A few months ago the American Family Association decided to use my novel, "One of the Guys," in its attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
"One of the Guys" is the story of a man impersonating a U.S. Navy chaplain on a ship as it goes from port to port in the Far East. Although it is fiction, a satire of Navy life, much of it is based on events I witnessed as a civilian college instructor working on Navy ships.
The American Family Association (AFA) is offended by my descriptions of sex shows performed by underage girls for the entertainment of sailors and Marines. The group has called my book "garbage," and "horror art."
But the fact is, I didn't write these passages to titillate. I wrote them because the use of children in sexual performances appalls me, and because the behavior of some of our servicemen toward Asian child prostitutes is not only an injustice but a crime.
In 1996, three years before the book was published, I received a $5,000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council for an early draft. In that year, the arts council received 7.7 percent of its funding from NEA.
The American Family Association is the same group that almost eradicated the NEA a few years back with its attacks on the works of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.
I find it strange that an organization that claims to uphold family values and to oppose the federal funding of obscenity isn't protesting the part of the military budget that goes to support pederasty in the Far East. Apparently, this association has no problem with the funding of such behavior -- just with the funding of writers who want to expose it.
For no other reason than recreation, U.S. Navy ships routinely anchor in the notorious sex resort of Pattaya Beach, Thailand. Since showing the flag at Pattaya is of no strategic importance, one wonders why the Navy would insist on visiting the place. Thailand is home to at least 80,000 child prostitutes, according to the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. In Pattaya Beach, some of our sailors and Marines enjoy the sexual services of children.
Since 1994 it has been a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for an American to travel overseas to engage "in any sexual act with a person under 18 years of age." Civilian pedophiles spend thousands on these sex vacations. So far as I know, the U.S. Navy does nothing to identify and punish the pedophiles in its ranks.
Even in a foreign port, a ship's command dictates the minutiae of daily life for thousands of men. Those whose hair is not regulation, or who have histories of alcohol abuse, or who are wearing T-shirts bearing offensive language or graphics, are not allowed ashore at Pattaya Beach. The Shore Patrol makes sure that personnel do not frequent clubs that tolerate drug dealing, or robbery of servicemen, or fighting. Gay clubs are off-limits too, and a sailor or Marine who isn't sexually active can still be drummed out of the service merely for being gay.
Yet the U.S. military has never punished the men who visit overseas clubs where they can have sex with children, or watch exploitative sexual "entertainment" performed by children -- all of the things described in my book. If the AFA's members really want to eliminate tax-supported obscenity, they should stop protesting the funding of a book, and start protesting the funding of a crime.
Robert Clark Young is a writer in Sacramento, Calif.
