DePaul Professor Teaches Homosexual Politics, Defended Pedophilia Incident

“If someone had told me 30 years ago... I would be tenured and promoted to a professor as a publicly professed lesbian at the country's largest Catholic university, I would not have believed them,” the professor says.

A professor at DePaul University in Chicago, who is currently teaching the course “Creating Change: Contemporary GLBT Politics” and helped pioneer DePaul’s Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies programs, is something of a celebrity in pedophilia circles for her 1979 article downplaying the damaging effects of childhood homosexual activity with an adult.

Elizabeth “Beth” Kelly, PhD, professor of women’s and gender studies, has taught at DePaul since 1992. In 2010, then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley named Kelly head of the city’s LGBT advisory council. That council has since been abolished by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“If someone had told me 30 years ago that in 2010 I would be tenured and promoted to a professor as a publicly professed lesbian at the country's largest Catholic university, I would not have believed them,” Kelly told the student newspaper, The DePaulia, in 2010.

She was hired by DePaul despite writing a 1979 article that reported glowingly of her own sexual relationship with a great-aunt when she was just a child. The article, “On woman/girl love, or Lesbians do ‘do it,’” reportedly appeared in the Gay Community News on March 3,1979, but is not available online. It has been excerpted at length on numerous websites and in publications including the pro-pedophilia book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case, by author Tom O’Carroll. That book is available on the IPCE website, which describes itself as “a forum for people who are engaged in scholarly discussion about the understanding and emancipation of mutual relationships between children or adolescents and adults.”

In her article, Kelly reportedly defended her lesbian, pedophile experience when she was between eight and 11 years old, as cited by David Thorstad in the 1991 book Male Intergenerational Intimacy:

"It has always seemed to me that people know when sex is a right thing for them to be doing, when mutually consented to, regardless of who else may or may not share or understand that knowledge. It took some hard object lessons before I finally learned how unusual such logic is in this world. Despite the cultural messages to the contrary that I eventually did receive, I knew that it was possible for a person to be aware of her own physicalness in a sexual way long before the social timetable of “maturity” says she should be—and to be able to act on her awareness. And I know that now, with all my “grown-up” being. Although for several years I succumbed to social sanctions against lesbian and childhood sexuality, and felt ashamed for having had such experiences, I have come to realize the need to affirm them as part of the rich texture of both human experience in general and my own conscious reality in particular."

Thorstad, reportedly “a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance,” praised Kelly’s article for its “sensible treatment” of “woman-girl love.”