All Gays Are Pedophiles

"Ralph was sick, not a visible sickness, a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was homosexual." (From the movie "Boys beware")

You are gay, and all gays are paedophiles!

—The Paedofinder General, Monkey Dust

Unfortunately not quite a Dead Horse Trope yet, the basic idea of this one is that all homosexuals (especially gay men) have a sexual interest in children and will molest them if they get a chance. This is still used as an excuse to persecute the gay community, the primary fear being that gays are trying to "recruit" children as part of the "Gay agenda" (related to Rape and Switch). Somebody Think of the Children!

You'll notice below that most examples of this trope are subversions, playing on people's prejudices only to reveal that the gays in question aren't pedophiles after all. Or the person making the claim is clearly a bigot the audience is supposed to side against from the start. Indeed, the majority of Real Life child molesters are heterosexual men, targeting children (of either sex) already known to them. Likewise, many male shotacons claim to be otherwise heterosexual.

Examples of All Gays Are Pedophiles include:

Anime

• There are several in Black Butler Nina and Viscount Druitt are bisexual pedophiles, Lord Trancy senior and Claude from the anime only like underaged boys, and Baron Klein from the manga likes men and underaged boys.
• In Berserk, there's Lord Gennon and Donovan. Paedophilia is common in Miura's work to emphasize just how crappy a place Midland is, so it's not just Gennon, or even homosexuals who are depraved. Just ask Charlotte, whose own father tried to rape her or even better, ask Guts himself why he Hates Being Touched so much since Donovan was the one who raped him.
• General Blue in Dragon Ball in the anime and videogames. In the manga he's just gay.
• Hisoka from Hunter X Hunter. He hits on four people, two of them are boys, both underaged. This also includes the Live Action Musical preformed by the anime's Japanese seiyuu cast.
• This wound up being subverted in Loveless, though it took some time for The Reveal to clear things up. Soubi's teacher Ritsu sexually abused him, so many fans assumed Ritsu was gay, but it turns out that he did it for revenge because he'd loved Soubi's mother, but she married another man. This seems to be a case where, like in real life, it has less to do with the gender of the victim and more to do with power and control.

Film

• The 1961 short film Boys Beware, notable for not only blatantly describing homosexuality as a contagious disease, but also having the child be punished for being molested.
• Milk points out the historical fact that even into the late 1970s homosexual school teachers could be fired for "being a danger to children" using this trope as a pretext.
• The 1950s film Red Light, Green Light: Meeting Strangers, and not only did it have the "all pedophiles are strangers lurking in bushes" trope, but most of the film was about young boys being targeted by older men. The very last segment in the film was about a girl who was targeted by... an older woman.
• Avoided in Maurice by shooting but ultimately dropping the scene in which Maurice attempts a very clumsy seduction of Dr Barry's nephew Dickie Barry. In the novel the passage is darkly funny in typical Forster fashion, mainly because of role reversal: Maurice is extremely desperate and horny, but at the same time fears rejection (acting more a like a teenager), while Dickie is calm, not entirely disinclined to the idea and perhaps more worried about them getting caught and other practicalities. In the DVD deleted scenes, Dickie is portrayed as perhaps a bit too wide-eyed and innocent, making the scene more uncomfortable than funny.

Literature

• In the Harry Potter, Rita Skeeter seems to imply a teacher-student relationship between Dumbledore and Harry in her book, although it is unknown if she was aware of his homosexuality or not, given that not even the audience knew until Word of God revealed it.
• Subverted in the Christopher Rice novel Light Before Day. Main protagonist Adam is trying to crack a child pornography case headed by a gay man, but is dreading the possible backlash against the gay community. His mentor, an older mystery writer (who's straight), assures him that the people running the operation are bastards for exploiting children, not for being gay, and that he need not worry about vindicating his community.
• This happens on a radio call-in show in David Sedaris' vignette "Chicken in The Henhouse."
• Vanyel Ashkevron had his own family thinking this of him when he came out as homosexual. It took years for him to get them to understand that he preferred more mature relationships. In fact, the Valdemaran word shaych (From the Tayledras shay'a'chern) came into existence when the population realized that with their greatest war hero being openly gay, they needed to have a polite word for that concept in their language.
• The fact that some readers read this trope into Katherine Kerr's Deverry series is one of the reasons that she released a revised edition of the second book Darkspell. In the original version, the evil mage Alastyr rapes his apprentice Sarcyn and his younger brother. When Sarcyn has grown to adulthood, the two are shown abducting a man and raping him repeatedly. (They draw magical powers from this act.) This led some readers to conclude that Alastyr was intended to be an evil gay pedophile rapist wizard. One of the revisions Kerr made was to change Sarcyn's brother into a sister, to drive home the point that no, Alastyr's crime is not homosexuality, it's that he's a child molester.
• Frank Herbert, author of Dune, was accused of invoking this trope via the character of Vladimir Harkonnen, though there was.^[1] The fact that that series isn't exactly long on gay characters didn't help matters.

Live Action TV

• Repeatedly averted in Law and Order Special Victims Unit, which at one point pulls a Lampshade Hanging on this trope by pointing out that somewhere around 90% of pedophiles are heterosexual men.
  • An episode of Law and Order revolves around the cold case of a boy who disappeared in the 1960s and whose body has recently turned up in his old building. The main suspects in the original investigation were a homosexual couple who lived nearby, largely because of this trope. They didn't do it, but the surviving member of the couple isn't particularly keen to cooperate with the detectives because of this trope, and bitterly lampshades it. Turns out it was a heterosexual man who killed him.
  • This trope was brought up in an SVU episode featuring a young girl who was raised by lesbians (her birth mother and the mother's partner). After some pictures were found of the family in which the girl was naked in an innocent child kind of way and taking a bath with one of the mothers (a practice that is not uncommon in much of the world) a lawyer convinced the girl's grandparents to press charges and sue for custody by showing them bogus studies that said gays were highly likely to molest their children.
• Discussed on NYPD Blue when PAA John Irvin (who was gay) was coming over to babysit Andy's son. "He's in charge, but if he wants you to do something that makes you uncomfortable you don't have to do it, and make sure you tell me about it." Nothing happened.
• Invoked in the American version of Queer as Folk: in which Brian's homophobic sister asks him to babysit her son. The little asshole, upon returning home, swears that Brian made him suck him off and of course, everyone believes him. This is supposedly due to the sister making homophobic slurs about Brian in front of the kid. Debbie also mentions in the first season that when her sister found out that Michael was gay, she wouldn't let her kids come over anymore because she was afraid Michael would molest them.
• A similar thing happens on the UK version of Queer as Folk, which leads to a moment for Stuart.

Stuart: I'm queer. I'm gay. I'm homosexual. I'm a poof, I'm a poofter, I'm a ponce. I'm a bumboy, batty-boy, backside artist, bugger. I'm bent. I am that arse bandit. I lift those shirts. I'm a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I'm Moses and the parting of the red cheeks. I fuck and I am fucked. I suck and I am sucked. I rim them and wank them, and every single man's had the fucking time of his life. And I am not a pervert. If there's one twisted bastard in this family, it's this little blackmailer here. So congratulations, Thomas. I've just officially outed you. (Beat) Oh, and one more thing: did I mention I've got a baby?"

• In the Masters of Horror episode "Sick Girl", Ida's landlady discovers she's gay, and accuses her of eying up her ten year old daughter. Ida is understandably offended.

Music

• Tom Robinson's 1976 angry gay anthem, Glad to be Gay, contains, among other descriptions of wrongs done to gay people, the lines, "Molesters of children, corrupters of youth/It's there in the papers, it must be the truth."

Web Original

• Some of the forum posts mocked on Fundies Say The Darndest Things fall under this.

Western Animation

• South Park has mocked this attitude twice.
  • In the episode "Cripple Fight", Big Gay Al is fired from the Mountain Scouts because of his sexuality and replaced with an supposedly heterosexual man, who really does molest the boys.
  • In "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy", Kyle's baby brother, Ike, has an affair with his kindergarten teacher. Kyle finds out and goes to the police, who immediately assume that the teacher is a man. Once they find out that she's actually an attractive young woman, they stop taking the situation seriously.
  • It is played straight with Mr. Garrison in "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" (though this episode took place right before he actually came out).
• Parodied in Monkey Dust when one of the Paedofinder General's victims were a couple of Straight Gays based on "some bloke in the pub who knew for definite". He even drops the very name of the trope.

Language

• In many Slavic languages, there is no distinction in the word "pederast" between a pedophile or gay.
  • Archaic Japanese contains a similar blur in the terms 若道, 美道, 衆道, and 若衆道, kanji-for-kanji translating to "the way of the youthful/beautiful/many" but meaning both "pederasty" and "homosexuality".
  • One particularly nasty slur in French, « pédé », is literally « pédéraste » but is primarily directed against gay males, or those perceived to be gay.

1. ↑ he wasn't attracted young boys because he was gay, he was gay because he was attracted to young boys, or more precisely, to himself at that age. He was seriously screwed up, on multiple levels.