Boy Crazy

BOYS FLOCKED TO THE THREE-STORY, wood-shingled house on Mountain Avenue in Revere for the teenage version of the Holy Grail: an endless supply of beer and weed. Being drunk and stoned made everything — from the air hockey to the movie watching — significantly more enjoyable. There was also money to be had. The pocket cash came from the local men, who especially liked it when the local boys (hustlers, gay teens, straight teens) lounged around the house with their shirts off.

Then there were smiles all around.

There was also sex. The boys had sex with each other. The boys had sex with the men. All of this was done quietly, because neighbors would later say that they didn't see or hear anything unusual coming from the house. There were no naked boys loitering in the doorway, no drunken men stumbling in the back yard, no obvious signs of depravity. It was a normal house, the neighbors thought, until they learned that it wasn't.

In June 1977, police arrested the house's owner and announced that it was the national headquarters of a sordid, pornographic sex ring. It was a stretch to call it a "ring," but Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne declared that the arrests were just "the tip of the iceberg." There had to be other perverted people in other wood-shingled houses. And Byrne had a way to catch them: A hotline people could call with anonymous tips about molesters.

In fact, man-boy relationships had been flourishing — not particularly secretly — for years in Revere. Revere Beach, on the eastern fringes of this working-class city, was a notorious cruising ground for men and boys. "It's surprising that no one has stumbled onto a 'sex ring' in Revere before this," Frank Rose wrote in a 1978 Village Voice piece about the scandal.

Everybody was talking about the case, which led to the indictments of 24 men. During an interview on a Boston television station, poet and outspoken boy-lover Allen Ginsberg joked about the scandal. "I had sex when I was 8 with a man in the back of my grandfather's candy store in Revere, and I turned out okay," Ginsberg declared before being hurried off-stage as the station cut to a commercial.

That moment aside, there was little to chuckle about that year for gays in general, and men who liked boys in particular. In Florida, beauty queen Anita Bryant was pushing her "Save Our Children" campaign, spearheading the repeal of budding gay-rights ordinances. In Toronto, police raided the city's gay newspaper after it published an article entitled "Men Loving Boys Loving Men." From coast to coast, states began enacting tougher laws against child pornography, alluding to the need to protect children from the clutches of homosexual adults.