There are three distinct cultural contexts for this question.

-- 1970's: Gays were newly legal in some areas but still heavily socially despised. The Gay Liberation Movement was uncompromising in its demands for liberation, demanding an end to the age of consent.

In this time, I met BLs as they happened to come along, since they were like anyone else. A friend in his 30's was interviewed on a radio program about his long-term affair with a boy who'd been 11 when it started. He said that the boy had turned out to be heterosexual but at 17 was still a good friend and they still j/o'd together occasionally for old times' sake. He thought the boy had taken the initiative and didn't feel taken advantage of. His 30-something boyfriend just rolled his eyes. I left that city later and I haven't succeeded in googling him up to see how things went after that. He hasn't been a news headline, anyways.

There was also a fellow university student, 19 or so, who showed around photos of his 12- or 13-year old boyfriend to anyone who cared to admire. Nobody felt socially accepted, so it hardly mattered that some might be a little less accepted. I remember being invited to a sex party where one of the guests was going to be a 14-year old (illegal then, became legal later, now illegal again) who was exceptionally cute. It was obvious that the invite also involved having sex with the 30-something hosts, so I declined with feverish haste. I'd be dead today if I'd ever got into doing that sort of thing (though AIDS hadn't been invented yet when I got this offer).

-- early 1980's: the heyday of Nambla and the northwest European organized paedophile movements. Tom Reeves from NAMBLA was an invited speaker at a conference I went to about where the lesbian and gay movement, as it was now called, was headed. Tom was showing some signs of frustration at this point; I had a couple of conversations with him and he spoke rather polemically much of the time. He also mused that he was really an ephebephile rather than a pedophile. I didn't mention to him that I also liked boys, partly because I was monogamous with my partner so it wasn't something I was doing something about, and partly because, knowing activists, I knew he'd try to put me to work in some way if I mentioned it. And I had enough on my plate. Anyways, he seemed to be a decent guy. The gay movement, at that time, was trying very hard to integrate with lesbians and feminism, and paedophiles were clearly not close to acceptance for any but the most radical lesbian feminists (like Pat Califia, whom you may google.)

-- after 1987 when the international LGBT movement kicked the paedophile orgs out in order to appease the United Nations:

A great schism was produced where 98% of the social paranoia and sex panic that had formerly attached to gays became attached to paedophiles as a substitute. This was the gay movement's big step up the social ladder to its end-of-millenium triumphs. The image of the paedophile had been hugely altered by all the feminist books about sexually abusing dads; also, there was the girl-murdering Dutroux in Belgium, and the authority-abusing, boy-molesting priests and lay brothers throughout Catholicism. Many other people who had had chilling experiences with persuasives (older people who persuade kids to get involved in sexual activities when they don't really want to) also found that the time was ripe to tell their stories. BLs then became pariahs, and suddenly meeting one became an issue. The post-Victorian notion that deviant sex desire causes complete loss of moral control was lifted up from gays in general and moved over specifically to paedophiles. Thus the idea that there might be self-controlling paedophiles who weren't like the denounced abusers became a social unthinkable.

Since that time I've met a small number of members of the self-aware BL community, plus one teen-loving gay man from my day-to-day life. I don't think he thinks of himself as BL, but I think we all would. With a legal age of 16 here, his taste in boys is legal; he's not going to get into any trouble. I'm going to go buy a coffee from him right now, in fact, and have a chat -- see y'all later.