CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : SAN FRANCISCO : Man-Boy Meetings Provoke Protests

Meetings of the North American Man-Boy Love Assn. at a city library are being protested after news reports that the group had gathered there under close monitoring for two years. About 60 people turned out at the Potrero Hill branch library to demand that NAMBLA be ousted. In the past five years, about a dozen people associated with NAMBLA have been arrested on child molesting charges, according to San Francisco Police Inspector Tom Eisenman. “We can’t really attack the organization NAMBLA because the organization isn’t molesting children, it’s the individuals,” Eisenman said. But librarian Marcia Schneider said: “We may think that they are despicable in terms . . . of the stands they are taking. However, they do have the right to use our meeting room as a First Amendment issue. It’s a public open space.”