The Albany Trust and the Paedophile Information Exchange
The Albany Trust was funded by the Home Office’s Voluntary Service Unit. The Albany Trust used some of that money to fund the Paedophile Information Exchange (more). Below are a series of letters from The Times concerning the Albany Trust’s support for PIE.
18th January 1975
21st January 1975
25th January 1975
And another letter from The Times by Tony Smythe, the Director of MIND and a former trustee of the Albany Trust, about MIND’s association with PIE.
9th April 1981
spotlight 
Reblogged this on Thinking Out Loud.
1970 propaganda article for the Albany Trust
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19700212&id=OjFVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4pADAAAAIBAJ&pg=4743,2115449
The Age – Feb 12, 1970
Our homosexual: Second of two articles
Persecution and shame
Joanne Slaughter, in London, inquires into the working of Britain’s Sexual Offences Act 1967 and finds old attitudes are slow to change.
Few pieces of modern legislation have been more courageously championed – or more stubbornly resisted – than the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which legalised homosexual relations, in private, between two consenting persons.
When the Wolfenden committee reported in 1957, public opinion polls showed that 40 per cent of the population were in favor of some measure of legal relief for the homosexual.
After 10 years of campaigning by MPs and the Homosexual Law Reform Society, the figure had risen to 63 per cent. Even so, the bill’s passage through Parliament was stormy. “One might just as well condone the devil and all his works,” fulminated one opponent.
It has been estimated that four per cent or five per cent of men in this country are exclusively homosexual. There are more of them than there are colored people and Jews.
No one underestimates the importance of the 1967 act. (“I can only say,” comments one London psychiatrist, “what a relief it has been.”) But its terms were strictly circumscribed and public attitudes change slowly.
Workers at the Albany Trust (the only voluntary organisation in the country operating full-time primarily to give help and advice to homosexuals and others with “deviant” sexual problems) say the vast majority of homosexuals who approach them for couselling continue to suffer the stress of acute loneliness and alienation from society.
The Rev. Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans (a counselling service, always available on the telephone, for would-be suicides), points out there has been no decrease in the number of suicides among homosexuals since 1967.
The homosexual’s search for companionship can lead him into a vicious and dangerous circle. Loneliness drives him to importuning; this in turn may well land him in a magistrate’s court with alarming social consequences.
Since 1967 some reformers, aware of this, have made attempts to found clubs which would provide social facilities for homosexuals. Centres run on these lines already exist in Holland.
In the north of England, Esquire Clubs Ltd. have been trying unsuccessfully for over 18 months to form a chain of clubs which, it is hoped, will eventually be able to offer not only social facilities, but also a counselling service to members, supplied by a panel of lawyers and doctors.
The organisers are anxious that the clubs (in contrast to the dreary “gay” pubs already in existence) should not be exclusively homosexual, but places to which members will feel free to take heterosexual friends and relatives.
The two planning applications made so far, in Swinton and Eccles, have both been turned down.
In Swinton, councillors complained that members would be a risk to an existing youth club nearby. In Eccles, after five months of dithering, the council turned down the application on the grounds that the building was not suitable for a licensed club and that there was nowhere to park vehicles.
Not all the reformers concerned with pressing for the 1967 legislation regard these efforts with approval. Mr. Leo Abse [MP] points out that one of the purposes of the act was to integrate the homosexual into society.
“I think a lot of people have got to get out of their ghettos,” he says. Lord Arran agrees. He has described clubs for homosexuals as “un-British”.
Existing commercially run homosexual clubs, which have been tacitly accepted by public and police for years, can still prove dangerous meeting places.
The proprietor of one such club in London was recently fined for permitting disorderly conduct on his premises. The police had entered on the pretext of a drugs search and although no drugs charges were made and, indeed, the club had had a strictly enforced rule prohibiting their use.
No overt sexual behavior had ever been tolerated at the club, which Antony Grey, the director of the Albany Turst, regarded as “one of the best run in London”.
Have name
Members claim they were searched in a “particularly humiliating way”. Their names and details were taken including, in some cases, a description of their clothing. One, wearing an open string beach sweater, was described by a police officer as having a “see-through blouse”.
As one homosexual, involved in a similar incident, pointed out: “If there should be a homosexual murdered in my district, now the police will have my name and will be round asking questions. It won’t matter that I had nothing to do with it and didn’t even know the chap.”
Blackmail is still a reality for the homosexual. Together with loneliness and guilt, it is one of the three major factors leading homosexuals to a stress state.
A worker at the Samaritans said: “It is just not true to say that because a man can’t be sent to prison, he can’t be blackmailed. There has been a decrease in the most vicious kind of blackmail since the passing of the act but that is all.”
Many men, even if they have done nothing illegal, are so anxious to conceal their homosexual state from relatives and colleagues that they are as vulnerable as if they had actually broken the law.
A local councillor in the north of England, who had been robbed and beaten up by a sexual pick-up, was so terrified of publicity that he could not be persuaded to complain to the police.
The need many homosexuals feel to conceal their condition is an added strain. Concealment and secrecy are far less widespread in America, even though homosexual acts are illegal in every State except Illinois. (A recent United States poll reported that 63 per cent of the nation considered homosexuality “harmful to American life”).
Homosexuals have picketed the White House and the Pentagon in their efforts to end civil rights and employment discrimination and professional men, publicly proclaiming their homosexuality, have raised the issue on television.
Some lonely homosexuals advertise for friends, with mixed results. One man claims to have received over 70 replies from a single advertisement placed in a widely circulated magazine. Another says: “I didn’t contact a single person. I suppose this shows the stupidity of the whole procedure”.
The police’s recent activities against the International Times have shown that efforts by homosexuals to make social contacts in this way may, in fact, be as risky as attending a homosexual club.
In April last year the premises of IT were raided by the police, under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act. Three thousand copies of the past six issues of the paper were seized, as were files relating to small advertisements and a number of sealed replies to box numbers.
The advertisement columns of these issues carried appeals for both heterosexual and homosexual parties. After the raid the police questioned a number of people who had inserted such appeals and replied to them.
Not prosecute
They appear to have concentrated exclusively, however, in the homosexual advertisements, although section 4 of the 1967 act, specifically states that it is no longer an offence for a person to procure a homosexual act with himself, if that act is not in itself an offence.
The form the questioning took has perturbed the National Council for Civil Liberties. Among the questions asked were: Are you homosexual / heterosexual / bisexual? Are you active or passive? What is the meaning of certain words, e.g., gay?
Charges have now been brought against the publishers of IT. Men who, on the advice of their solicitors, and refused to answer questions earlier, have now been assured that the police are prepared to give them a written undertaking not to prosecute in respect of anything they may say.
“This IT business,” Antony Grey told a Parliamentary Civil Liberties Group, “is by no means the only instance we have had in the past two years of adults who have made contacts through pen pal clubs being visited by the police and questioned about their private correspondence – sometimes years after they had written the letters in question”.
The Albany Trust’s counselling service has had a far greater number of legal cases to deal with during the past six months than at any time since July, 1967.
Their case files indicate that the police, after a lull in their activities immediately after the passing of the act, are now tightening up operations against homosexuals who contravene the remaining laws.
Leo Abse [MP], who is, on the whole, satisfied with how the act is working, says that there are certain regions of the country where there “appears to be an excess of zeal on the part of the police”. This is patchy. Tony Smythe, general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties, says: “The degree of police activity against homosexuals depends very largely on the chief constable of the area”.
One policeman said he had been “frankly relieved” when a chief constable departed from his area. “All we seemed to do was go about pinching pooves,” he said.
The Albany Trust case files show no decrease, either, in the number of public indecency cases where the sole prosecuting evidence is that of plainclothes vice squad police. “One would expect,” comments one social worker, “that the police would occasionally produce a member of the public who had actually been offended”.
Often the only people present are the two men actually involved and the plainclothes police. There is evidence that these duties are unpopular. One policeman said: “It’s not the sort of thing one takes a delight in bringing to court”. Also such a situation, inevitably, leaves them open to charges of “planting” agents provocateurs.
In one important respect the male homosexual is still discriminated against compared with heterosexuals (or lesbians). The age of consent for a girl is 16. Under the Sexual Offences Act, homosexual behavior under the age of 21, even in private, is illegal.
That myth
After some discussion the Wolfeden committee diplomatically settled for 21 because, at the time, it was the age of majority. Now, under last year’s Family Reform Act, it is 18, and there is pressure to reduce the homosexual age of consent as well to 18. Medical witnesses appearing before the committee were unanimous in stating that the effects of homosexual seduction in youth had been greatly exaggerated.
In Holland the Government has now proposed, on the recommendation of an official committee consisting of mental health experts, that the age of consent should be reduced from 21 to 16.
One of the most damaging myths about homosexuals is that they are, by their very nature, a danger to children. People persist in confusing them with pedophiliacs.
Michael Schofield, a sociologist, found in his study Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality in 1965 that many pedophiliacs have extensive heterosexual relations and that their sexual experience may include young girls as well as young boys. Very few of the pedophiliacs he interviewed had homosexual friends or knew anyone who was homosexual.
Kinsey estimated that about a third of all males have some homosexual experience at some point. The report Towards a Quaker View of Sex concluded that this might well be an understatement.
Reformers feel that legal sanctions enhance the undue importance placed on a youthful homosexual incident. In a recent case a doctor told the court that the youth concerned had suffered immeasurably more harm from police questioning than from the homosexual encounter.
At least one case of wholesale prosecutions of under-21s since the act has aroused public concern and had unhappy enough consequences.
Questioning youths about a minor offence of larceny in the Potteries, police discovered that a number had been concerned together in homosexual parties. Three were subsequently sent to Borstal; a fourth hanged himself in prison. All of them had committed acts in private which, had they been over 21, would have come within the scope of the 1967 act.
Some of the strongest supporters of reform in 1967 strongly oppose a change in the age of consent. Some fear a backlash of public opinion. “I don’t think we should push too hard too fast,” explains one social worker.
Others, like Leo Abse, feel it is vital that no adolescent working through a homosexual phase should receive encouragement from older homosexuals which prevents him reaching heterosexuality. The Criminal Law Revision Committee is due to review the entire law governing sexual offences including, presumably, the question of the age of consent.
Most reformers feel that increased public education is as vital as further legislative changes. Many of the men who consult the Albany Trust, particularly those from working class homes, are still suffering frm the rejection with which disclosures of their homosexual condition were greeted by their relatives.
In Holland, experimental efforts are being made to tackle this schism between parents and their homosexual children. Two-day meetings have been held at which the parents, children and other homosexuals are able to discuss their mutual problems and conflicts together.
All species
At the moment the only places to which homosexuals can turn are the Samaritans and Albany Trust. The Albany Trust has a permanent staff of only four, including the director and one full-time social worker. It is also desperately short of funds.
Last year more than 500 people came to the trust, who are aware that this represents only a tiny proportion of those needing help. They would like to see some specialised counselling available in every major city.
Basic knowledge is still lacking as to why people are attracted to their own sex anyway. Homosexuality appears in every known animal species and in every known civilisation. Biologically, homosexuals do not differ in any way from heterosexual men or women.
Kinsey regarded homosexuality as a natural deviation of the sexual instinct. An American sociologist, John Gagnon, has said: “We may eventually conclude that there are as many causes for homosexuality as there are for mental retardation – and as many kinds of it”.
Most experts agree that early environment is often a contributing factor. A significant number of homosexuals have childhood experiences of a possessive or over-affectionate mother and an absent or hostile father.
Leo Abse, while pointing out that this cannot be the only cause, thinks boys from fatherless families could be helped to identify with some male figure if more men were encouraged to become child-care workers, probation officers and primary school teachers.
Opinion varies as to whether homosexuality alone, without additional personality disturbance, is a medical problem at all. One psychiatrist said: “I would take the view that it is a disorder of the function; as such it is an illness”.
The “sickness theory” is enormously popular in America but, as the Wolfenden committee pointed out, on the criterion of symptoms homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease “because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects”.
In America, success rates as high as 30 per cent have been claimed by psychiatrists who have had homosexual patients under analysis, the definition of a “cure” being a change from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality.
But a psychiatrist in London found that with anything less than full analysis, in other words, with group psychotherapy, some men did achieve a degree of heterosexuality, but that their homosexuality remained extremely strong.
The provision of psychotherapy for men and boys committed to prisons or borstals for homosexual offences, is still inadequate.
Four times
Hugh Klare, secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform, estimates that there are facilities for about 200 people at prison psychotherapy units at any one time, whereas probably four times that number would benefit from such treatment.
“It wouldn’t change the direction of their sexual urge but it would help them to live with themselves and with others with greater ease,” he says.
The Albany Trust is finding increasingly that patients are being referred to them by psychiatrists who recognise that their needs are social rather than medical.
As the Wolfenden committee reported: “It has been suggested to us that associated psychiatric abnormalities are less prominent or even absent in countries where the homosexual is regarded with more tolerance”.
We have come a long way towards creating a healthier legal and social climate for homosexuals since 1957, but the evidence suggests that there is still quite a bit of ground to be covered.
…
Click to access 09-93%20NAMBLA-Melzer%20RPT.pdf
CITY OF NEW YORK
THE SPECIAL COMMISSIONER OF INVESTIGATION
for the New York City School District
EDWARD F. STANCIK
SPECIAL COMMISSIONER
AN INVESTIGATION
AN INVESTIGATION
INTO MISCONDUCT RELATING TO PEDOPHILIA
BY PETER MELZER, A TEACHER
AT THE BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF SCIENCE
September 1993
Sean Courtney, Special Counsel
Raymond E. Mulhern, Senior Investigator
Lucy Ruta, Investigator
…
[Page1]
I. INTRODUCTION
This case, which commenced with allegations that Peter Melzer, who is a teacher of physics and science at the Bronx High School of Science, has publicly and vigorously advocated pedophilia,…
…
[Page 3]
II. THE BACKGROUND OF OUR INVESTIGATION
Peter Melzer, born April 16, 1940, is licensed by the Board of Education in physics and general science at the high school level and in science at the junior high school level. He has been teaching for the Board of Education since 1963, and has taught at the Bronx High School of Science since 1968.
[Page 4]
This Office opened its investigation into Melzer in May of 1992 upon reviewing a file on Melzer that the now-defunct Office of the Inspector General of the Board of Education generated between 1984 and 1986. Melzer came to the attention of the entire Bronx Science community as a result of a three-part
television news report by WNBC’s John Miller on an organization called the North American Man/Boy Love Association or NAMBLA. The report, aired on March 2, 3 and 5 of this year and viewed by many hundreds of thousands of households each night, prominently displayed Melzer on camera at public meetings of NAMBLA’s New York chapter, and identified him, accurately as our investigation has found, as a pedophile and a leader of NAMBLA, as well as a teacher at Bronx Science.
[Page 11]
1. Early evidence of Melzer’s pedophilia
The first documentary evidence of Melzer’s pedophilia materialized in 1979. A United States Postal Inspector obtained Melzer’s name and address from a mailing list of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which was found during the execution of a search warrant by federal agents in California in May of 1979. In a letter dated June 23, 1979, replying to correspondence from the Inspector who was posing as a member of a British pedophile organization named P.I.E., an acronym for the Pedophile Information Exchange, Melzer wrote that he had joined P.I.E. in 1978 when he was living in Britain and that “[u]p to a year ago I had never knowingly met other serious like minded individuals [such as those in
P.I.E.].” He noted that “I am attracted to boys up to the age of about 16 . . .” An article by Melzer in a 1982 issue of the NAMBLA Bulletin further revealed his personal and public commitment to promoting pedophilia.
On discovering PIE and, subsequently, NAMBLA several
years ago, my spirits had soared . . . [with the] hope that
organizations of intelligent, outspoken paedophiles existed
. . . Joining was not enough. All of those years of
psychological oppression had to be vindicated, and I
channeled all of my anger and energy into helping make
NAMBLA a stronger and more effective organization. In
so doing, I gained a certainty in my own identity . . .
Melzer resigned as the editor of the Bulletin and as a member of NAMBLA’s national governing body, called the “Steering Committee,” but he did not resign from NAMBLA itself…
Melzer’s invigorated return to the public advocacy of pedophilia occurred no later than December of 1983; by that time he had become treasurer of NAMBLA’s national organization…
[Page 13]
a detective in the Department’s Public Morals Division in the early 1980’s when, posing as a NAMBLA member, he worked with Melzer on NAMBLA’s Steering Committee. Healy distinctly recalls having a conversation in or around 1983 with Melzer during which Melzer discussed having sexual relations with a young boy or boys in the Philippines. The Philippines has been cited as a popular destination for sex tourism by pedophiles in the NAMBLA Bulletin.
Melzer’s presence in the Philippines in 1983 is corroborated by a letter that he sent to the principal of Bronx Science in October of 1983. In the letter, Melzer offered to discuss with faculty members an educational conference that he had recently attended in the Philippines; in the letter he also suggested that an exchange program between Bronx Science and a science high school in the Philippines be considered…
http://www.josken.net/1.htm
GAY SOLIDARITY GROUP NEWSLETTER
NUMBER 1
Formerly Gay Solidarity Group (Established in 1978)
PO Box 1675
Preston South Vic 3072
Australia
ISSN 1446-4896 ISSUE 1, 1979, NUMBER 1
Vol. 1 No.l APRIL 1979
BOX 380, P.O. BROADWAY, N.S.W., 2007, AUSTRALIA
British Police harass
On March 26 1979, Roger Moody will go on trial at the Old Bailey for a crime he did not commit. The chances that he will be sentenced to up to 5 years imprisonment, however, are very high.
Roger Moody has worked in England for many years as a peace activist; he has been an editor of “Peace News”, which has more than once embarrassed the authorities through its articles. He is also well known to many Australian aborigines and indigenous peoples of other lands for the work he does with indigenous rights. He was one of the people involved in the beginning of the Stop Unenco Alliance, a transnational strategy group opposing the Germany/Dutch/British uranium consortium
In November 1977 Roger’s home was raided by a squad of policemen. They held a warrant alleging that Roger published obscene material. Hundreds of items belonging to Roger, including published and unpublished articles, letters, magazines and personal photograph albums were carted off in the raid. Roger was arrested on alleged assault on young boys. He was held in custody for the next 36 hours. He was finally released without charges being laid against him. Detective-Sergeant Wilson who is masterminding the case against Roger prides himself on being Ms Whitehouse’s (and the Home Office’s) police “adviser” on child pornography. There are some striking anomalies in the whole affair:
At no time has any child or parent ever complained to the police about Roger’s conduct or relationship with him.
The police knew nothing about the boys known to Roger until their raid in November 1977. The offence is alleged to have taken place in summer.
The police traced and exhaustively “interviewed” ten other boys with whom Roger has had close relationships, mainly through his work as one of the pioneers of “Adventure Play” in the United Kingdom. Four of these boys were held for a total of about 12 hours and subjected to considerable police pressure before making certain “confessions”. Later all the boys withdrew their statements, saying the police “forced us into telling lies.”
In their “softening up” of one of the parents of the boys, the police alleged that Roger has published “pornographic pictures all over the world.” that “he was one of the leading lights of P.I.E. (Pedophile Information Exchange)” and that they were out to “have him.” The third statement is manifestly true, the others have no basis in fact.
The persecution of a homosexual in an attempt to silence his criticism of the British Government’s uranium policy and the uranium industry must be opposed. Internationally we can help make sure Roger is not imprisoned. For example people can write to the Home Secretary, London. S.W.I,. U.K. demanding the charges be dropped. If there are letters it is easier for Roger and his lawyer to appeal.
For further information contact Gay Solidarity.
ADDENDUM
There is another current case in Britain that is similar.
On the tenth of February, almost two hundred people marched in Bradford, demanding that charges of “buggery and indecent assault of a minor” against Frank Kelly be dropped. Kelly is a local anti-fascist activist.
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