Are you like me? Do you sometimes think that if you ignore something – a toothache, the credit card company or the leaky faucet – it will just stop being a problem? It will go away and leave you to worry about the important things. Unfortunately, this is how some progressives and Marxists try to deal with the question of gay rights and equality. Sometimes we say, 'there are more important problems' or 'that is just too complicated for me to think about' or, even, 'let’s set aside the things that make us different and focus on the real struggles at hand.' These kinds of attitudes are part of a larger problem that has come to be called heterocentrism.

Heterocentrism is a concept that is related to the practice of heterosexism. The latter implies the enforcement of unequal conditions for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people (LGBT). Like other forms of discrimination, heterosexism serves the ideological purpose of normalizing certain social relationships under capitalism in order to help perpetuate it. On one level, and we see this in the current period, heterosexist explanations of normal sexual activity and personal relationships say that homosexual activity and same-sex relationships undermine traditional cultural values, i.e. heterosexual activity and marriage. A key reason for raising the specter of a homosexual attack on 'normal' marriage is to foster hatred and division among ordinary people against other members of their communities, their families and in the working class in general. The ultra-right, the main source of this heterosexist ideological drive, hopes to drive wedges into communities and sections of the working class in order to weaken them politically and to cloud their very specific interest in common political action, class unity and shared economic, democratic and cultural interests.

But 'normalized' sexual relationships and 'traditional' ways of forming heterosexual family arrangements is more than an ideological issue, and it is certainly more than a wedge issue. Heterosexism is the practice of normalizing certain social relationships that are particular to capitalism itself. Heterocentrism is a legal, cultural and linguistic device of heterosexism. Related to homophobia, or the more overt practices rising out of hatred or fear of homosexuality, heterocentrism might be clarified by putting it in relation to similar terms used to describe the marginalization or exclusion of other oppressed groups.

Ethnocentrism, for example, describes the racist practice of viewing culture or history through the lens of a dominant racial or national group. Androcentrism, or male-centrism, suggests a sexist mode of expression or way of seeing the world that excludes women from history, politics and discussion. In both cases, men or whites or some combination of the two are viewed as normal, intelligent and the subjects of history, while those excluded are silenced, ignored and are given attention only when they impact those in the 'center.' Heterocentrism applies a similar approach except with heterosexual people as normal and valuable, while LGBT people are relegated to the margins of social life, rejected, undervalued and so on. Any 'centrism' then is a kind of metaphor for describing social relationships and power: dominant and powerful groups are at the 'center,' while oppressed groups are on the margins. The social implications are obvious. Ethnocentrism promotes racist practices. Androcentrism promotes sexist practices. Heterocentrism promotes antigay discrimination. Even if the practitioners express sympathy for oppressed groups, or espouse democratic and egalitarian principles, exclusion, hate and violence along with social discrimination across the board result.

We can note examples of heterocentric practices in many areas of life. Dominant culture, while it has opened up some space for gay and lesbian topics, tends to overwhelm us with heterocentric images of 'traditional' family arrangements and sexual relationships, while sidelining, disparaging, ignoring or otherwise demeaning homosexual activities, desires or images. Think of all the movies that you saw this past year, the television shows, the books and magazines you read, and advertisements in just about every social space available. While some hints of homosexuality (and less demeaning images of homosexuality) have touched the edges of this enormous cultural tidal wave – 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,' Brokeback Mountain, and intensified political activity by the LGBT community in many local and state political campaigns against anti-gay measures – it is painfully obvious that life in the US is represented as straight as an arrow.

Think of the furor created over the 2004 book The Intimate Worlds of Abraham Lincoln, by C.A. Tripp. Tripp, a one-time colleague of renowned biologist Alfred Kinsey and not a professional historian, put together a massive amount of documentary evidence indicating that Lincoln had numerous sexual and love affairs with men. While speculation about Lincoln’s sexual life has a long history – rumors about affairs with men even arose during his presidency, and the great Chicago poet Carl Sandburg noted bisexuality in his biography of Lincoln – it has long been ignored. In fact, when Tripp’s book appeared, his critics accused him of all kinds of things from misreading the substantial amount of documentary evidence to discussing something that had little relevance to understanding Lincoln or his times. Even those who presented themselves as sympathetic to equality suggested that Tripp had gone too far and that we really didn’t need to know if Lincoln slept with men. Meanwhile the same historians might have tripped over themselves to learn more about the heterosexual intimacy of other presidents and their wives. This contradiction reflects a heterocentric view because it explicitly says that homosexual desire isn’t worth public discourse or being recorded historically, especially when it seems to have been an integral part of the life of a personage so central to US history as the Great Emancipator.

So what can Marxists say about heterocentrism as part of the ideology and practice of heterosexism? Scrutiny of Marx’s work reveals that he had little to say on these matters, while his partner Engels more directly delved into the private sphere of sexuality, sexual desire and the historical development of personal relations in some of his major scientific works. Specifically in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels surveyed enormous amounts of anthropological data to theorize about the role of families and sexual desire in the societies he studied. Reading Engels’ book through contemporary eyes is startling in some ways. It rejects the notion that certain sexual practices are 'normal' or 'natural.' By identifying major shifts in both sexual behavior and the organization of family and kinship ties and linking those shifts with changes in property relations, Engels showed that types of sexual activity and the rules of sexual behavior were not encoded in our genes but manufactured in society by people themselves (with the strongest influence coming from the ruling classes).

While Engels had little to say about homosexual practices, homosexual desire or ideological references to homosexuality, presumably his rule of thumb about the social rather than biological nature of human activity applies here. (Some scholarship on Engels’ letters suggests, however, that indeed he did not apply his own theories to this question, as he may have privately opposed political movements that called for legal measures guaranteeing gay equality and may have regarded homosexual acts as abnormal and even pathological.)

Engels’ work also points to historical formations and transformations of social identities that have been based on particular roles within family arrangements and on types of sexual activity (that have changed and are changing over time). 'Identity' is a modern term which describes the process of expressing or understanding a collective or community nonclass relationship (or a network of relationships) to existing dominant groups, resulting in a shared (though often disputed) approach to subverting, resisting or struggling to transform the power relations. In other words, sexual, economic and political repression of women and their responses to it forged something we now call a gender identity (though social class, sexuality, nationality and other kinds of identities make talking about gender in an isolated way simplistic). As sexual, economic and political domination of women by men emerged in Greek society, Engels notes, Greek women used different strategies to subvert male authority or in some small manner resist exploitation and oppression, even if applied only a private level. Without offering a detailed social history of women in ancient Greece, Engels does hint that social identities organized around sexual activity and family arrangements were socially constructed by the need for maintaining property relations, patterns of consumption, the division of labor and by humans who struggled over how those identities and relations would be defined.

Anthropologists have found evidence that many cultural groups from many different parts of the planet at many different points in their development regarded homosexual acts as commonplace and indeed a normal part of human development. Biologists and sociologists have also shown that it is a common human activity in modern times. Recent discoveries in the field of genetics suggest that the predisposition to same-sex activity is a genetic variation along the lines of hair color and right-handedness. None of this empirical data, however, has much to say about the social value of sexual relationships or of the relatively modern formation of homosexual social identities. Historian Barry D. Adam notes that social identity per se is defined only within a complex system of power and domination, especially in class societies. Indeed, if homosexual activity is seen only as a normal and common activity, a social identity of homosexuality doesn’t emerge. Only with the formation of capitalism, especially with industrialization, and its particular ideology of the heterosexual family, along with the emergence of urban areas and 'homosocial' spaces (places where people of the same gender interact and form intimate bonds that sometimes turn into sexual and love relationships), such as factories, bars, theaters and molly houses, does a specifically homosexual identity develop. With this identity also emerges the political movement for equality. So in effect, we might safely say that Aristotle may have displayed homosexual behavior, but indeed Lincoln was queer.

Why is this distinction important? It is important because its apparent opposite, 'normal' heterosexuality – as a category of social value, not just a description of the performance of certain biological functions – became a basis of capitalist relations of production. As Engels noted: The form of the family corresponding to civilization [by this Engels specifically means capitalism] and under it becoming the definitively prevailing form is monogamy, the supremacy of the man over the woman, and the individual [implied as heterosexual] family as the economic unit of society.

Engels clarifies that the family is a ruling class concept created for the purpose of maintaining order in the ruling class, providing rules for the inheritance of property, fostering political stability, maintaining the economic independence of the bourgeoisie from the church and shifting to a secular basis for politics and power. But what does it mean for working people? Engels says that the ruling class imposes its values on oppressed classes and demands that the oppressed accept their values and emulate their actions. Ruling classes come to believe that their values are universal and seem shocked when we ignore or reject them. In Origins, Engels offers little in the way of explaining what practical use other than this ideological self-indulgence and self-deception the bourgeois family has from a working-class perspective. But from Marxists after Engels, we gather that the family setting is a place for reproducing the barest means of existence, passing on capitalist social and cultural values and training for consuming commodities. In other words, reproducing the status quo.

Engels further notes, however, a 'great contradiction' created by the imposition of a 'normal' bourgeois sexuality and family. Under the guise of 'love' the capitalists promote greed, competition and the 'shabby individual.' The heterosexual individual is invented, and to defend it, heterosexism with its double-edged sword of heterocentrism and homophobia.

So how do we take all of this into account when developing our anticapitalist, pro-socialist values, and in expanding the horizon of our understanding of the nature of this democratic struggle? Do we insist that a total subversion of 'normal' bourgeois heterosexuality is a big step in the revolutionary process? Yes. Beginning with a thorough self-examination for heterocentric and heterosexist impulses, we should advocate in our movement, unions and community organizations for gay equality by following the practice of advancing openly LGBT people into leadership of our movement and by extending our unique talents for coalition building to LGBT issues. Working-class publications, schools and educational tools should give value and voice to a diversity of social identities and their complex interaction in each of our own lives, while also advocating our specific and universal liberation as groups within a great class struggle. The basic Marxist-Leninist principle of the right of self-determination and development should be followed on this question. We should recognize the dialectical link between the particular, what has been disparaged as 'identity' politics, and the universal nature or what is referred to as the 'fundamental' identity in capitalist society – class and class struggle.

Elevating one side of this dialectic in order to erase the other is an error. It is incorrect to say that class is a more 'fundamental' aspect of capitalist life and thus attention to it, class struggle and class-based social revolution will alone erase democratic problems of oppression and inequality aimed at nonclass based groups such as LGBT people. This is a form of heterocentrism disguised as revolutionary politics because it suggests that we can ignore the day-to-day realities faced by gay people. Since 'class' is lived out in different ways by different people, we should not demand the erasure of identities for the sake of class struggle. Insisting on this kind of complete conformity instead of broad unity distorts an accurate understanding of our great struggle and serves the interests of the ruling class, which is a ruthless overseer endlessly looking for points of tension and division to push wedges between us. Overcoming this error requires that we also accept that identity cannot be separated from class exploitation and pretend that real liberation can come by ignoring how capitalism works.

By insisting that sexual activity with members of the opposite sex and the social value attributed to it is no worthier than homosexuality and by advocating social equality, we can shake the foundations of bourgeois morality. We should not allow the ruling class or its antidemocratic allies to define our families, who we can love or what roles each of us can play within our households, our organizations or in society. Our ultimate purpose should be to reject the received cultural values of inequality, repression and abuse that support and reproduce capitalist exploitation in favor of the egalitarian principles we call for in a socialist system.