Lesbian and Gay Liberation: A Communist Strategy

wee

Fra See SOREN é 2 iy

aS ss

AX.

Sz

an Sh = ia

bs

BERNE 4 Vers

Acknov wiedgements ¢ infraduction 4

The origins and nature of leshian and gay oppression §

Marxism and the lesbian and gay question

False strategies for Hberation 20

An act on Brod ranine for lesbian and gay tiberation 28

Eee

Acknowledgements

Since the late 1960s the rebirth of the women’s and leshian and gay movements has given rise to a renewed interest in sexual politics. A number of writers within these movements, and within the various leit groups, made valuable contributions on this question, particularly in unearthing the long lest works of progressive sexologists, socialists and sexual reform campaigners. In writing this pamphiet we consulted many sources but we would like to acknowledge a specific debt to several books. Chapters one and two in particular owe a debt to

the following works:

Vern L Bullough Sexual Vurtance in Society and History (University of Chicago Press)

deffrey Weeks Sexuality and its Discontents (Routledge and Kegan Paul) Alan Bray Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Gay Men’s Press) Gay Left Collective Gay Left

John Lauritsen and David Thorstad The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (Times Change Press)

Eduard Bernstein On Homosexuality reprints by Athol Books)

All of these books provided much valuable information but we take full responsibility for the political analysis in this pamphlet.

Eotors note

In this pamphlet we have used terminology relevant to the historical periods under consideration, Thus, is dealing with the period prior to Stonewall we have tended to use the terms homosexual and homosexuality with reference to both men and women, since these wore the commonly accepted terms at the time. For the recent period we use our own preferred term; ‘lesbians and gay men’,

a M

fet

i i

tthe time ofre-printing this pamphlet Clauge 28 3 of the Local Government Bill, which outlaws the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, is about te become law. in recent months Lebour council after Labour council save slung out their dented shields and hoisted the white flag.

In these circurnstances the strategy that has been adopted, by Harringey and others, to Sight’ Clause 28 is one of capitulation. The ALA initiated method of attempting to win, through court action, = narrowly defined definition of ‘promotion’ is to concede defeat before the fight iz begun. To rely on Tory judges to ruis favourably is utopian. We know from case after case of lesbian mothers having their children taken from them that the courts are not on our side.

We must support individual councillors like Linda Bellos who state they will defy Clause 28 and we must eampaign for all Labour councillors to do the same, but we must remain absolutely clear that the record of these reformists is one of sell out after sell out.

The entire history of left’ Laboar coundile taking up the cudgels on behalf of the oppressed has been strewn, with problems. In essence it has heen » history of ‘gesture polities’, with little or no real resources heing provided, For most of the councils concerned it hae been acynical attemptéo provide left cover’ for cuts and more cuts. ,

In asituation where jobs and services ave being cutin other council departments itia notconducive to breaking down anti-gay prejudice. This does not mean calling for cuts here first but opposing all cuts and calling for growth budgets to meet the needs of all sections of the community. In doing go we will be capable of winning ‘straight’ trade unionists to a defence ofleshien and gay rights and tea policy of ‘non-compliance’ with Clause 28. Itis an urgent necessity to begin now to lay the basis for a massive campaign of defiance of Clanse 28 by the front Hue unions in jecal government and education, We must win as many unions se possible, nationally and locally, ica definite commitment te non-compliance and defence of any individuals victimised asa result of operating this policy, up te and including strike action.

However the main obsiacle ta overcome if we are te de thie is the isolation of the lesbian and gay conmruniGes tyom the organised labour movement. If we are te win workers to teke action in defence of our rights we must see, and convinces them that Clause 28 is part of a class wide offensive by the Tories. This is not the view of many

ZB

bed

in the leadership of Stop Phe Clause’. Even soive on the ‘vevelutionary’ left have attempted to step the campaign from turning to the labour movement and arguing for defisnee. A leading supporter of the Internationel Soclalist Group, damie Gough, sttended « nationa) Stop the Clause’ meeting and moved the deletion of nencorapliance from it’s policy statement,

The campaign is deomed to failure unlessit breaks out of it’s selfimpasedizclation. Pick up any leafiet produced nationally by the ‘Stop The Clause Campaign’ end you would be forgiven for thinking that the battery of antiunion laws, the racist immigration laws end the attacks on workers generally that we've witnessed over the past few years hadw’t happened. The publicity for the 9 January demo read: Today tts lesbian and gaya, tomorrew—bloek and minority ethnic people? Trades unioniste? Wamen?’. The factisofcourse the Clause represents not the beginning of an attack on workers’ rights but a driving heme of the attack that was leunched by the Tories in LOTSA.

le is only actions like the threatened strike by Bradfore teachers in defence of a colleague sacked for admitting he was gay and groups like Trades Unianists Ageinet Clause 28’ that show a glimmer of hope in defeating Clause 28.

As we said in the intreduction to the first issue of thie pamphlet:

‘There is a danger thet, faced with the bosses onslaught, lesbiana and gay men will seek personal or separatist solutions to. their plight end turn away front the labour movement, The labour movernent itself will come under pressure from the sclf-secking bureaucrats at the top to ditch the progressive policies on lesbian. ard gay rights thet have been adopted by bath the TUC and the Labour Party?

Unfortunately, more and more, these predictions are coming tre. And yet it is ever more urgent to overcome these weaknasses. To do so we nead a Mersiat understaniing of lesbian and gay oppression and an action programme to fight it. We need to have a balance sheet ofthe strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist tradition on the Jesbian and gay question and we need tobe armed against the false atrategies for liberation that mushroonied in the 19708 under tha influence of feminism and ecénomism, This pamphlet aime to meet these needs. It ja a revolutionary communist strategy for lesbian and gay liberation.

Workers Power Agwil 1088

rs

tal oppression in capitalist society. Despite some countries having legalised homosexual

acts between consenting ‘adults’ in private, oppression, discrimination and legal harassment continue to exist on a massive scale, So much s0 that millions feel obliged to conceal their sexuality or to repress it, The submerged misery of these ‘ millions is incalculable. Against all who voluntarily or involuntarily reveal their sexuality, a massive barrage of repression is unleashed. Lesbians and gay men face not only abuse and derision but physical assault which can end in murder. At work lesbians and gay men face the constant threat of . dismissal and victimization and, if unemployed, discrimination. In addition there is the routine harassment by the police on the streets, in the gay clubs,*through entrapment and so on, Lesbian. mothers are systematically denied the custody of their children. The ‘popular press’ keeps up a constant campaign of vilification —-an incitment to ‘queer bashing’ and a constant stoking of the fires of homophobia. Why is there this monstrous campaign of repression which unites such unlikely bedfellows as the Pope, fan Paisley and the Ayatoljah Khomeini? Homosexual acts have long been condemned by certain religions — most notably Christianity — but the systematic oppression of homosexuals as a distinct. category of people separated off from ‘normal’ society especially in Western Europe and North America began only some

; esbians and gay men are subjected to a bru-

two hundred years ago, That i is, itis a feature of —

capitalist society. . The justification for this ‘oppression is that homosexuality is not merely abnormal but also,

and more importantly, ‘unnatural’. While the lev-

els of toleration that capitalist society is prepared to grant homosexuals have fluctuated, acceptance of homosexuality, and therefore the recognition of it as a perfectly natural phenomena, has never

existed. Yet the sexual behaviour deemed ‘natural by capitalist society —heterasexual activity with great emphasis on penetrative intercourse as ‘rea}” sex —is only one aspect of human sexuality, What makes it so suited to being described as the only nateral form of sex is ite reproductive function. Now thisis extremely important for the survival of the species and has always been so. The idea, perpetrated by many radical feminists, that penetrative heterosexual intercourse is inherently oppressive to women ignores a fundamental biological fact of human life. However, acceptance of the importance of reproductive sex is only half the story. Because one thing is natural it does not follow that everything else is unnatural. Moreover, the very word natural, brings with it a whole number of problems of definition. Human beings have never taken nature as a salt accompli, but . have always sought to either utilise or transform. nature. Our species has, by social means, repeatedly developed and travsformed its own ‘nature’. . To understand the development of lesbian and gay oppression it is necessary to dispense with ~ capitalisin’ § categories of natural and unnatural. in matters of sexuality. They. are arbitrary i in the extreme,

Capitalism has existed for several hundred years. In the thousands of years preceding capitalism’s rise to world dominance there were many different views of what wes natura] end unnatural in sexual relations. Different societies. and even different sivata within 2 particular society conformed te moral codes that wera peculiar te themselves. What was perfectly natural and even.

_ sanctified for the pre-Columbian natives of South

America seemed unnatural and abominable to the Christian conquistadores. The wide diversity of moral codes in sexual matters throughout history is eloquent testimony te the uselesaness of the term natural as any sort of guide. Attitudes io-

¥ Lesbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

wards sexual behaviour and moral codes that velate to if repeatedly change as a particular scciety itself changes. Moral codes for regulating sexuality are determined by the needs of the class that rules in a particular society. These codes are aiways in conformity with the social needs of the

dominant class. The condemnation of homosexu-.

ality as unnatural and the systematic oppression of hemesexuals that this led to, arose from the

necial needs of capitalist society and its ruling -

class, the bourgeoisie. Nature was called upon by the hourgeoisie te validate an oppressive code of saxual conduct, A cursory glance at history demonstrates that with its sexual morality, as with all if the other aspects of capitalist society that are seemed eternal and natural, nature had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The present bourgeois <titude to homosexuality is net eternal and his- “avy repeatedly shows this to be the case.

ANCIENT GREECE

ly Ancient Greece homosexual activity was not regarded as pnnatural at all. Sexual love between men was glorified by poets, philosophers, sculpiors and painters. Although there are recorded examples of lesbianism as well —~ the term itself being derived from Lesbos, the name of the island where Sappho, a poetess who celebrated the love between women, lived —~ there is no evidence to suggest that i; was accorded any social approval. Amongst males, homosexuality was not merely tolerated, it was encouraged. After his failure to rescue Eurydice from the underworld the mythical songster Orpheus turned to. the love of young. males. His songs openly celebrated this love. Plate and Aristotle, highly regarded by bourgeois scholars, both extolled the virtue of male homosexuality. Attempts by Christian scholars to suggest that such love was a non-physical, idealised love (hence ‘Platonic’)}, do not square with the mass of written ond archeological evidence depicting in great detail, and with obvious approval, the physical asnects of male homosexuality. Even before the taath publicised acceptance of homosexuality in Greece, earlier examples of the social approval of homosexuality exist. In ancient Mesopotamia the earliest legal codes dealt with many aspects of aaxnal morality but there were mo provisions for ‘be punishment of homosexuality. Indeed amongst the caste of priests in early Mesopotamia “imesexual practice was commonplace, public cmd accepted. ;

However, nobody should imagine that Ancient ‘heece was a haven of sexual freedom, It was a strongly patriarchal class society —- based on slavery. Whilst many of the free males of Athens, Sparta and Thebes conducted same-sex emotional md sexual relationships women suffered terrible

oppression. The citizen’s wife was largely confined.

to hey household and severely punished for any

sexual relations: beyond those with her husband necessary for producing children, The family was already an instrument of oppression, Other

_ women were restricted to prostitution. The slaves, « the great majority of the producers, had no rights

either political or sexual, EMBARASSING FACT

The main point however, is that this aociety not only functioned, it alse produced some of the finest products of the human spirit, giving birth te the earliest forms of democracy, to classics of tragic and comic drama, to philosophy, sculpture, architecture, mathematics and so on. And all this happened in a period when intra-male sexuality was not repressed but encouraged: This society was in no sense decadent -—~ that is falling apart as @ result-of sexual customs, This embarrassing fact is usually passed over in silence by bourgeois historians and moralists. Classical Greece was unusual in the explicit honour and role accorded to male same-sex love. It was closely related to the educa- ° tive and military training aspects of the Greek City-State, resting on the exploitation of slaves and the subordination of women. The ‘ideal’ rela-

tionship was between an older, mature man and a

younger adolescent (pederasty, which literally

means ‘love of boys’). This was supposed to aid the

education, moral as well as practical, of the young and to bind together the male citizens asa military force. This pattern has existed as well in other warrior societies throughout history.

LEGAL PUNISHMENT

However, if this pattern was unusually highly developed in Ancient Greece, if same sex love was only tolerated in other societies, nowhere was it treated as it has heen for modern times with fear and loathing, let alone subjected te systematic legal punishment, Also, in Greece heterosexualiiy and homosexuality were not counterposed. Men were not though of as being either homesexual or heterosexual. Sex between men and women. was principally for the purposes of reproduction, while sex between men was a source of pleasure. There was, however, no question of invoking nature te grant approval or disapproval for either. Instances of homosexuality and heterosexuality amongst the gods and goddesses were, after afl, Jegion.

The rise of Christianity, in the late classical world and during ‘the establishment of feudal Christendom, brought sbout a significant change | in attitudes towards homosexuality in Western Europe. However, homosexuality was lumped

together with other sexual sins deserving of spe-

ciel treatment, by the zealots ofthe early Christian. church. Practitioners of homosexuality, aleng with fornicators, these guilty ofhestiality, adulter-

ers aid more bes sides were the targets of Christianity according to Saint Paul.

PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES

Paul, as part of his plan to unify and cantralice the Christian church, stamped on the very early sexually free attitudes of Christ's followers and advocated an ideal of celibacy that had prefound . consequences for Europe for centuries to follow, For Pauline Christianity tust and debauchery were major sins, punishable by ged and the lew and homesexuality tended to be vegarded as particularly abominable extension of these sine, Once again itis clear that the target of god’s wrath was a Taan guilty of a homosexual practice, rather than a man guilty of being a homoremal, To counter the sins of the flesh Paul preached celibacy as the highest good for all. He wrote to the Corinthians:

Tt is good for a man irot to touch a wort F would thoi ail men were even as myself’

. For

OPPRESSIVE NORMS

He did concede in the same letter that this ideal might | be beyond many and. that the beet wary to arua.” ~ne would be to marry, But marriage was very much sccond nest, Reinforcing the oppressive norms of the family, visible trom the

_ earliest days of class sociéty, Paul taught that within marriage women had to cecupy a position of total subservience to their men:

Let the women: learn it silence with ail subjeetion. But i suffer not a woman to teach, notte usurp authority over the man, but fo be in silence.’

Whereas paganism had witnessed many cults im which sexuality was ait integral.eiement of dosixine and indeed worship (ertility rites), Christianity — at least as systemuatised by the third century Homan State Church ---. exchided it. The blessed trinity, the holy farnily and the virgin birth of Christ by Mary all excluded sex. Moreover, the church was ren by an all male, priesthoad, -

Por early Christianity sex itself was an expes sion of sin, of the fall and of the devil. The sexual impulse was, according to Saint Augustine, se powerful that it destroyed the capacity for reasoned thought. Therein lay its danger. It was an earthly pleasure that could divert the faithful away from the purauit of heavenly delights. And women were the temptresses, the true daughters of Eve. Thus in the earliest. teachings homosexuality was not seen asa major threat. But the hostility towards sex in general that was typical of Christianity meent that it would inevitably become a

The origits and nature of lesbian and gay oppression. W

target for persecution.

ironically warnings against; homosexuality be.” came necessary for ‘those closed communities —- monks and nuns -— who had chosen to live celibate lives. Sait Basil was obliged to warn young wonks te:

<< , fly from intinute association with comrades of " yourown age and runaway from them as from fire.’

Saint. Auguetime found it necessary to utter a similar caution for mens:

‘The love between you, however, ought not to be earthly but spiritual, for the things which shameless women do even to other women . . are to be avoided.’

BRAZEN YPOCRIGY

‘As the chuxch developed, during the middle ages, into a major power, running the affairs of its own vast feudal estates and heavily influencing the aifairs of ali the kingdowmes of Christendom its attitude towards sexuality hardened. By 1215 absolute celibacy was imposed on all clergy. Its willingness te condemn to tue stake those guilty of bast or thase guilty of sodorzy— usually along with a variety of ather erimes —- inereased considerably, Putthis hardening up on morality was accompanied by an inevease in brazen hypocrisy. Fornication by the holy fathers of the lowest order and the highest was commonplace. And in the monastie communities the sins that Basil and Augustine had warned against were practiced, often without veproof, so long as discretion was maintained. In other werds a stringent code of sexus! morality —

treusgression of which meant death or dismem-

-berment — was « weapon of social coercion used to _ texrorise and control the peascnt masses. It is no

aecident that the various hereties burnt by the church were often in politics ‘rebellion againstthe ~ papacy, and equally no accident that their charge

. shacis contained along with the sin of heresy the

sing of Inet and sodomy, in the later middle ages the sins of sodomy or

-buggery Go apneax to have been more widely

punished than previously. It was at this time that

- the modieval church furnished the world with the

concept of a sin against nature. Homosexual activity was listed as such a sin by the leading Catholic theologian Saint Themes Aquinas. But it was in the same category of heinous crimes as masturba-

. tion, bestiality and... having heterosexual intercourse in anything other than the missionary

position! In cases brought before the law, however,

homosexual activity tended to be regarded as on a

par with adultery. Proseentions of sedomites were normally ‘sex cases’ in which the accused would stand charged of a host of other supposed sex crimes. The idea of the sin against nature became more important in the sense of identifying an

@ Lussblan and gay liberation: a communist strategy

aoe

actttal breed of ‘unnatural’ sinner/criminal as fendalism gave way to capitalism. Capitalism appropriated late feudalism’s idea of a natural arder of everything on Earth ordsined by god, and nsed it to sanctify its own particluar methods of exploitation and oppression. In turn this led to a further qualitative development of western sotiety’s attitudes to homosexuality. This process of thangeis at its clearest in the case of the earliest mijor eapitalist power, Britain.

CIVIL WAR

The civil war that erupted in Britain in 1642 was a tlass struggle for political power between the foxdes representing the remnants of feudalism and those who championed the cause of capitalism, the botrgeoisie and a new social order. In the econemdie and political spheres capitalism did sriamph over the old feudal aristocratic order (though not without the aristocracy winning important compromises that enabled it to survive as a. pOwerful factor in Britain), By the end of the seventeenth century the changes in society were heing reflected in changes in philosophy and morality. The ‘natural order’ of late feudalism was préserved but was proved to be in accord with the précepts of reason and empirical fact. One element ofthe natural order of things was the newly emerging bourgeois family. It was counterposed to the Lbertinism of aristocratic sexual relations, and all manifestations of sexuality that did not accord with this emerging norm were held to be deviations from nature and from reason. There were very elear implications in this development: for soslety’s view of homosexuality,

4s social relations began to be moulded by the netds of an economy geared towards production for exchange, the market and money, an intensification of the sexual division of labour took place. There was a growing physical separation of the ‘hae’ from the place of work. The eld feudal household as a unit of production itself was being broken up. As one historian of the period, Sheila Rowbotham, observed: ‘Although’ many women still continued to work alongside their husbands their role in family preduction came increasingly to be regarded as supplementary. By the eighteenth century women in the growing strata of “middiing people” were aireadily being reared for the leisure and sensibility wé associate with the Victorian middle class.’ (Htdden from History

Changes in the organisation of work not only efieeted the legal and social position of women but also the dominant ideas in society about the disLinet roles of women and men.

‘The empirical philosophy of John Locke, writing in the 1690s, gained in popularity in Britain. He

erence Se on tart en tp Rt a

taught that private preperty was the most basic

‘natural right’ for men. The bourgeois man should

be ‘free’ to accummulate capital through his own hard work and through the use of his workers’ labour. In particular he needed to be free of the cares of the home, the organisation of domestie life, the rearing of children and so on. This affected the way in which the bourgeoisie viewed marriage, it modified the institution to suitits own purposes, Yn feudal times the peasant husband would have sought a wife suited not merely te producing childrer: and keeping house but. alse to helping in the field,

The aristocracy generally married for purposes of property and to continue the family line, but a mistress, not a wife, was often the object of the Lord’s affections, Arranged marriages were the norm and customs such as the land-owning Lord’s right to sleep with a serfs chosen bride on the first night of her marriage prevailed into late feudal times throughout much of Europe.

BOURGEOIS IDEALS

The rising bourgeoisie, on the other hand, celebrated the ideal of the individual love match. Marriage should be the result of a man’s love for a woman —an idea embodied in the principal novels of the eighteenth century in Britain. The bourgeois family was private and domestic. It was not - a basie unit of production, but a social structure which freed the male in the family to accumulate capital and te establish his influence in society and politics, Affection was supposed to be the cement that held the new family structure together. Asthe Bolshevik Alexander Kollontai noted:

‘In practice, of course, the bourgeoisie itself, in the name of convenience, continually sinned against this moral teaching, but the recognition of love as the pillar of marriage had a profound class. basis,’

The relevance of this for the. way in which homosexuality was treated was that any sexual relationships outside of the heterosexual love marriage were increasingly viewed as.a threat to the bourgecis family itself. Homosexuality in particular becarne an offence not simply against nature in the physical sense as had been the case in feudal times, but also against the natural, that is bourgeois, family. Homosexuality ceased to be . simply the action of those overtaken by lust and therefore prepared to ‘do anything’ as the feudal moralists had taught. Rather, as an activity in direct contravention of the bonds of the love matriage, 1) came to be viewed as the activity of a - distinct minority who were choosing to commit. crimes against the natural order of the world.

In the period of the transition from feudalism to - capitalism there occurred a series of moral panics

and large seale persecutions aimed at ‘devil wor-

.. homosexuals, T

alzo provoked a. veaction from

shippers and \ witehes, An intearal bhi charges against tlie victims —~ Wi aiid. WOT was ‘unnatural vier’, Wonten suspectad of belary unnatural in thelr affectiois were torhived er burned ai the stake, Phe crime of unatural offestion (often. levelled at women whe simply lived. alone in the village} was, however, rarely the ordy reason for such witch hunts. Bad harvests would sornetimes provide a pretext, On other occasions

neiurel disasters would suffice as an excuse, In the early eighteenth contwry however, perseeution aimed at male homor SezwE sin besanse they

were homosexuals, part of the new cakeyory of

people being created, began on. an unprecedented seale,

CHE Vie TAAL

Initially 36 took the form of raids which vosutuan in the arrest and prasenution of er oUps of men

frequenting Londen’s Molky Honser’. Tn. place of

trisis of nadividual deviants ~- the uid merp: for

eases of sodomy ~~ whole groups of men were.

prosecuted in collective trials 1726. Convietiona resulted in the doxth penalty. Sad in the trials it became clear that these meér. ware viewed a¢ sinners who freely and knowingly chose to sim. Homosexualiiy was hearing to he seen as the activity peculiar to a ceeap of paople-— The eighteenth centery muly sav we. “mningofthiz process, Kwas taken con new

stage of Gey opment as capitalism raabured ari _ as the norm of the hourpeois furily permeated tre _whele of seciety in the latter half ofthe atucteonth

centary.

Active persecution, in the efshtcenth contiuesy 1ase perseculed. There is evidence of organined resistance up ta and ineluding the use of violence a cairist tae raiders, by the users of the ‘Molly # Howson’ in £726, Of course nothing like a hemoseraal movement developed, bot a growling sense of idenizty amongel those tarzettad for attach was evident, The development af a sub-culiave through eo anventions of dvesa and behaviour helped fael this cenge af identity. The very erealion of a Uehniet idontity was, however, a result of the choiee, in matters af

sexual hehavieur, thet capitation was now posing to elt individuals.

“PME ey?

The svaale homovenual. of the cighteuath centary had to conform te established morality ox hieeome aan, ndegd the MoBies were the prototype of

what many nineteenth centnry, sexoclogists axcd

homosexuol rights’ camps signers slike catied the ‘third sex’-— women trapped huside nen’s bodies.

int L639, L707 ans

Thie view, though false, enabled male horasexn-.

Jating the best ele separated categories ——~ x2:

_ fhe origins and nature Gs fabian € nd ay oppression. €

ais to develop on alternative caliure and eseape fros the imeral sbrichuves of bourgeols society. Tae calture, which couls loosely be described as ‘campy WAS Ox tremely j important for the Mollies. In his

Secret Bistory afthe London Clubs of 1 709 Naward. Waxed gives aclear picture of the Molly subeulture whick set the tone for homosexual culture for vears ta follow. Ns wrote of the Mchies:

‘They cadopt oll the smali venities natural to the feminine sex to such an extent that they t iry to spank, mlk, chatter, shriek and scol id as women do, EPInE rem Ca well in cther as specks .

OF course the idea of ‘apa’ wemem confuses homnzoe ese LE! i the suporimigosed gonder yeras that esp ni hac developed concomitant with its eexaal divis ftahouar, ut ib was this lox roles hat the Moles sa were men end women is Wes BOF of shinply a bi ological fact.

Were respomaing ta. A were womren. "

netha M ties did wot foe! jus thoohetervosemaal ser ~ i ho norm, thoy adopted Keshionahle amongst wy in thas wile there kn

ali ty and bolavi Jovy

g (hough Chey W hat t sactety Lod fle mariez3am Ve AOL ati. we | wi

i GS TPES

i Clear biclagi option between men. and wore, this Goon mat Cetey e either sexuslity

moe oriantation —- or post JOUR.

vm Home pret EROS

with a “par-

CF zor than biologically ly ine fae te “ah WOmMGEr are eaatrre of bio. agy, of gender,

BIG fou

tic nailer ; yams 7 ROK ae Wasi, Lac. 7

> dowevar tise “ta ics of duld vaavins, which in ah Chass sociation have > he: asa thas: Wied a Ss. women’s wove, are not determined ly bisingy, by gender at

Enea ere Th. toviting dan hieln ay that makes women

Bak othen gen, Nothing at alk, r my thought of as Wout r, Ins iach they ave the product of a. ofleaocr which exasa in the esurse + sanity’ socte! develonment, Moreover, § yastity this caiseia of Jabour over the centuries diffs ving class: nee ties have comstructed a culture im. winters, ie © k0d vaacoctiive characteristies art terms “i Bows ara social behavious, are totally eounternescd. |

eel oa a DY ee

This coumves-poition stems from socisily comstaveted pender releg not, to any significant degree, from wiolorw, Ti, S&eraronte the human por

iy, prevents men and women. from assimiments o: both of the. rightly wine and feminine ung Wiiebis an extremely

a and thereby trays:

_deabiru oti ive divide. In o nutshell then, gender raies

‘¥ Lesbian and gay liberation: a coramunist strategy

are primarily products of our society not of our sexuality. .

Despite all this, however, and despite the elesient of misogynistic ridicule that undoubtedly axists within the camp tradition pioneered by the Mollies, the male homosexuals of the eighteenth century were attempting to defend their sexuality against its stigmatisation at the hands of capitalism and its moral guardians,

Towards the end of the eighteenth century and with the development of industry the bourgeoisie consolidated itself in Britain as the ruling class. Aé the same time it brought into being the indusial working class and eventually the conditions necessary for the revolutionary transformation of capitalism itself — large scale industry. Farming developed on a capitalist basis, while the Enelosure Acts, 1760-1830, eliminated the peasantry as & serious social force within Britain. The thousands who were driven off the land migrated to the towns and became free labourers ~- proletarians. Capitalism was creating its own class enemy despite itself,

Initially the bourgeoisie did not seek to impose its ideal’ family on the newly emergent working class. On the contrary the requirements of capital accumulation in the early nineteenth century led it to ruthlessly break wp proletarian families. Child labour, the horrific exploitation of women workers and the exacting toll of long hours at the factory for men all undermined the reproduction of astahble family life for the masses, However, as the working class grew and began to organise as a class and as capitalism’s needs for the reproduction of labour power became greater, the ruling class’ ideas about the family were obliged to become the ruling ideas for the whole of society. Pressure from the working class for the protection of family life (a progressive struggle) and the bourgeoisie’s need to use the family as a means of regenerating and reproducing labour power led to the spread of the bourgeois family as the bedrock social unit in society.

The process was accelerated towards the end of the nineteenth century. Capitalism in Britain had developed into its imperialist stage. This was accompanied by significant changes in the composition of the working class. A relatively better off layer of skilled male workers came to politically dominate the organisations of the working class. This was the social basis for the development of reformism. The ‘aristocracy of labour’ was ‘bought off by the fruits of imperialism’s super profits.

BOURGEOIS FAMILY

It was in this period particularly, that the beurgeois family was sold to, and adopted by, the mass

of the working class, It was at one with the general

10

response of skilled workers to the trade crises (women ovt first} and to their trade union demands (the male family wage’ and the exclusion of women from productive labour especially in the skilled trades).

if the status of the bourgeois was partly messured by the ‘leisure’ of his wife and daughters in the eighteenth. century, by the end of the nineteenth century a similar attutude prevailed amongst the upper layer ofthe working class. And it served as a powerful transmission belt for this bourgeois ideology to the rest of the class. The effect on attitudes towards homosexuality was that the working class became infected by the bourgeoisie’s hostility to ‘unnatural acts’.

The systematisation of oppression was reflected in Jegal developments.

Homosexuals were the most clearly identifiable

deviants from the hourgeoisie’s natural order. They were set apart from. society -~ with even well meaning sexologists helping the process with their theories of men trapped in women’s bodies and vice versa—~ as atargetfor repression, Al) that was missing —- given the difficulties of using Henry VII's sodomy laws —~ were modern legal codes for dealing with them. A Liberal MP, Henry Labouchere, furnished the necessary clauses with his law on indecency, in 1885. It stipulated: ‘Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or ig a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to preeure the commission by any male pereson of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.’

Thousands of gay men have suffered af the hands of the gross indecency laws ever since. Pressure for their introduction had come originally from well meaning reformers to combat the ‘white slave’ trade in children for sexual purposes. The guardians of bourgeois morality saw to it, as they have so often since, that this pressure by the reformers was used to their own advantage. In 2 climate of moral panic, they so shaped the law that. male homosexuals became the principal victims, along with prostitutes, of the moral panic.

The most celebrated homosexual victim of the moral reaction that followed the Labouchere Amendment was Oscar Wilde, the author. Bis case is rightly famous not simply because of his individual reputation, but hocause it revealed, in the starkest possible terma, that capttelem’s cure for thase ‘suffering’ from homosexuality was two years hard labour. In society’s view homosexuals were not merely sick men, they were criminals. Wilde himself had faced gay baiting from his college days, At Oxferd his forthright ‘decadence’ prompted the yahoos at his college to try and, wreck his room (though Wilde’s ‘effeminacy’ was no obstacle to him kicking these thugs down the stairs!).

“Fine wiiglies aml marines of lesitiiam amd gay oypppneaitam WF

oe tte ern arr seen feria Nanette eet hyn ten A At rattett netrrttinttetane mrer ty emia srtt Mam mamas naryata tra errant ae ert

J POLIDE RamENCE

Following » well pebllited affair with Lord Alfred Baughes, son al‘ (he Merugsis of Queensberry, evtlience thal Wilde ied eommuitited acto of gross indevenoy with ather males was ameaesod ny the polices and Wate wera cometeted dm 18M. The nisle homosensll ammount panished and mxaay fled to whut dhey maw es 2 thawen, Pasta, where tolerance was grenter 2s a mesult of the Iageny af the Napolwonte God jin Bhemchs Lew. More imgextantly the how Inad waged its fioger at all ihomew- - sexuals ay jailing Wille his flehe awaited alll of them. "hues amsamalihy het 3 excme of ceameloas fear, fear of osing foond guilty of a “cxtme’ wihiela caused mulediy any Tuam ant alll, te wintels doe ‘victim’ hed coneeutel, aod whiel: wes comimeted privately. Dhe iioncer weaalegit, Hawellodk Bula, pointed to the deap rested walzimmess whick wmderlay the laws tihat were used sepia Wilde andl many news after hina:

‘The act shign brenght eaoh of ws into the world is not indecent; it nowulhd bousme wo af camvied om te public. f tte male persons, whe hawe reacted years of dimnetion, counout together to perform. some act of seamul dutimacy je primate, mo iedecency hes tem wonmitied, fone af the consenting’ parties subaryuently prevkiims the act, indiecemey nuiy doubtless ibe wrentad, aw may happen alee ie the case of normal aenuul iuleresasse, batit seeIPES contrary & swell walioy what euch proclomatii should convert the wat finito a prema afffemee.”

We nesil met agree with Bile’ wiers on pediliic . morality, to beable aynrectate thee wary im wlniele he hightghiadithe Gineriminaiory draracter af the law on gues indexeney.

Other ‘imperialist cumntniins fioliomed a Inracilly sinvilar pattern. lin! Giermamy Paxagrapt LTS, remdering zelle Megal, was paced inte Tnpaniall Rew thu DBM. Ihe the UGA, despite variations ‘hdbwaeon sintes, Town agama Pron sexuality were Euanghit imo fine ie fhe minmeeenth conibery.

What: CeSbiandon? En. the mineteemtia cemtusy there wasnetan Sxreintiont egal ores axgaitnst it. Rhis was met due to any enlightened atilitud, however. ‘Biinetasnth centheny sittitindless tio wemsem,

‘vespectalile waren’ dhatis, were based om oi tatall -

denial oftvewxivtenne wfikomale sexuality. Giraud

ally thissuvmsimndiiied ly tthe wieww tihnadt mice women

wanted ex, lyat paorety Ror proereative porpones,

The aexulogiet, rogpost, Posrel, ypiiied fins out

look when ihe want:

The most jprafsundl aradl mactdt mentareal ivveliiontizon,

Of the sexed apeuatite ttm ements mexternal Lowe,” Indeed, ‘this eutlonk infileenend eaxhy feantmietts

rat errr a sn Samal armament

tt

ition of masthcerbaod. Their wiew off sexual inthe One ae procreative filiiiacent Red tern tm castigate levbiams for engagiog im mon-repredustive sex, Bren Meorie Stages, whe fought. te eslightes

Wore an imey senna mations, dewleged quack: themies aieut (he ceutralithy of seaem te sexual achivity te justify & Thestilihy te Resiicaisen. Sine

“Tike Baclruck olbjicttow de Uesiliarsom ie eerely that avorucre com cnully pilexy wsittte acts oiler cxesal carmarant . Hameo maton! amion. or supply cust otter wnith the seminal ox prostatic acevetions, which they « aught to howe and crave Kor unconsciously.”

Thos the deste! of female samality led the mimainentih contausy marall gueadiions te iemare iti the haye thet it weak’ em asovay. Wher, veloc 2 aenwratl dineeision to v Wom 9 WES as granted, i wae

pawud toy 143 te 5B votes in the Haase of Com: msomne. Et mevedi: ‘Amy act of gross indecomey beteewen female persons shell be a misdemeanor avd pumistaible tm the sana manner as anty sual aot consxattitied By mole

We Henecel Lends boiteald,provented eine reading the sistete Ihedk met out off friemduinis tonnads Lesivinns: hut because the old fassills ware stifleamvinced mest women did mat Ioxaw anything alborutt hestbikamntian cand io psessa Ieew abba it woe

thethnungeoisie were prepawed to use aller Tews— the indecent: accamulltt-—egainat keabione and ed mo hesitation, im 1926, of fiiciding Radelyite Malis - Weld af Laweliiness gailiiy af chacemitiyy andl aunp-

he hougeoiic of the late nineteenth cemimry called am science to help them juatiiy thei trest-

. Vinimalily alll leading: experts fn These fields Eoolt Ubing. Magmus Tivnehitld, Pend, Hawelselk Bisse — fix womed the wefoows of the anti homasexwall kaw. They were, Ihy and Large, convinced that Toxnesesmraliitiy stinccnllel fine tine alhpart af setemtiine inaweligation, mati criminal presecatines. To tite extent,

i manrality. However, their thesties for explaining homo-

Ww Lesbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

sexuality often reinforced bourgeois society's view ’ of it as either an abnormality or an illness. Thus Kraft Ebbing’s path-breaking Psychopathia Sexu-

alis (1886) billed itself as a medical study.of the .

‘abnormal’, Freud, similarly regarded homosexuality as a disorder or perversion. But he rightly opposed the idea that homosexuality stemmed from a woman being trapped inside a man's body

or vice versa, He believed that homosexuality was -

a confusion of choice in terms of sexual preference, not a confusion of gender identity, Polemicising against the ‘third sex’ thesis he wrote:

normative approach to sexual orientation. The ideas of the early sexologists and psychologsts were ignored by capitalism’s law makers and

moral guardians. Until the 1920s and 1930s that :

is, By then a more pliable breed of scientists than

_the great. pioneers, were installed in the key

medical establishments: throughout the imperialist countries. .

The views of the pioneers that homosexuality , was an abnormality were seized upon,’and their .

pleas for tolerance and understanding were ig-

-nored. Even those who sought to harmonise psy-

‘The literature of homosexuality usually fails to -

distinguish. clearly enough between the question of the choice ‘Of 0b ject on the one hand and of the sexual characteristics of the subject on the other. .

. Aman in. whose character feminine attributes.

obviously predominate . . . may nevertheless be

heterosexual. The same is true of women.’

This was a very important insight. THROWBACK

However, Freud was a bourgeois liberal not a

Marxist. He did believe that the homosexual’s,

preference for same-sex love was a throwback to the days before civilization, when bisexuality. was the norm. As such it was a problem, if not an illness; a disorder, if not a crime. He wrote: .

‘Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage; but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation;

it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it —

to be avariation of the sexual funetion produced by a certain arrest of the sexual development.’

In other words, the ‘sexual function’ is not dictated by norms laid down by society but by an

independent, ‘sexual development’ which goes on.

in each individual. Psychological factors ean check that development and thereby cause homosexual-

ity, because.the proper endpoint of that development for. Freud was, and should always be, hetero-

sexuality. Freud did not challenge capitalism’s

12

chology and Marxism, like Reich, classified homo-

.sexuality as a deviation from ‘normal’, genital

based sexual activity. Tragically Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in getting homosexuality listed with the World Health Organisation as.a recognised illness. Science and morality were brought into harmony.

By the beginning of. the twentieth century most of imperialist Europe and North America had legally sanctioned the oppression of. homosexuals — male and in a different way, female. It took over

sixty. years for any generalised shift in attitude .

and law reform to take place. But the years of tolerance that followed the 1960's, were not only of

limited duration, they were of limited use. For

lesbians and gay men oppression merely changed into a different gear, Now even the reforms of the ‘permissive’ sixties are under attack as gay men are blamed for the AIDS virus, and turned into modern day lepers and aslesbians are sacked from their jobs, denied their children and-all too frequently, beaten up on the streets.

_ Capitalism has given lesbian and gay oppression a legal, political and in many respects, a social

form. It has made it more wide-ranging and thoroughgoing than ever before, but it has also sparked resistance. ‘That resistanee needs to be transformed into a struggle, not only against

oppression but also against the capitalist society

that nurtures and sustains that oppression.y

and Western Europe was accompaniad, as we have seen, by an emerging morality that categorised homosexuals as deviants. Homogexuality was no longer merely an instance of individual depravity. It was a way of life for a whole number of people, especially men, and had to ba treated as a threat to society. The development of the systematic social and political oppression of homosexuals did lead to the development of organieed resistance. In a number of European countries movements and campaigns for homosexual rights emerged.

The very term homosexuality was coined by a Hungarian, Doctor Benkert, in the 1860s. Benkert ~~ himself a homosexual —- wrote an open letter to the German government in 1869 protesting against the proposed introduction of Paragraph 178-into the imperial legal code. This Paragraph rendered all homosexual acts committed by males punishable offences, carrying heavy prison gontances. Moreover, the intreduction of the Paragraph wae eepecialy worrying for male homosexuals since it was common knowledge that the

; he development of capitaliem in Britain

the juestion

tries, oppression ‘manifested iteolf in a variety of

other ways.

' The political basis of the early homosexual rights campaigns in Britain, and more particularly in Germany, was bourgeois democratic. That is to say that, the campaigne were aimed at changing specific anti-homosexual aspects of existing law. In 1810 Napoleon introduced his legal code: throughout much of Europe. This code regarded matters of sexuality, where consent waa given, ac entirely private. The code was not a reflection o* Napoleon's own reputed homosexual inclinations, as bourgeois historians have argued. Rather it waz a real gain of the French Revolution of 1789 which had inscribed on its banner the democratic rights of man, including privacy in all matters concerning sexual preference and behaviour.

However, the ideal of bourgeois. democratic

equality ~- between men and women, between

German police had built up extensive files on the

sexual habits of numerous individuals. Benkert's letter wae significant in bringing opposition to Paragraph 175 into the open. In that sense it laid down a marker for future movements against the

races and between homosexuals and heterosexuals -—~ popular for the purposes of sumntoning the plebian masges to struggle against feudalism, soon came into conflict with the realities and necessities of a world dominated by capitalist exploitation and the remorseless quest for ever

. greater profits. As industry in Europe developed,

the effective exploitation of wage labour by the

.. capitalists eventually necessitated the imposition

paragraph when it became law throughout Ger-

many in 1871.

In Britain homosexual acis between males had been punishable by death until 1861. But the change in law in that year, to make such activities merely liable to prison sentences was designed to increase not decrease perescution. Trials for sexual offences were more likely to result in convictions ifthe death penalty waa not the outcome. The law on gross indecency between males, introduced in 1886, consolidated anti-homosexual legislation in Britain. Despite the lack of legal provision for the prosecution of lesbians in meat capitalint coun-

13

of the bourgeois nuclear family structure on the entire proletariat. In turn this family atructure, - militated againat bourgeois democratic rights for women and hornosexuals (male and female), Ir many Eurepean.countries and in North America _ this development led to the stigmatisation and eriminalisation of all aspects of eexuality the: deviated from capitalism's heterosexual family norm, Homosexuality, which as we have seen wae already classed amongst the chief crimes agains, nature, was inevitably a major target. Thus Parsgraph 176 stipulated:

‘Unnatural coupling undertaken between persons of the male sex and between people and animals i::

¥ Lesblan and gay liberation: a communtat strategy

ae ce Ne ee LR RR EA Tt lf Etienne re erate terete A re

ih a punishable by imprisonment. Civil rights can also be withdrawn.’

Paragraph 175 and the Oscar Wilde trial in Britain, which stressed the unnaturalness of hig exime, set the terms of reference for the early reform campaigns. Humanists, bberals and gosialists of various hues conducted agitation against capitalism's institutionalised oppression of homosexuals. They reasserted a fundamental temet of bourgeois democracy; namely that the state has no business interfering with personal natters so.long as they do not harm anyone. Defence of the Uranians (a term coined by the homosexual rights campaigner, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and adopted by lesbians and gay men at the time as their common title) centred on combatting the legal discrimination they faced.

In Germany a long running campaign had as ite central focus the demand for the repeal of Paragraph 176, This defence of democracy was completely correct, and, for ite time, highly progressive. However, the link between the oppression of homdsexuals and the development of the family under capitalism was not understoed by the early movement of Uranians or by the pioneers of Marzism, Indeed Engels, who iaid the foundations of the Marxist analysis of the family, did not see the connection between the. structure of the family under capitalism, together with the ideology associated with that structure, and the oppression of

homosexuality. Worse, his idealised view of -

heterosexual love (a view influenced by nineteenth century romanticiem) led him to condemn homosexuality as an outrage againat the dignity of man:

. but thie degradation of the women [Engels is referring to prostitution in ancient Greace — WP] was avenged on the men and degraded them also till they fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods with the myth of Canymede,’

Engels developed this attitude in isolation from any existing homosexual rights movements and for once allowed a mixture of romanticism and Victorian morality to cloud hia normally rigorously materialist judgement.

Despite Engels’ individual viewpoint and regardless of the itidividual viewpoints of the leaders of the socialist movement, it was that movement that took up the defence of homosexuals and the fight for their democratic rights as citizens. Tho leader of the Universal German Workingmen’s Asiociation, Ferdinand Lassalle, defended J B von ‘Schweitzer, who was hounded out of the legal profession because he was known to be a homosexual, Lassalle welcomed von Schweitzer as a leader of the Association. His

grounds for doing so shewed that early socialists ,

14

understood the democratic principle at stake even if they did not understand the question of sexual politics. Lassalle declared:

‘In the long run, sexual activity is o matter of taste, and ought to be left up to each person, so long as he doesn’t encroach upon someone else’s interests, Though I wouldn't give my daughter in marriage to suck a man.’

Not that Schweitzer had expressed any desire to marry Lagsalle's daughter!

From the 1860's on the working class and socialist movernent in Germany did not allow. its primitive views on the nature of homosexuality to obatruct its firm commitment to the democratic defence of homosexuals, Marxist and non-Marxist socialists became, from very early on, the most consistent fighters for homosexual rights, proving once again that only the working class remained faithful to the democratic ideals that the bourgeois

revolution had espoused but that the hypocritical, _

penny pinching bourgeoisie had long since con- ;

signed to the dustbin of history. Towards the end

of the nineteenth century the strongest party of a

the Second International, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), won the acclaim of Uranians everywhere by daring to challenge Paragraph 176 on the floor of the imperial Reichstag.

Bebel, the great socialist leader, took the floor.in |

1898 to ridicule the idea that homosexuals were a tiny handful of perverts. He asserted, against this view, and to the horror of the bourgeois deputies all around him on the benches of the Reichstag, that there were homosexuals everywhere:

The number of these persona ia 90 great and -

reachee so deeply into all social circles, from the lowest to the highest, that if the police dutifully did what they were supposed to, the Prussian state would immediately be obliged to build two new penitentiariea just to handle the number of violations against Paragraph 176 within the confines of

Berlin alone.’

Bebel’s defence of homosexuals was grounded in the SPD's fundamental commitment to the democratic aspects of the socialist minimum programme —- the state should keep its snout out of people’s personal affairs. But while the party's position on democratic rights was unambiguous, its attitude to homosexuality was more confused. The basic position, which.was way in advance of

Engels’ attitude, was developed by Eduard Bern- .

stein (ater a leading revisionist within the party!) in a series of articles in Die Neue Zeit in 1895. The occasion for these articles was the Wilde trial in Britain. Bernstein effectively and savagely attacked the bourgeoisie for its mean and hypocritical treatment of Oscar Wilde, They had praised his literary work up to the point that he was found

guilty of gross indecency. Then they banished .

Wilde from the ranks of polite society. Bornstein :

noted: ©

®verything changed for him, and the directors of the theatres that had acquired his pieces — of what is injured morality not capable? —removed not his

“s. pleces, but hie name, from the posters.’

'. This example of bourgeois hypocrisy prompted - . Bernetein to attempt to develop an understanding of homosexuality, ‘deriving from scientific experience’,

“The strength of Bernstein's analysis was its

Herzen: also writing in Die Neue Zeit, refined this

_ view and ascribed the causes of the ‘illness’ to a

“debunking of the idea that homosexuality was —

- unnatural, as charged.-by capitalist morality. . Using the method of historical. materialiem, he -explained the way in which’moral and sexual __.wiews were the product of definite historical and ,focial circumstances, Bourgeois sexual morality :» was far from being the eternal and natural law . that capitalism’s hired moral hacke claimed. In ;- fact it was a recent development and at that time was far from being universal. Precisely becauce attitudes to matters of sexuality are historically conditioned the yardstick of what was ‘natural’ "was invalid. Bernstein argued that the prevailing morality constituted,the ‘normal’ and that therefore deviations from it were abnormal rother than unnatural, ‘Nature and norm were different things and most norms were, in any case, unnatural. As Bernstein éxplained: -. For what‘ie not unnatural? Our entire cultural existence, our made of life from morning to nitht ie @ constant offence against nature, againet the original preconditions of our existence. If it was only a question of what was natural, then the woret sexual excess would be no more objectionable than, say, writing a letter -— for conducting eoctal intercourse through the medium of the written word ta far further removed from nature than any way as yet known of satisfying the sexual urge.’

By rejecting the idea that same-sex love was.in

any way unnatural, and by showing that such a

confusion of gones at the earliest, bisexual phase of the embryo. This produced the person who had a- woman's mind trapped in a man’s body. This concept was embraced by wide actions of the homosexual community and extended to explain lesbianiam -- the man’s mind trapped in a women’s bedy. The key, therefore, to understanding the illmesd ofhhomosexunlity was science. Sexuality, it was believed, was detormined acientifi-

cally. Herzen argued:

‘In my eatimation it [ why people are homosexual or not — WP] is to be found in embryology in conjunction with phylogeneticism and anthropol-

ogy.”

This scientific determinism wae, by and large, accepted by the Uranian movement. The major homogerunal rights movement, the Scientific Humaniterian Committee (an international organisaticn, but based and at its strongest in Germany) and its eating theorists conducted a great deal of research to scientifically prove the ‘third sex’ theory. The committeo’s journal was actually celled the Yearbcok for Intermediate Sexual Types, All of this reflected the major boom in ‘scientifitiem’ in the lete nineteenth and early twentieth eontury.

Thig eyproach was much more indebted to Social Darwinism, asgociated with writers such as Herbert Spencer, than Marxism. Consequently, its materialism wes corrupted by an overly evolutionist and biclogist stance. The result was the develepment of quack theorics of homosexuality, Phyaical, biolegicel, genetical and biochemical factors. often took precedence over social and psychologjcal considerations. The influence of this ‘scientificiern’ was widesproad in the Uranian and gocialist movements (though one gay organisation,the -. Community of the Special, rejected scientific de-. -

. terminism only to replace it with mysticiem),

type of lové had existed in many different societies _.

at many different times, Bernstein made arevolu-._

tionary contribution to the development of Oo

Marxist theory of sexual politics,

The weak side of Bernstein's analysis was the:

way its grasp of the causes of homosexuality, He tended to accept capitalism's categories ingofar as he believed that homosexuals did constitute a

Pioneer sexologists and homogexual rights cam-

. paigners like Meenus Hirechfeld and Kraft Ebb-

ing, fully endoreed this approach. While many valid insights were gained as a

_ result of the work of the early sexologists, the -

- Marxiet movement made a major, if entirély un-

distinct category of people by virtue ofthe fact that - they suffered from an iHness. In other words their ...

sexuality was not and could not be the product of

free choice. As an illness homosexuality had tobe

understood, tolerated and aympathised with. He -

wrote that cases’ of homosexuality ‘must not be _.

became widéspread amongst the sociaiist movement and persisted for many years in ite ranks,

judged ‘morally but- pathologically’. This view .

deratandable, mistake by accepting the ‘third sex’

theory as en explanation of homosexuality. This theory fails to undoratand that gender ‘oles, as opposed to gender itestf, are for the most part socially, not scientifically moulded and that arigid

division batwoen homosexuals and heterosexuals . entails the cramping of human sexual potential

that is a necessary feature of capitalism's version

of family life, Nene of this is to deny that biological

distinctions between the genders exist and do determine certain differences. But there is no

18

¥ Leeblen and gay iiberation: a communist strategy

, ae . aad selentific proof, to date at least, that gender dictates a heterosexual norm for all people or that it dictates all manifestations of behaviour that have become associated with a particular, gender through the centuries.

Despite this theoretical weakness the impact of Marxiam’s essentially principled, democratic stand on the homosexual question brought support for the SPD from many Uranians and propagated inside the working clags e high level of wlerance, if not aupport, for homosexuals, In Serlin Magnus Hirschfeld circulated a questionnaire on sexuality which included questions on homosexuality amongst 3,000 students and 6,721 metal workers. Not one worker objected to answering the questionnaire. A gaggle of students, on the other hand, brought Hirechfeld to court and had - him successfully prosecuted for ciroulating an

‘insulting’ questionnaire. Throughout the trial the workers’ movement defended Hirschfeld and the SPD's paper, Vorwaerts, carried regular articles on the case.

The Uranian movement did not fail to recognise who its allies were. The bourgeois. parties in the Reichstag had only words of hate for homosexuals. The SPD, at the very least, spoke of humanitarian

‘tolerances, In 1912, the Scientific Humaniterian Committee intervened in the elections accordingly. It published an advert which declared: ‘Third Sex: Consider this! In the Reichstag on 31

May, 1905, members of the Centre, the Coneerva- -

tives and the Economic Alliance spoke against you ... Gut for you the orators of the Left. Agitate and vote accordingly.’

The support for the left actually went further than just voting. In the Garman revolution of 1918 gay men and lesbians (who had been involved in the German women’s movement before the war and who had campaigned to get that movement to take up their cause) organised and fought to deatroy the rule of the Kaiser and of the aristocratic Junker class. The homosexual presence under the banner of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, was visible in rallies, demonstrations and atreet fighting. At a mass meeting at the height of the revolution Hirschfeld called on an audience of almost 4,000 to struggle not merely for a democratic republic but also for a ‘social republic’.

.. The Committee’s petition on Paragraph 175 was actually presented to parliament in 1922, but by then the democratic counter-revolution led by the right wing leaders of the SPD meant that the reactionary law was never repealed. However, a greater degree of tolerance was won and Hirechfeld wae able to found the Institute for

Sexual Science, housing it in the palace of a Ger- .

men prince removed from both his oversized house and his lofty social station in the course of the

16

revolution. The Institute, like Hirschfeld himself, became « target of attack for the growing Nazi movement and was eventually smashed up and closed by Hitler’s stormtreopers.

Outside of Germany, too, socialists were in the

front ranks of those responding to the Uranians’ call for a campaign for democratic rights for homosexuals. In Britain the utopian socialist, Edward Carpenter, campaigned for homosexual rights and linked them with the need for socialiam. After the Wilde trial and the witch hunt atmosphere it engendered, Carpenter had great diffi- | culty getting his work published. Only the press of the working class movement would publish his writings on sexuality. The Manchester Labour Preas published his book Towards Democracy, which dealt with homosexuality as well as a range of other topics. The socialist Belfort Bax (a man who believed that males were the oppressed sex!) was prepared to take a stand on the rights of homosexuals to behave in private as they wished. He argued that morality had nothing to do with: «..@ sexual act, committed by the mutual conseni of two adult individuals, which is productive of no offepring, and which on the whole concerns the welfare of nobody but the parties themselves.’ Of course while adhering to this position many socialiste, like Blatchford, the editer of The Clarion, still found ‘the whole subject nasty’. But that put them on the side of those who were ignorant of sexual politics rather than on the side of moral reaction.

In the USA the anarchist movement and anar-

chist figures like Exama Goldmann (who had met

lesbians while she was in prison) took up the eudgels in defence of homosexuals, particularly in the many states that had reactionary laws on the question,

The work of Bebel, Bernstein and the SPD Gn particular in the Reichstag debates on Paragraph

176 in 1896 and 1905) enlightened the socialist

movement internationally to the democratic questions at stake in the defence of homosexuals. Additionally it brought many Uranians to recognise the need to identify their struggle for rights with socialism and internationalism (the Community of the Special adapted Marx’s old slogan to read Uranians of the World Unite’). The parties of the working class had been the only ones to respond positively to the pressure for reform carried out by the pioneer homoséxual rights movement,

The most tangible gain achieved in the struggle for homosexual rights in this period was a reault of the victory of the working class under the banner of revolutionary Marxism (Bolshevism) in Russia in October 1917. In December 1917 the Bolshevik government abolished all the Czarist laws that forbade or restricted homosexual activity. This

was an enormous gain and proof positive that revolutionary socialism is the key to destroying capitalism's reactionary moral laws, ac well as its other repressive laws. The world’s firet. workers’ state provided the only form of government prepared to enforce on behalf of homosexuals the old democratic principle that the state should not interfere in private matters. Doctor Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Inetitute of Social Hygene, codified Bolsheviem’s approach i in a 1923 pamphlet, ‘The Sexual Revolution it Russia. tt stated: - ‘Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legiclation ae offenees against public morality — Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same aa so-called natural’ intercouree. Allforms of sexual intercouree are private mattera.” The open expression of homosexuality was tolerated to a far groater degree in poet-revolutionary Ruesia than in the capitalist countries. However, the revolution did not get much be-

yond the SPD's already extabliched theoretical understanding of homosexuality, The view that it was a form of bodily/genetic disordor rather than &- crime, and should therefore be tolerated not punished, remained prevalent amonget Russia's leading sexologists. The Bolshevik revolution had created the preconditions — working class power — for the achievement of lesbian end pay lbera-

tion. The possibility for further theoretical and |

practical advances exieted. But thie possibility was not realised, The enormous democratic gain of 1917 was not built upon for one simple reasen —- a political counter-revolution wae carried through by the bureaucratic caste that hed emerged in the war-torn, desperately poor end backward Soviet Union. Numerous gains made by the working class and the oppressed through the revolution were stolen from them by the bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, which had usurped political power, - Under the leadership of Stalin in the late 1620s -the Soviet Union became a degenerated workers’ state. That is, the potential for the transition te socialism on the basis of the poat-capitaliat proparty relations, was blocked. An ever present danger of economic collapse, thanks to the blinkered and self serving policies of the bureaucracy, moant that the country was in ati a fairly constant atate of crisis, Part of this process was a reactionary . shift of position by the workers’ state on the ques- -:tion of homosexual rights.

After leading the fiéld in the defence of homozexual rights at various international medicel eongresses throughout the 1920s, towards the end of the decade Soviet doctors, including Batkis, were inatructed to drop all mention of homocoxuality. Their bureaucratic masters drew « veil over the

pi pr ar tthe em ete at ak ee A

Marxism and the lesbian and gay question 7

subject end kept it in the closet until the problem of AIDS in the 1980s obliged Gorbachev to admit the exiztence of homorsxzuality in the Soviet Union. The democratic gain of 1917 was obliterated in 1934 when, alter the personal intervention of Stalin, laws making homosexuality punishable by imprisonment were re-introduced.

Underlying this renewed attack was not, av many modern lasbian and gay activists have asserted, a historic incompatibility between socialiam and leebien and gay liberation. To credit Stalin in the 1930s 95 gocialiat in the revolutionary senas of that word, shows a profound lack of understanding about the nature of socialism. The attack actually represented a retreat from socialism as 4 result of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, The ravolutionary perspective of removing the oppressive aspects of family life through the socialisation of domestic tasks, child rearing and ao on, was abandoned by the Stalinist apparatus, This was no tactical and temporary retreat dictated by the appalling poverty of the young workera’ republic and its inability te be able te afford to aocialisa domestic labour.

On the contrary it was a conscious strategy directed at, renurrecting as a noble ideal the bourgeois model of family life, which every Soviet man and women should follow. The woman was expected to carry out domestic tasks as well as working in a Soviet factory. This revival of the bourgeois family by Stalinism was designed to to assist the bureaucratic caste develop Soviet industry and agriculture in a menner that served its own narrow interests and bolstered its awn privilezea, Just as capitalism, in ite defence of the fomily, is ebliged to oppose all threate to the heterosexual, nuclear norm so Stalinism was obligad to do the same. To juatify this the bureaucracy propagated the theory that homosexuality was & bourgeois deviation, typical of degenerate capitalism in general and fascism in particular. The pro-Staliniat author Maxim Gorkil summed up the official Soviet attitude in the 19306 and showed the distance that separated the deganerated workers’ state and the Bolshevik government of 1917 when he wrote:

In the fascist countries, homosexuality, which rutina the youth, flourishes without punishment; in every country where the proletariat hae auda-

ciously achieved social power homosexuality hee been declared & social crime and is heavily punished,’

Needless to say Gorkii’s supposed paradies for hormosexuals, Nazi Germany, showed its real colcurs by pinning pink triangles on homosexuals, rounding them up and sending them to face atarvation and death in the concentration camps.

It is no exaggeration to say that the combined

ety cee fa arta arte er rate ttre thf tana eran

¥ Lesbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

-ounter-revolutionary victorids of Stalinism and ‘ascism eradicated the gains that had been made dy the homosexual rights and socialist movement in the preceding forty years. The homosexual rights movement, as an organised force, was de- »troyed. Worse, within the socialist movement itselfthe climate of reaction led to very reactionary views on the lesbian and gay question taking root.

In May 1928 the German Communists Party UPD), the most advanced party in the Comintern an matters of sexual politics, was able to answer a auestionnaire on hornosexual rights to the effect tnat it had ‘taken a stand for the repeal of Paragraph 175 at every available opportunity’. Less than five years later it had reversed its position, Immediately prior to Hitler’s rise to power the KPD consciously adopted a policy of gay-baiting the Nazis on the basis of the bourgeois deviation

‘theory of homosexuality. The existence of some well known gay men in the ranks of the Nazis prompted the Stalinist KPD to equate Nazis with homosexuality and describe homosexuality itself as a filthy and corrupt perversion. Tragically this viewpoint, which should have been consigned to the dustbin, had a long standing impact on nearly all wings of the socialist movement.

In this climate of reaction the tiny forces representing the continuity of revolutionary communism — the Trotskyists — were unable to develop a Marxist theory of sexual politics. Their achievements in keeping alive the principles and practice of Marxism were monumental, But, given the terrible pressures they were under and the objective tasks posed by the moves towards world war, if is not surprising that sexual politics did not constitute an immediate priority for the Fourth luternational, Unfortunately, however, the Trotskyists did fai} to make a clear statement on the democratic principle of privacy in matters of sexuality that was posed by the homosexual questton. The whole question appears to have been dropped from consideration altogether.

After the war and Trotsky’s death the Fourth International degenerated into a centrist organisation, Unable to comprehend the survival and expansion of Stalinism all wings of the movement ended up capitulating to it in one way or another. By 1951 the political programme of Trotskyism had been liquidated by the Fourth International’s leaders; Pablo, Mandel, Healy and Cannon. Not surprisingly this degeneration hampered the further development of a revolutionary perspective os: homosexuality. The SWP(US) for example was, in the late 1950s, prepared to engage in an elaborate and diversionary debate on the use of cosmetics by women, but unable to bring itself to say anything on the question of homosexual rights.

Some of the degenerate fragments of the Fourth

18

International were even guilty of emulating the

_KPD’s gay baiting. During the Socialist Labour League’sfight with Gaitskellin the British Labour Party in the early 1960s, the League’s journal, Labour Review, attacked.the Labour leader for appointing the right winger, George Brinham, as a youth officer in charge of the Young Socialists. The right wing appointed bim, fumed Labour Review in its Winter 1962/63 edition, despite ‘his addiction to homosexuality’. The ‘Trotskyists’ were outraged that ‘such a man’ had been allowed near young people. The right wing, as agents afthe bourgeoisie, hinted the Healyites, were guilty, like Oscar Wilde before them, of corrupting the youth, This backward and reactionary view of homosexuality persisted in the Healyite group until 1985 when Healy himself was expelled for sexual ‘abuses’ of women comrades, After his expulsion numerous horror stories of Healy’s persecution of lesbians and gay men inside his organisation came to light. Some other groups followed Healy's example. A Greek organisation that had once been part of Healy’s International Committee, published a document in 1980 on homosexuality and referred to it as a foul smelling subject’.

Nor was it only the International Committee that had a bad record on the lesbian and gay question. The USFI of Ernest Mandel, despite making various adaptations to feminism in the 1970s and not condemning homosexuality in a Healyite fashion, has refrained from ever publishing a major document on the lesbian and gay question that the British section had submitted to a world congress. Its silence has never been ex- - plained. The USFI’s supporters in the USA, the SWP, showed their fear of the lesbian and gay question in 1970, when they authorised the banning of known gays from membership of their Young Socialists’ Alliance for security reasons’. Andin 1973 a call for an intervention inte the US gay movement was defeated at the SWP’s conference on the grounds that it would give the party an ‘exotic image’.

By and large, however, the revival of a lesbian and gay movement in the 1970s did lead to a modest improvement in the positions of the major left proups throughout the world, on matters of sexual politics. Reactionary excesses of the Healyite type were the exceptions rather than therule. But the period 1933-84 up until the end of the 1960s can justifiably be described as the dark agen. as far as Marxism and the question of homosexuality is concerned. The homosexual rights moveTaent was smashed, Marxists were at best. indifferent, at worst reactionary, and lesbians and gay men were driven underground or into the the | closet and individual isolation.

Capitalism’s long boom after the Second World

Marxism and the lesbian and gay question \ ¥

War brought prosperity, relative class peace‘and stability in the imperialist heartlands. One result of this.was that welfare services expanded and

lessened the strain on the family in terms of -

looking after children or elderly and sick relatives. More women were drawn into the labour force. This economic developmént was accompanied by a relative liberalisation in the field of morality,

The limits of the liberalisation were very definite. A sexuality that contradicted the essential structures and norms of the heterosexual family could be tolerated but never accepted. Persecution was lessened but not entirely removed. However, Uic different social climate of the late 1950s and 1960s led, eventually, to the redevelopment of various homosexual rights movements in the imperialist countries. Socialists were obliged to take a position on homosexuality, since in some countries the capitalist state itself was discussing

_ proposals for reform of the law. In Britain, in 1957,

’ the Wolfenden Commission of Enguiry into homosexuality and prostitution, published a report recommending that the legal persecution of male homosexuals, providing they were over twenty one and conducted their sexual activities consensually and in private, should cease. The report’s proposals did not. become Jaw until 1967.

Typical of the left’s response to Wolfenden was

an article by C Dallas in Socialist Review, the journal of the group that later became the British SWP. She wrote that the tolerance recommended by Wolfenden would be the best help for the paor, the misfits, the abnormal’. Prison would only weaken and emotionally damage the hapless and effete gays: ‘Besides its complete futility as a cure, prison life i is so degrading for a man who might be highly strung and very sensitive, that it might cause permanent mental damage.’

The old idea of the woman’s mind trapped in a

man’s body is stongly hinted at by Dallas. She concluded that only socialism could cure the world of homosexuality, thereby accepting completely the idea that it was an illness, a disorder of some sort: Tfnature then [after socialism — W P) produced an abnormality, which it might do in a small number of cases, medical treatment would take good care of Hw.’

On the one hand Dallas’ attitude, like Bealy’s to date and that. of Ted Grant and his Militant Tendency for a long time, revealed that the Marxist position on the lesbian and gay-question had been

buried beneath mountains of ignorance and obscurantism. On the ather hand the heliefof Dallas and the ethers that homosexuality was an iliness of some sort that required toleration and medical help, did reflect an inherited weakness of the Marxist position on homosexuality from the days of the SPD. It took the development, of a lesbian and gay movement itselfte challenge the‘sickness’ “theory in the ranks of the left and, in the 1970s, to stimulate a reconsideration of’ the homosexual question.

By ‘the latter part of the 1970s centrist Trotskyism had swung from its previous flawed or reactionary theories on homosexuality to a capitulation to the prevalent ideas amongst the lesbian and gay movements. Many of the left groups in Western Europe and North America tried to re-

- eruit lesbians and gay men by adapting to the

autonomous movements instead of trying to combat. their, usually, patit-bourgeois and utopian ideas. To have combatted these ideas the left would have needed a distinct Marxist theory of sexual politics and their relationship to the class struggle. It failed to develop such a theory and, like the autonomous movements themselves, was incapable of charting a road to lesbian and gay liberation. The result of this failure was the fragmentation of the various lesbian and gay movements to the extent that once again they have ceased to exist as meaningful, organised campaigns. The major forces claiming to bé Trotskyist have re-established the tradition of defending lesbian and gay rights but. they have been unable to connect this defence with an overall programme for working class power and lesbian and gay liberation.

‘In this context, and in the context of growing moral reaction in Western Europe and North Ameriea, the task for revolutionary Trotskyists in relation to the lesbian and gay question is to provide a communist perspective for liberation. Marxism furnishes us with the means for doing this. The Marxist. tradition is richer than many

‘lesbian and gay activists care to admit. It is incom-

plete in some respeets and flawed in others. However, historical materialism is the only basis

“upon which a theoretical understanding of sexual

politics and the oppression of homosexuality can be constructed, Only revolutionary Marxism provides an action programme which combines the struggle for democratic rights and the struggle for real sexual liberation with the class struggle for socialism. “y

¥ Lesbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy Yay

_ False strategies for liberation.

he rebirth ofa radical lesbian and gay move-

ment can. be dated to the summer of 1969, A

routine police raid on a gay bar in New York led to the Stonewall nots. Inspired by the huge street demonstrations by the mass campaign in the USA against the Vietnam war, by the street battles by students in France and Germany and sick of the incessant police harassment they suffered, gays fought back with a vengeance. For three days and nights gay men battled with the cops. Their action set rolling a whole new movement. Prior to Stonewall the campaigning for homosexual rights was low key. Organisations were dedicated primarily to lobbying people in high places and were dominated by bourgeois liberals seeking limited reforms that would help make their lives easier. Typical of such groups was the Homosexual Reform Society in Britain, set up in 1958 and geared more or less exclusively to getting the then Tory government to implement the Wolfenden proposals. The Society was strictly non-political, and confined its activities te persuading potentially sympathetic MPs to the need for law reform, This class collaborationist approach was also followed by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), which originated out of the North West Committee of the Society.

To many activists back in the late 1960s and early 1970s CHE offered little or nothing. It was particularly dire on the question of lesbianism. The sheer energy and militancy of the Stonewall riots and the ‘liberation’ movement they inspired, were far more appealing to the younger lesbians and gays undergoing a general radicalisation. The Gay Liberation Front (GLP) was created, first inthe US and then in Britain as the radical alternative to

As against CHE’s discreet pleas for toleration the GLF advocated and practiced an unapologetic pridein gayness. Gay liberation was viewed as first and foremost liberation from self-oppression, from life in the closet, The GLF’s proposed means for achieving liberation was for more and more gays to ‘come out’. If this occurred on a sufficiently mass scale homophobia would be challenged and over-

20

come. This strategy stressed the courage of the individual ~~ helped by groups of course — but it placed no special stress or reliance on the labour movement and the working class. This approach led the GLF in the USA and Britain automatically towards a separatist position. From feminism it took over a radical critique of the family. But this critique was largely limited to the restrictions that the family placed on homosexuality. The various GLF manifestos did not explain why the family was the root of lesbian and gay oppression, what its role and function was in society and consequently how to overcome or Lransform it. The GLF’s tactics were, as a result, individualistic and separatist. The use of drag by gay men, for example, certainly chal- .

Jenged bourgeois society's stipulations concerning

gender based dress codes but did nothing to change bourgeois society itself. Radical drag could never have mass appeal as a means of struggle, based as it was on self-expression and individualistic activ-

~ ity. Worse, it alienated many lesbians in the GLF

who saw woman-deprecating mimicry at work amongst at least sections of the drag activists. The importance of drag within the GLF revealed a fundamental weakness in its strategy. The individualistic methods of struggle it proposed were a_ reflection ofits largely petit bourgeois social composition. And that radical petit bourgeois individual- _ ism led to dress, along with a host of other things that constituted a particular life-style, becoming more important than collective struggle. Gradually the campaigning gave way to the creation of a cultural scene — a life-style that lesbians. . and gays could live, within capitalist, society. Of © course individuals developing their own lives, personal, sexualand social in a way that recognised and celebrated their gayness was a necessary and totally legitimate thing to do. But it was not and could not be a strategy for eliminating the root causes of oppression. The rapid growth of gay culture — even of a ‘yay capitalism’ to cater for it — whilst it made life better for many gay men and, to a lesser extent, for lesbians, in San Francisco, New York, London and Amsterdam — did not achieve

False strataqgies for liberation ¥

the breakthrough of overcoming capitalist society's homophohia. Indeed as the Lberal 1960s and 1970s zave way to the reactionary 1980s — the decade of Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan et al — it became plain, even before the tragedy of AIDS, that a moral counter-offensive was being launched. AIDS added a mora] panic to a developing moral reaction, The life-style 'sohation’ —— available at its peak only to those who could afford it and who lived in the larger cities — has been proved to be a very precarious buffer between the individual and his or her oppression,

Capitalism can and does intrud into the lifestyles of lesbians by denying custody of their children, and gay men are imprisoned for cottaging ander the gross indecency laws. Life-stylism, as the <esponse that eventually dominated within the GLE, led to its collapse as a fighting movement, It had made important gains for lesbians and gay men. The GLF, along with the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and to some extent inspired by it, placed the question of sexual politics back onto the political agenda. But like the WLM, its failure to develop a collective response, a class response to oppression, turned it in on itself and caused fragmentation to the extent whereby a lesbian and gay movement, in any meaningful sense of the word, ceased to exist. The movement was replaced by numerous, and sometimes competing, pressure groups. Acrimonions clashes arose from the fact that individualism paved the way for subjectivism.

The self became the centre of everything and tri- |

umphed over what had been the uniting features of the movement — the common fight against oppression. Different people chose different life-styles, waged disputes as to which were the best and parted company. The key institutions of oppression ceased to be central targets and were left intact. One group to emerge out of the GLF and alsofrom sections of the left, was the Gay Left Collective. It published Gay Leff, the first issue of which came gat in the Autumn of 1975. The Collective’s memvers had been profoundly influenced by the class hattles that had raged in Britain in the early 1970s, ‘Phese battles had shown the real power and potenLial of the working class. The 1974 miners’s strike, ‘or example, had led to the Tory government being forced to call an election which they lost. Gay Left was, initially, a positive response to these developraents, The journal attacked life-stylism as an introspective retreat from the terrain of struggle and as a failure to register the significance of the class struggle for lesbian and gay liberation. The first issue scathingly criticised the gay movement's lifestylism thus: ‘But the power structures of society were left comcletely untouched, and the lives of the majority of gay people were left completely unchanged by the

sweet smells of incense, inspiretion and homebaked bread,’

Rejecting an individual road to liberation, the Col-

jective unambiguously declared: ‘Sexual oppression cannot be destroyed under capitalism.’ This development out of the gay movement was extremely significant. It reflected the failure of both the lesbian and gay movement and the established groups on the British left to offer lesbian and gay socialists (though the Collective was initially all male) a perspective of struggle. None of the left groups had provided a class answer to the lesbian and gay question. So a smal) group of gay men who regarded themselves as Marxists set out to try and do just that. Many of the contributions to the journal, particularly in its first year of existence were very valuable. At a theoretical level they endeavoured to develop a class based theory of sexual politics. At a practical level Gay Left promoted the building of gay groups in particular workplaces and unions, unifying such groups in a Gay Workers’ Movement. However, a definite trend away from class politics began to emerge, growing stronger as the left itself fragmented in the early years of the Labour government. As the 1970s wore on the politics of feminism began to exercise a preater influence over Gay Left than the politics of Marxism. The absence of an authentic and influential Trotskyist organisation which took sexual politics seriously helped this process along. The emphasis of the journal began to shift away from collective struggles and more and more to purely personal struggles. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ came to mean that the personal, the way you felt and behaved, was more important than politics in the sense of taking collective social action. Even sexual politics started to be defined in purely subjectivist terms. Gay Left began to replace rather than supplement, the method of Marxism with the methods of psychoanalysis as the key means to understanding oppression. The turn away from Marxism was signalled in an article in the fifth issue of the journal entitled ‘Why Marx? This article argued that Lenin and Trotsky were, despite everything they wrote against it, guilty of economism. Economism is a tendency to regard eco-

‘nomic or trade union struggles as self-sufficient, as

the class struggle par excellence, and therefore tends to denigrate political struggles or any issues originating outside of the workplace, Economism believes in tailing economic struggles, not in leading them and linking them with other struggles. Lenin and Trotsky were opponents of this tendency not practitioners of it. In the Althusserian and feminist jargon popular in the 1970s, however, economism came to stand for the class interests of the proletariat, which were compared unfavour-

21

Lasblan and gay liberation: a communist s strategy

ios * with ‘ideological struggles’ waged by intellec- -als on behalf of the oppressed. Indeed for many sists the working class (white, male and ne‘srosexual by definition) was enemy number .. Gay Lefé took on board this false definition of ec :romism which denigrated the class struggle at oh > workplace, Instead of seeking to integrate the vt for lesbian and gay liberation with the ir ~.ggles of workers for better wages and condi- “On S, for trade union rights, for jobs, the Collective started to counterpose a concern for ‘personal politie’ to the class struggle. Without at first realising it. Gay Left was helping petit bourgeois individualism to make a comeback. Sexual oppression was removed altogether from the field of class struggle and taken upstairs to the ‘ideological level’. This meant that the fight for lesbian and gay liberation and the class struggle were increasingly seen as totally distinct spheres of practice. Marxism was suitable for class struggle but psychology was the xey to understanding oppression: ‘Psychoanalysis and the debatés on ideology [debates largely amongst Stalinists of the Eurocom-

nunist stripe — WP] provide @ theoretical basis for .

the continuing struggles of women and gays against potriarchy .. ideological, though as socialists we fully participate in the necessary economic and political struggles against capitalism.’

The old critique of the GLF and the fragments coming out of it to recognise the specific nature of che family within capitalism and its importance to the capitalist economic order was dropped. Instead the Collective criticised itself in its first year be- “ase it had ‘probably overstressed the purely eco- “omic aspects of the family’. And, the Leninist party vas abandoned in favour of the organisationally an d autonomous movement:

. gay liberation is the self-defined activity of gay

B »eople fighting to gain control of their own lives and

destinies .., We believe an autonomous gay move-

e2ent ( and an autonomous women’s movement) to be

essential, and reject any effort to subordinate the mavement to any one political sect.’

. AS gays our specific oppression is |

So, liberation was self-defined by gay people as a”

whole, no matter what their class, their politics or

their beliefs, Gay Left had come fall cirele. By the

fifth issue its principal contributors were lighting

their own incense sticks and baking their own vholemeal bread,

The reason for Gay Left’s demise was its inability to develop Marxism on the question of sexual polities and break decisively with feminism. For that matter it-also failed to develop a revolutionary critique of the real economism on the British left, embodied in the practice of the International Socialists/ Socialist Workers Party (IS/SWP), Jeffrey

Weeks, one of Gay Left’s regalar contributors,

22

wrote in the first issue that the failure by socialists to tackle sexual oppression:

‘ .. represents, above all, @ theoretical failure to grasp that @ ruling class perpetuates itself not only through the economic and ideological forms of exploitation and oppression, but also through the character structures, the emotional for mations ofits member's’

This ‘not only but also’ approach is simply nota Marxist, materialist approach, The rea] question is what relation ship do the ‘character structures’ and ‘emotional formations’ of individuals bear to the system of exploitation and class rule? For Marxists the mode of production is the decisive basis on which the family and consequently the general patterns of individual psychology rest. Therefore you cannot understand problems of individual psychology — the existence of which we do not at.all deny — or the sexist and heterosexist consciousness of most men and women, without understanding that our society is capitalist. Only on the basis of this understanding can individual psychological problems be tackled and sexist/heterosexist consciousness fought. Any psychology, no matter how radical, that starts with the individual rather than with capitalist society and its social relations, including the family (and the sexist/heterosexist norms that prevail within it) will end up offering individualistic and utopian solutions to the problem. The bourgeois family which, by its very nature, oppresses women and homosexuals, can only be replaced when its roots in the capitalist mode of production are dug up. The only class that has the ability to do this is the working class. Therefore to counterpose as separate tasks the struggle for socialism and the fight to overcome character structures is totally false. The separatism it involves confirms and reinforces the sexism and heterosexism of the existing reformist labour movement. It hives off Jesbians and gays into a utopian project of psychological self-hberation. Feminism had al-

ready gone down this path. Gay Left followed.

By the second half of the 1970s feminism had come a long way. The modern WLM was not, at the outset, all that sympathetic to lesbians. When lesbians in Britain left the GLF and turned to the

. women’s movement they found not only an unwill-

ingness te accept sexual orientation as an important question but also open hostility to lesbianism. In Sisterhood is Powerful one activist recalled: ‘When a woman showed up at a feminist meeting and announced she was a lesbian, many women avoided her. Others told her to keep her mouth shut for fear of endangering the cause.’

However, the question of lesbianism refused to go away. In fact the opposite happened. The issue kept being raised. In 1978, at a women’s conference in Birmingham, a split on the issue of lesbianism

ne ntentmyme

between radical ferainists and sacialist feminists occurred. The split was a sign of the fragmentation that was wracking and destroying the WLM. In fact the origins of the split Jay in an earlier period of feminist history. The radical feminists had argued at a national conference of the WLM in 1971 that men were the enemy — all men. In their position yaper, ‘Thoughts on Feminism’, they argued that to achieve liberation women had fo stop sleeping with men:

. as long as the Sex Act remains the norm for sexual relations, we remain the habitual givers, pawns in the male power game. And we will continue to.-be dominated by men... As long as we have our closest emotional/ sexual relationships: with men, women’s liberation can be no more than a lobby.’

Seeing the division in society as being primarily between genders opened the door to attacks on the male working class (no different to male bosses because of their shared anatomy) and left the radi-

cal feminists classifymg the women of the ruling .

class as, potential sisters in struggle. The whole reactionary theory was encapsulated by Leeds Revolutionary Women in 1979 who denounced the masses of women who are heterosexual:

‘Every woman. who lives with or fucks a man helps maintain the oppression of her sisters and Ainders our struggle.’

‘Such 2 position not surprisingly split the WLM

“since it stigmatised its heterosexual members as scabs. The radical feminist wing of the WLM held a

definite appeal for many lesbians. The GLF -— an

alliance with gay men —~ had not really provided the answers. The WLM was, to some extent, wary

of making lesbianism a major issue, Radical femi- —

nism seemed to be the only creed that took lesbian-

ism seriously. Yet its logic was extreme separatism

and bitter hostility to the ‘male dominated’ working class. It led to political lesbianism. Sexual orientation became determined by a strictly politica] consideration -— men are the enemy. We believe that ‘peoplé should be free to choose their sexual orientation for whatever reason they like. But we do challenge the.premise that political lesbians base their choice on, the premise that all men are the enemy. It is a premise that leads.to disunity in the face of the class enemy in whose: interests sexual oppression is perpetrated. It undermines the possi-

bility of building unity between lesbians and gay men, let. alone between them and the working class asa ‘whole.

Radical feminism identified the system on which male power was based as Patriarchy not class society. This justified the theory that all men oppressed all women and were therefore the real enemy. It led to some horrendously reactionary

False strategies for liberation

ideas such as the control of the male population through eugenics to keep it at the 10% required for

- reproductive purposes, an idea seriously put forward at a US women’s conference. Socialist femipism. did not dare challenge the false theory of - Patriarchy and male power head on.

As a result the socialist feminists found themselves, despite their formal split with the radicals, adapting some of the most ‘radical’ feminist ideas. They saw women’s subj ection to men as being based on ideological, psychological and sexual oppression and articulated as an initial answer to this consciousness raising. It soon became apparent that only a tiny number of women could be drawn into this process. Why were most women impervious to

it? Not because the principal terrain of struggle lay _ elsewhere for the mass of women, said the socialist

feminists — echoing their’. radical sisters — but because women were ‘subjected to the terror of sexual. violence. Sexual vielence was the most important means of enforcing male power. This violence was defined as being an unbroken chain

‘starting from verbal comments, through domestic

violence and sexual harassment at work right up to rape. Such a definition fails to recognise that all acts of violence take place within particular con-

texts, and while all, including rape, are manifesta_.tions of the oppressive nature of human relations under capitalism, quahtative distinctions hetween '

sexist verbal comments, sexual harassment and rape clearly exist and have to be made. They cannot

_be understood as a simple continuum. Yet both ‘radical and’ socialist feminism argued that male. _ power was exercised through an interconnected - slidingscale of violence. This was summed up inthe

slogan; ‘pornography is the theory, rape the practice’. Hence the campaigns sponsored by socialist feminism (amazingly, by the British SWP as well during the height of its feminist Wonen’s Voice turn in the late 1970s) such as ‘Reclaim the Nigh?’

‘and the anti-pornography campaigns, As the tac-

ties and strategy of the women’s movement became more and more anti-male anda separatist, its base became narrower and as a movement, even as a socialist feminist movement, it had virtually ceased to exist by the early 1980s.

While. socialist feminism and lesbian and gay activists influenced by it, avoided the worst excesses of man-hating they did embrace the theory that oppression stemmed from male power. Thus while Patriarchy and class society were related,

. they were at the same time distinct. To fight class

society you needed — eventually —~ socialism. To fight Patriarchy you needed feminism — now. This outlook permeated the positions of one of the most important socialist contributions on lesbian and gay liberation in the 1980s, Gay Liberation in the. Eighties by Jamie Gough and Mike Macnair

23

—>=shian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

cagh being a regular writer in the publications of

© British section of the United Secretariat of the varth International — the USFi — until it split a so years ago), This book has influenced the Labour .eapaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights (LCLGR) 2G, in some respects, must take responsibility for mang that organisation floundering when the ory eratists and class collaborationist liberals re-

comitly hijacked the Legislation for Lesbian and Gay —

iLights Campaign. The book’s central argument is chat male power results in an alienated sexuality for all, and that this is at the root of lesbian and gay oppressivi. In this analysis class society becomes a secondary factor. The authors write: ‘The repression. of lesbian sex and of men playing the “passive” role are, then, based on male power and ihe family system.’ And again:

'... Sexuality is arranged around a system of male penver,’

Systems of sexual order replace those of economic order as the bedrock determining causes of sexual oopression. Now, we do not deny that the ideology . “male dominance has a profound influence on the

“-y In which society, m its, majority, views and |

vrents homosexuality. It will take working ‘class

«ate power and years of education to lay the basis °

ov eradicating this ideology. But neither the ideol-

ary of maje dominance, nor even the limited bene-

{2é8 that many men do gain from the oppression of women, should be confused with economic and’ class relations that these things are based on. The

ideology of male dominance is not, a reflection of a

reality called male power, but of the reality of class

zociety in which sexual order is arranged to suit the

riceds of the ruling class.

ough and Macnai’s false analysis is no mere

ceademie mistake, It leads to a class collaboration- :3t. practice and to support for the idea of ah all class iesbian and gay movement. They argue: “48 with the women’s liberation movement, social- “sts must support and help io develop the existing eiay liberation movement. To wait until there exists « uniformly “socialist” or “communist” ar “working class” gay movement is a recipe for doing nothing chout gay liberation.’

That the authors put inverted commas around ive terms relating to class and class politics, but do nut when they talk about the gay liberation movement speaks volumes about their politics. The working class exists, Revolutionary communism is the only politics that fights consistently for the icstoric interests of that class and for all oppressed oy capitalism. To downgrade them in the way “s.agh and Maenair do is to abandon the terrain of jess politics. This is particularly true given that ‘hey counterpose to a working class perspective the wisting gay liberation movement. Which gay lib-

eration movement? There shomly isn’t one in Britain, or indeed in most countries. There are numerous disparate campaigns. There are class divisions between different wings of the lesbian and gay ‘communities’. No matter, Gough and Macnair argue, this ‘movement’ is central, whereas class politics are peripheral. In fact, as the experience of those lesbians and gays who organised support for the striking miners and printers discovéred, this ‘movement’ — or more accurately the lesbian and gay community in the larger cities —~ is split along class lines in any case. Sectiéns supported the strikers, sections refused to, We say that it is necessary to take the split further. Capitalism, not male power, isthe real obstacle te sexual liberation. The struggle for liberation eannot be separated from the class struggle for socialism. If it is, it will lead to the triumph ofbourgeois and petit bourgeois elements whose perspective is limited to piecemeal legal reform within the framework of capitalism. This was demonstrated in real life by the hi-jacking of the Legislation Campaign atits May 1987 confer-

- ence. Jt was seized from the Gough and Macnair

influenced LCLGR hy a motley alliance of anti-

working class liberals and feminists, whose 'radi- - . calism’ was such that they saw fit to bait, ina -.

completely reactionary manner, bisexuals, transsexuals, straight supporters of the campaign and jeft groups, all in the name of autonomy.

A major reason for the triumph of feminist and separatist ideas amongst lesbian and gay activists was the fatlure of the centrist left to provide an alternative, Indeed, hostility to even discussing the - lesbian and gay question on the part of the British left groups, which were growing in size and influence in the early 1970s, drove many women and gay men towards separatism. Later adaptations to feminism — by the SWP, the USFY and others —- merely served to bring the influence of separatist - ideas into the labour movement. In the early 1980s this meant these ideas being carried into the left of the Labour Party.

The IS/SWP tradition in Britain reveals the rea] errors of economism on the question of sexual polities. Economism is not a serious involvement with the economic struggles of the working class but a refusal to raise transitional demands or political slogans within these struggles. It is not active involvement—indeed a central orienation to — work in the trade unions, but a refusal to raise anything but the narrowest ‘trade union’ issues in them. It is, in short, the tailing of the present consciousness of the mass of trade unionists in the belief that this consciousness will spontaneously develop into a socialist one if the struggles intensify sufficiently, The ‘economist’ therefore’ tends to exclude ‘difficult’ questions which seem to bear no relationship to the economic struggle. The IS group

24

took the question.of racism very seriausly -~ espe-

cially after the London dockers, a militant section of workers, marched in support of Enoch Powell.

But the lesbian and gay guestion did not (apparently) threaten to split the workers in their economic struggle in the same way as racism did.

Therefore IS relegated it to a footnote. Indeed when gay activists tried to raise it inside IS they got short shrift’ — being accused of splitting the working class over secondary questions, "-

The issue of homosexuality was taken up for the

first time since Dallas’ articles of the 1950s (see Chapter 2) in 1973. A gay activist, Don Milligan, submitted an article on the GLF to Socialist Werker and raised the lesbian and gay question at the group’s national conference. The matter was referred to the incoming leadership who promptly ignored the whole question. In the years following, an 1S Gay Group was set up but the leadership repeatedly obstructed its functioning. It was refused advertising space in the paper and any official status within the group. A-conference on sexist, planned by the Gay Group in 1973 was cancelled as a result of pressure from the leadership, Typical of the attitude of the leadership was a response to the Gay Group’s request for a conference from the ‘Publications and Training Committee’. It stated: ‘TS does not take a position on what you describe as “sexism”, and also contrary to your opinion we have not found the issue to cause any concern amongstihe working class members of IS.’

In other words it was not the business of IS members, supposed revolutionaries, to champion the cause of the oppressed inside the working class. This, alongside the IS/SWP attitude to the woman’s question and to Ireland was symptomatic of its deep and consistent economism. Not surprisingly it led to many lesbians and gay men leaving, more accurately being driven out of, the organisation.

It was only after feminism’s ideological impact on

society began to make itself felt, inside the unions

and the Labour Party that the SWP, as IS had become, turned its attention to matters of sexual

politics. It was prepared to adapt to feminism to-

catch a few recruits. In 1977 Women’s Voice groups were set up. In 1979 the SWF published The Word is Gay. In both cases the politics of the existing autonomous movements were tailed, not challenged. Just as economisin in the early 1970s led IS to tail the economic struggle of the workers in the hope of winning recruits, so in the later 1970s it tailed the struggles of the sexually oppressed, likewise in search of recruits rather than revolutionary answers and a revolutionary strategy. For good measure it ritualistically added the call for trade union action on matters of sexual politics but it did not, attempt te construct a Marxist alternative to

False stratacgins for Bhevation ¥

feminism. When the recruitment ceased and the danger of losing members to the movements in-

- creased, the SWP’s turn to feminism was abruptly

ended. Women’s Voice groups were wound up and, during the Thatcher years, the ‘downturn’, as the SWP calls the present period, the organisation has confined itself to abstract propaganda on the Jesbian and gay question. ‘Ifthe working class cannot fight on the economic front how can it be expected to take up other causes? Nothing, therefore, can be done until the dark clouds of the downturn fade away. Doubtlessly, if a renewed period of aggressive wage struggles materialised the SWP would revert to saying that the question of lesbian and gay rights was a side issue or a diversion.

Militant, the other major group on the British left claiming to be Marxist, has an even worse record. Only since 1983-84 has it, allowed the LPYS, which # controls, to take a position on lesbian and gay rights. Whereas the SWP chopped and changed its position on the movements of the sexually oppressed, ignoring them one minute and tailing them the next, and the British section of the USEFI (a tradition represented by Gough) consistently adapted to feminism, the Militant stood firm in the tradition of 1930s ‘Marxism’ — that is, Stalinism ~

on sexuality. For years it classified homosexuality as a ‘bourgeois perversion’. Gay baiting inside the LPYS was encouraged and physical attacks on gay men took place at the LPYS summer camps in 1981 and 1982. Those who raised the question of homosexuality inside the LPYS were dismissed as ‘middle class’. Not only was lesbian.and gay rights,

_ in their view, ‘not a working classissue’, it was not

even acknowledged as a legitimate democratic is-

“ Sue,

Militant’s attitude remained unchallenged until lesbians and gay men within its own ranks organ-

‘ised themselves unofficially. This, combined with

pressure from the Labour left, which had begun to

identify the lesbian and gay issue as one of its

worthy causes, forced Ted Grant, the leader of Militant, to put his 1930s outlook into the closet. However, despite the change of position inside the LPYS and the visibility of lesbians and gays in Militant, the tendency’s position today is a long way from Marxism. Just as its answer to the working class on most issues is ‘socialism’, plus a few reforms now, so for lesbians and gays all it offers is socialism in the millennia and the reduction, not the aboliton of, the age of consent.

Against such distortions of Marxism one group on the international left which has tried to develop a serious programme for lesbian and gay liberation is the Internationa} Trotskyist Committee (ITC). The British section of this tendency, the Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL) published an

action programme for lesbians and gays. The ITC's

25

Lasbian and gay. liber ation; a communist strategy

‘ion in the USA, the. Revolutionary Workers oague (RWL) is distinguished for the importance

, attaches to the struggles of lesbian and gay men. ‘any points made by the ITC on the realities of «tian and pay oppression and its relationship to “e way in which capitalism structures and uses 46 family unit, are valid. The ITC have also stated, a:taally at least, that their interventions into vevious lesbian and gay movements are aimed at winning them to a class position or sphtting them on a class basis. However, there is a crucial aspect of their analysis of the ‘specially oppressed’ that undermines the ITC’s claim to to be the real Marxists on this question. The RWL in particular have long argued that the ‘specially oppressed’ —blacks, women, lesbians and gay men — are the people who are most likely to be radicalised in an anti-capitalisi, direction. Without any explanation the RWL argue that the more oppressed you are the more va tical you are likely to be. Thus, they write that wamen and gays ‘can be some of the most militant class struggle fighters’. This is true, but it does not

Gow, automatically from the fact that they are —~

sppressed. The question of class interest plays a vital part in determining whether they will be or at, Moreover, it is without a doubt the case that

white, male, heterosexuals can be amongst the

most militant class fighters. But RWL go on to aivess that the 'specially oppressed are the vansaard of the socialist revolution. 'Thus:

‘THe RWL has a special commitment to winning —

militant lesbian /gay workers and intellectuals to ‘he struggle for socialist revolution.’ ‘special, that is, in the sense of prioritising lesiss an and gay work, and work amongst other sectims of the oppressed, over all other work, in oarsult of a vanguard of the oppressed. Despite iheir professed class politics the RWL are drawn ‘ato blurring the class line amongst the oppressed. “hey emphasise the separateness of the specially uppressed and, by compiling lists of which section is snore oppressed than another and therefore reqiiring extra special emphasis, they pass value judgements. The most oppressed become the most highly ~«ulaed, the best potential vanguard fighters. And she danger of this is that it counterposes sections of ‘he class to each other. It stresses special divisions over the need for class unity. It is a strategy that usks reproducing capitalism’s cwn divisions .nongst the working class, A working class lesbian i: ‘ikely to have more in common with a working ci2ss heterosexual, than with a life-stylist middle ciass lesbian, Class interests will, eventually, iscamph over the faet of common oppression. Of curse in the DSA it is true that one section of the specifically oppressed, the black working class, is ery touch a vanguard element in the class struggle. But to generalise from this experience

and assert that this will ‘be true for all of the oppressed groups is not only revisionism, it also flies in the face of reality in many countries.

The elevation of the revolutionary potential of the oppressed and the role as foremost vanguard - fighters assigned to them by the RWL pushes the

ITC as a whole towards an uncritical stance to-

wards the autonomous organisations of the oppressed. For the RIL, for example, gay activismin’ _ and of itself — regardless of whether it is carried — out under Trotskyist leadership — is the vital — thing. They wrote of the Lesbians.and Gays Sup: port the Miners (LGSM):

The fact that it has only been due to gay activists and. not those from the left has been important.’

This misrepresentation of the facts (the organised left was the backbone of the LGSM campaign) was an attempt to justify the ITC’s belief that the ‘specially oppressed sectors are the most militant’ and that therefore ‘intervention [amongst lesbians and gay men —- WP] is an essential process in mobilising the vanguara’.

This oppressed vanguard theory is carried into the RIL’s Action Programme for Lesbian and Gay Liberation. The strategy outlined in this document — is to ‘seek genuine unity with all specially oppressed _ people in the struggle for liberation’. The need for this struggle to be rooted, above all, in the organisations of the working class, with self-organisation only as a tactical means of furthering the objective of class unity, is ignored by the RIL/JITC. The Action Programme is not a Marxist programme for the whole working class on the lesbian and gay guestion, It is a charter for mobilising self-organised lesbians and gays for democratic and civil rights. For, although we are informed that ‘our struggle is a struggle against the capitalist class and the state which serves it’, the programme never makes concrete the link between the struggles of lesbians and gay men and the class struggle. 7

While we would agree with many of its demands

they donot, unless they are actually linked with the struggle’ for revolutionary socialism, add up to liberation. Indeed at one point the programme leans towards the Gough/USFI view that the fulfilment of democratic reforms via a Labour government, actually equals liberation: ‘We must demand that the Labour Party implement the demands for lesbian and gay liberation in this programme, for civil rights et work in the fields of housing, health care and education.’

Civil rights do not equal liberation. And what of the revolutionary workers’ government, the smashing of the state, the socialisation of domestic labour? The programme makes no connection between the fight for these things, which the ITC claims to stand for, and the fight for lesbian and gay liberation.

As against the. ITC’s view we believe that an action programme that links the struggle for demoeratic rights and civil. liberties, the struggle for sexual liberation and the struggle for socialism is

False strategies far jiberation ¥

needed, Around it lesbians and gay men must organise, on a class basis, with the clear objective of

- winning the working class as a whole to their cause...

27

asbian and gay liberation: a communist strate

he systematic oppression of lesbians and gay men under capitalism is not accidental.

4 Capitalism utilises the family as a social cut for the reproduction, physical maintenance and early education of labour power. As such, it :ortrays the family — a monogamous, heterosexual child produeing and rearing unit — as both natural Git bas ‘always’ existed) and as normal ianybody not conforming to this set up is ‘abnormar). To reinforce the family as an institution cpitalism has developed a set of sexual and moral cudes which are stultifying for all, but are specially «wppressive for women, children, lesbians and gay wien. The Christian church, an anti-sex bastion, tes an importantrole in perpetuating and legitimicing this morality. From the Nineteenth CenLury on, medical science and psychology have reinforced this view defining any but, heterosexual : clations as perversions, sickness or abnormality. These ‘scientists’ do this despite the absence of any ‘value free’ evidence for their case, Sexual prientatiew becomes, not a matter of free and imformed cheice, but a product of social conditioning. An erelusive heterosexuality is imposed on people

‘som their earliest days. Expressions of homosexu-

azidy In people are consciously fought by moral teaching, social pressure and, ultimately, a battury of repressive laws enforced by the capitalist slate.

The ideological requirements of capitalism for ile defence of its family provide the justification ior the oppression of lesbians and gay men. The ivlated family household, despite being the only vedoubt of personal security for working class neople in capitalist society, is also the ‘material basis fer the oppression of lesbians and gay men, as well as women generally. As such, despite the ‘ct that there are non-working class lesbians and

ray men, the fight for lesbian and gay liberation is 2. class question. Only the political triumph of the ‘sarking class over the capitalist class and the

order — communism — can create the conditions whereby the family, as the basis for socia} oppression, can he transcended.

Thus, working class lesbians and gay men — or those who consciously and consistently identify with the struggle of the working class ~— have a material interest in fighting for real sexual liberation. Middle or upper class lesbians and gay men .

_ can and have been won to struggles for democratic

rights, for formal equalities under capitalism, for public tolerance and so on. Indeed the existence of gay men in the highest echelons of capitalist society has led to periods of limited tolerance. However, bourgeois and middle class lesbians and gays ean, despite their oppression, afford to cushion themselves from much of that oppression in a way that working class lesbians and gays cannot. Being oppressed does not automatically mean that lesbians and gays of the middle or bourgeois class are likely to be radical. Their stake in bourgeois society is often an overriding factor. Working class Jesbians and gays may share aspects of oppression with such elements but they have a fundamental and irreconcilable class antagonism to them. Therefore we are against any attempt to blur:

. class differences within a lesbian and gay organigay org

vseation of an entirely new social and economic,

sation/movement. We are for the clarification of such differences. Not in order to drive out people from these class backgrounds for this reason alone. But if bourgeois and middle class elements will not. come over to the side of the working class then they thereby place themselves on the side of the class enemy. Furthermore we are against any tendencies to separatism. For this reason we oppose the call for an autonomous lesbian and gay movement, implying as it has come to do, autonomy from distinct politics, as well as from distinct parties.

Working class lesbians and gay men have a consistent, material interest in fighting the system that lays the basis for their oppression. Formal equality under the law means nothing to a

worker who does not have the material means to

go through endless court. cases fighting discrimi-_ nation. Only the abolition of capitalism will create .. the material basis for the end of oppression, for a’

society in which sexual orientation becomes a matter for absolutely free choice. While we as communists fight for an end to all forms of discrimination and while we defend all those attacked because of their sexual orientation, we do so on the basis of recognising that the lesbian and

gay question is not a separate question from the _ class struggle requiring a separate programme ‘

and party, but a class question requiring a working elass, socialist answer and a revolutionary communist party. The fight against sexual oppression must be part of the overall struggle of the working class against all forms of exploitation and oppression.

THE NEW PERIOD OF CRISIS The patiern of sexual reform and mora! reaction in

the major imperialist countries over the last thirty five years demonstrates clearly the relationship

An action programme for lesbian and gay liberation ¥

cireles Jabour movement and Hberal). The other side of this time lag, however, is that the intensification of moral reaction (recognising that limited Jegal and public tolerance did not eradicate moral reaction but merely temporarily offset it) in the imperialist countries came in the 1980s, almost a decade after the opening of the new period of economic ‘crisis. The imperialist hourgecisie’s first, and stil] primary, targets were the economic gains workers had made during the boom years. Wages, jobs and services have all been under attack —-mounting in severity by the year — since the early 1970s. The increased tempo of attacks on the public sector has necessitated a new ideological campaign aimed at glorifying the family. The hatred of the moral reactionaries for the 1960's is evidenced by Tebbit’s fulminations against the permissive decade.

5 Inevitably lesbians and gay men have been

between lesbian and gay oppression and capitalism. The early 1950s witnessed an enormous —

expansion of capitalism — the post-war boom — which brought with it material reforms for the working class. In Britain the capitalists were able to afford to expand health, education and welfare services to an unprecedented degree. The demand for labour power in both industry and the expanding service sector meant that womeri were drawn into employment on a massive scale. The family remained crucial, but capitalism could afford to buttress it with expanded services rather than . economic coercion and ideological terrorism. These material reforms were the necessary preconditions for changes in sexual attitudes and actual Jegal reforms affecting the domain of ‘public

morality’. Capitalism could afford to be more re-"’

laxed about its own morality since economic crisis was not undermining its ability to pay for welfare services, nor tearing apart the fabric of faniily life, Indeed the need for women in the workforce led to an increased emphasis on the importance of ‘happy’ sexual relations as a means of cementing the family unit. The 1950s saw’a definite shift in attitudes towards sex particularly towards women and sex.

It took a further decade of pressure — largely in the form of middle class lobbying campaigns — for this more relaxed morality to produce changes in the law with regards to homosexuality. Proposals for legal reform in Britain had been recommended by Wolfenden in 1957. They were not enacted until 1967. Sexual reform lagged well behind the economic conditions that made it possible. Nor would it have come without pressure from progressive

‘pinpointed as a threat to the family. Barly warn-

ifgs in Britain of the systematic gay-baiting that was to follow, came when Mary Whitehouse successfully prosecuted Gay News for blasphemy and when the Callaghan Labour Government — as part of its attempt to portray Labour as the party of the family — carried out a vicious, hysterical witch-hunt of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). To broaden the onslaught paedophilia and homosexuality were Jumped together by the popular press and gay men were portrayed as would-be child molesters. The fact that PIE stood four-square for consensual relations only and against molestation and included heterosexuals and homosexuals in its ranks was characteristically ignored by the rabid press.

The arrival of AIDS jn the 1980s in the USA and Europe was the enue for the present backlash against lesbians and gays. In the USA the Moral Majority is on the offensive. In Britain reactionary erusaders like Manchester Chief Constable James

. Anderton are beating the drams of anti-gay big-

otry. In France the right-wing Chirac government -has attempted to ban a popular and widely read gay magazine. And, as the economic situation shows no signs of improving, these attacks are ‘likely to increase rather than go away. A Monitoring of AIDS Victims Bill isbeing mooted, and AIDS sufferers have been stopped and deported from several countries while travelling in Europe.

For lesbians and gay men, therefore, the task is to organise to fight mora) reaction. The relationship of capitalism and its crisis to the level of lesbian and gay oppression reveals, above all else, that the working class is not merely the ably of lesbians and gay men, but the only force capable of waging a successful struggle against moral reaction and its insidious effects (increased physical attacks, legal harassment, discrimination at work etc), Lesbians and gay men must not organise a

* i.esbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

‘utback" separately: from the struggles of the

wking class and its organisations. The fightback

«at be organised within these organisations, ‘nning support for the struggle against oppresuf, At the same time within the lesbian and gay ommanities’ support must be organised for the conomic and political struggles of the working dass. Lesbians and gay men must stand in the front ranks of the labour movement as militant class fighters and. at the same time, win that

defeat of this bureaucracy is something évery conscious worker must be committed to. Only the

_ defeat of the bureaucracy can clear the way to the

movement to a militant, class fight for lesbian and —

say liberation as part of a struggle for socialism. hat sucli a class perspective amongst lesbians and gay men can achieve tangible results has been shown by organisations such as Lesbian and Gays ctupport the Miners (LGSM) during the Great Strike of the British miners in 1984-85 and, also in Poitain, Lesbians and Gays Support the Printers curmg the.1986 News International strike. In both cases a class perspective of solidarity with workers in struggle brought together, and gave a sonse of political purpose to, lesbian and pay activ- «Not since the decline and fragmentation ofthe

iesbian and gay movement in the 1970s had poli-

ties, class politics, been fought for so vigorously. ‘he result was not only real solidarity with strikcradut also support from workers for the struggles ov Tesbians and gay men, notably the progressive palities embraced by the NUM and the participa- .on of miners and their families in the 1985 Pride Niarch. To build on such developments lesbians.and gay men must: organise within the labour movement ~ building union caucuses, united front avpaigns,and when necessary and possible coaye wrdinating all these activities in a proletarian movement -— around a programme for social and political equality and liberation. The programme ‘ve advance now is largely orientated to thé British =fuation, but, we believe, it can be focused and

sdapted to other countries. It is a programme to’

rally lesbians and gay activists. to the class siragele and to rally the working class to the cause of iesbian and gay liberation.

MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR LESBIAN AND. GAY WORKERS TO ORGANISE OPENLY IN THE UNIONS

‘ve trade unions are dominated by a bureaucratic vaste —- unaccountable and politically reformist. <» general its reformism is of the most staid, tionary sort. It accepts as eternal the bigotted itudes of its members — themselves a product «i capitalism’s daily ideological crusade in schools «2 wspapers, the media and through the church, It soos nothing to counter this ideology. On the certrary its tendency is to oppose progressive

transformation of the unions into revolutionary instruments for the struggle against exploitation and oppression,

¥ For the right oflesbians and gay men tocaucus inside the unions to prepare for full participation -. in the union and to develop the confidence :to be able to come out in the unions.

¥ For union sponsored education courses ‘for officials, shop stewards and members on lesbian and gay oppression and how to fight. it.

¥ For union meetings to be ‘held in work time with no Joss of pay — a burning necessity for lesbians or (less frequently) gay men with children and facing the resultant domestic pressures.

VY Yor rank and file control of the unions: through repular mass meetings to decide on action; through making all officials subject to regu- - lar election, recallable between elections and paid | the average wage of workers they represent; ' through union conferences made up of lay dele-

gates elected by the branches,

' ¥ Por the building of an anti-bureaucratic rank

and file movement in the unions, committed from the outset to the fight against lesbian and gay

oppression.

roticies on the lesbian and gay question, The

FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT

Mass unemployment is a stark reminder of the bankrupcy of capitalism. Amidst a world of plenty, a world in which millions could be put to work producing goods desperately needed by the starving poor of the imperialised world, the dole queues in Britain, the USA, Germany and France continue to grow. Lesbians and gay men are affected as much as anybody, by the curse of unemployment. We also face the additiona) threat of being discriminated against and stopped from getting jobs if we have already come out, as well as being victimised and thrown on the dole for no other reason than that the employer has discovered our sexual preferences. What should be an entirely private matter becomes an excuse for vindictive sackings. Teachers, social workers and youth workers have been particularly affected by such discrimination, normally charged with being a danger to young people — a miserable piece of prejudice that bears no relationship to the statistical reality of child molestation or abuse (predominantly heterosexual in character). Fighting discrimination needs to be seen as part of the fight against unemployment, |

¥ For the right of lesbians and gay men to come out at work without fear of discrimination. by the employers on the grounds of sexual erientation.

30

fe

An action " prog amine for lesbian and gay Hhberation ¥

For full equality of opportunit ty for vacancies and promotion for lesbians and gay men in all spheres of employment, and for the necessary increase in public spending on investment resources to fulfil this demand,

¥ While discrimination by employers should be made illegal, the working class must recognise that, as with women and blacks, discrimination against lesbians and gay men, mustbe fought with direct action. Only this will stop the bosses exploiting loopholes in legislation. For strike action to defend lesbians and gay men sacked by the state or the bosses.

¥Y For workers’ control of hiring and firing to ~

enforce an anti-discriminatian, equality of opportunity policy. Workers’ control over the bosses is imperative if they are not to abuse paper equal opportunity policies. For 24 hour state funded creche facilities to enable lesbian and gay parents to get to work.

WY Wight unemployment by eatting the hours (with no loss of pay), sharing the work (under workers’ control) and nationalising, under workers control and with no compensation to the bosses, firms pleading bankruptcy or threatening closure or redundancy. For strikes and occupations to fight for these policies.

¥ For an unemployed workers’ movement with fall rights of representation withiN the labour movement. For the right of the unemployed to join the union of their choice at reduced subs-rates, For the championing of the fight against lesbian and gay oppression within such a movement.

THE ONSLAUGHT ON SERVICES HITS LESBIANS AND GAYS HARD

Capitalism can no Jonger afford the welfare services it provided to slightly.ease the burden of domestic labour for women in the family during the boom when it needed women workers in large numbers, It is compelled'to attack services and unload the burden of welfare provision back on to individual families. In the spheres of health, housing and education these attacks can have disastrous consequences for lesbians and gay men. they must be fought around politics that meet the needs of all:-workers. All too often the leaders of the labour movement settle for compromises that. benefit only sections of the working class leaving others to suffer the consequences.

¥Y End the discrimination against lesbians and gay men in housing, All too often lesbians and gay men are refused housing by the councils on the grounds that ‘families’ come first, There should be

eqnal access to housing for all on the basis of a massive housebuilding programme financed by

. the state but under the control of the workers. The

resources for this nrust be fought for if heterosexual working class families are not to be set into competition with lesbians and gay men.

¥ For council provisionof decent temporary accomadation until permanent homes are ready. For working class tenants’ groups with lesbian and gay repr esentation to enforce this policy.

¥ For a massive expansion of the NHS. to cope

with the health requirements of all. This is liter-'

ally a life and death question for many gay men faced with the'danger of AIDS, Cash for research’ — not to line Saatchi and Saatchi’s pockets. For

’ free condoms and needles on demand.

¥ A London hospital has had to suspend dispensing Retrovir (a life prolonging drug for AIDS patients) because it cannot afford the drug compa-

- ties’ prices. Nationalisation of the drug companies

under workers’ control and with no compensation can end such scandals,

¥ No compulsory testing for AIDS. Repeal the Contagious Diseases Act.

¥Y For an adequately funded sex education pro-

gramme in all schools —- to be decided by commit-

tees of classroom teachers, parents and pupils — toéxplain in amanner free from heterosexual bias, sexuality in general and homosexuality as one

aspect, of it. Children and youth must not be .

‘protected’ by being fed the bigoted lies that are the stock-in-trade of the state and many headmasters/. toistresses,

¥ Full support to councils who pursue ‘positive

. image’ policies with regards to homosexuality in

the schodls. Such polities, however, must be a step -towards a national scientific, materialist pased sex education course.

‘¥ All of the ahove policies require that lesbians

and gay men take their place in the numerous battles against schoo! or hospital closures, under the slogans — no cuts, expand the services to meet everybody’s. needs, for a massive programme of public works funded by the state but controlled by the workers, .

DON’T FORGET WAGES

Like all workers lesbian and gay workers need a living wage. When workers struggle for better wages — or against attacks on jobs for that matter — lesbians and gays must join that fight and, on the lines of LGSM, take that fight out amongst the

| | i

Lesbian and gay liveration: a coam.unist strategy

“umn and gay ‘community’ seeking to rally those -veased for their sexuality to the cause of those vlcited and oppressed by capital at work.

“or a national minimum wage linked to the of living and set at the level of the average “ustrial wage. ;

Against all wage restraint. For the protection

/ apes against inflation by wage rises in line

with rises in the cost of hving as determined by committees of workers and their families,

Por roal equal pay, for equal work for women. “pd inequality of pay suffered by many lesbians.

POLITICAL AND LEGAL EQUALITY NOW

‘2: 1867 in Britain limited legal reform enabled a acy man to have sex with another gay man provi ted both were over 21 and sex took place in total vivacy. This reform was a concession but it still icaves an enormous gap between the democratic ebts of most people and those of gay men. Lesbios remain unrecognised in British law but are no inss systematically discriminated against for that. “fl legal and political equality under capitalism coes not equal liberation, but it must be fought for b« the working class as an important element, of ‘he fight for liberation. .

Abolish the age of consent whereby a private ciatter — sex between consenting individuals —-is ~hiected to the control of the capitalist state, At i 52 moment the age of consent for heterosexuals is 4 and for gay men 21. This leaves youth open to “ious oppression. For young gay men under 21 ‘. soppression is particularly severe. Every sexual rac they engage in is a crime.

For the right of lesbians and gay mento have .ostody of their children. No legal discrimination ‘* sustody eases, on the grounds of sexual orientaLhon.

eer

* Abolish all laws — gross indecency, soliciting, ovurages to. publie decency, insulting behaviour 1 all laws relating to prostitution -- used to porsecute lesbians and gay men,

oad

Abolish the obscenity and Blasphemy laws .

vbich can and have been repeatedly used against.

sumosexual literature (Gay News, Gays The Word BECO

Abolish the exceptions to Wolfenden — the avaty, navy, etc. AU homosexuals should have full yal and political equality in society. No democrat “rt oppose the above reforms. They encapsulate ‘= basic democratic position that a person’s sexi.al orientation and practice — providing it is consensual — is entirely a private matter.

* Zind all police harassment of gay men via.

entrapment. AH cases involving’ entrapment brought to court to be automatically dismissed. NDisband all the special squads and units, like the IRW’s, the vice squad and others, which can and have been used to raid gay bars and clubs.

AGAINST THE BOSSES’ OFFENSIVE

Moral reaction is part and parcel of the bosses’ overall offensive against, the working class. The anti-union laws, the police picket-busting squads and the witch-hunts, are al] elements of this offensive. So too are the gay-haiting articles that litter the national press, the increased incidence of ‘queer-bashing’, often organise by fascist groups hike the BNP and NI, the physical attacks on health workers who look after AIDS patients, the vandalism to AYDS hospital units and the police raids on gay pubs and clubs. This offensive must be met with bold policies and direct. action.

Y= For the right of lesbian and gay organisations

to reply to the vicious gay-baiting articles churned out in the bosses’ press. For print workers to fight for such a right and to stop the presses if itis not - granted,

¥ For a democratically controjled labour movement daily paper committed to regular articles supporting the struggle for lesbian and gay rights and against. oppression.

¥ For organised defence squads to defend les-' bian and gay pubs, clubs and individuals against ‘queerbashers’ and police raids. For links with workers’ defence guards — joint support, training ete. Full labour movement support for lesbian and gay defence squads.

W For workers’ defence of AIDS related workers, | establishments and patients. For state funded education courses on AIDS to explain thenature of the disease to healthworkers and school/college students:

W For the.repeal of all anti-trade union laws.

AGAINST ALL. DIVISIONS IN THE WORKING CLASS

Capitalism continuously strives to divide worker against worker. Sectionalism divides craft against craft and skijled against unskilled. Sexism divides men against women. Racism divides white against black. And heterosexism divides heterosexuals from lesbians and gay met. There is a constant pressure on all sections ofthe working class to seek separate solutions to whatare, in fact, the common problems of exploitation and oppression. This pressure has given rise to.various forms of separa-~ tism amongst sections of the working class —

32

An action programme for lexbinn and gay liberation ¥

craftism, feminism, black nationalism, While communists understand such pressures we do not concede one inch to them. We are integrationists, not separatists. We strive for maximum unity of the working class against the common enemy. To achieve this unity we fight against all those things capitalism uses to divide us.

V Against craflism — we fight for the linking up _ ofindustrial struggles, up to and including the use of the general strike against the bosses’ offensive. We are for industrial unions to transcend craft and trade unions.

¥ Against sexism, we are for the full social and political equality of women as part of the fight for real women’s liberation and socialism. We fight all

comties, a rule that means vicious oppression for lesbians and gays (remember Paisley’s anti-sod-

" omy campaign).

THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE QUESTIGN OF GOVERNMENT

The Labour Party has given the lesbian and gay issue mixed treatment in the last seven years. We know full well where Neil Kinnock stands — “on the balls wing’ of the party, ready to denounce ‘fairies’ during the repulsive gay baiting campaign

- against Peter Thatchell in 1983. But despite this

instances of misogyny amongst gay men, and we

combat the ideas of radical feminist separatism amongst lesbians.

¥ Against racism, we fight all immigration controls by the British state. We do not simply try to make them less racist or heterosexist in application. We support black self-defence against racist and police attack. We join the fight to drive erganised racists from holding office in the unions. We are for physically smashing the fascists, not giving them. a platform, driving them out of the unions. We don not gay bait fascists or right wing reactionaries such as Harvey Proctor but we do not excuse any lesbian or gay fascists from the treatment they will get from the defence squads of the labour movement.

¥ Against the poisonous fumes of nationalism we fight for a consistently internationalist policy. Disarm the imperialist bosses — always hetter their defeat in wars than their victory. Despite their persecution of lesbians and gay men we defend the USSR, Cuba and other degenerate workers’ states against capitalist attack. We are for the workers— notthe capitalists — overthrowing the bureaucracies that rule those states, thereby clearing the way to socialism and lesbian and gay liberation. We support the abolition of all anti-lesbian or gay laws in the degenerate(d) workers’ states. We are against nationalist solutions to the economic crisis — like import controls ~~ that line workers up with the bosses. Workers of the world unite — so too must lesbian and gay workers, for oppression is international and must be fought on an international plane.

Y Imperialism’s enslavement of’ the oppressed colonies and semi-colonies must. be fought. National liberation movements should be supported. In Britain today this means fighting to get British troops out of Ireland and supporting the struggle of the republican fighters to achieve this aim. Lesbians and gay men have no interest in helping the British state maintain Loyalist rule in the six

posturing by Kinnock the party has a formal commitment to support lesbian and gay rights. Moreover at a local level Various left councils —~ spurred on by the old GLC ~- have set up lesbian and gay committees, launched egual opportunities programmes and have even tried to introduce ‘positive images’ of homosexuality. in the schools. However, all too often these councils have — despite carrying the ‘loony left? tag — either left policies at the level of being good intentions with no hard cash to hack them up, or approached the whole question from a non-working class perspective. Indeed Livingstone consciously set the tone by cultivating lesbians and gays as one element of his ‘rainbow coalition’ (he was always quick to denounce “the old, white, male working class” — g thinly disguised attack on the working class asa whole),

The result of all of this is that policies on lesbian and gay rights have either been tokenistic or, as happened during the general election, jettisoned because they were and ‘unpopular’ cause (unpopular with the rabid bosses’ press that is) and replaced it. with a campaign proving Labour’s commitment to the ‘family’, The lesson is clear. Reformism cannot consistently fight the oppression of lesbians and gays, let alone advance a prog-

' ramme to overcome that oppression, However, we

yecognise that many lesbians and gays, like many

workers in general, do not believe us. For this reason we say that we will join them in a vigorous

fight to win the Labour Party to a policy of consis-

tent support for lesbian and gay rights —- demanding it takes up the policies we have outlined in this

_ programme. We also fight to force Labour, should

ey ef

it ever get into office, to carry out these policies as

part an overall programme of arming the working class, making the government accountable to the mobilised working class and its base organigations, and moving against the military, economic and political power of the bosses and their state. We do not believe Labour will carry out such a programme, but in the struggle to force it to we can and wil] win to that programme, millions of workers, the foremost fighters for lesbian and gay liberation amongst them.

Lesbian and gay liberation: a communist strategy

THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY, WORKING CLASS POWER AND LESBIAN ANB GAY LIBERATION

struggle Cor lesbian and gay rights and libera2 is, as we have stated throughout, a class .uigple, To be defended and extended on any sort { \asting basis requires the overthrow of the ‘oases’ state, its repressive apparatus, its laws and its bureaucracy. Only the working class, ledby 2 eensistently revolutionary communist party, xb perform this task. Such a party must comprise 1¢ leading militants of the working class. It must ‘+: rooted in the workplaces and workers’ organisaons. Lt must be forged in the active struggles of tr 5 working class, winning leadership ofthem and ‘acting them towards the conquest. of political av wor, To do it the working class needs to build its councils of delegates from the factories, the ‘ousing estates, the communities, and its own 1 militia. Not only can these act as intruits for the overthrow of the capitalist state but as the instruments of a new order — of -covking class state power. vt what way will working class power benefit ‘ashians and gays? How will it liberate them? By vrdidating the social and economic power of the :<mtalists, by expropriating their factories the vorkers’ state could develep a centrally directed, :.. democratically controlled plan of production, - suvating the anarchy of competition and the <i dvive for profit and replacing them with ueataction to satisfy human need. ‘Aae part of this plan would be directed towards “it: Provision of services that could socialise chil-

arearing and housework. Phe domestic slavery of women within the fannly could be progressively eliminated through the provision of socialised childeare, washing, cooking and cleaning facihties. The specialised care of the old and care for the disabled could be taken on by state funded commnnity services, All of these tasks now belong to the woman within the family. they explain the importance of the isolated family unit and its normative heterosexual siructure, to capitalism. Socialise these tasks and you create a new foundation for human relationships to be built apon, Not merely - is the material basis for ending women’s oppression created but so too is the basis for a revolution in sexual attitudes,

Of course Hberation will not come overnight. But, the gradual elimination of production for profit, the education of people away from the prejudices that have for so long blighted human relations, and from institutions like the church that have encouraged prejudice, and the ability of all to participate freely and equally in social, economic and political life, will progressively

_ eradicate women’s oppression, lesbian and gay

oppression, indeed all forms of specific oppression, .

We cannot predict what pattern sexual relationships will follow in a communist saciety. What we can say is that the removal of the oppressive norms so pivotal to the bourgeois family, will lay the basis for sexual relationships based on real freedom of choice. As such this will free lesbians and gay men from the torments and horrors of a coercive morality that obliges millions to deny or disguise their sexuality, and that has driven thousands to suicide or mental iliness because of their sexuality. ¥

FORWARD TO COMMUNISM AND LESBIAN AND GAY LIBERATION |

34

Send £5 and receive 10 issues of the Workers Power, monihly

paper of the Workers Power Group.

Make cheques payable to Workers Power and send to: BCM 7750

London WC1N 3XX

Printed and published by Workers Power. BCM 7750, Landon WC1N 3XX.

© Workers Power. April 1988.