Socialism and LGBT rights

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It is a myth that homosexuality or LGBT activism have any link with socialism or any particular political philosophy. Some 19th and 20th-century LGBT activists worked within leftwing groups and appropriated Marxist and civil rights terminology to further their agendas, but they also worked within other movements including the Fascist Movement. They freely subverted and twisted political terminology to suit their own ends.

Homosexual fascists have always been common. There have also been Communist regimes that dealt in a very brutal way with homosexuals.

History

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German atheist philosopher whose ideas were an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, is now widely thought to have been homosexual. Sometimes described as the "the state philosopher of the Third Reich", he was never married, and was certainly not interested in women, although he was very preoccupied in his writings with sexuality. Passages in his own diary and letters suggest homosexuality.[1] The biographer Joachim Kohler has concluded he was homosexual.[2] Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung relate an anecdote that Nietzsche contracted syphilis, from which he died, during a visit to a homosexual brothel in Genoa, Italy.[3][4]

Adolf Brand

Adolf Brand (1874–1945) created the first homosexual magazine of the 20th century, Der Eigene (the Self-Owner), in Germany. It was elitist and militaristic, a clear forerunner of Nazi ideology. Brand asserted "that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens."[5]

Ernst Röhm

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One of the founders of the German Nazi party, he was an open homosexual, finally assassinated on the orders of his rival for power, Adolf Hitler, who may well have been homosexual himself. They first met in 1920, and were close friends for 14 years. Röhm and his SA built Dachau, the first concentration camp. He promoted his homosexual friends to high posts and gave homosexual parties. It has been said by historian Louis Snyder that Röhm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute… He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies do the same. He believed straight people weren’t as adept at bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was given a high premium in the SA." Elie Wiesel, the Jewish Holocaust survivor, records in his writings that there were many homosexual SS guards who exploited boys in the concentration camps. "There existed here a veritable traffic of children among homosexuals."[6]

Edouard Pfieffer

Edouard Pfieffer, who was a senior minister in the 1930s under the French premier Daladier, influenced the government in a pro-Nazi direction. Historian John Costello writes of Pfeiffer: "As a connoisseur of homosexual decadence, Pfeiffer had few equals, even in Paris. As an officer of the French Boy-Scout movement, his private life was devoted to the seduction of youth." [7] [8]

Michael Kühnen

Michael Kühnen German neo-Nazi. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual."

Martin Webster

Martin Webster was one of the leaders of the UK National Front, a nationalist and anti-immigration movement in the 1980s, Webster was openly homosexual. Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, said homosexuality is “extremely prevalent” in the British far right, and "at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement’s organisers were gay".

Michel Caignet

Real name Miguel Caignet, born Paris 24 October 1954, was one of the founders of the Gay Nazi Party. Caignet studied at the Sorbonne and obtained a doctorate in Anglo-German linguistics. He belonged to FANE, ("Fédération d'action nationale et européenne," or "National and European Action Federation") a neo-Nazi group that got into friction with Jews and he was denounced by the weekly VSD (Vendredi/Samedi/ Dimanche). He denied the Holocaust and translated Le Mensonge d'Auschwitz, (The Lie of Auschwitz) by the Danish Nazi, Thies Christophersen, and published it in the periodical Combat Européen. In 1981, he was the victim of an acid attack allegedly by a Jewish group. He went on to become President of the so-called Centre de Culture Européenne (Centre for European Culture) set up by himself and other Nazis and editor from 1986 of Gaie France (Gay France) magazine. Specializing in pictures of young boys, it is sometimes referred to as a "pedophile" magazine, otherwise a "gay" magazine. It mixed homosexuality with Nazism and pagan even Satanic ideas, reaching a circulation of 15,000.

After FANE was dissolved Caignet went on to found the Mouvement Européen (European Movement) with the German Nazi Michaël Kühnen. He translated Kühnen's books into French, including "Lettres de prison" (Prison Letters) and "Homosexualité et national-socialisme" (Homosexuality and National Socialism).[9]Caignet was affiliated with G.R.E.C.E. another "new-right" group and with a far-left Holocaust-denial group named La Vieille Taupe.

In 1992 Caignet was convicted of the crime of incitment to pedophile acts for articles in Gaie France. He re-launched it under another title, Gaie France, new series, in 1993, and continued publishing it together with other similar magazines entitled Alexandre, Sparte, Complice, Le Gay Pavois, etc.

Caignet was a lover of Pastor Joseph Doucé, who was mixed up with the infamous CRIES (Centre de Recherche et d'Information sur l'Enfance et la Sexualité i.e. Centre for Research and Information on Childhood and Sexuality) a UNICEF institution that turned out to be run by and for pedophiles. Doucé was murdered in 1992.

In 1997 Caignet was convicted again for involvement in the film company of Jean-Manuel Vuillaume, making child-pornographic films in Colombia. The videos were distributed by a network named Toro Bravo. Caignet was sentenced to four years, served eighteen months, and retired on the profits he made out of the magazine and the videos.[10] [11] [12] [13] [14]


Pim Fortuyn

Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, described as a "gay former Marxist professor", ran on an anti-immigrant and anti-Islam platform, that was categorized as racist by leftwing observers. He was openly, flamboyantly homosexual. He was assassinated in May 2002, after opinion polls had predicted he would do very well in the imminent General Election. He was aged 54. His murderer said he shot Fortuyn to protect the Muslims of the Netherlands. [15] [16]

Alice Weidel

Born 1979, she is the co-leader of the German Alternative für Deutschland party, which opposes immigration, Islamization, and globalism. AfD is classified as "far-right" by the mainstream media. Weidel used to work as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors. She is openly lesbian and lives in Switzerland for tax reasons with a woman partner originally from Sri Lanka. The couple have adopted two children. [17]

See Also Nicky Crane, UK skinhead icon, and Kenneth Mieske USA skinhead hero.

Nazism Prevalent in Homosexual Porn and in LGBT Movement

Nazi uniforms are often to be seen in Gay Pride Parades and Nazi themes and images abound in homosexual pornography. Tom of Finland, the artist famous for his sadomasochistic homoerotic art, has been called “the most influential creator of gay pornographic images.” A homosexual commentator, Johann Hari has admitted in the Huffington Post that "Homo-Nazi sites... have bred on the internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple: while white men are superior to other races, gay men are “the masters of the Master Race”. They alone are endowed with the “capacity for pure male bonding” and the “superior intellect” that is needed for “a fascist revolution.” The ARC even organizes holiday “get-togethers” for its members where “you can relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers.”[18] [19]

History

The sexual politics of Utopian Socialism

Charles Fourier, Utopian socialist who coined the word feminism in 1837 and defended same-sex sexuality.

The first currents of modern socialist thought emerged in Europe in the early 19th century. They are now often described with the phrase utopian socialism. Gender and sexuality were significant concerns for many of the leading thinkers, such as Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in Britain, as well as their followers, many of whom were women. For Fourier, for example, true freedom could only occur without masters, without the ethos of work, and without suppressing passions; the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole. Writing before the advent of the term 'homosexuality', Fourier recognised that both men and women have a wide range of sexual needs and preferences which may change throughout their lives, including same-sex sexuality and androgénité. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long as people are not abused, and that "affirming one's difference" can actually enhance social integration.[20]

Germany

Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, German socialist arrested on a homosexual charge in 1862.

From the earliest European homosexual rights movements, activists such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld approached the Left for support. During the 1860s, Ulrichs wrote to Karl Marx and sent him a number of books on Uranian (homosexual/transgender) emancipation, and in 1869 Marx passed one of Ulrich's books on to Engels.[21] Engels responded with disgust to Marx in a private letter, lashing out at "pederasts" who are "extremely against nature", and described Ulrichs' platform of homosexual rights as "turning smut into theory". He worried that things would go badly for heterosexuals like himself should homosexual rights be gained.[22]

Known to both Ulrichs and Marx was the case of Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, an important labor organiser who had been charged with attempting to solicit a teenage boy in a park in 1862. Social democrat leader Ferdinand Lassalle defended Schweitzer on the grounds that while he personally found homosexuality to be dirty, the labor movement needed the leadership of Schweitzer too much to abandon him, and that a person's sexual tastes had "absolutely nothing to do with a man’s political character".[23] Marx, on the other hand, suggested that Engels use this incident to smear Schweitzer: "You must arrange for a few jokes about him to reach Siebel, for him to hawk around to the various papers."[24] However, Schweitzer would go on to become President of the German Labor Union, and the first Social Democrat elected to a parliament in Europe.

August Bebel's Woman under Socialism (1879), the "single work dealing with sexuality most widely read by rank-and-file members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)",[25] can be seen as another example of the ambiguous position towards homosexuality in the German labor movement. One the one hand, Bebel warned socialists of the dangers of same-sex love. Bebel attributed "this crime against nature" in both men and women to sexual indulgence and excess, describing it as an upper-class, metropolitan and foreign vice.[26] On the other hand, he did publicly support the efforts to legalize homosexuality. For example, he signed the first petition of the "Wissenschaftlich-humanitärer Kreis", a study group led by Magnus Hirschfeld, trying to explain homosexuality from a scientific point of view and pushing for decriminalization.[27] In an article for Gay News in 1978, John Lauritsen considers August Bebel as the first important politician "to speak out in public debate" in the favor of gay rights[28] since he attacked the criminialization of homosexuality in a Reichstag debate in 1898.

The leading figure of the LGBT movement in Germany from the turn of the 20th century until the Nazi government came to power in 1933 was undoubtedly Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld, who was also a socialist and supporter of the Women's Movement, formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to campaign against German Penal Code Section 175 which outlawed sodomy. Hirschfeld's organisation did a deal with the SPD (of which Lassalle and Schweitzer had been members) to get them to put forward a bill in the Reichstag in 1898, but it was opposed in the Reichstag and failed to pass. Most of Hirschfeld's circle of homosexual activists had socialist politics, including Kurt Hiller, Richard Linsert, Johanna Elberskirchen and Bruno Vogel. After the toppling of the German monarchy, the struggle against § 175 was continued by some social democrats. The German Minister of Justice Gustav Radbruch, member of the Social Democratic Party, tried to erase the paragraphe from the German penal law. However, his efforts were to no avail.

Britain

Edward Carpenter, influential British socialist within the Fabian Society, the Labour Party (UK) and early LGBTI activist and theorist

In Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he passionately advocates for an egalitarian society where wealth is shared by all, while warning of the dangers of authoritarian socialism that would crush individuality.[29]

Edward Carpenter was a leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain being instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. The 1890s saw Carpenter in a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. He strongly believed that same-sex attraction was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the LGBT movements of the 20th century. The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women expressed his views on homosexuality. Carpenter argues that "uranism", as he terms homosexuality, was on the increase marking a new age of sexual liberation.[30] He continued to work in the early part of the 20th century composing works on the "Homogenic question". The publication in 1902 of his groundbreaking anthology of poems, Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, was a huge underground success, leading to a more advanced knowledge of homoerotic culture.[31] In April 1914, Carpenter and his friend Laurence Houseman founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Some of the topics addressed in lecture and publication by the society included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex; a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct and problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilization, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution.

Anarchism, libertarian socialism and LGBT rights

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In Europe and North America, the free love movement combined ideas revived from utopian socialism with anarchism and feminism to attack the "hypocritical" sexual morality of the Victorian era, and the institutions of marriage and the family that were seen to enslave women. Free lovers advocated voluntary sexual unions with no state interference[32] and affirmed the right to sexual pleasure for both women and men, sometimes explicitly supporting the rights of homosexuals and prostitutes. For a few decades, adherence to "free love" became widespread among European and American anarchists, but these views were opposed at the time by Marxists and social democrats.[citation needed] Radical feminist and socialist Victoria Woodhull was expelled from the International Workingmen's Association in 1871 for her involvement in the free love and associated movements.[33] Indeed, with Marx's support, the American branch of the organisation was purged of its pacifist, anti-racist and feminist elements, which were accused of putting too much emphasis on issues unrelated to class struggle and were therefore seen to be incompatible with scientific socialism.[33]

The Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women's Associations), a turn of the 20th century left-wing organisation led by Lily Braun campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Germany and aimed at organising prostitutes into labour unions. The broader labour movement either attacked the League, saying they were utopians, or ignored it,[34] and Braun was driven out of the international Marxist movement.[35] Helene Stöcker, another German activist from the left wing of the women's movement, became heavily involved in the sexual reform movement in 1919, after World War I, and served on the board of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. She also campaigned to protect single mothers and their children from economic and moral persecution.[36] Anarcho-syndicalist writer Ulrich Linse wrote about "a sharply outlined figure of the Berlin individualist anarchist cultural scene around 1900", the "precocious Johannes Holzmann" (known as Senna Hoy): "an adherent of free love, [Hoy] celebrated homosexuality as a 'champion of culture' and engaged in the struggle against Paragraph 175."[37] The young Hoy (born 1882) published these views in his weekly magazine, ("Kampf", in English "Struggle") from 1904 which reached a circulation of 10,000 the following year. German anarchist psychotherapist Otto Gross also wrote extensively about same-sex sexuality in both men and women and argued against its discrimination.[38] Heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (1849–98) spoke positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the 1890s in his German-language journal "Der arme Teufel" (Detroit).

Lucía Sánchez Saornil, leader of Mujeres Libres in 1933 which was an anarcha-feminist Spanish organization during the highest points of influence of the anarchist movement there

Across the Atlantic, in New York's Greenwich Village, Bohemian feminists and socialists advocated self-realisation and pleasure for women (and also men) in the here and now, as well as campaigning against the First World War and for other anarchist and socialist causes. They encouraged playing with sexual roles and sexuality,[39] and the openly bisexual radical Edna St. Vincent Millay and the lesbian anarchist Margaret Anderson were prominent among them. The Villagers took their inspiration from the mostly anarchist immigrant female workers from the period 1905-1915[40] and the "New Life Socialism" of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner. Discussion groups organised by the Villagers were frequented by the Russian anarchist Emma Goldman, among others. Magnus Hirschfeld noted in 1923 that Goldman "has campaigned boldly and steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."[41] In fact, prior to Goldman, heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (1849–98) spoke positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the 1890s in his German-language journal "Der arme Teufel" (Detroit). During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Mujeres Libres was an anarchist women's organization in Spain that aimed to empower working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón and had approximately 30,000 members. The organization was based on the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and social revolution and argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Flying day-care centres were set up in efforts to involve more women in union activities.[42] Lucía Sánchez Saornil was a Spanish poet, militant anarchist and feminist. She is best known as one of the founders of Mujeres Libres and served in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). By 1919, she had been published in a variety of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to explore lesbian themes[43] at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and subject to censorship and punishment. Writing in anarchist publications such as Earth and Freedom, the White Magazine and Workers' Solidarity, Lucía outlined her perspective as a feminist. Although quiet on the subject of birth control, she attacked the essentialism of gender roles in Spanish society. In this way, Lucía established herself as one of the most radical of voices among anarchist women, rejecting the ideal of female domesticity which remained largely unquestioned. In a series of articles for Workers' Solidarity, she boldly refuted Gregorio Marañón's identification of motherhood as the nucleus of female identity.[44]

European gay anarchists

Anarchism's foregrounding of individual freedoms made for a natural marriage with homosexuality in the eyes of many, both inside and outside of the Anarchist movement. Emil Szittya, in Das Kuriositäten-Kabinett (1923), wrote about homosexuality that "very many anarchists have this tendency. Thus I found in Paris a Hungarian anarchist, Alexander Sommi, who founded a homosexual anarchist group on the basis of this idea." His view is confirmed by Magnus Hirschfeld in his 1914 book Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes: "In the ranks of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to me as if proportionately more homosexuals and effeminates are found than in others." Italian anarchist Luigi Bertoni (who Szittya also believed to be gay) said that "Anarchists demand freedom in everything, thus also in sexuality. Homosexuality leads to a healthy sense of egoism, for which every anarchist should strive."[45]

Anarcho-syndicalist writer Ulrich Linse wrote about "a sharply outlined figure of the Berlin individualist anarchist cultural scene around 1900", the "precocious Johannes Holzmann" (known as Senna Hoy): "an adherent of free love, [Hoy] celebrated homosexuality as a 'champion of culture' and engaged in the struggle against Paragraph 175.”[37] The young Hoy (born 1882) published these views in his weekly magazine, ("Kampf") from 1904 which reached a circulation of 10,000 the following year. German anarchist psychotherapist Otto Gross also wrote extensively about same-sex sexuality in both men and women and argued against its discrimination.[38] In the 1920s and 1930s, French individualist anarchist publisher Emile Armand campaigned for acceptance of free love, including homosexuality, in his journal L'en dehors.

The individualist anarchist Adolf Brand was originally a member of Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian committee, but formed a break-away group. Brand and his colleagues, known as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, were heavily influenced by homosexual anarchist John Henry Mackay. The group despised effeminacy and saw homosexuality as an expression of manly virility available to all men, espousing a form of nationalistic masculine Lieblingminne (chivalric love) that would later be linked to the rise of Nazism. They were opposed to Hirschfeld's medical characterisation of homosexuality as the domain of an "intermediate sex". Brand "toyed with anti-Semitism",[46] and disdained Hirschfeld on the grounds that he was Jewish. Ewald Tschek, another gay anarchist writer of the era, regularly contributed to Adolf Brand's journal Der Eigene, and wrote in 1925 that Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee was a danger to the German people, caricaturing Hirschfeld as "Dr. Feldhirsch".

Anarchist homophobia

Despite these supportive stances, the anarchist movement of the time certainly wasn't free of homophobia: an editorial in an influential Spanish anarchist journal from 1935 argued that an Anarchist shouldn't even associate with homosexuals: "If you are an anarchist, that means that you are more morally upright and physically strong than the average man. And he who likes inverts [gay men] is no real man, and is therefore no real anarchist."[47] However, despite this history, present-day anarchists widely accept homosexuality.[48]

The "homophile movement" and US socialism

McCarthyism in the US believed a "homosexual underground" was abetting the "communist conspiracy", which was sometimes called the Homintern. A number of homosexual rights groups came into being during this period. These groups, now known as the "homophile" movement, often had left-wing or socialist politics, such as the communist Mattachine Society and the Dutch COC which originated on the left.[49] In the context of the highly politicised Cold War environment, homosexuality became framed as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.[50] This era also witnessed the establishment of widely spread FBI surveillance intended to identify homosexual government employees.[51] Harry Hay, who is seen by many as the father of the modern gay rights movement in the United States, was originally a trade union activist. In 1934, he organised an important 83-day-long workers' strike of the port of San Francisco with his lover, actor Will Geer. He was an active member of the Communist Party. Hay and the Mattachine Society were among the first to argue that gay people were not just individuals but in fact represented a "cultural minority". They even called for public marches of homosexuals, predicting later gay pride parades. Hay's concept of the "cultural minority" came directly from his Marxist studies, and the rhetoric that he and his colleague Charles Rowland employed often reflected the militant Communist tradition. The Communist Party did not officially allow gays to be members, claiming that homosexuality was a 'deviation'; perhaps more important was the fear that a member's (usually secret) homosexuality would leave them open to blackmail and made them a security risk in an era of red-baiting. Concerned to save the party difficulties, as he put more energy into the Mattachine Society, Hay himself approached the CP's leaders and recommended his own expulsion. However, after much soul-searching, the CP, clearly reeling at the loss of a respected member and theoretician of 18 years' standing, refused to expel Hay as a homosexual, instead expelling him under the more convenient ruse of 'security risk', while ostentatiously announcing him to be a 'Lifelong Friend of the People'.[52] The Mattachine Society was the second gay rights organization that Hay established, the first being 'Bachelors for Wallace (1948) in support of Henry Wallace's progressive presidential candidacy. The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality reports that "As Marxists the founders of the group believed that the injustice and oppression which they suffered stemmed from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of American society".[53]

Bayard Rustin, prominent American socialist and African American civil rights and LGBTI activist

In 1951, the Socialist Party USA was close to adopting a platform plank in favor of gay rights, with one article in the Youth Socialist Party press supporting such a move.[54] African American socialist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, in 1953 for homosexual activity with two other men in a parked car. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as consensual sodomy was officially referred to in California then) and served 60 days in jail. This was the first time that his homosexuality had come to public attention. He had been and remained candid about his sexuality, although homosexuality was still criminalized throughout the United States.In 1957, Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement. U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was a member of the SCLC's board, forced Rustin's resignation from the SCLC in 1960 by threatening to discuss Rustin's morals charge in Congress.[55] A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual," and had the entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record.[56] Thurmond also produced a Federal Bureau of Investigation photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair. Rustin was instrumental in organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 7, 1963]]. He drilled off-duty police officers as marshals, bus captains to direct traffic, and scheduled the podium speakers. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rachelle Horowitz were aides.[56] Despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not want Rustin to receive any public credit for his role in planning the march. Nevertheless, he did become well known. On September 6, 1963, Rustin and Randolph appeared on the cover of Life magazine as "the leaders" of the March.[57] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and election monitor for Freedom House.[58] He also testified on behalf of New York State's Gay Rights Bill. In 1986, he gave a speech "The New Niggers Are Gays," in which he asserted,

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Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new "niggers" are gays.... It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change.... The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.[59]

Communist and Socialist Countries

After the Russian Revolution under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Union released a new legal code, differently from the code from the tsarist era, the new Russian penal codes was absent from legal punishments on matters such as homosexuality. However other states in the USSR continued to ascribe legal punishments on sodomy.[60]

The lowest point in the history of the relationship between socialism and homosexuality undoubtedly begins with the rise of Joseph Stalin in the USSR, after Lenin's death, and continues through the era of state communism in the Soviet Union, East Germany, China and North Korea. In all cases the conditions of sexual minorities, including transgender people, worsened in communist states after the arrival of Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of homosexuals were interned in gulags during the Great Purge, where many were beaten to death. Some Western intellectuals withdrew their support of Communism after seeing the severity of repression in the USSR, including the gay writer André Gide.[61]

Historian Jennifer Evans reports that the East German government "alternated between the view [of homosexual activity] as a remnant of bourgeois decadence, a sign of moral weakness, and a threat to social and political health of the nation."[62] Homosexuality was legalized in East Germany when Article 174 was repealed in 1968.[63]

There was a variety of attitudes to homosexuality in the Socialist countries. Effeminate men and homosexuals were sometimes forced to participate in programs of 'reeducation' involving forced labor, conversion therapy, psychotropic drugs or confinement in psychiatric hospitals.[citation needed]

The revolutionary Cuban gay writer Reinaldo Arenas noted that, shortly after the communist government of Fidel Castro came to power, "persecution began and concentration camps were opened [...] the sexual act became taboo while the "new man" was proclaimed and masculinity exalted.".[64] Homosexuality was legalized in Cuba in 1979.[65] Fidel Castro apologized for Cuba's poor historical record on LGBT issues in 2010.[65]

Following the 1953 uprising in East Germany, the government defended the traditional family, while homosexuality was regarded as contrary to "healthy habits of workers."[66] This agenda was pursued using the existing Article 175 of the penal code, which had been applied under the Nazis. While there had been no law against sodomy in the USSR, such a law was introduced in 1933, added to the penal code as Article 121, which condemned homosexual relations with penalties of imprisonment up to five years. With the fall of the Soviet regime and the repeal of the law against sex between consenting adult men, prisoners convicted under that part of the law were released very slowly.[67]

Homosexuality was legalized in several Eastern Bloc countries under Communism, such as Bulgaria,[68] Czechoslovakia[69] and Hungary.[70]

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After 1968

During the emergence of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the socialist left began to review its relationship to gender, sexuality and identity politics. The writings of the French bisexual anarchist Daniel Guérin offer an insight into the tension sexual minorities among the Left have often felt. He was a leading figure in the French Left from the 1930s until his death in 1988. After coming out in 1965, he spoke about the extreme hostility toward homosexuality that permeated the left throughout much of the 20th century.[71] "Not so many years ago, to declare oneself a revolutionary and to confess to being homosexual were incompatible," Guérin wrote in 1975.[72] In 1954, Guérin was widely attacked for his study of the Kinsey Reports in which he also detailed the oppression of homosexuals in France. "The harshest [criticisms] came from marxists, who tend seriously to underestimate the form of oppression which is antisexual terrorism. I expected it, of course, and I knew that in publishing my book I was running the risk of being attacked by those to whom I feel closest on a political level."[73] After coming out publicly in 1965, Guérin was abandoned by the Left, and his papers on sexual liberation were censored or refused publication in left-wing journals.[74] From the 1950s, Guérin moved away from Marxism-Leninism and toward a synthesis of anarchism and marxism close to platformism which allowed for individualism while rejecting capitalism. Guérin was involved in the uprising of May 1968, and was a part of the French Gay Liberation movement that emerged after the events. Decades later, Frédéric Martel described Guérin as the "grandfather of the French homosexual movement."[75] Meanwhile, in the United States late in his career the influential anarchist thinker Paul Goodman came out as bisexual. The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his romantic and sexual relations with men (notably in a late essay, "Being Queer"[76]), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging gay liberation movement of the early 1970s.

Emerging from a number of events, such as the May 1968 insurrection in France, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and the Stonewall riots of 1969, militant Gay Liberation organisations began to spring up around the world. Many saw their roots in left radicalism more than in the established homophile groups of the time,[77] such as British and American Gay Liberation Front, the British Gay Left Collective, the Italian Fuori!, the French FHAR, the German Rotzschwule, and the Dutch Red Faggots.

The then styled Gay Lib leaders and writers also came from a left-wing background, such as Dennis Altman, Martin Duberman, Steven Ault, Brenda Howard, John D'Emilio, David Fernbach (writing in the English language), Pierre Hahn and Guy Hocquenghem (in French) and the Italian Mario Mieli. Some were inspired by Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which attempts to synthesise the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. 1960s and 1970s radical Angela Davis (who officially came out as a lesbian in 1999) had studied under Marcuse and was greatly influenced by him. In France, gay activist and political theorist Guy Hocquenghem, like many others, developed a commitment to socialism through participating in the May 1968 insurrection. A former member of the French Communist Party, he later joined the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), formed by radical lesbians who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971, including the left ecofeminist Françoise d'Eaubonne. That same year, the FHAR became the first homosexual group to demonstrate publicly in France when they joined Paris’s annual May Day march held by trade unions and left-wing parties.[citation needed]

In the United Kingdom, the 1980s saw increased opposition to LGBT rights from the right wing Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, who introduced Section 28 in 1988 in order to prevent what they saw as the "promotion" of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle in schools. However, the Conservatives' main opposition, the Labour Party, did little to address the issue of LGBT rights, ignoring calls from left-wingers such as Ken Livingstone, to do so.[78] Meanwhile, the popular right-wing press featured pejorative references to lesbians, supposedly especially associated with the all-female anti-nuclear protest camp at Greenham Common,[79] and individuals such as Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election.

However, the growing commercialisation of the western gay subculture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (the "pink pound") has come under heavy criticism from socialists, for instance, Hannah Dee remarked that it had reached "the point that London Pride - once a militant demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall riots - has become a corporate-sponsored event far removed from any challenge to the ongoing injustices that we [the LGBT community] face."[80] At the same time, an anti-war coalition between Muslims (many organized through Mosques) and the Socialist Workers Party led a leading member Lindsey German to reject the use of gay rights as a "shibboleth" that would automatically rule out such alliances.[81]

The American Revolutionary Communist Party's policy that "struggle will be waged to eliminate [homosexuality] and reform homosexuals"[82] wasn't abandoned until 2001. The RCP now strongly supports gay liberation. Meanwhile, the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US released a memo stating that gay oppression had less "social weight" than black and women's struggles, and prohibited members from being involved in gay political organisations.[83] They also believed that too close an association with gay liberation would give the SWP an "exotic image" and alienate it from the masses.[84] That position was abandoned long ago.[when?]

As the Gay Liberation movement began to gain ground, Socialist organizations' policies evolved, and many groups actively campaigned for gay rights. Notable examples are the feminist Freedom Socialist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the International Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative (United States) and the Socialist Party USA. The Socialist Party USA was the first American political party to nominate an openly gay man for President, running David McReynolds in 1980.

See also

References

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  21. Most of the information on this incident is taken from: Kennedy, Hubert, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer: The Queer Marx Loved to Hate. In: 'Journal of Homosexuality' (ISSN 0091-8369) Volume: 29 Issue: 2/3, pp 69-96. Hereafter, original sources cited by Kennedy are given.
  22. The letter, dated June 22, 1869, is published in Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich: Collected Works, vols. 42, 43 (New York: International,1988), 43: 295–96
  23. Linsert, Richard. 1931. Kabale und Liebe: Uber Politik und Geschlechtsleben. Berlin, Man.
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    *Mayer, Gustav, 1909. Johann Baptist von Schweitzer und die Sozialdemokratie, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Jena: Gustav Fisher, 1909). p 91
  24. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vols. 42, 43 (New York: International,1988), 42: 120
  25. Hekma et al. (1995). p. 14
  26. Bebel, August (1879). Woman under Socialism. translated by Daniel De Leon, New York: New York Labor Press, 1904. pp 164 - 165. In a footnote added in 1909, he remarked that the Eulenburg scandal proved that homosexuality was widespread in the upper classes.
  27. Hirschfeld, Magnus (2000) The Homosexuality of Men and Women. Prometheus Books
  28. http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/BEBEL.HTM
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  31. The 1917 New York edition is now available as a free online e-book
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  37. 37.0 37.1 Linse, Ulrich, Individualanarchisten, Syndikalisten, Bohémiens, in "Berlin um 1900", ed. Gelsine Asmus (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1984)
  38. 38.0 38.1 Otto Gross
  39. Sochen, June. 1972. The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village 1910-1920. New York: Quadrangle.
  40. Cott, Nancy. 1987. The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven/London.
  41. Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976)
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  48. A-infos: Poland, Warsaw, anarchist Action Against Homophobia and Repression
  49. On Mattahine's left beginnings, see: John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1983). On the COC, see: Hans Warmerdam and Pieter Koenders, Cultuur en ontspanning: Het COC 1946-1966 (Utrecht: NVIH, COC & Interfacultaire Werkgroep Homostudies, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1987), p. 58.
  50. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), p. 65.
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  71. *The Parti Communiste Français was "hysterically intransigent as far as ’moral behaviour’ was concerned" (Aragon, victime et profiteur du tabou, in Gai Pied Hebdo, 4 June 1983, reproduced in Homosexualité et Révolution, pp. 62-3, quote p. 63.);
    * The trotskyist Pierre Lambert's OCI was "completely hysterical with regard to homosexuality"; Lutte ouvrire was theoretically opposed to homosexuality; as was the Ligue communiste, despite their belatedly paying lip service to gay lib. (à confesse, Interview with Gérard Ponthieu in Sexpol no. 1 (20 January 1975), pp.10-14.)
    * Together, Guérin argued, such groups bore a great deal of responsibility for fostering homophobic attitudes among the working class as late as the 1970s. Their attitude was "the most blinkered, the most reactionary, the most antiscientific". (Etre homosexuel et révolutionnaire, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 215, no. spécial : ‘Les homosexualités’ (August 1975), pp. 9-10. Quote p. 10)
  72. Guérin, Daniel. 1975. Etre homosexuel et révolutionnaire, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 215, no. spécial : ‘Les homosexualités’ (August 1975), pp. 9-10.
  73. Letter of 27 May 1955, Fonds Guérin, BDIC, F° Δ 721/carton 12/4, quoted in Chaperon, ‘Le fonds Daniel Guérin et l’histoire de la sexualité’ in Journal de la BDIC, no.5 (June 2002), p.10
  74. Berry, David. 2003. For a dialectic of homosexuality and revolution. Paper for "Conference on "Socialism and Sexuality. Past and present of radical sexual politics", Amsterdam, 3–4 October 2003.
  75. Frédéric Martel, Le rose et le noir. Les homosexuels en France depuis 1968 (Paris : Seuil, 2000), pp.46.
  76. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  80. Dee, Hannah (2010) The Red in the Rainbow: Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation, London: Bookmarks Publications, p.8-9
  81. Cohen, Nick: "The lesson the left has never learnt", New Statesman, 21 July 2003 (website)
  82. Revolutionary Communist Party. On the Question of Homosexuality and the Emancipation of Women. Revolution. Spring 1988.
  83. SWP and Gay Lib
  84. Lesbian and Gay Liberation: A Trotskyist Analysis

Further reading

  • The Red in the Rainbow: Sexuality, Socialism and LGBT liberation by Hannah Dee. Bookmarks Publications. London. 2010. ISBN 9781905192700
  • Journal of Homosexuality, 1995, Volume 29, Issue 2/3. ISSN 0091-8369 — Simultaneously published as: Gay men and the sexual history of the political left, Gert Hekma et al. Eds. Harrington Park Press 1995, ISBN 1-56023-067-3.
  • The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 2009
  • Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past 1988.
  • Eileen Phillips (editor), (1983), The Left and The Erotic, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 184 pages, ISBN 978-0-85315-583-6
  • Engels, Homophobia and the Left By Max Elbaum 2002. online text
  • Marxist Theory of Homosexuality 1993. online text
  • Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin's Russia By Dan Healey. 2002. GLQ 8:3, pp. 349 – 378.
  • Sex-Life: A Critical Commentary on the History of Sexuality, 1993, Don Milligan. [1]
  • Terence Kissack. Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-11-6

External links