I was an unlucky kid and grew up in the 1960s in a small town where several boys fell prey to a pedophile.This film shows how easy it is for pedophiles to pick up naïve boys. I think this film should be shown to every school-age boy as self-defense training.One member of NAMBLA casually mentions how easy it is to pick up boys and the camera follows him into a mall where he leads boys out to the parking lot, aborting his plans just as the boys are about to climb into his van. Chilling!In 1994 I attended a Queer Symposium held during Gay Games in New York. The rules for the crowd were that anyone who identified as "queer" was invited to participate. When representatives from NAMBLA arrived, organizers of the symposium had to quiet the crowd from the stage and moderate the heated audience Q&A.When I went to see this film, I noticed that most of the sparse audience was sunk down in their chairs, wearing hats; it was easy to spot who was there out of morbid curiosity and who came out of livid interest."Chicken Hawk" is aptly titled and wickedly unabashed. Child molesters and pedophiles are complex in their desires, and if one can get past the initial repulsion, these are just men who have justified their aberrant behavior. They don't question it, they embrace it and have found a support system. That is scary.

Superficially at least, this film is as value-neutral a portrayal of its subject matter - homosexual ephebophile men who divert their interests into political lobbying, as you are going to get. Absent are the imposing, moralising commentary, off-target references to pedophiles and highly biased samples present in most treatments of pederasty. The producers present as interested parties who are willing to absorb a range of viewpoints without forcing any clear agenda, be it of the right-religious or femino-victimological persuasion. What we discover is a group of political outcasts who are now seen as increasingly out of favour, even among a gay movement that originally had written into its stonewall declaration - the abolition of all age of consent laws. As an organisation, NAMbLA is a political hot-potato, a historical and cultural curiosity and a whole load of baggage, already well past its effective lifespan when the film was made.Nevertheless, the documentary fails to go beyond interviewing those-who-shout-the-loudest in a way that - as already pointed out, involves somewhat editorially suspect subtleties. The use of music to infer emotional states, the exclusion of all but two or so contrarian anecdotes of man-boy sex (the bread and butter of most literature on gay youth and older men) and the bizarre over-focus on Leland Stevenson and his suicidally contrived romanticising of anal sex and intergenerational "flirtation" all pay testimony to that. Understandably, most organisations as severely ostracised and fringe in nature as NAMbLA attract their fair share of loose-screws. Maybe this was why "Chicken Hawk" left at least one battle-scarred queer and long-time mentor of gay-youth with a strong impression that the whole story had not quite been told. A closer focus on the group's more pragmatic members would have been at least a small improvement to a documentary that even left one reviewer under the illusion that - as demonstrated by the comments here on IMDb, a decidedly milquetoast teenboy-lover such as Renato was out "molesting" the local game.Nevertheless, don't let these rather personal complaints distract you from viewing this fascinating portrayal of politics and pederasty in the modern world - available, as I write, on YouTube.com. Things have moved on considerably since "Chicken Hawk" was shot, but the sheer rarity of the information on show makes it a must-watch for all appreciators of sexual politics and philosophy.

Chicken Hawk is a documentary that sheds a strange, immoral light on the world of pedophiles and more so the perverted and disillusioned group known as NAMBLA, aka the North American Man Boy Love Association. At first, I was unsure of the film's authenticity, but as it progressed, the various scenes and spots these men haunted validated its realness, which in turn, increased its disturbing effect. These homosexual men are as insane as any non-institutionalized person could be. They rant and explain how these children are in fact "flirting" and "desiring" such communication, with such a bizarre eloquence and intellectual manner, that is indeed interesting to listen to their bewilderingly, sick diatribe. The film is definitely con pedophiles, as would be any sane production company, but I believe the picture could have been a little more polished if it had kept a more neutral stance. Very decent documentary on the whacked out organization that is NAMBLA.

I felt that the underlying treatment of this documentary was generally hostile to a fair understanding of men who love boys and the message we have for society.There were many "cheap shots" which I saw Adi taking in his film. Incidentally, not towards both sides, equally, but only towards boy lovers. There were technical maneuvers, such as making close-ups on people's teeth, or looking up at Leyland while he drove-and panning on old, dead trees they passed. And the music that was used-stuff that added to an emotion of we boy lovers not being all there, and even pathological.Now, if Adi had made such a film about black men who loved white women in the 1920s, people would see what I'm talking about. You'd have a movie of "pure" interviews and images from that time. There would be no attempt at analysis. The result would be a film in which there would be a huge uproar in society about the way in which no one attempted to humanize the black men adequately. Adi's career might be ruined before it even started. And you can bet that he would not even begin to allow himself to make an oversight like that.To conclude, i say that "CHICKEN HAWK: Men Who Love Boys" as a film is in the grey area between a constructive communication to the public, and a destructive one. For the media literate it should hold intriguing questions that can be thought about at length before coming to tentative conclusions. For the media illiterate, the film will most certainly be just one more reason to enhance and enable the increasing psychiatrick-industrial complex. They won't desire to look at we "perverts" as individuals, nor wonder how the film-maker got so close to such people who are supposedly forever "beyond the reach" of "ill-equipped" and "weak budgeted" law enforcement agencies. They'll just foam at the mouth and want to KILL KILL KILL like good citizens are supposed to do at the whim of imposed authority.