LGBTQ+ has a paedophile problem

Are there paedophiles within the LGBTQ+ movement? Is the Pope a Catholic? The question of whether predators are hiding in plain sight, in a movement graced by an unexplained plus sign, has always struck me as clinically naive. Who do you think the plus sign represents? Stamp collectors? People who own show poodles?

This question seems especially silly after Stephen Ireland, a major LGBTQ+ activist, founder of Surrey Pride and former head of the UK Pride Network was convicted of numerous counts of child abuse, including the rape of a 12 year old boy. He also exchanged hundreds of messages fantasising about, amongst other things, abducting boys from playgrounds, snipping their vocal cords and castrating them.

I’m only bothering to ask this question, to which everyone already knows the answer, because Ofcom has just launched an investigation into remarks by the comedian Josh Howie. On GB News he dared to suggest some of the blessed rainbow people might be a little nonce-adjacent. How very dare he!

Howie was making a joke about the church of Mariann Budde. You may remember that she was the pasty-faced bishop who berated Donald Trump in a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral. Howie quoted a statement from her Episcopalian Church that emphasised its support for “the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons”. He then added the dreaded words which must never be uttered: “that includes paedos”.

In the following storm, much of it pumped up by the ridiculous blowhard Jolyon Maugham, something curious happened. Thousands of gay men like me offered Howie vocal support online. Not just because comedians should be allowed to make provocative jokes that put people in a right tizzy. It was because Howie’s joke hinted at a dark truth about the LGBTQ+ lobby that it’s time more people seriously discussed. Whisper it gently: the LGBTQ+ lobby really does have a paedophile problem.

For a start, Stephen Ireland is far from the first abuser to be hiding in plain sight on planet LGBTQ+. In 2009, it took the FBI to help Police Scotland track down a baby rapist who was posting online images of his abuse. He turned out to be the CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland, who just happened to be running Scotland’s biggest child abuse ring from the offices of the charity. Was an external investigation ever launched into LGBT Youth Scotland to ensure it was safe for its young users? Of course it wasn’t. Even whilst its (by now) ex-CEO was on trial, the Scottish SNP-led government continued to pump money into it.

It still does — even though last year, Andrew Easton, who authored the charity’s “Trans Youth Guide to Coming Out”, was convicted of distributing horrific child abuse images including of baby rape. Nobody’s perfect.

The LGBTQ+ lobby resists scrutiny of its behaviour by outsiders

And who can forget the time Mermaids appointed an apologist for paedophiles as a trustee? Jacob Breslow had published a book just months before his appointment called Ambivalent Childhoods, a title you might have thought would raise an eyebrow. If that did not, his comparison in a speech to a pro-paedophile conference of “ejaculating on a child or with a child” to “cumming on a shoe” surely should have.

Defenders of the LGBTQ+ lobby insist you can find men in any walk of life who fantasise, as Ireland and his partner David Sutton did, about lurking in changing rooms or outside school playgrounds to kidnap children.

That’s true — but there has been a sea-change in awareness about child abuse in the UK. Tough safeguarding rules have now been put in place almost everywhere where adults and children interact. It’s a sensible reaction to the horrors that have happened when there have been next to no limits placed on the power men in positions of authority could exercise over children.

After decades of appalling abuse in Britain’s public schools, for example, there has been something of a reckoning — as Alex Renton’s moving BBC podcast In Dark Corners attests. Even the Vatican is trying its best to make up for lost time. Thousands of children were abused by priests who were then “punished” for their crimes merely by being moved on to ecclesiastical pastures new. Suitably, err, chastened these men were able to pray with and then prey upon other unsuspecting children. Pope Francis has fired or demoted scores of top clerics who failed properly to respond to this abuse.

Funnily enough, the Catholic Church provides a useful comparator to the LGBTQ+ lobby — and not just because most of its child abusers were homosexuals. One reason its officials refused to acknowledge the spiralling evidence of abuse was that they were convinced the institution was engaged in an existential struggle. This life or death conflict justified almost any act that immunised the Church from criticism — even protecting abusers.

Like the Church in previous decades, the LGBTQ+ lobby weaponizes its claim to being a uniquely important force for good to deflect any criticism of its poor or non-existent safeguarding. Under a halo of social justice activism, it defiantly resists scrutiny of its behaviour by outsiders.

There is, though, a huge difference between the Catholic Church and the LGBTQ+ lobby. The abuse the Church covered up contradicted its teaching. The Church never openly advocated policies that placed children at danger of sexual abuse. The LGBTQ+ lobby does. At the highest levels of political power, it promotes child-harming policies such as the prescribing of puberty blockers — drugs that keep children’s bodies from maturing. And it even gets praised by saucer-eyed liberals for doing so.

It is no accident the LGBTQ+ lobby’s policy agenda echoes the depraved desires of child predators. If you doubt this, just look at the Stephen Ireland case. He was a passionate defender of so-called “gender affirming healthcare for children”, which effectively sterilises them. Lo and behold, in hundreds of messages he and his partner David Sutton fantasised about pumping boys full of estrogen — and then castrating them.

All paedophiles obsess about ways to circumvent the ring of protection parents place round their children. Ireland’s 12-year-old victim was a runaway boy. Is it really coincidental that another key demand of the LGBTQ+ lobby is that schools should be allowed to socially transition children without telling their parents? Deliberately dividing kids from their parents is obviously not the same as snatching them from a playground, but in any instruction manual for a grooming gang it would surely rank as a first and necessary step.

Predators gravitate to organisations that don’t safeguard

Some will argue even if the LGBTQ+ lobby’s policies effectively enable child abuse, it’s going too far to suggest it harbours more than a handful of predators. Surely, though, that depends on how robust you think LGBTQ organisations are in policing themselves — and how rigorous is the scrutiny of those who fund and support them. The signs are not reassuring.

We know from past experience that predators gravitate to organisations that don’t take safeguarding seriously. You can measure that seriousness by the reaction to a breach of child protection. In the wake of an abuse case, organisations that really care about child safety register their shock by devoting heightened attention to what went wrong. They treat it as their number one priority to ask questions, overhaul systems and raise awareness to find out whether it was an isolated case.

Compare that with the reaction of the LGBTQ+ lobby to Stephen Ireland who visited schools for Pride in Surrey, developed a partnership with Thorpe Park which sold the group’s merchandise and set up Pride Hub, a community centre in Egham where young people of all ages were invited to “chill”.

Incredibly, if you search the leading LGBTQ+ news sites such as Pink News or Attitude Magazine for stories about the Stephen Ireland case, you’ll find absolutely nothing. Zero. Not one mention. It’s as if he never existed. How does that encourage robust safeguarding? How does it signal to predators that we are on their case? It doesn’t.

If there is one organisation we might expect to be all over the implications of the Ireland case, it would be Pride in Surrey: the group he founded and of which he was one of its three directors until his arrest. Yet, apart from a short and bland statement deploring Ireland’s behaviour when he was first charged, and then another when he was convicted, Pride in Surrey have sought to ignore the case.

This would have been a more defensible response were it not for some uncomfortable facts. “Pride in Surrey” was created in 2018 by Stephen Ireland and the group’s current CEO, Charlie Watt. They were in a sexual relationship at the time. During the trial it also emerged that in 2019 the couple added Sam Powell, Pride in Surrey’s current Volunteer Manager, to their relationship to form a throuple.

To be clear, none of this is to cast aspersions on Powell or Watts. If there had been any evidence they were party to criminal behaviour, Surrey Police would have arraigned them too. That’s not the issue.

What is disturbing is the complete absence of any publicly expressed concern about these distinctly intimate links between the two men who are now in charge of Pride in Surrey and a man convicted of child abuse who, until months before his rape of a 12-year-old child, was in a relationship with them.

How would donors have reacted if this were a heterosexual throuple who ran, say, a swimming group for girls or a martial arts group for boys and one of its founders were charged with child rape? I reckon at the very least they would have been anxious to put some distance between themselves and the organisation. Whilst asking a few searching questions to satisfy themselves that the bloke accused of raping a twelve year old boy was not the tip of some unholy iceberg.

Instead, something remarkable occurred. Everyone who supported Pride in Surrey behaved as if nothing much had happened. In September 2024, only a month after Ireland and his partner were charged with child abuse, its annual Surrey Pride went ahead as planned. Everyone from the Women’s Institute to the Royal Horticultural Society rocked up to join the fun. Guildford Borough Council took to social media to publicly thank Pride in Surrey for choosing the city for the event. Surrey Fire and Rescue even supplied a fire engine in rainbow colours emblazoned with a reminder of their, err, Code of Ethics. Ironic or what?

Things got more surreal as Ireland’s trial loomed into view. In January this year, the local Liberal Democrats who control Guildford Council expressed on Instagram their delight the city had been chosen for Surrey Pride 2025. It was a “privilege” they said. Last month, as Ireland’s trial was already underway, Pride in Surrey boasted they had been invited into Ashcombe School in Dorking. It didn’t seem to matter to the school that an organisation founded by a man who dreamed of castrating children was on their premises.

On the 12th of March, the lawyers in Stephen Ireland’s case finished their summing up. The court had heard evidence about porn shown to a child. About encouraging a 12 year old boy to smoke crystal meth “from a bong”. About forcing a boy to engage in various kinds of sexual activity. And raping him. The next day the jury would deliver its guilty verdict.

Homosexual boy abusers were not an invention of homophobes

Can you guess what else happened on the 12th of March? Runnymede Council awarded Pride in Surrey one of its Civic Awards. Its Pride Hub community centre was chosen as Cultural Organisation of the Year. Could they have shown less sensitivity towards a 12-year-old victim of rape than handing a gong to the project that was his rapist’s brainchild?

Doe-eyed supporters of the LGBTQ+ lobby often defend their attitude by saying they don’t want to give credence to the nasty historical slur that suggested all gay men were itching to get their hands on vulnerable prepubescent boys.

Of course, that was unfair. However, here’s the thing. Homosexual boy abusers were not just some dark invention of homophobes. These men did exist. And they weren’t always on the fringes either. I could wax lyrical, but instead here are some random examples.

On its website, the University of Essex still boasts about the worldwide significance of its former Professor of Sociology, Ken Plummer, a major figure in the UK gay rights movement. You’d hardly guess he defended “sexual relationships” (sic) between adults and children.

The gay activist Gerald Hannon celebrated the alleged “joys” of child abuse in “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” in the hugely influential gay magazine Body Politic in the 1970s. In the 1970s the magazine Gay Left which was edited by a who’s who of left wing gay intellectuals saw fit to publish a long essay in defense of pedophilia by Tom O’Carroll, the head of PIE.

Diehard apologists for the LGBTQ+ lobby claim all this is in the past. Unfortunately, it isn’t. I recently subscribed to the last highbrow gay magazine in existence, The Gay and Lesbian Review. In the latest edition, anthropologist Will Roscoe lavishes praise on Harry Hay who founded the American gay rights movement in the early 1950s.

Roscoe holds Hay up as a model for a new generation of LGBTQ+ activists. He fails though to make any reference to Hay’s passionate defence of so-called “boy-love”. He had to be thrown off Pride marches in the 1980s for carrying placards in support of the North American Man Boy Love Association (or NAMBLA).

The sad truth is that for decades the gay movement and its successor the LGBTQ+ lobby have refused to properly acknowledge, never mind eradicate, the hotchpotch of dangerous ideas it was bequeathed by intellectuals who claimed child abuse was liberating for children — ideas later camouflaged in the gobbledygook academese of queer theory.

These ideas about children’s alleged sexual desires have formed a toxic undercurrent that, despite the best efforts of many lesbian and gay moderates, keeps resurfacing at regular intervals. Combine that underlying tolerance for child sexual abuse with the new creed of “gender identity ideology”, with its advocacy of child sterilisation, and you end up with a movement that poses a profound danger to children.

If we had regulatory institutions that really did put child safeguarding first and foremost, it would be the LGBTQ+ movement that was now under investigation and not GB News. In his throwaway joke Josh Howie merely hinted at a disturbing truth. The LGBTQ+ lobby represents a global danger to children because it believes the normal rules that protect children do not apply to it. It’s time society insisted that they bloody well do.