In the past few days, I've heard news of two MAP organizations barricading or closing their doors. The first was the BL Talk and associated Fawnlet magazine project, which is on hiatus after one of its editors freaked out about being mentioned in a silly little YouTube video. The second, and much more disappointing example, is the offline advocacy group Beyond The Plus. While the BL Talk and Fawnlet projects were ultimately not activist endeavors, Beyond the Plus certainly was; "we're here, we're pedo, get used to it!" may as well have been their motto.

Do please note that this article is not going to be very polished or well-researched compared to prior articles. First, because information on the organizations that attacked Beyond the Plus is not exactly forthcoming. Second, because I'm currently in the process of moving house and starting a new job, and I simply don't have the time to dedicate hours of research. That said...

BL Talk and Fawnlet

I'll start with the least interesting case, BL Talk and Fawnlet. While public, the content is clearly not aimed at people beyond the heavily siloed MAP community. That's completely fine. Projects by the community and for the community are still valuable; they give people a lot of pleasure. Still, they do represent us publicly at the end of the day, and the decisions their creators make affect how our community is perceived.

So what happened? A couple of weeks back, a brand-new YouTube channel published a video about the MAP community, or at least a thin slice of it, and this included a feature on BL Talk and Fawnlet. It was clear that not a lot of research was done to make the video. Many of the details were wrong, a number of important sites were omitted, and the producer was too much of a coward to even log into any of the sites he was supposed;y 'investigating'. The comments were quite silly, too. People suggested that the producer might be murdered by a cabal of elite pedophiles, and claimed that pedophiles are running 'baby farms' to produce children. Then there were the standard woodchipper jokes and other such nonsense. The overall picture is not of people to be taken very seriously.

The video did encourage readers to report the featured sites to the NCMEC, but that's not a major cause for alarm. The NCMEC receives tips constantly, and has to deal with some pretty serious cases. They likely don't give a fuck about BL Talk, or Fawnlet, or any of the other sites mentioned. That's why BoyChat has been online for thirty years! People have made videos about me, reported me to the NCMEC and equivalents in other countries, and yet... here I am.

Unfortunately, one senior member of the BL Talk and Fawnlet projects freaked out, and thus it is on hiatus...

Beyond the Plus

The much more concerning case is that of Beyond the Plus, whose primary purpose was to be a visible in-person pro-MAP organization. Now I don't know all the details surrounding the backstory, and wouldn't typically publish with such an information gap... but as mentioned, time is pressing. According to leader Ally Kotetsu's fediverse posts, which have also been copied to BoyChat:

Here is the timeline of events that affected Bt+'s eventual downfall.

In December we started receiving attention on Soyjak Party. One of our staff got doxxed and a bunch of people on there started giving death threats to our staff. Vi and I chose to ignore it, but our other staff wanted us to take measures to ensure their safety, mainly shutting down the website. Vi and I did not want to do this, because we felt the danger there wasn't credible, that shutting down the website wouldn't stop it, and that it wasn't fair to do something that would affect all of our members just because of publicity that we knew we would attract all along.

One of our staff members wanted us to tell our members about the soyjak thing, but I didn't think it was necessary. They were only going after staff so I thought that telling people would freak them out beyond reason. Though eventually people found out on their own and felt betrayed that we had not disclosed that information to them, which hurt a lot of the trust that had been built between staff and members. From there on our event attendance declined significantly and our new membership rate dropped to 0. I concede that I should have told people what was going on, I just didn't think at the time that that was a positive thing to do, but here we are.

One staff left because they got doxxed. (Which happened because i asked what name they wanted to use for the staff page and they chose to use their full legal name.) One of our staff made it an ultimatum that if we didn't shut down the website, they were gonna leave. I told them we could talk about it at our next meeting but they made it an ultimatum that I alone had to respond to. I chose not to, so they left, leaving vi and I the only remaining staff.

From there on the ex staff member pressured us to shut down the org, citing member safety a concern. Apparently, people in the local community were getting impatient with our existence, and said ex staff heard someone say something about how if BT+ wasn't gonna go away then they were gonna push us out of the city.

During our January social, a local community member found out event information (I assume from a current member they were friends with) and came to the social to yell at us about how we needed to shutdown. They presented information I was not aware of signifying that our members were in danger, and also presented the threat that Bt+ was going to garner news attention and lead to trump sending ICE to Seattle.

After that we decided we would let our members vote on the future of the org, and once we told them everthina that was aoina on they no londer felt safe. no londer trusted us. and decided that public. in-person organization like us wasn't how they wanted things done. We held a vote, and the only people to vote to stay public were a good friend of mine and one other member. Anyone else who voted to stay public had never actually come to any of our events in the first place so I discounted their votes. Everyone else wanted us to shutdown. And so here we are.

I feel like a lot of this happened because of my mistakes, but I also felt like it was inevitable. I thought people were going to be able to be brave when stuff like this happened, but it didn't turn out that way, maybe because I didn't tell them all of the apparent danger. I saw the soyjak party thing as a joke and I didn't want to pay it any attention, but others felt differently, which is something I didn't expect would happen. In any case, I don't see this as anyone's fault. The truth is that our people are not ready to literally fight for our rights, and we only will have them when people are. That won't happen overnight I was going to shut things down at the end of the month, but said ex staff member kept pressuring me to do it right away. Eventually I caved in because I was already planning for Bt+ to go away and nobody else had voted yet, so it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

There's some group in Seattle called CAT HOUSE, which has been described to me as a queer "gang", "discord server", and "underground railroad." Supposedly the higher ups in that org wanted nothing but for Bt+ to go away, and said ex staff made it sound like they would do anything to make that happen. The only reason they hadn't yet supposedly was because some local community members were able to get them to hold off on the promise that I was eventually going to shut things down, but apparently when the news coverage hit they ran out of patience and the threat of them doing violence against me became a realistic one.

I expected a lot to happen because of Bt+, what I did not expect was that queer people would act not on hatred of us, but on fear of fascism. And instead of trying to work together they wanted to erase us from existence. And what I expected less was that the local radqueers were going to side with them rather than stay by our side. But that is how things went.

In Beyond the Plus' case, it seems there is actually a credible threat. I don't know the people involved well enough to deduce just how credible it is, but it's clearly a more serious matter than anything the BL Talk people are dealing with. Still, wasn't this inevitable? Wasn't stirring the pot kind of the point?

Ally takes the threats she's received so seriously that she asked me not to write about Cat House, at least not aggressively. She and her supporters pointed out that it's easy to be a warrior from behind a keyboard, versus facing potentially violent enemies in real life in your own city. They're not wrong, but why start a public, in-person group in the first place if you're going to run away with your tail tucked between your legs when the very predictable trouble starts? In Washington, it is lawful to use deadly force to defend oneself and others, and it is my understanding that Beyond the Plus leaders were indeed armed. Unless Cat House had sent a literal army, the Beyond the Plus people should have been able to take care of themselves.

Responding to the bullies

Most antis are bullies, who enjoy picking on the weakest possible target. And well, unless they're billionaires, MAPs are pretty much the easiest target you can find. This needs to change. I do not want to see another Nicholas Prosper or Connor Weston, but I do want MAPs to stand their ground and defend themselves lawfully when attacked. The capitulation of both BL Talk (et. al) and Beyond the Plus has only encouraged further bullying.

Antis need to learn that threatening and bullying MAPs can have consequences. Cat House's main fear, apparently, is ICE. Therefore, if you can dig up any info on Cat House's members, do please let me know. Despite not exactly being a fan of the brownshirts myself, I'll do my best to find anything that might be of interest to ICE, and send in a tip...