couple for the first time in your life.
We'd stop participating in the sniggering campaigns run by Time and Newsweek, berating Al Gore as loser-of-the-week for making a very mild statement of support for Ellen DeGeneres, and realize that gay and straight kids need to see as many diverse models of authentic human relationship in media as we can muster.
And we'd stop fooling ourselves and wasting valuable resources with showboating, headline-grabbing opportunism that reassures us that we can concoct a totally safe world for our children by isolating evil in a certain population, making ever larger and more public databases of that population, and keeping those pariahs out of our neighborhoods and off the Net.
Every day, the online world sends us a wake up call that it is as real as the offline world. We'd better be prepared to give our kids more than a bunch of election year sloganeering and Band-Aid solutions, because to thrive in the real world, they'll need more than that.
