Bill Andriette

Who is Bill Andriette?

Bill Andriette is an American journalist, gay rights activist, and Age of Consent reform activist. Andriette is the Art Director for the LGBT periodical Baltimore Outloud, and was previously the Features Editor of The Guide, a gay travel and entertainment magazine published in Boston. As of 1996, he was the spokesman of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

In an interview in The Boston Phoenix in 1996, Andriette said, "I realized I was gay when I was 12." He joined NAMBLA when he was 15 years old, and by the age of 17 he was a member of the Steering Committee. For six years he was the editor of the NAMBLA Bulletin. He expressed differences with some earlier NAMBLA directors' views regarding legalization of what is now considered to be statutory rape, finding room for compromise with government and societal concerns. He expressed frustration that the LGBT rights movement had ostracized NAMBLA, because he regarded the moral condemnation of pedophiles as a "reactionary ideology which the gay movement has happily adopted to burnish its own particular identity category."

During the 1993 International Lesbian and Gay Association controversy, he defended NAMBLA's membership in ILGA, and to a greater extent NAMBLA's place in the gay rights movement, by claiming that "'the main tradition' of homosexuality" is consistent with supporting the abolition of laws prohibiting statutory rape.