“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.Įverybody 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.