A Second Draft, with corrections, on The Communist Movement and Gays Rights, Part One by Norman Markowitz

The following is a second draft of my article  on the Communist movement and gay rights.  I thank Erwin Marquit, Art Perlo, and others whose valuable contributions have improved the draft.  I apologize to readers for all typos and other errors.  Copy editing remains one of the least of my skills

Norman Markowitz

     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.  This 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 21st century , at least in the developed countries, homophobia  continues to be viewed as a normal attitude toward and homosexual behavior, 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 the past 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 have expressed 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,  peoples movement

gains are always ad hoc, subject to both open and hidden forms of reversal, as long as the repressive class system that  serves as their  foundation remains. 

In that sense the old IWW slogan,  an injury to one really is an injury to all, is true in this instance,  because the continuation of homophobia  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 homosphobic purges and persecutions in government, support for anti-gay legislation would be particularly ironic. .

Here, the  anti-Communist portrayal of the Communist movement as a sinister conspiracy advanced by people hiding their true identities and seeking to corrupt  “normal people”  that is, working people filled with love for God, flag, country and capitalism ,fitted  in with conventional  fears of homosexuals preying upon unsuspecting youth

   Anti-Communist political films like My Son John (1952) often hinted that “Communist spies”  were possible homosexuals, un-married and effeminate.  In that film, the mother of a state department official and Soviet agent worries that he is not married and asks him often about girl friends.

 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

 This is a lesson that has to be relearned over and over again, as people’s movements  appealing to mankind’s  most forward looking   aspirations, confront  mankind’s most backward sensibilities.

For example, Karl Marx and most of his  early 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 20th 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 Socialist party as a whole avoided the issue, taking a “color blind” approach that 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 ,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  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 has  of course continued as a major negative force in U.S. life..

The “Women Question”

In the 19th century, the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier said that a society should be judged by its treatment of women.  The movement 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,”  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 employment, protection from domestic violence, 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, equal rights for women in education and employment,  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 19th century to the early 21st has played a central role in these struggles.

Gay Rights

The history of the struggle for liberation/rights is part of this ongoing history.   But in the 21st 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   are the   largest minority group on earth.  [2]

One might say as Charles Fourier did in the 19th century concerning women, that the quality of a civilization in the 2stt 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 gender are strengthened immeasurablly[3]

Homophobia is also advanced in the U.S and many other nations by both  the secular and clerical right.  The late Reverend Gerry Falwell, a major organizer of the clerical right from the 1970s to his death, sought  in the early 1980s  to blame AIDs on male homosexuals, accusing them of seeking to infect the heterosexual population with the disease.

 His successor  Reverend 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.[4]

 In Africa and other former colonial regions, rightwing Christian missionaries, Islamic clergy and other clergy encourage homophobic repression, vigilante violence, and legislation ranging from prison sentences to the death penalty.  For the religious right, the “normality” of homophobia makes it, to use a term used about abortion rights by major leader of the post war anti-Communist purges and former U.S, President  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 are not compelled to in most societies in contemporary  history.

Gays before the development of a  gay liberation/gay rights movement were compelled to  live [5]in the underground in the U.S. and other countries, which criminalized their erotic orientation, and  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 called  for tolerance, and  an end to forms of discrimination.   In the world, institutions established either by or for gays, called “homophile,” sought  to foster self-segregation in a safe environment, not social integration. 

  Condemnations  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. Questions of Hitler’s sexual orientation were also used by anti-Nazis [6]

 On the left, some pointed to homosexual practices within military cliques and aristocratic ruling groups to connect  both militarism and the dissolute world of the ideal rich with homosexual behavior. [7]  In the working class, often beneath the service, hostility to gay men was connected to  the view that they did not have to bear the costs and responsibilities of supporting wives and children.  Also, they were often seen as “privileged” white collar workers, artists, designers, purveyors  clothing and other luxury goods to the upper classes.  The dominant stereotypes  in many working class cicrlces portrayed that as unfit for manual labor and stigmatized them for not engaging in manual labor.

 

In the CPUSA, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was a policy that one found from the early 20th century, long before the Clinton administration sought to make it a policy in the U.S. military in the 1990s.PNevertheless,  the pioneers of the Gay Liberation movement in the U.S.  also 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 by combining theory and practice, Communist movement provides ss a higher education in political activism, in how to organize and educate. 

The role of Harry Hay and others who founded  the Mattachine  Society in the  U.S. in theearly 1950s and continue their values in the gay rights movement  is the best example of this practical role.  The Mattachine Society at the time of its founding was the most important gay Rrghts organization in history.

 Although Hay and his comrades would leave the leadership of the Society to more conservative elements led by Frank Kameny in the mid-1950s, their vision and their militancy would be expressed in the Gay Liberation movement.

The Gay Liberation  movement 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.  The spirit of that riot, its fighting “wretched of the earth” gay working men and drag queens, was   essentially the return of Harry Hay’s 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  in a 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  the gay  liberation movement  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 people 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  and secular right since the 1970s.  In a later article  I will look  at the history of  the contribution of both Harry Hay and the Communists  to gay liberation, in  the struggles of the last decades in the United States.

 But as we await  the U.S.   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 in it.

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, in which he both analyzed and condemned  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.

[edit]S

 

 

 

 



[1] The party was very divided, with some on the left calling for militant campaigns against racism and segregation and some on the right quietly accepting   American Federation   of Labor(AFL) union constitutions that barred African-Americans and even segregated socialist party meetings in the South.  Although Socialist Party members were involved in the initial founding of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), the experience of W E.B. Dubois, NAACP founder and editor of  its journal, The Crisis , should be instructive.  Dubois, long interested in the socialist movement, joined the Socialist party before WWI but soon left it because he found many of its leaders indifferent to the struggles of African-American people and some openly racist

[2] This research  like sexuality itself is complicated and controversial.  Kinsey’s research showed a much larger percentage of males having engaged at some time in acts considered homosexual than was previously  believed.  It also showed that sexual acts, erotic feelings, were or could be situational, and also far less static and fixed than Freudian psychology, which distinguished between acts and feelings, believed.  Freudians saw erotic orientation fixed in early childhood,athough one could engage in sexual acts with the same or opposite sex regardless of orientation.  Freudian psychology, which saw mental health as individuals learning to cope with and adjust to existing social relations, not struggle individually or collectively against them, encouraged homo erotic oriented people to repress homosexual conduct, although without the moral religious condemnation of such actions that was the norm within society.

[3] The argument long advanced by feminist sociologists is that women, while often a numerical majority in a great many societies, are a sociological minority in that they are subject to the forms of exclusion and discrimination that ethnic, national, and religious numerical minorities usually face

[4] It is interesting to note that both Falwell especially and Robertson in their early days as media evangelists were supporters of Southern segregation and opponents of both the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation.

[5]  It is important to remember that the SPD and the KPD  both supported in the 1920s the decriminalizing of Homosexual private behavior, a huge advance at the time.  Germany with its large left was also the center of the “homophile” campaigns in the Weimar period.  After WWII,  in the  German Democratic Republic(DDR), its Psychological Society was the first on earth to declare formally that homosexuality was not a mental illness, years before the American Medical Association, in response to the gay liberation campaigns, issued a similar statement.

[6] Cuba is also an interesting case.  Under the Battista dictatorship, Havana became the  Western Hemisphere’s capital for all forms of organized vice, including  open  gay prostitution.  The revolution associated this was both upper class decadence and the subjugation of the country to U.S. colonial domination—as Cuban pimps provided wealthy Americans with heterosexual and homosexual prostitutes, child prostitures, and anything else that they were willing to be for.  The revolutionary government then pursued an an anti-gay policy for many years, a policy for which it was justly criticized, albeit often hypocritically by anti-Communists in the U.S. and other countries who would  never support gay rights at home.  Today those policies have been completely repudiated, a point that the CPRF might investigate, if it is interested in the policies of socialist countries under Communist leadership on the issue of gay rights

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  • Thank you Professor. This is an insightful article, and the beginning of a thorough-going analysis. One minor correction: there was extensive lesbian involvement in the Stonewall riots, it was not just "working gay men and drag queens." One of the important precipitating incidents during the raid was the fact that a butch working class lesbian fought her arrest, struggling and resisting being put into the paddy wagon, after which the crowd tried to overturn the vehicle.

    I would also recommend to you the book "Stone Butch Blues" by Leslie Feinberg, a transgender communist, (a leader in the Workers' World Party) who wrote this account of working class lesbian/queer life in the factories of Buffalo in the 1950's and 60's. It is a remarkable account of struggle, organizing and survival.

    I remember reading a CPUSA party program, perhaps in 1987 or so, which explicitly condemned homosexuality and denounced the LGBT movement as a bourgeois distraction. It was quite disappointing at the time, and quite contradictory to the reality on the ground. I would see party organizers hawking the party newspaper at LGBT rallies and marches, even while this program condemned us.

    Once again, thank you.

    Posted by pinkjohn, 04/13/2013 5:38pm (11 years ago)

  • I thank E.E.W. Clay for his fine and helpful commentary. I knew about some of these backward positions, which in regard to "security risk" in effect mirrored the policies of the U.S government. They are indefensible, just as the expulsion of Japanese American comrades during WWII was indefensible. The CPUSA made a formal apology for that decision, which was an open public decision. In this case an apology would be merited also.
    The tragic reality was that homophobia was "normal" in a far less virulent form in the CPUSA as it was in the larger society long after it should have been and in a way that the racism and sexism was not.
    Norman Markowitz

    Posted by , 04/04/2013 10:51am (11 years ago)

  • banded should be banned below
    Thanks

    Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 04/01/2013 11:22am (11 years ago)

  • The CPUSA is to be commended for its capacity to change from less progressive and even backwards positions on Gay liberation, and on sexual liberation, in general.
    The present writer has experienced gay Communists decrying and protesting, struggling against policy and positions on equality struggles, when visiting CPUSA districts, in the early '70s and '80s.
    In memory that recent, gay Americans were discouraged and even banded from(as "open" gay Americans) the CPUSA as "security risks"(with the infantile rationale that repressive authorities would "blackmail gays with the threat of exposing their sexuality"-of course, a policy and rationalization, which, if ever practiced as CPUSA policy in any district, is odious, and ineffably unthinkable today.
    It is critically important for us to be totally honest about this.
    The present writer, in no way presents this to slander the very, remarkably progressive and positive CPUSA, even on this issue, on which it has faltered, as it has also, and corrected itself, on the issue of racial and sexual equality, on which it is certain the CPUSA will continue to make progress by leaps and bounds, due to its outstanding leadership and membership, focusing on class struggle, democracy and change for more abundant democracy.

    Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 04/01/2013 11:17am (11 years ago)

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