The Communist Movement and Gay Liberation part 1

     Recently,   Putin’s authoritarian state capitalist Russian government pushed through repressive legislation in Russia directed against Gay people, apparently with the support of Duma representatives of the Communist Party of The Russian Federation, has become the source of controversy. 

Although the CPRC did not institute the legislation according to press reports, that has not stopped old school anti-Communists from using their apparent support to attack Communist parties generally as “homophobic,” as if the Soviet Union were still in existence and the CPRF had the influence and prestige globally that the CPSU had.  Also, the conservative dominated U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on the question of Gay Marriage, against which conservatives have mobilized fiercely, even though marriage and family are among mankind’s most powerful  conservative socializing institutions.

                In the 21^st century at least in the developed countries, homophobia remains relatively “normal,” and homosexuals of both genders acceptable as long as they “keep their place,” a place ranging from invisibility to recycled versions of old stereotypical roles.  This was of course true about anti-Semitism, racism directed against people of color, sexism/male chauvinism and xenophobia/national chauvinism in all of these countries.  The Communist movement consciously fought and helped to win major victories against the ideological and institutional expressions of all of these destructive ways of thinking and living, so much so that they are no longer normal and acceptable in their old forms, even among so called conservatives in the U.S. who in recent decades express their nostalgia for the prejudices of the past by sneering at “political correctness in the present.  But like all other victories in social struggles and the larger class struggle, gains are always ad hoc, subject to both open and hidden forms of reversal, as long as the repressive social system that is its foundation remains.  In that sense an injury to one really is an injury to all because the continuation as acceptable and normal in clerical and secular guises opens doors for the restoration of sexism, racism and other prejudices in more virulent forms.

In the U.S., particularly, where the postwar purges and persecution of Communists merged with intensified homophobic purges and persecutions in government, this is especially ironic. Also, the portrayal of the Communist movement as a sinister conspiracy advanced by people hiding their true identifies and seeking to corrupt  “normal people” aka working people filled with love for God, flag, country and capitalism fitted  in with conventional  fears of homosexuals preying upon unsuspecting youth

In the U.S. at least, books like psychologist Harold Greenwald’s The Tender Men. Sought to portray male Communists as either repressed or closeted homosexuals.  Anti-Communist political films like My Son John (1952) often hinted that “Communist spies” in were possible homosexuals, un-married and effeminate.  Finally, women Communists were often portrayed as strident masculine ideologues, possible Lesbians.  In many of these crude B movies, the upper level Communists were portrayed in  such ways  while lower level male Communists were portrayed as violent strong arm men doing the dirty work of the party and lower level  female Communists  as sluts seducing honest male workers for the party. 

Rightwing politicians sometimes ranted publically against “queers and Communists” and one even noted that Communists and Homosexuals were the two great conspiracies in the world.

This shouldn’t be surprising.  Like all forms of racism, sexism, ethno cultural religious bigotry, the content and forms of homophobia interact with and strengthen attacks on all people’s movements 

A  Very Short History of Narrow and Broad Approaches to attacks on minorities  on the Left

But this is a lesson that has to be relearned over and over again, as people’s movements For example, Karl Marx and most of his followers in the U.S., refugees from the revolutions of 1848, actively supported the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War and the union cause during the civil war.  But one prominent refugee, former member of the League of Communists and enemy of Karl Marx, Wilhelm Weitling refused to criticize slavery in the U.S.  appealed to the racist prejudices of American workers as an organizing tool, and refused to support the union against the confederacy during the Civil War.  In the early 20^th century, the Socialist Party was sharply divided on the issue of racism and segregation in the U.S. generally and in AFL unions particularly. 

The party as a whole avoided the issue, taking a “color blind” approach that all the victory of the working class would solve all problems for workers[1]

The Communist party in the 1920s, coming into existence as part of a world  movement that both advanced the strategically the struggle for socialism everywhere and also made that struggle inseparable from the struggle against  imperialism and colonialism, rejected completely the socialist party position on racism. 

Communists made the struggle for what was then called “Negro Liberation” inseparable from the general struggle of the working class, made the struggle against all forms of racism in all peoples organizations including the CPUSA a central priority and contended that it was the duty of all white Communists to fight against all manifestations of racism in trade union, all peoples organizations, and the general community

The struggles of the working class through the world, the defeat of fascism in the second world war, and the collapse of colonialism internationally, followed two decades later by the collapse of de jure U.S. segregation, made a racism that was normal and even “scientific”  no longer “normal” and acceptable, although it continued of course.

The Women Question

In the 19^th century, the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier said that a society should be judged by its treatment of women.  The struggle for women’s liberation/women’s rights also  struggled and still struggles against institutional and ideological sexism—sexism that  portrayed women as “the second sex,” and denied or sharply restricted women’s civil rights and liberties, from the right to vote in federal elections in the U.S. until 1920 and later in many European countries, to the right to own property in their own name, gain access to higher education,  access to professional and managerial positions,  various forms of skilled labor, trade union membership etc.

All of this was “normal” as a feminist/women’s rights movement developed in Europe and North America to challenge it.  In Germany and other European countries, Socialist parties following the example of the flagship party of the Second International, the SPD, fought for the economic and political emancipation of women.  Women like Clara Zetkin in the SPD and Alexandra Kollontai in Czarist Russia (later a prominent Bolshevik) combined in both their thought and action the larger aims of the socialist movement with the special struggle of women workers and the struggle of all women as an oppressed sex/gender.  In the U.S. socialist women like Florence Kelley, who had been a friend of Engels, IWW and later CPUSA leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Anarchist/Feminist Emma Goldman, and Socialist birth control leader Margaret Sanger all combined the struggle for women’s rights /liberation with the larger aims of the socialist movement.

Class conscious women, Marxist and socialist feminists played a role in the development of the women’s liberation movement through the world in the post WWII era.  In the U.S., Betty Friedan, who after WWII had been a journalist for the U.E News, newspaper of the then Communist led United Electrical Workers Union, published in 1963 The Feminine Mystique, a work that galvanized both housewives and often marginalized professional women and appealed specifically to young women in or with aspirations for college and a life beyond that of homemaker.  Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to advance women’s civil and reproductive rights. 

While issues of affirmative action for women and minorities, the right of women to pregnancy termination remain ongoing struggles, sexism like racism is no longer “normal” and acceptable today.  And the socialist/communist movement from the late 19^th century to the early 21^st has played a central role in these struggles.

Gay Rights

The history of the struggle for Gay Liberation/Gay Rights is part of this ongoing history.   But in the 2is century, homophobia remains “normal” in most of the world.   If one extrapolates from the research of William Kinsey and others concerning homosexual males over half a century ago, as representing an estimated 10 percent of the male population it is likely that Gay people, existing in all nationalities and cultures as largest minority group on earth. 

One might say as Charles Fourier did in the 19^th century, that the quality of a civilization in the 21^st century can be judged by its treatment of Gay people.  In a society where Gay civil rights and civil liberties are both clearly defined and established in law and in custom, the civil rights and civil liberties of all other minorities, ethnic, religious, and in sociological terms gender[2]

Homophobia is also advanced in the U.S and many other nations by both secular and clerical right.  The later Reverend Gerry Falwell, a major organizer of the clerical right from the 1970s to his death, sought to blame AIDs on male homosexuals, accusing them of seeking to infect the heterosexual population with the disease.

 His successor Pat Robertson has engaged in similar demagoguery. Gay men particularly continue to be subject to physical assaults, beatings, even murder by homophobes encouraged to acts of violence by a larger homophobic political culture. In Africa and other former colonial regions, rightwing Christian missionaries, Islamic clergy and other clergy encourage homophobic repression.  For the religious right, the “normality” of homophobia makes it, to use a term used about abortion rights by Richard Nixon, a “wedge issue,” an issue to divide and distract masses of exploited and oppressed people, to see the enemy as Gay rather than landlord, warlord, capitalist, etc

The oppression of Gays has one important difference from the oppression of other groups, one similar to what resistance groups face in open dictatorships.  Gays must live a life in and of the underground, or “closet,” compelled to hide their erotic orientation or be defined completely and stigmatized by that orientation.  People of color except in extreme cases cannot hide their color.  Women except in extreme cases cannot hide their gender.  Religious and ethno cultural groups can change their religion or ethnicity, but in most societies in modern history are not compelled to.  Gays before the development of a Gay Liberation/Gay Rights movement were compelled to in the U.S. and other countries which criminalized their erotic orientation, made them targets of police entrapment and brutality, portraying them at best as victims of mental illness and social maladjustment in a society organized to make deny them any possibility of leading healthy, happy adjusted lives.

Homophobia lives in and through a culture of fear and repression---it encourages men to define masculinity in terms of physical violence and physical domination over other men, women to accept submissive roles in relationship to men for fear that their own sexual orientation will be threatened.  In the working class especially it functions to strengthen male chauvinism in general, the association of learning and culture with effeminacy.

Communists, the Left, and Gay Rights

The record of the Communist movement concerning Gay Rights is complicated.  Unlike the struggle of the rights of oppressed minorities and women, the development of a movement calling for equality for gay men and lesbians is a development of the later twentieth century.  Earlier writing in defense of Gay people was calls for tolerance, and end to forms of discrimination.  “Homophile” meant through the world institutions established either by or for gays to foster self-segregation in a safe environment, not social integration. 

Accusations of male homosexuality, although a special characteristic of the right, went across the political spectrum.  Anti-Nazis in Germany, including Communists, pointed to the fact that Ernst Roehm, leader of the Nazi Storm troops was a homosexual to discredit him. On the left, some pointed to homosexual practices within military cliques and aristocratic ruling groups to discredit both militarism and the dissolute world of the ideal rich with homosexual behavior.  Gay men and Lesbians who played important roles in people’s movements and liberation struggles were hailed as individuals but never as gay men or lesbians. 

On the left, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was a policy that one found from the early 20^th century, long before the Clinton administration sought to make it a policy in the U.S. military in the 1990s.

We can say though that the pioneers of the Gay Liberation movement in the U.S. came from the Communist movement.  The socialist/communist movement not only attracts the most class conscious working people but the most advanced members of oppressed minorities, colonized peoples, across class lines.  And the Communist movement provides by combining theory and practices a higher education in political activism, in how to organize and educate. 

The role of Harry Hay and other  ongoing and former  members of the in the founding of the Mattachine  Society in the  U.S.  is the best example of this practical role.  The Mattachine Society at the time of its founding was the most important Gay Rights organization in history.  Although Hay and his comrades would leave the leadership of the Society to more conservative elements led by Frank Kameny.

The Gay Liberation that took shape at the end of the 1960s began with what was essentially a ghetto riot  in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Bar in the Summer of 1969.  Harry Hays definitions of Gay Liberation/Rights  as part of the postwar liberation struggles for liberation from colonial oppression in which the colonizer forced the colonized to identify with the oppression, to live prison of self-hatred , never daring to think that his one culture, language, ethnicity, and erotic sensibilities were entitled to respect and equal treatment in society.

Although a Gay Liberation movement that  was  born directly of civil rights and women’s rights struggles in the U.S and indirectly of  the organizing skills, commitments and courage of men like Harry Hay and his pioneering comrades in the  early 1950s, the subsequent history of  Gay Liberation/Gay Rights in the U.S.  has  experienced the ups and downs of people’s movements over the last three decades.  Today, it would be fair to say that the civil rights of Gay men and Lesbians in the U.S., while quantitatively a and qualitatively more advanced than half a century ago, have fallen behind the gains made in other developed countries.

A Movement Grows in a Period of  political stagnation and reaction

In the U.S. virulent homophobia has been a weapon the religious right since the 1970s.  In part two I will look  both at the history of Harry Hay and the Communist contribution to Gay Liberation, and also how the struggles of the last decades in the United States.  But as we wait in the U.S. the Supreme Court decision (where the Obama administration’s justice department will be arguing in favor of gay marriage rights)Communists  and the broad left in the U.S. and internationally might look at the reworked Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment put forward by the National Organization for Women  in the United States and other countries.  Notice  that sexual orientation, along with ethnicity, color, marital status, and “indigency” of poverty is listed.

And the Communist Party of the Russian Federation along with the rest of us might listen to this remastered Speech by Lenin when sound recording was in its infancy both analyzing and condemning anti-Semitism.  I think it can and should be applied to all forms of bigotry, including homophobia.  For us there are English Subtitles but I expect that the CPRF could listen to and possibly hear Lenin in his original Russian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=capVnww7aMU

Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," remains a priority for the organization, as stated in their platform. During their 1995 conference, NOW also wrote and adopted their own constitutional amendment that would cover all of NOW's programs of reform, including abortion, lesbian and gay rights, affirmative action, etc., and labeled it the Constitutional Equality Amendment.

Although NOW has given moral support to attempts to ratify the ERA, they also continue to support the CEA as part of their official platform.

The Constitutional Equality Amendment, which has not been introduced into any session of Congress, reads;

1.    Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place and entity subject to its jurisdiction; through this article, the subordination of women to men is abolished;

2.    All persons shall have equal rights and privileges without discrimination on account of sex, race, sexual orientation, marital status, ethnicity, national origin, color or indigence;

3.    This article prohibits pregnancy discrimination and guarantees the absolute right of a woman to make her own reproductive decisions including the termination of pregnancy;

4.    This article prohibits discrimination based upon characteristics unique to or stereotypes about any class protected under this article. This article also prohibits discrimination through the use of any facially neutral criteria which have a disparate impact based on membership in a class protected under this article.

5.    This article does not preclude any law, program or activity that would remedy the effects of discrimination and that is closely related to achieving such remedial purposes;

6.    This article shall be interpreted under the highest standard of judicial review;

7.    The United States and the several states shall guarantee the implementation and enforcement of this article.