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Lavender & Red

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Published Jun 8, 2005 4:54 PM

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1. Rise of German Homosexual Emancipation
Movement

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2. The love that dared to speak its name
3. Lesbians on the front lines of fight for rights,
liberation
4. ‘The war to end all wars’

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

5. Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, 6. Gender and sexuality in czarist Russia
HEALTH CARE,

7. Roots of Russian ‘homosexual subculture’

CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,

8. Capitalism shakes the branches

JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,

9. Naysayers pooh-pooh Bolshevik gains
10. ‘People of the moonlight’ in the dawn of revolution’11. Soviet Union in the 1920s: Scientific, not utopian

POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,

12. 1920s Soviet Union: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals

HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,

13. 1930s USSR: Survival with setbacks

WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

14. 1930s Soviet Union: ‘Seismic gender shift’
15. Progress and regression: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR
16. ‘Can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?’
17. Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany
18. Denazification in socialist Germany opened door to gay rights
19. Same-sex rights in East Germany: Legal and material progress
20. East Germany in the 1970s: Lesbian & gay movement blossoms
21. East Germany: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle
22. Lesbians and gay men: Great gains in 1980s East Germany
23. Late 1980s East Germany: Gay/lesbian clubs in Party, state
24. Gains cut short by 1989 counter-revolution
25. Post-WWII Europe: Struggle for decriminalization
26. Beginning of post-war witch hunt: Before McCarthy, the Pentagon
27. 1950: ‘Lavender scare’!
28. 1950s witch hunt: Even McCarthy was gay baited
29. What made Stonewall possible: Early resistance to state repression

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RespondLavender & Red

30. German movement inspired U.S. organizing
31. Young Harry Hay and the Wobblies
32. Harry Hay heard ‘siren song of revolution’
33. Harry Hay tried to ‘close book’ on his gayness
34. Harry Hay: ‘Historical materialism in 3/4 time’
35. ‘Bachelors for Wallace’
36. 1950: Gay leftists organize against Korean War
37. When idea for gay political organizing finally ignited
38. Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’
39. Pre-Stonewall gay organizing
40. Harry Hay: Painful partings
41. Finding the right word
42. Hay studies ancient history, finds pride
43. 1952: Mattachine battles police harassment
44. 1952 court victory against anti-gay charges
45. Headwaters of first mass political gay movement rise
46. Mattachine victory sparks internal debate
47. Mattachine red-baited
48. 1953 Mattachine convention: Left wing speaks, opposition unites
49. May 1953 convention: Right wing ousts left leadership
50. Two-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement
51. 1955: First lesbian organization rises on waves of militant struggles
52. 1955: Lesbian organizing and ‘red feminism’
53. 1955: Black movement raised hopes of all downtrodden
54. Civil rights leaders faced red-baiting, gay-baiting
55. Civil rights era activists were gay-baited, red-baited
56. Gay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fight57. ‘Queer’ activists, Black and white, led the way
58. Early 1960s: ‘Gay is good!’
59. Mid-1960s gay activists target U.S. gov’t
60. Why 1960s gay rebellions had to erupt ‘from below’
61. 1960s: Youth demand lesbian, gay rights
62. Calif. resistance predated Stonewall Rebellion
63. Cops raid the Stonewall Inn
64. Raid draws crowd and temperature rises
65. Stonewall 1969: ‘Turning point of rage’
66. Stonewall Rebellion: Crowd rage ignites

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Lavender & Red

67. Stonewall 1969: ‘All hell broke loose!’
68. Stonewall 1969: Fighting in the streets
69. Stonewall 1969—second night: ‘Liberate Christopher Street!’
70. Stonewall , night 3: ‘The battle was on’
71. Many histories converged at Stonewall
72. Post-Stonewall gay liberation: ‘Power to the People!’
73. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
74. People of color activists organize across the U.S.
75. Early left-wing liberation: ‘Unity with all the oppressed’
76. Early gay liberation: Demonstrations of anti-racist solidarity
77. Early 1970s: Political split in gay movement
78. LGBT members welcomed from day one
79. Workers World fought gay oppression before Stonewall
80. Internal education on gay liberation
81. Party-wide education campaign in 1972
82. WWP searched for roots of lesbian/gay oppression
83. Marxist analysis rocked U.S. left
84. Marxist analysis blazed history’s trails
85. 1976 WWP pamphlet found answers in Marxism
86. 1970s Cold War gay-bashers condemn Cuba
87. Colonialism: the real ‘Apocalpto’
88. Colonial period in Cuba
89. 1950s Havana: Imperialist sexploitation
90. Why many Cuban gay men and lesbians left after 1959
91. Early Cuban Revolution paved road to sexual liberation
92. 1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not
93. Hollywood projected Cuba as ‘police state’ for gays
94. 1970s: Decade of cultural progress
95. Behind the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’
96. ‘A visible feature of Cuban society’97. Sex education campaign battled old prejudices
98. Cuba mobilized before first diagnosis
99. Care & prevention, not repression
100. Cuba brought science, not scapegoating, to AIDS care101. U.S. imperialist blockade obstructed Cuban AIDS treatment
102. Change apparent in still photos and motion pictures
103. The sweet taste of change in Cuba

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Lavender & Red

104. ‘Gay Cuba’
105. How La Güinera made room for more gender106. 1990s: Cuba education about same-sex love reached every home107. Cuba‘s CENESEX led the way on sexual rights
108. Cuba’s CENESEX proposes ground-breaking transsexual rights
109. Cuba: ‘Bringing revolution’s humanity to all aspects of life’
110. Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe
111. Anti-gay, anti-trans laws rooted in class rule112. Western rulers imposed anti-gay laws throughout world
113. Struggles for sexual, gender liberation rooted in national liberation
movements
114. ‘Big lie’ and breakup of Yugoslavia
115. Wars, lies and ‘mass rape’ charges
116. The cynical abuse of ‘women’s rights’
117. U.S. war agitation targeted LGBT movements
118. U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan
119. ‘Life better for gay & lesbian Iraqis under Hussein’
120. British colonialism outlawed ‘sodomy’ in Iraq

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Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Workers World June 3, 2004: Rise of German Homosexual Emancipation Movement

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Pride & struggle a century ago:: Donate now ::Rise of German Homosexual
Emancipation Movement
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchWinds of change will fill the banners of Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Pridethis June, lifting them to new heights.
After decades of fierce and unrelenting struggle, same-sex love has
been effectively decriminalized and many gains have been won.
Organizing, rolling civil disobedience has helped push back state
denial of equal rights of same-sex couples--a form of institutionalized
discrimination that is a pillar of class society.
Millions of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans people across theUnited States will take to the streets in Pride events in cities andtowns this June, as they do each year to recall and honor the 1969
Stone wall uprising against police repression. And millions of peopleof all nationalities, sexualities, genders and sexes will line the streets
to applaud and cheer these celebrations of individual courage andcollective struggle.
The 1969 rebellion in New York's Green wich Village was led by themost oppressed of the LGBT communities--people of color,
teenagers, transgender and transsexual, homeless, impoverishedand so marginalized in the work force that prostitution was the only
source of income for many.
The uprising was the spark that ignited a large-scale movement. It
galvanized quantitative fighting back into qualitative mass resistance.
It did not develop in social isolation. The Stonewall Rebellion--whichmarked the birth of what became the modern LGBT movement--rosein the wake of social upheaval against imperialist war and rampant
racist repression.
Marchers will draw on the lessons of how the left wing of early gay
liberation found its way into the anti-war movement, took part in anddefended the national liberation struggles, helped develop women'sliberation, and took part in labor battles from the shop floor toorganizing in support of the Chicano farm workers' union drive.
If they look to accurate historical accounts, today's activists will alsofind that the young gay liberation movement received support fromthe most revolutionary sectors of the political left wing.
More than three decades later, revisiting this dynamic historicalperiod of struggle is an activist contribution to today's movement.

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Workers World June 3, 2004: Rise of German Homosexual Emancipation Movement

But it is less known to many today that the Stonewall Rebellion
launched the second--not the first--mass movement for LGBT
liberation.
The first great wave of struggle to demand sexual and genderemancipation had taken place from 1869 to 1935. It began inGermany. It was a dynamic, expanding movement that grew to beinternational. And it left its mark on other social and politicalmovements, as well as literature and the arts.
The history of the struggle in that period, as well, is rich with lessons.
Why not in France?
Why did the movement appear in Germany? And why in that epoch?
It's impossible to glean a broad understanding without examining thesocial and economic soil in which the German movement for sexualand gender emancipation was rooted.
The widespread, murderous counter- revolutionary pogroms against
women, transgender expression and same-sex love carried out by
the Catholic and early Protestant hierarchies had subsided as theIndustrial Revolution began sweeping away the kingdoms of Europe.
The momentous revolution in France at the end of the 18th century-in which the downtrodden and disenfranchised of the cities, including
many women, played a vitally important part--had uprooted thevestiges of the feudal power of the kings and the Catholic Church.
The French Revolution established a legal code, Napoleonic Code,which remov ed homosexual acts from the list of criminal offenses.
Of course, state and church bias and demonization were noteradicated by formally removing the laws. Variations of sexuality,
gender and sex continued to be subject to a political policy of divideand conquer. And a class-divided economy itself continued to pit
segments of the work force against each other.
But the Napoleonic Code was the enlightened act of a young
capitalist class that saw its role as righting the wrongs of feudal
backwardness. And this decriminalizing of homosexual acts had farreaching effects on other European nations.
Why did the French Revolution remove anti-homosexual statutes
while the capitalist revolutions in England and the United States didnot?
The French Revolution was later, and more thorough, for sure. But
the French capitalist class also had to battle the powerful andtenacious Catholic Church and its ideology. That may have impelled
the revolutionists to have to carry out a more thorough " of the
Church's "moral" authority than in the other countries.
So why didn't a sexual liberation movement arise in France? Why inGermany?
Because anti-gay repression was much stronger in Germany.

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Workers World June 3, 2004: Rise of German Homosexual Emancipation Movement

Prussian expansion set stage for battle
Germany in the late 1800s had a powerful industrial base. But it was
weakened by the remaining constraints of feudalism. Germany had
few colonies as a result.
Other European powers were colonizing the world, plundering fromAfrica to Australia. Asia and Africa were conquered by the British,
French, Dutch and Belgian imperialist powers.
In many of these cultures, women still enjoyed significant societal
rights; variance in sex, gender and sexuality were accepted andrespected. But with bullets and bibles, the imperial patriarchs ofwealth at the pinnacle of capital's expanding power conquered
militarily and ideologically with their cultural values and property
relations.
In North America, the fierce clash between the expansion of slavery
and the expansion of Northern industrial capital was about to breakout in the bloodiest battle of the 19th century--the Civil War. The
victory of the North would set the stage for U.S. capital to begin its
merciless globalization in search of greater profits.
But Germany was not unified enough to be a colonial contender--yet.
It was fragmented into almost 300 different countries.
While several of these had no laws against same-sex love, Prussia
did. And it was Prussia that was devouring all the other Germanstates except Hanover.
Next: The love that dared to speak its name

Reprinted from the June 3, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to support pro-labor, anti-war news.

HOME | NEWS | SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | WWP |SUPPORT WW

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Workers World June 10, 2004: The love that dared to speak its name

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Pride & struggle a century ago

The love that dared to speak its name:: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchBy Leslie Feinberg
The love that had dared not speak its name raised its voice in the1860s in Germany. As its demands rose, they were amplified by
support from the revolutionary groundswell of workers who wereorganizing and fighting to win basic democratic rights.
From the first challenges to sexual oppression in the 1860s, the left
wing of the emerging socialist movement--those revolutionaries who
were fighting to shatter the manacles of capitalism as well as themental shackles of ideological reaction--supported this strug gle
against state repression and for sexual liberation.
In 1862, a young lawyer named Jean Baptiste von Schweitzer wasconvicted of a homosexual act in a city park. Von Schweitzer was amember of the socialist German Workers Association, headed by
Ferdinand Lassalle. Some in the group wanted to expel Von
Schweitzer. But Lassalle defended him, arguing that sexuality "ought
to be left up to each person" whenever no one else is harmed.
Not only wasn't Von Schweitzer expelled; he became president of
this socialist workers' organization after Lassalle's death.
The struggle for emancipation ratcheted up in the 1860s, when aPrussian proposal for a harsh penal code made male homosexuality
an even more serious crime.
In 1864, a gay man in Germany began writing courageously andprolifically against this law and in defense of homosexuality. Karl
Ulrichs was a civil servant in the small city-state of Hanover. He
knew that Prussia would soon absorb the city, extending anti-gay
legislation throughout Germany.
As early as 1862 he had coined the word "Urning" to describe amale sexually attracted to other males, which he believed derived
from a kind of intersexuality in some brains. The English translation is"Uranian." This term--based on a myth in Plato's "Sym posium" thatreferred to a god dess of men who love men--was picked up andused throughout Europe and England.
Despite being confronted with shock and outrage, Ulrichs carried out
a 30-year public campaign, mainly literary, warning of the dangers of
the repressive Prussian law and insisting on justice for "Urnings."
In 1869, a Hungarian doctor wrote an open letter in defense of gay
rights to the minister of justice. While his last name is known--

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Workers World June 10, 2004: The love that dared to speak its nameBenkert--he wrote under the pseu donym Karoly Maria Kertbeny. In
1868 he created the term "homosexuality."
Benkert pointed out that since the French Revolution and theintroduction of the Napoleonic Code, the momentum of history was
toward decriminalizing homosexuality.
He listed famous homosexuals in history like Shakespeare, Newton,
Michel angelo, Frederick the Great and countless others and asked
how much cultural history would have been squandered by theirimprisonment.
Benkert stressed that society had to escape from the genocidal
feudal campaigns that had claimed millions of lives. He denounced
the use of scapegoating and concluded that the state had nobusiness nosing around in people's sexual lives.
In 1871, a Draconian anti-gay Para graph 175 was introduced withno debate into the penal code of the Second Reich.
Fight against Paragraph 175 heats up
After 30 years of trailblazing work by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Benkert
and others, the first political movement of a mass character forsexual and gender rights emerged in Germany in 1896. The demand
for sexual and gender emancipation continued to draw backing fromsocialist leaders.
A year before the official emergence of this movement, Eduard
Bernstein, then a Marxist and a leader of the German Social
Democratic Party, wrote a defense of the gay British literary figure
Oscar Wilde in an important left newspaper. Wilde's arrest and trial
were an example of how anti-gay and anti-transgender repression--in
this case charges against a feminine gay male--were intertwined in
the minds of prosecutors.
Bernstein's article called on socialists to lead the way in sexualreform, challenged anti-gay prejudice and rejected the increasingly
popular psychiatric theories that pathologized same-sex love.
The first gay liberation organization was born in Germany two years
later, in 1897. It was called the Scientific Humani tarian Committee.
Its founder and notable leader throughout much of the committee's
35 years was Magnus Hirschfeld--a gay Jewish doctor who may
have also been, like many other leaders of the German movement, across-dresser. He coined the word "transvestite," did extensive
research and produced germinal writings on the subject of crossdressing.
The Scientific Humanitarian Com mittee published a yearbook thatreported on movement activities. It also documented literary, crosscultural, cross-historical and scientific studies on same-sex love andtransgender.
The committee aimed to abolish Paragraph 175, raise social
consciousness and encourage sexually oppressed people to fight for
their rights. To achieve its goals, the committee held regular public

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Workers World June 10, 2004: The love that dared to speak its nameforums, organized speaking tours nationally and internationally, andsent literature to other governments about the need to decriminalize
same-sex love.
The committee's main focus was a petition campaign, launched in
1897, to collect signatures of prominent people demanding the repealof Paragraph 175.
Socialists of all sexualities unite
From its earliest days, the committee won support fromrevolutionaries, who were at that time called Social Democrats. In
1898, the committee took to parliament the signatures of 900 doctors,
lawyers, educators and scientists calling for the repeal of Paragraph175. It was rebuffed.
However, the socialist minority in the German parliament did support
the demand. The great socialist leader August Bebel took the floor,
becoming the first major supporter to battle for the petition.
Bebel, author of "The Rights of Women"--an early socialist
denunciation of the oppression of women under capitalism--signed
the petition, took copies to parliament and urged others to add theirnames.
He argued that homosexuality was so widespread among all
economic classes in society that "if the police dutifully did what they
were supposed to, the Prussian state would immediately be obliged
to build two new penitentiaries just to handle the number of violations
against Paragraph 175 committed within the confines of Berlin
alone."
When Bebel made this speech, and subsequent ones, on theparliament floor, the right-wing politicians booed. But socialists
greeted his defense of same-sex love with supporting shouts of"Hear, hear!"
Hirschfeld himself was affiliated with the Social Democratic Party
from 1898 until the rise of fascism forced him into exile.
Rise of a mass movement
The committee carried on a whirlwind of activity. In 1899 it sent a
letter to Roman Catholic priests asking them to take a stand on gay
oppression and gay rights, sent information to parliament members,
wrote to more than 2,000 daily newspapers, placed ads innewspapers, sent 8,000 letters to top administration and police
officials, another to public prosecutors, and 8,000 copies of thepetition to judges.
More than 6,000 prominent people, half of them doctors, signed thepetition. Others included Albert Einstein, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola,
Kathe Kollwitz, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria
Rilke.
Well-known socialists of that period, including Bebel, Karl Kautsky,
Rudolf Hilferding, Gerhardt Hauptman and Eduard Bernstein, also
signed.

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Workers World June 10, 2004: The love that dared to speak its nameIn 1905, during another debate on Paragraph 175, the committee
went back to parliament with more than 5,000 signatures. The Center
Party, a right-wing group with strong support from the Catholic
Church, led opposition to reform.
Again it was a socialist--Adolph Thiele-- who argued on behalf ofgay rights. But the move for reform was again defeated.
In 1907 more than 2,000 people attended a public debate on
Paragraph 175.
But this pinnacle of organizing was followed by a period of reactionthat drove many supporters underground and forced activists to keepa lower profile. The opening shot of this anti-gay witch hunt was ahighly publicized scandal about alleged gay activities by a number ofhigh German political figures who were forced to stand trial.
In 1910, at the height of anti-gay frenzy, the parliament began todebate extending Paragraph 175 to include lesbian acts between
women.
Next: Lesbians on front lines of fight for liberation

Reprinted from the June 10, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to support pro-labor, anti-war news.

HOME | NEWS | SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | WWP |SUPPORT WW

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Workers World June 17, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

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Pride & struggle a century ago:: Donate now ::Lesbians on the front lines of fight forrights, liberation
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
page
Email the editor
SearchA proposed German penal code was drafted in late 1910 that would
criminalize sexual acts between women.
Any law that threatened same-sex love between women was also
inherently anti-trans gender, since the oppressed populations
overlapped. In 1721, for example, a German individual who wasnamed Catha rina Mar garetha Linck at birth was burned at the stakefor the crime of being a female-bodied person who lived as a maleand married another woman.
Until 1794 a Prussian code executed people of all sexes for what thelaw characterized as "unnatural acts." That edict was amended in
1837 to a sentence of "imprisonment followed by life-longpunishment."
In their book "Lesbians in Germany: 1890s-1920s," authors Lillian
Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson wrote, "In 1851 punishment for'unnatural acts' was restricted by a new code to males only.
'Victorian' mentality had spread to Ger many. The law preferred toignore the possibility that women were capable of sexual
expression."
The menace of including same-sex love between women in
Paragraph 175 posed a new challenge for the women's movement in
Ger many, which had been "advancing unimpeded" since the early
1900s.
Women who today might call themselves lesbians were very active inthe early German women's rights movement. But they largely did so
without "coming out of the closet."
The early Uranian movement had been mostly made up of individuals
who today might identify as gay men, male-to-female cross-dressers
and transsexual women. However, as the Homo sexual Emancipation
Movement grew in social strength and weight, it emboldened
lesbians to openly emerge as social leaders.
'Reach for the stars!'
Anna Rueling was just such a leader. That name was a pseudonym
as well. She was born Anna Theo Sprungli.
Exactly a century ago, Rueling made a famous public address in

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Workers World June 17, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

Berlin, delivered before a meeting of the Scientific Human itarianCommittee.
This 1904 public meeting was an important breakthrough. Faderman
and Eriksson note "Accord ing to [Uranian leader Magnus] Hirsch
feld, the police sometimes even prevented women from attending theScientific Humani tarian Committee's public forums because thediscussion of homosexuality was regarded as unsuitable in thepresence of women. A public lesbian organization would not havebeen tolerated at that time."
Rueling congratulated the committee, wrote Michael Lombardi-Nash,"for its support of women's rights and for including lesbians, alongwith homosexual men, in its fight for equal rights." (The Gay &Lesbian Review, May-June 2004)
Her speech that night was a landmark. It was titled "What interest
does the women's movement have in solving the homosexual
question?" In it she stressed the imperative of unity between thewomen's and homosexual emancipation movements. But the talkwas essentially calling for unity against transgender oppression, as
well, since Rueling--like many rights activists of that era--consideredhomosexuals to be a kind of intermediate sex. She called for equal
opportunities in education and the job market for women, men andhomosexuals.
Unity was key to Rueling's arguments. "If people would just observe,
they would soon come to the conclusion that homosexuality and the
Women's Movement do not stand opposed to each other, but rather
they aid each other reciprocally to gain rights and recognition, and toeliminate the injustice which condemns them on this earth."
She stressed that homosexual women "have suffered because of
their masculine inclinations and natural characteristics, and becauseof the many, many injustices and hardships caused by laws, society,and the old morality which concerns women."
Rueling told those gathered, "[F]rom the very beginning of the
Women's Movement to the present day, it has been more often than
not homo genic women who took over the leadership in numerous
battles."Rueling blasted the mainstream leadership of the movement. "If weweigh all the contributions which homosexual women have made to
the Women's Movement, one would be astounded that its large andinfluential organizations have not lifted a finger to obtain justice in thestate and in society for the not so small number of its Uranian
members, and that they have done absolutely nothing to this very
day to protect so many of its most well-known and most worthy
female predecessors in this battle from ridicule and scorn when they
explain to the greater public about the true essence of Uranism. ...
"The so-called 'moderate' tendency will not help homosexuals one bit
for the simple reason that deeds of this kind have no tendency at all.
Victory will come as a sign of radicalism, and we expect that theradicals will change the direction. ...

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Workers World June 17, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago"The Women's Movement and the movement for homosexual rights
have thus far traveled on a dark road which has posted many
obstacles in their way. Now it will become brighter and brigh ter
around us and in the hearts of the people. This is not to say that thework of securing the rights of women and of Uranians has come toan end; we are still in the middle of two opposing sides, and many a
bloody battle will have to be fought."
Rueling concluded with optimistic historical vision, "And when, attimes, as they will, hard times come to either side--that will not be
the time for hesitation to stand up in defense against injustice and to
march on to victory which will surely be ours. Revelation and truth
are like the rising sun in the East--no power can force it out of its
orbit. Slowly but surely it rises to its glittering zenith!
"Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but in the not too distant future the
Women's Movement and Uranians will raise their banners in victory!
Per aspera ad astra! [Reach for the stars!]"'An injustice doubled'
In his 1905 book "Berlin's Third Sex," Hirsch feld estimated that there
were more than 1 million homosexuals--male and female--in
Germany; some 56,000 in Berlin alone.
The coffee houses, restaurants and beer halls for the "third sex,"
however, were mostly frequented by males.
Hirschfeld did refer to a "dating agency" in 1905 for lesbians. And healso described Ber lin "masquerade" parties in which "many of thelesbians wear male costumes."
But the looming peril in 1910 of the extension of Paragraph 175
galvanized a broad range of organizations and individuals--including
leaders of the Homosexual Eman cipation Move ment, and socialist
and women's rights organizations--that worked to stop the expansionof the penal code.
Leading activists of the fightback argued that the extension of
Paragraph 175 meant, "An inequality would not thereby beeliminated, but rather an injustice doubled."
In 1911 The League for the Protection of Mater nity and Sexual
Reform, a politically conservative organization within the women's
movement, adopted a resolution which may be the first statement by
any women's rights group on homosexuality. It denounced the
proposal to criminalize lesbianism as "a grave error." [The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, James D. Steakley]
On Feb. 10, 1911, the League held a meeting, at which Hirschfeld
also spoke, to discuss how to link the struggles. The socialist
newspaper "Forward" reported that the turnout was so large that asecond meeting had to be scheduled.
Next: The 'war to end all wars' derailed the struggle

Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
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Workers World June 17, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World June 24, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

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Pride & struggle a century ago'The war to end all wars':: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchBy Leslie Feinberg
The outbreak of World War I derailed the thrust of the movements forsexual and gender emancipation and for women's rights in Germany-and created a profound political split in the international workingclass struggle.
It was no accident that the war began precisely at a time of aworldwide upsurge of the working class in Europe and in the UnitedStates, as well as stirrings in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The
workers' movements were gaining strength and momentum. They
were increasingly taking a stand against imperialist war.
There were no socialist countries or liberation movements to blame
for World War I. It was a plain, unvarnished racist war for colonial
empire. The principal capitalist countries, each hungry to gobble up a
bigger share of the markets and profits, tried to redivide the colonial
world.
In each of the capitalist countries the bosses appealed to theworkers to unite behind them in battle. The German ruling class wasable to rally its working class for the war on a patriotic basis. Even
the majority in the socialist movement of that day, and the
Homosexual Emancipation Movement, got swept up into thechauvinist appeal.
Going along with this right-wing, murderous patriotism put the brakeon every social movement--gay, trans and lesbian, women's rights,
workers' and socialist struggles--because it gave the ruling class theupper hand, strengthened the right wing and set back the
progressive movement.
Those in Germany who didn't fight against the war, instead
supporting their own ruling class with patriotic fervor, were pulled in arightward direction.
But not everyone gave in to frenzied national chauvinism. In theGerman socia list movement, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht
took a principled stand against the German ruling class. They werearrested and later assassinated as a result of their opposition to thewar.
World War I took the lives of 20 million workers.
A new revolutionary front

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Workers World June 24, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

The inter-imperialist war interrupted the progress of the working class
movement in Europe and Russia. But as the war dragged on foryears, the intolerable conditions of life, carnage and suffering sparked
revolutionary workers' uprisings.
The very same processes that had been either submerged or driven
underground by the outbreak of the war began to resurface andspeed up. Imperialist war accelerates all the social, political andeconomic processes that exist during peacetime. War is the mostviolent expression of the constant clash of capitalist competition for
profits.
World War I generated a huge area of struggle in Asia. It laid theground-work for the development of national liberation movements
around the world. And the war sparked a revolutionary situation inalmost every leading capitalist country in the world.
World War I contributed to making the monumental Russian
Revolution a necessity. It was not military defeat on the battlefield,
but revolutions in Russia and Germany, that brought World War I toan end.
Just eight weeks after the October 1917 Russian Revolution, whichbrought the workers', peasants' and soldiers' Soviets to power, the
new government led by Lenin abolished the czarist anti-gay laws,
which were similar to the German Paragraph 175. This action went
hand in hand with guaranteeing the rights of workers, land for thepeasants and equal rights for women.
Abolishing the anti-gay laws in Russia was a historic step forwardfrom the Napoleonic Code, established in 1804, that had given legal
expression to the French bourgeoisie's revolutionary victory overfeudalism in 1789.
The left wing of the Russian revolutionary movement did more thanjust strip the anti-gay laws from the Russian penal code. The
Bolsheviks argued that the walls that separated same-sex love fromthe rest of human sexuality should be torn down.
The new Soviet legislation stressed that all forms of sexual
gratification should be treated the same way--as "natural"--and thatsex was a private matter. Only the use of force or duress, injury or
encroachment on the rights of another person, was a matter for
criminal prosecution.
The fresh winds of the Russian Revolution also filled the sails of
struggle in other parts of the world, including Germany.
'Socialism means solidarity'
In 1918, mutiny broke out in the German Navy. Workers throughout
the country went on strike in support of the rebellion.
On Nov. 7, a council of workers, soldiers and peasants established
the Republic of Bavaria. The revolutionary wave spread to Berlin
where a socialist republic was proclaimed on Nov. 9. The kaiser
abdicated the next day.

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Workers World June 24, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

In this revolutionary wave, the lesbian and gay movement, largely
middle-class in its leadership, took its stand with the working class.
The revolution gave the Homosexual Emancipation Movement newenergy. This insurrection lent inspiration to the lesbian and gay
movement's hope that their liberation was on the horizon.
The Scientific Humanitarian Com mittee had, like the Social
Democrats, taken a social-patriotic position during the war. Yet it had
published articles by and maintained solidarity with gays from all thecountries involved in the war. Many of the early fighters for gay
liberation had died on the imperialist battlefields.
With the overthrow of the monarchy and militarism, the committee
expressed "firm hope that our movement, too, will once again be able
to move into the forefront and lead the struggle for homosexualliberation to its long-desired end."
Magnus Hirschfeld, a leader of the Homosexual Emancipation
Movement, and members of the Scientific Human itarian Committee
supported the new republic. "We took the most active part in all the
revolutionary events," reported the committee.
Hirschfeld spoke at a mass rally in Berlin on Nov. 10. Held at theheight of the revolution, it was in front of the Reichstag building.
Between 3,000 to 4,000 people gathered near to where therevolutionary Red Guards were fighting pitched battles withreactionary officers who supported the kaiser.
Recalling Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, August Bebel, Wilhelm
Liebknecht and other revolutionaries, Hirschfeld said that not only inGermany, "but elsewhere too, nationalism attempted to destroy
internationalism, and militarism attempted to destroy socialism."
Hirschfeld stressed to the crowd why socialism was so important:"Socialism means: solidarity, community, mutuality, further
development of society into a unified body of people. Each for all andall for each!"
In addition, he said, "We want: the community of peoples, struggle
against racism and national chauvinism, removal of limitations on
economic and personal communication between peoples, the right ofpeoples to self-determination regarding their relationship to a state
and their form of government."
Historians John Lauritsen and David Thorstad explain that as soon
as the revolution had broken out, "The Com mit tee immediately senta delegation to the new government to press for a total amnesty thatwould include the release from jail of all inmates convicted ofhomosexual acts. The removal of censorship and the greater
freedom of the press and speech that ensued following the revolution
were a boon to the gay rights struggle for a time. But perhaps themost tangible benefit to the gay movement was the acquisition of abuilding that was to become an international center for gay liberationand sex research.
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Workers World June 24, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

Prince Hatzfeld prior to the revolution. It was one of the finest
palaces in Berlin."
The first of its kind, the institute compiled historical, biological,
anthropological, statistical and ethnological data and documentation
regarding human sexuality and gender. It also housed the Scien tific
Humanitarian Committee. So it was an international lesbian and gay
community center.
At the opening of this Institute for Sexual Science, Hirschfeld spoke
about this concrete gain: "In his speech to the scholars, doctors andpoliticians who attended the opening in July 1919, Hirschfeld called it'a child of the revolution'--not only of the uprising that swept Berlin on
November 9, 1918, but also of the 'great spiritual revolution' that had
begun decades earlier with the first stirrings of the homosexual rights
movement." ("The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935),"
Times Change Press)
Thousands came through its doors, including a number of socialist
youth groups and parties that were struggling to inform themselves
on homosexuality and other sexual questions.
One such delegation consisted of Soviet doctors. The group washeaded by the peoples' commissar of health, who proudly described
how their revolutionary Soviet government had immediately removed
the czarist anti-gay laws.
In January 1923, the Soviet minister of health traveled to Germany.
"He is reported to have expressed to members of the Institute for
Sexual Science how pleased he was that the former penalty against
homosexuals had been abolished in the Soviet Union. He also said
that 'no unhappy consequences of any kind whatsoever have resulted
from the elimination of the offending paragraph, nor has the wish thatthe penalty in question be re-introduced been raised in any quarter.'"Momentum accelerates
In Germany the Social Democratic Party, which had swung to theright to support the war, helped curb the revolutionary uprising.
Those who were for a revolutionary alternative looked to the gains of
the Russian Revolution for inspiration, and organized communist
parties through out the world.
Within a few short years after the defeat of the November uprising inGermany, the revolutionary movement there had grown from
representing only a vanguard of the working class to obtaining theadherence of millions of workers.
In August 1920 the Scientific Human itarian Committee held its firstpost-war general membership meeting. The next year a new ministerof justice who was himself a signer of the petition was appointed.
The struggle opened up more social and political space for lesbians.
In Berlin there were 60 spots where lesbians could meet, somegeared for middle-class women, others for working-class lesbians.
There was even a lesbian newspaper called The Girlfriend: Weekly

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Workers World June 24, 2004: Pride & struggle a century ago

for the Ideal Friendship. It was sponsored by the Fed eration for
Human Rights, a gay group whose membership had swelled to
48,000. This newspaper advertised lesbian night spots and ran
personal columns to help women meet each other.
In 1921 Hirschfeld helped organize the first congress of the World
League for Sexual Reform, in Berlin.
By 1922 the Committee had 25 branches throughout Germany andhad spread to Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, England, Italy
and Belgium.
At the same time, however, the German counter-revolution--headed
by Hitler and bank-rolled and backed by a segment of the industrial
and banking class--had obtained a base in the middle class. And the
Homosexual Emancipation Move ment would be one of its firsttargets.
Next: Counter-revolution

Reprinted from the June 24, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to support pro-labor, anti-war news.

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

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Lesbian, gay, bi, trans pride, part 5:: Donate now ::Sexual freedom vs. fascism inGermany
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
page
Email the editor
SearchDecades of left-wing political activism, agitation and education
ushered in the short-lived era of the "Golden Twenties" in Germany.
Berlin rivaled Paris for its flourishing gay and lesbian cultures-which
included transgender expression. The movement had forced thepolice to issue certificates to trans people, allowing them to "crossdress" without threat of arrest.
Turn-of-the-century independent strug gles for sexual reform,
including the movement for women's right to vote-which had held its
first large protest in Berlin in 1894-were coalescing into a broadpolitical alliance between the women's emancipation movement andthe gay, trans and lesbian movement.
The most prominent organization in that political coalition was the
League for the Protection of Maternity and Sexual Reform, founded
in 1905. Its leader, Dr. Helene Stoecker, became a director of the
Scientific Humanitarian Committee headed by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld,a leader of the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement.
The First Congress for Sexual Reform convened in Berlin Sept. 1520, 1921. The gathering met at the Institute of Sexual Science-theinternational center of the movement for sexual emancipation.
Experts traveled to Germany from around the world for this groundbreaking discussion about sexology, genetics and the law.
In his book "The Pink Triangle," Richard Plant--a later refugee from
Nazi Germany-noted that "The congress was such a success that
Hirschfeld was embold ened to create the World League for Sexual
Reform, which at its height claimed a membership of 130,000."
In 1923 there were at least 25 gay/ trans/lesbian organizations inGermany. And the movement was debating the formation of anational homosexual political party.
Early targets of fascism
German fascism targeted the gay/ trans /lesbian and the women's
rights movements even before anti-Jewish and anti-gay laws, codified
in 1934-35, officially marked the unleashing of the widespread
campaign of terror.
Magnus Hirschfeld was an easy target for the Nazis because he was
Jewish and gay, as well as a movement leader and socialist. In 1920

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

Nazis beat him up as he spoke at a meeting in Munich. Again in
Munich, in 1921, his skull was fractured and the fascists left him fordead. In Vienna two years later, Nazis hurled stink bombs and thenopened fire on a meeting where he was speaking.
On May 6, 1933, fascist youth were organized to march on theInstitute for Sexual Science, accompanied by a brass band. They
trashed the international archive, making a mountain of the many
thousands of books and journals, photographs and charts-at that time
the largest collection in world history. Storm troopers showed up andtook over the ransacking. Four days later, the enormous heap ofarchive materials was publicly burned on Opera Square. The Nazisthrew a bust of Hirschfeld on the pyre.
Hirschfeld was abroad on a worldwide speaking tour that had taken
him to the United States, China, Palestine, India, Indo nesia andJapan. He later died in exile.
After 1933 the Nazis forcibly dismantled all independent youth
organizations, even the Catholic ones, by denouncing their leaders
as "homosexual degenerates.""By the summer of 1933," Plant wrote, "Ernst Roehm's SA [Sturm
Abteilung] goons were raiding gay bars throughout Germany. Many
were closed, but others didn't shutter their doors until 1935. That
was the year when the campaign against homosexuals shifted intohigh gear and the new Nazi laws banning such gathering places andoutlawing homosexuals as 'sexual vagrants' went into effect."Roehm was himself an openly gay leader of the fascist storm
troopers--the "brown shirt" militias used as a weapon of violent
repression against the progressive and revolutionary politicalmovements.
To some, it might seem a contradiction that a gay man led raids on
gay bars. But there are gay and lesbian, bisexual and trans people inevery economic class in capitalist society. When the class struggle israging, the real question is, as the timeless U.S. labor union songdemands, "Which side are you on?"Roehm's role in attempting to crush the liberation movements thatsought to overturn capitalism is no more paradoxical than thereactionary J. Edgar Hoover-reportedly a gay cross-dresser--laying
siege to the left-wing struggles, including gay liberation, in the UnitedStates in the 1960s and 1970s
What is ironic is that Roehm drowned in his own ideological current.
In 1934, Roehm was purged from the Nazi Party and shot. His
homosexuality was the political flashpoint. But his violent removal
resulted from internal rivalries and Roehm's struggle to supplant thestanding army with his own fascist militia, which ran counter toHitler's attempts to appease the military brass.
Plant concludes, "'The Night of the Long Knives'--the popular phrase
for the [internal] bloodbath that began on June 28 and lasted until
July 3, 1934--saw Adolph Hitler wreck the SA militia and order the

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

shooting of its chief, Ernst Roehm, the man who, since 1919, hadbeen Hitler's sponsor and faithful second-in-command."Roehm's purge was the harbinger of a storm of violence against leftwing movements for sexual, gender and sex liberation.
A harsh new anti-gay edict was publicly issued one year to the day
after the Night of the Long Knives began--June 28, 1935. Paragraph
175A criminalized kisses, embraces, even homosexual fantasies. The
law gave the fascist state license to carry out arrests and internment
in camps with impunity under the mantle of "criminally indecent
activities between men." Plant estimated that between 50,000 and
63,000 males were convicted of homosexuality from 1933 to 1944, of
which nearly 4,000 were juveniles.
Although laws against lesbianism had not been codified, German
women were snared in the state web, as well--rounded up in SS
raids on lesbian bars, sentenced by the Gestapo and sent toconcentration camps where they faced horrific brutality.
Estimates of the total number of lesbian/gay/trans prisoners forced towear the pink triangle on their uniforms in Nazi concentration camps
range from 100,000 to 600,000.
Learning from the mistakes
Communists and socialists of all sexualities and genders fought theNazi attacks on the gay/trans/lesbian and women's struggles.
Yet was there backwardness about homosexuality on the part ofsocialists and communists in the German left? Yes.
"The Left" was not politically monolithic. Frequently even activist
historians lump together the German communists and social
democrats as "the left," "the socialists." But like a fast-moving river,political movements are made up of many currents.
Before World War I, the Social Demo cratic Party was the party of
revolutionaries. But after its cowardly capitulation at the outbreak ofWorld War I--the overwhelming majority supported their own
capitalist class in that inter-imperialist rivalry for colonies--the party
lost its revolutionary character. After the war and the Russian
Revolution, those who had opposed the capitulation formed a newcommunist party.
Revolutionaries must constantly be working to shed centuries ofruling class indoctrination that serves to divide and conquer the vast
laboring class. Every form of bigotry and backwardness holds backunity and progress in a revolutionary struggle of all sexualities,
genders and sexes to abolish capitalism and liberate humanity.
However, some in the Social Demo cratic and Communist parties inGermany --and in the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, whichby then had retreated from some of its earlier, more revolutionary
positions--took easy political advantage, especially immediately after
the purge of Roehm in the Nazi Party, by gay-baiting the fascists.
That was a serious political error. It was like a striking worker

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

shouting an anti-gay epithet at scabs or police attacking the picket
line. Anti-gay bigotry goes against the workers' own class interests.
The U.S. and British imperialist bosses were gay-baiting the Nazis,
too. But in that case it actually did serve the interests of their side of
the class barricades.
Error vs. ideology
There is a profound difference, however, between political error andpolitical ideology.
In the heat of the struggle, the actual positions the German
Communist Party and the Nazi Party took on homosexuality and on
abortion demonstrate class objectives as different as night and day.
In 1928 gay publisher Adolf Brand, a founding member of an elitist
and male chauvinist German gay group called the Community of theSpecial, polled the political parties of Germany about their position
on Paragraph 175.
After the Second International collapsed following its surrender to theinter-imperialist chauvinism of World War I, German revolutionary
elements joined the Communist Party. As the Communist Party
became strong, it responded to the call by the gay/trans/lesbian
movement for support against Paragraph 175.
The Communist Party replied that it had "taken a stand for the repealof Para graph 175 at every available opportunity. There is no need toemphasize that we will continue to wage the most resolute struggle
for the repeal of these laws in the future."
Communist lawyer Felix Halle, a co-worker in the Coalition for
Reform of the Sexual Crimes Code, provided this formulation of theGerman Communist Party's stance:"The class-conscious proletariat, uninfluenced by the ideology ofproperty and freed from the ideology of the churches, approaches thequestion of sex life and also the problem of homosexuality with alack of prejudice afforded by an understanding of the overall social
structure. ... In accordance with the scientific insights of modern
times, the proletariat regards these relations as a special form of
sexual gratification and demands the same freedom and restrictions
for these forms of sex life as for intercourse between the sexes, i.e.,
protection of the sexually immature from attacks, ... control over
one's own body, and finally respect for the rights of non-involved
parties."
The Nazis deliberately hid the fascist nature of their party by callingthemselves "National Socialists." But their response to the poll showsthat their program was just the opposite of a communist workers'
party. The Nazi reply included this succinct sentence: "Anyone who
even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy."Some theorists have explained this ferocious enmity as part of the
Nazi effort to build a "Rambo" fighting machine. That's true. But thefact that the fascists despised and destroyed the movements for

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

sexuality, gender and sexual freedom was also rooted in their entire
political ideology and the capitalist class objective it served.
Imperialists laid groundwork for fascism
Today understanding the class basis of German fascism and thestrengths and weaknesses of the communist resistance to it areespecially important because governing ideologues in the U.S.--theexpand ing imperial empire of capital--have fashioned their own"bad-guys-good-guys" version of the rise and demise of Germanfascism.
In that version, fascism and communism are evil twins. And the great
democratic U.S. imperialism, with a few imperialist powers in its
posse, rode in and saved the day.
But in reality, the banking and industrial class of the United Statesand its imperialist allies had laid the basis for the growth anddevelopment of the Nazi regime with the Versailles Treaty thatformally ended WWI.
The U.S., England and France redrew the map of Europe and recarved Ger many in a way that was designed to arouse national
hatreds and pit peoples against each other in order to preclude
internationalist working-class solidarity.
That gave the right wing parties in Ger many, especially the Nazis,
the oppor tunity to fan the flames of national chauvinism.
The victorious Allies also ordered defeated Germany to pay
reparations for the war, with a provisional payment of
20,000,000,000 Marks. The bankers and politicians who had started
the war were not the ones to be bled to death by these payments.
The workers and middle class were saddled with the bill. However,the decision on reparation payments was postponed until 1921 inorder to give the capitalist class of Germany the chance to destroy
the rising revolutionary struggle of the workers.
The economic dislocation that followed World War I was staggering.
In the face of the reparations and penalties imposed on Germany,
the government began printing money to meet expenses, resulting inrunaway inflation. The financial system was in a tailspin.
Only when the bankers and industrialists abroad realized that aferocious class struggle in Germany was raging did they begin torelent somewhat on their economic bloodletting. But this was only away of stifling the growing revolutionary working class movement inGermany.
Capitalist counter-revolution
By the late 1920s, the fascist movement--with its base in theeconomically devastated middle class--began to win the backing of asector of German industrialists and bankers to carry out the dirty jobof counter-revolution. State repression of sexuality, gender and sex
to enforce the capitalist economic unit of the patriarchal nuclear
family was a key plank in the fascist platform.

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Workers World July 1, 2004: Sexual freedom vs. fascism in Germany

The progressive movements were battling the state to decriminalize
variance in sexuality and gender. And they were trying to free thelives of women of all sexualities and genders that were tightly
corseted by lack of basic social and economic rights.
These modest but vital goals, raised during a period of working-classstruggle and capitalist economic depression, made these movements
enemies of the Nazis.
Nazi campaigns focused on eradicating homosexuality and abortion,
mandating procreation, and sharply restricting women's rights androle in society, in addition to vicious racism and national chauvinism.
However, in 1931, a militant battle broke out against passage of the
fascist Paragraph 128 of the Criminal Code that banned abortion.
Feminist historian Atina Grossmann provided a valuable account of
this struggle in her essay "Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931
Campaign Against Para graph 218":"The 1931 arrests of two physicians and Sex Reform activists on
charges of having performed illegal abortions sparked a storm ofprotest from feminists, Com munists, and Socialists. Under theleadership of the Communist Party, they organized an extraordinary
coalition campaign for the legalization of abortion."
Next: The dual role of the Soviet bureaucracy; lesbian/trans/gay andwomen: political setbacks in the Soviet Union, gains in the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Reprinted from the July 1, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to support pro-labor, anti-war news.

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Workers World July 8, 2004: Gender & sexuality in czarist Russia

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Lesbian, gay, bi, and trans pride series, part 6

Gender & sexuality in czarist Russia:: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
page
Email the editor
SearchBy Leslie Feinberg
Lenin's Bolshevik Party abolished the czarist anti-gay law andlegalized abortion less than eight weeks after the October 1917
Revolution. The Soviet leadership under Stalin retreated from thoserevolutionary positions by re-criminalizing homosexuality in 1933-34
and abortion in 1936.
Neither of these actions reflects the policies or psychologies ofindividuals, but of deep economic changes going on in Soviet society
and their impact on the family. The question of same-sex love andthe role of women in what became the Soviet Union has a long andcomplex past that can't be examined in isolation from the classstruggle as a whole.
Much of the scrutiny of this particular aspect of history has been byresearchers and academics who are hostile to the Russian
Revolution and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics it forged. Anticommunism not only taints their work, in too many cases thediscrediting of socialist revolution is the actual foundation of theiranalysis.
Working-class communist intellectuals--particularly those from theformer socialist-bloc countries--who examine the question ofsexuality, gender and sex in this vast region within the context of theclass struggle, without glossing over any of the weaknesses or
mistakes of the revolution, will make a vital contribution to thesocialist movement.
As ancient as humanity
As with every other inhabited land mass on the planet, the extended
region that was to become the Soviet Union seems to haveencompassed same-sex love and gender/sex variance during earlytimes. Sexual variance is found not just in the history of one
nationality or one class.
British archeologist Timothy Taylor identified what he believed wasevidence of what today is called transgender, as well as women
warriors, in pre-class Iron Age graves in southern Russia. "I think I
have identified females who moved into a male sphere as well as
men who cross-dressed," he wrote. ("She-Men," British Daily
Telegraph, Feb. 13, 1995)
Historian Dan Healy stated in his book "Homosexual Desire in
Revolutionary Russia" that: "The popular, everyday (bytovoe) sexual

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Workers World July 8, 2004: Gender & sexuality in czarist Russia

patterns and practices of the mass of Russians were marked bypagan survivals (orgies, nonreproductive sex acts), which Russian
Orthodoxy, with its incomparably weak institutions and priesthood,
had been incapable of eradicating."
Healy explained, "Rural and lower-class Russians possessed anarray of terms to describe individuals who appeared or behaved likemembers of the opposite sex. They associated this gender
marginality with hermaphroditism observed in domesticated animals,
linking social qualities with the familiar phenomenon of physicalsexual indeterminacy."
For example, Healy noted that "The lexicographer Vladimir Dal, whogathered his material between the 1830s and 1850s in central
Russia, found that the manly woman was known as muzhlanka,
muzhlatka, borodulia, suparen, and razmuzhiche. Dal reported that
his informants defined these women as 'resembling a man in theirappearance, movements, voice, et cetera,' or 'by structure, by bodyformation'; they might even approach the condition of a'hermaphrodite-woman' (germafrodit-zhena).
"The lexicographer found an analogous vocabulary describing thefeminine male. In addition, Dal reported that the verb devulitsia wasused of men who 'luxuriate, take women's habits, manners.'"
None of the words used to describe "manly" females were insults;
some of the terms for feminine males were.
The stamp of feudalism on sexuality
In an essay about Russia and same-sex love, Simon Karlinsky
observed, "There is a considerable body of evidence that prior to theWesternizing reforms of Peter the Great (at the beginning of the 18th
century) male homosexuality was widespread and tolerated in all
strata of Russian society. This is attested by foreign travelers andalso by the sermons and denunciations by Russian Orthodox
churchmen of the 16th and 17th centuries who repeatedly
complained about the prevalence of homosexuality." ("Hidden fromHistory," NAL Books: 1989)
Sexuality between men took place within every economic class inimperial Russia--even the tsar, Peter "the Great," was said to"dabble in bisexuality on occasion." (Karlinksy)
Of course, men of all classes who had sex with other men might still
have believed that what they were doing was "sinful."
And the sex that took place between men in the owning classes andlaborers, termed "gentlemen's mischief," cannot be characterized asconsensual sex, even when physical violence was not directly
involved as coercion. Some 52 million human beings, enslaved as
serfs in czarist Russia, had no rights as far as the landowners wereconcerned.
Serfdom was formally abolished in 1861 as part of the Great
Reforms under Alexander II. But the peasantry, the preponderant
class in czarist Russia, still lived under the boot heel of patriarchal

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Workers World July 8, 2004: Gender & sexuality in czarist Russia

semi-feudalism.
Codifying state repression
Revolutionary ferment in Western Europe in the second half of the
18th century, which brought the bourgeoisie to power in France andelsewhere, also brought challenges to the absolute monarchy in
Russia. Other Western influence, however, had brought repressive
laws in its wake earlier in the century. German military advisers toPeter the Great had drafted a Military Legal Code in 1706, based ona Swedish military edict, that penalized consensual sex between
males. The punishment was burning at the stake.
This law was broadened in the Military Code of 1716. The legislationof 1706 and 1716 applied to soldiers on active duty.
"Criminalization of male homosexual behavior for the whole ofRussian society came with the promulgation of a new Legal Codedrafted in 1832," Karlinsky wrote, "during the reign of the most brutalof the Romanovs, Nicholas I. This code did not retain the militarylegislation of Peter the Great, but was instead patterned on thecriminal codes that existed at the time in various German
principalities, especially that of Wurtemberg, which it copied."
But industrialization in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s--and theurbanization it brought with it--set swift economic changes in motion.
As large numbers of peasants--mostly men, but some women, too-left their villages and farms to come to the cities in search of paying
jobs, the old feudal social structure of the family, sexuality andgender/sex expression they brought with them was transformed, as
well.
Next: Capitalism creates same-sex subcultures; 1917 revolution
seeks to liberate them.

Reprinted from the July 8, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World July 15, 2004: Roots of Russian 'homosexual subculture'

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Roots of Russian 'homosexualsubculture'

Supportanti-war,
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news:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 7
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchRevolutions against feudalism and capitalism in Russia illuminatedthe nexus of the battles for the liberation of sexuality, particularly
same-sex love, the abolition of sex and gender restrictions, and theemancipation of women.
These seemingly divergent struggles were up against institutionalizedcommon obstacles. The economic unit for both peasants and workers
was the oppressive patriarchal family, whether feudal or capitalist.
The super-structure of law, religion, politics and education functioned
to justify the inequality of a class-divided economic base. And thiseconomic and social injustice was enforced by the state machinery ofrepression.
Russian capitalism created an exploited economic class that was up
against these common enemies at every turn and was forced to takeon the Amazonian task of battling class rule, its ideology and its
state.
Of course, women as a whole were easily visible in pre-revolutionary
Russian society; they were not a "closeted" population. But it took
the growth of capitalist industrialization to create a homosexual"subculture" in Russia.
As early as the 1870s, historian Dan Healey describes that "as
Russian cities expanded and commerce and industry grew, a new,'homosexual' identity appeared alongside more traditional relations."(Russian Queen)
Forensic doctors and others referred to these men as "tetki." Theword literally means "auntie," Healey explains, but it can betranslated as "queen." Tetka was a patronizing word used for any
woman older than the speaker.
"The 'little homosexual world' (gomoseksual'nyi mirok) became afeature of Russia's largest cities," Healey says. (Homosexual Desire)
The abolition of feudal serfdom in 1861 and the demand for wage
labor created by industrialization drew large numbers of peasants to
the growing cities in search of paid work. It was this centrifugal forceof capitalism in Russia that centralized an urban industrial class in
the 1880s and 1890s, in which a homosexual subculture took root.
Healey writes that, as this subculture in large cities like St.

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Workers World July 15, 2004: Roots of Russian 'homosexual subculture'Petersburg and Moscow began to grow in size and complexity at theend of the 19th century, "It developed its own geographies ofsexualized streetscapes, its rituals of contact and socialization, its
signals and gestures, and its own fraternal language. In these rituals,
gestures and language, the subculture elaborated roles forparticipants, often based on the principles of the market in male sex."(Homosexual Desire)At the same time, capitalist market relations stamped their own
trademark on sexual relations. "This pattern of relations marked adistinct break with older, patriarchal forms of male sexuality, forencounters took place beyond the patron-client nexus of thehousehold or workshop," Healey continues. "Now a sexualmarketplace evolved, with a new hierarchy of values and a new
symbolic order." (Homosexual Desire)"Indeed, capitalists were now taking the Russian tetka and his friends
seriously, running bathhouses, bars and 'balls of woman haters' thatcatered discreetly to this clientele." (Russian Queen)
Healey adds, "'Female homosexuals' (as Russian psychiatrists
tended to call certain women who had sex with women) appeared in
more scattered locations, often off the public stage, in the 1890s."("Homosexual Desire")
The weight of the patriarchal family
Women bore the brunt of the burden of the patriarchal family
structure in feudal Russia.
"Russian peasant society ... replicated the structure of thehierarchical patriarchal state," observes Christine D. Worobec.
"Women and children found themselves subordinated to husbands
and fathers just as peasants as a whole were subordinated to thetsar, the supreme father." (Late-Imperial)
The medieval family economic structure was a heavy yoke aroundthe necks of all those who were not wealthy, landowning males.
Author William M. Mandel wrote: "Although the serfs were freed in
1861, they remained dependent upon and ruled by their former
owners in precisely the fashion of the Black population of theAmerican South after Emancipation." (Soviet Women)
These oppressive conditions generated resistance. In a mass trial of
50 peasants (Narodniks) in 1877, 15 were women. Mandel describes
them as populists who "believed the solution to Russia's problems lay
in that country's traditional peasant communes--freed, however, oflandlord exploitation."
He quotes Sophia Bardina, a 22-year-old defendant, who spoke
eloquently from the docket about the need to abolish the patriarchal
class structure of the family. She told the court, in words laden withsarcasm, "Nor do I know whether the family is undermined by thatsocial order which forces a woman to leave her family and turn to thefactory where she and her children are inevitably corrupted, thatorder which compels a woman to become a prostitute because of her

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Workers World July 15, 2004: Roots of Russian 'homosexual subculture'poverty and which even sanctions prostitution as a legitimate andnecessary phenomenon in every well-ordered state; or whether thefamily is undermined by us who are striving to eradicate this misery,
which is the principal cause of all social calamities, including thedestruction of the family." (Soviet Women)
Mandel recalled that the Russian writer Maxim Gorky was beaten
almost to death by Cossacks in a rural village after he tried to save awoman who was being dragged naked behind a horse because she
was accused of the "crime" of adultery.
"That practice did not exist in town," Mandel concludes.
Next: Shaking the branches, not the trunk

Reprinted from the July 15, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Workers World July 22, 2004: Capitalism shakes the branches

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 8

Capitalism shakes the branches:: Donate now ::By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticleAs city life and capitalist industrialization were shaking up family andsexual relations for Russian male workers, women also felt theirimpact.

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SearchHistorian Dan Healy wrote, "Same-sex relations between women intsarist and early Soviet Russia reflected the general transformation of
women's roles and opportunities. For increasing numbers of women,
the ties of the patriarchal village were loosening and breaking, andas with migrant men in the city, links to family ... were not always
sufficient to maintain traditional forms of surveillance, including themonitoring of sexual behavior." ("Homosexual Desire")
While capitalism shook the branches of this rooted patriarchal
system, it left the trunk intact.
Russian women were still weighed down with the burden of
patriarchal family relations that served the class interests of thesemi-feudal, semi-imperialist state.
Laura Engelstein writes, "Imperial Russian law established a systemof power within the family at least as autocratic as the one governing
the operation of the state: the husband wielded absolute authority
over the wife, and the father entirely dominated the children. Women
could not leave their households or undertake paid employment
without the formal permission of father or husband, who controlled
their access to the necessary official papers. No law protected
women against physical abuse short of severe bodily injury.
"No formal grounds existed for legal separation; divorce, for which
adultery constituted one of the few legitimate reasons, could beobtained only after elaborate and humiliating (or duplicitous)
procedures; annulment was a rare and arduous attainment. No oneof any age, male or female, could marry without the permission ofparents or other appropriate authorities. By ancient custom, women
had the legal right to maintain their own property after marriage, butthey suffered severe disadvantages when it came to inheriting family
wealth." ("Fin-de-Siècle Russia")
Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Bolshevik leader and author of the prerevolutionary pamphlet "The Woman Worker," described company
housing at the Thornton Broadcloth Mill, which, like much of Russianindustry, was foreign-owned. Workers lived in "a huge building withan endless number of rooms, the partitions not up to the ceiling. ...

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Workers World July 22, 2004: Capitalism shakes the branches

The din was ear-splitting. The walls were green with damp. There
were two families in each of the rooms, which were not large. ...
They dried their laundry in the room, and it was so stifling the oillamps sputtered. ... Dormitory rooms were terribly crowded. ... The
working day was incredibly long (12-14 hours at the textile mills). We
saw some of the women workers lying on the cots in exhaustion,
their faces in their pillows." ("Soviet Women")
Urban living also left its mark on the lives of male workers. "The
rapid expansion of Russia's industrial base was accomplished bylarge numbers of male workers living in cities where there wasneither space nor money for the replication of peasant marriage andfamily patterns," Healey wrote. "In tsarist Moscow, working men in
the sexually active younger age groups outnumbered women, andthey were crowded together in accommodations precluding any
possibility of starting families or of bringing a wife and children fromthe village to join them." ("Homosexual Desire")
As peasants were pulled towards the vortex of urbanization in searchof jobs, "A significant proportion of these newcomers stayed only
temporarily or seasonally; many left wives and families behind in thevillage," Healey notes. "Others settled and became the basis of anurban proletariat in St. Peters burg, Moscow, and a handful of othercenters. Urban workers' hous ing was crow ded. A huge proportion
lived in barracks, flophouses, or shared rooms and even shared
beds; a significant percentage lived in employers' households andworkshops.
"Men found opportunities for sexual expression with each other in
Russia's industrializing centers. As they exploited these new
possibilities, they transformed Russian masculinity's traditional
patterns of mutual male eros." ("Homosexual Desire")
That same-sex Eros--including, in some instances, lesbian love--wasexpres sed eloquently in the literature and arts produced in the late
19th century by the radicalized intelligentsia that was funded andflourished in the battle of the rising bourgeoisie and their imperialist
backers against feudalism.
This articulation of the love that was finally speaking out in its own
name flowered after the easing of censorship of books andperiodicals following the 1905 Revolution against Tsar Nicholas II.
Two currents in women's struggle
The emancipation of women and the overall struggle for sexualliberation are closely tied, in particular because sexual subjugation in
general is historically a key weapon of patriarchal domination.
That connection was visible in the late 19th century as revolutionary
activists established collective living spaces. These politicalrevolutionaries, writes Mandel, "established communes in the largest
cities that were, particularly for women, places of refuge for runaways
from the patriarchalism of smaller towns or family estates."
Mandel describes this collective living and the gender expression thatwas its hallmark in his own words, perhaps limited by his own

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Workers World July 22, 2004: Capitalism shakes the branches

concepts: "The members of the communes shared money, food, andpossessions. The women particularly expressed their contempt forexisting society by violating its rules of dress. They wore their hairstraight, their clothing severe and comfortable, glasses wheneverthey needed them, and particularly violated convention by smoking. A
unisex effect was striven for, not in the wearing of trousers, which
was unthinkable, but in the abandonment of everything that made forfemininity and for regarding women as sex objects." ("Soviet
Women")
Between 1905 and 1917, two clear currents emerged in Russia thatvied for leadership in the women's movement. One was socialist,
seeking nothing less than the complete liberation of all workers andpeasants from class domination. The other was a feminist groupingthat was more middle- and upper-class in its composition andpolitical orientation. It focused its struggle on the right to vote--animportant bourgeois democratic demand.
In December 1908, for example, the feminists organized a Russiawide congress in which more than 1,000 delegates took part. Only
45 working women were present and not one single woman from thepeasantry--the class that represented Russia's vast majority oflaborers.
The revolutionary women's current looked very different. In 1913, theBolsheviks organized an important first celebration in Russia of International Women's Day. Their organizing was in sharp distinction to a
January congress on women's education convened by liberal
intellectuals to which only a few women workers had been invited.
The Bolsheviks knew that in the repressive political climate of thatyear, the police would not issue a permit for a demonstration. So
they secured the Grain Exchange for a "learned symposium." On the
day of the event, March 8, the federal police--who were present at all
meetings and could end any gathering at a whim--filled the first two
rows in the hall.
The speakers at the Bolshevik-organized event were all women-working women. One of the leading voices at the meeting was a 25year-old weaver who had been a member of her union executive
board for six years. The weaver described the class composition andmood of the event: "No matter how poor the working women were,
on 'their day,' the first holiday of women in Russia, they put on thevery best they had, and the packed hall looked like a meadow inMay from the brightness of the colors. ... [The police] didn't succeedin spoiling our holiday, although every speaker had to get her mostprivate thoughts across to the audience as though breaking throughthe alert silence of the first rows." ("Soviet Women")
The outbreak of the inter-imperialist World War I in 1914 illuminatedthe bourgeois political foundation of those who identified with thefeminist current. According to Richard Stites, a researcher inDenmark, "The feminists were rhapsodic about the great possibilities
of serving the [Russian] fatherland and, in return, gathering political
dividends for themselves. They showed no subtlety in connecting
their 'sacrifices' to eventual payment in the coin of women's

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Workers World July 22, 2004: Capitalism shakes the branches

suffrage." ("Soviet Women")
Stites notes it was not well-to-do movement women who did most of
the sacrificing during WWI. It was the women and men of thelaboring classes who sacrificed.
And women workers paid with their sweat in toil, too. The percentageof women workers in factories had reached 30 percent of the total
when the war broke out.
By 1917, as the imperialist war brought hunger and want, death anddisability, thousands of women in the St. Petersburg needle trade
walked out on strike, marching through the streets demanding"peace, bread and land." Male workers joined them, swelling theranks of protest to 90,000.
That strike broke out on March 8--International Women's Day--and it
was the first shot of the anti-capitalist Russian Revolution.
Capitalism's historical task
Capitalism in Russia, like feudalism, relied on the patriarchal family
structures as economic units. The rule of capital accumulation
created its own super-structure of law, religion, politics and education
to justify the inequality of its economic base. And it enforced thiseconomic and social injustice with brutal state repression.
World War I--an outgrowth of capitalism's drive to expand its
relentless search for profits beyond its own border--was also having
a profound impact on patriarchal family relations. The war uprooted
millions of peasants and workers in Russia and elsewhere, disrupting
planting and harvesting, production and family reproduction.
This clash of imperialist titans over who would steal the land, labor
and resources of colonized peoples only profited the imperial victors.
The war was slaughtering tens of millions of laborers and oppressedpeoples, and exacerbating the super-exploitation and suffering ofpeoples caught in the grip of colonialism.
Capitalism, in relation to feudalism, was a progressive force in that it
was a superior economic system--a qualitative leap in human
productivity. Capitalism eradicated much of the medievalism of feudal
autocracy with its need for science and technological advance.
Capitalism socialized the artisan's individual tools, forging them into
massive means of production. It galvanized a working class.
But the social relationship of capital--of exploiter and exploited--is abrutal one for workers and oppressed peoples.
And capitalism in Russia was too weak and too subordinated to theexisting imperialist countries to even fulfill its bourgeois democratic
promises to the masses. The brief liberal capitalist regime ushered inby the February 1917 Revolution solved none of their problems. It
couldn't get out of the war that was killing the workers and peasantsbecause the ruling class had imperial ambitions. It couldn't distributethe land to the peasants. And it couldn't meet the most elementarydemands of the workers. Thus, the Bolshevik slogan of "Bread, land

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Workers World July 22, 2004: Capitalism shakes the branches

and peace" won the masses over to the need for a second
revolution.
And this revolution in October 1917 created a workers' state thatbegan the work of uprooting the entire trunk of ruling-class economic
structures. It was no accident that one of the first acts of the
Bolshevik government was to abolish the tsarist anti-gay and antiwoman laws.
Next: Bolshevik Revolution advances women's and gay rights.
Sources:
Laura Engelstein: "The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search forModernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia." Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1992.
Healey, Dan. "Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The
Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent." Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Healey, Dan. "The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How theSoviet Closet Was Born." Russian Masculinities in History andCulture. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Mandel, William M. "Soviet Women." Garden City: Anchor Books,
1975.
Worobec, Christine D. "Masculinity in Late-Imperial Russian PeasantSociety." Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York:
Palgrave, 2002.

Reprinted from the July 22, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Workers World July 29, 2004: Naysayers pooh-pooh Bolshevik gains

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Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series part 9

Naysayers pooh-pooh Bolshevik gains:: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
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By Leslie Feinberg
Simon Karlinsky, a Berkeley professor of Russian literature anddrama, pooh-poohs the decriminalization of same-sex love by theyoung Russian workers' state in October 1917. "The revolutions of1905 and of February 1917," he writes, "which brought
unprecedented new freedom of expression for Russian gay andlesbian writers, are all too often conflated in Western minds with theBolshevik-led October Revolution, routinely credited with the sexualliberation achieved by the two earlier revolutions." ("Gay Literature")

SearchKarlinsky offers details about the public articulation of same-sex lovein Russia's literary Golden Age in the late 19th century and its Silver
Age in the early 20th century. He focuses in particular on theflowering of what today would be called "gay" and "lesbian" literature
between 1905 and 1917.
The most famous, of course, was the novel "Wings" by Mikhail
Kuzmin (1872-1936) that swept the imagina tion of the malehomosexual population because it was the first "gay" novel in
European literature to end happily.
Between 1905 and 1910, the publication of Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's
novel "Thirty-three Freaks" and her collection of stories "The TragicZoo" also electrified the public in general and "lesbians" in particular.
The celebrated writer Nikolai Kliuev, leader of the "peasant poets"-named for their class origin and for the theme of their writing--was
also openly "gay."
Using quotation marks around the words "lesbian" and "gay" is areminder that modern identities are relative and not precisely
adaptable to other historical periods, regions, nationalities andclasses. Russians have used different con cepts to describe samesex attraction, like "blue" or "pink," or "people of the moonlight"--thetitle of a book by Vasily Rozanov in 1913.
From all this, Karlinsky concludes--and so do other anti-communist
historians--that the revolution should have stopped in February 1917.
"Constantly sabotaged by the monarchists on the right and the
Bolsheviks on the left, the regime managed to promote human rights
and freedoms on a scale not experienced in Russia before or since.
That was when women and minorities were given full civil andpolitical rights, including the vote. Freedom of religion, speech, press,
labor unions, and strikes became a reality, the prominent feminist

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Workers World July 29, 2004: Naysayers pooh-pooh Bolshevik gains

Sophia Panina was given a cabinet-level post, and all vestiges ofcensorship were abolished."
Karlinsky concludes, "The seizure of power by Lenin and Trotsky in
October 1917 was hailed by many then (and is still often regarded)
as an enhancement of the rights gained by the revolutions of 1905
and February 1917. But as far as rights (including gay rights) andpersonal freedoms are concerned, the October Revo lution was
actually a reversal and a negation of the two earlier revolutions
rather than their continuation."Is that true?
Those who wax eloquent about the bourgeois democracy that briefly
flourished in 1905 and again in 1917 focus on the political freedoms
incorporated in the laws of that time. But they omit that, while
political debate emerged and strikes may have become legal,
millions of bellies were still growling for bread. Backs were bowed bydawn-to-dusk toil in fields and factories. Women were drag ged by
the hair to their patriarchal family roles. Young men and women,
looking for same-sex love, lived invisible lives, ended up being
marketed for someone else's profits or forced to pay extortionists
from their own pockets. Jews were forced to fight or to flee from
pogroms.
Even after the February revolution, all this continued to be
exacerbated by Russia's participation in the war, whose killing fields
were drenched with the blood of millions of Russian and German
laborers.
The February 1917 Provisional Gov ernment, headed by Kerensky,
was hoisted to political power by a ground swell of workers andpeasants who yearned to throw off the yoke of class exploi tation byrich landowners and factory bosses.
They hungered for bread, land and peace. But the Provisional
Government was tied to Russia's weak capitalist class. They wouldn't
give up the territorial claims that kept Russia in the war. They weren't
for expropriating the bosses. They couldn't even carry out land
reform.
All that required another revolution--one that suppressed thelandlords and capitalists. It came in October, under the leadership ofthe Bolsheviks.
The communist revolution had to carry out the tasks that thecapitalists and their government could not complete.
In December 1917, only weeks after seizing state power, theBolsheviks abolished the tsarist anti-gay law, legalized abortion,
provided maternity leave, lifted the onerous restrictions on divorce,and legally recognized children born outside of marriage.
This act of expunging the super-structure of egregious laws was of apolitical character. It demonstrated the revolutionary direction andgoals of the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership.

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Workers World July 29, 2004: Naysayers pooh-pooh Bolshevik gains

However, these tsarist laws had been a codification of the inequalitythat was institutionalized in the semi-feudal, semi-imperial classrelationships in the economy and in society. So the revolutionary
work of transforming the social structure had just begun. And thatwork was not unimpeded. It was carried out under fire from invading
imperialist powers on 14 fronts.
Next: 'People of the moonlight' in the dawn of revolution

Reprinted from the July 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Workers World Aug. 5, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi, trans pride series, part 10

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 10:: Donate now ::'People of the moonlight' in the dawnof revolution
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchThe Bolshevik Party did not merely scrap anti-homosexual tsarist
laws. Sexologist Wilhelm Reich, in "The Sexual Revolution,"
described the intent of the Bolsheviks' political position. They felt it
was necessary to tear down the walls that divided homosexuals-also known in Russia as "people of the moonlight"--from the rest ofsociety.
The revolutionaries tried to examine sexuality and gender as they did
all social and economic relations--through a scientific lens. Reich
explained that the Bolsheviks believed same-sex love harmed noone and that it was wrong to punish anyone because of theirsexuality.
And as Lenin and his party won over segments of the middle classes
to the goals of the socialist revolution, the young workers' state drewstrong support from prominent homosexuals. Russian literary
historian Simon Karlinsky, no friend to socialist revolution, admits
that, "With remarkable unanimity, all male gay and bisexual writers
welcomed the October takeover." That included Mikhail Kuzmin,
author of "Wings," and Nikolai Kliusev, considered the unofficial poetlaureate of the Russian peasantry.
Historian Dan Healey puts this accomplishment in a larger historicalcontext. "Soviet Russia was by far the most significant power since
the French Revolution to decriminalize male same-sex relations,while Britain and Weimar Germany continued to prosecutehomosexuals. Soviet health authorities courted the left-leaning sex
reform movement headed by Berlin sexologist and homosexual rights
campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld.
"Biologists and doctors chiefly sponsored by the Commissariat of
Health began to investigate homosexuality as a scientific and medical
phenomenon, often from sympathetic perspectives that were incomparative terms markedly advanced."
The weight of material suffering during those years was unbearable.
By early 1918, after nearly four years of devastating imperialist war,
the urban food ration was four ounces of bread a day--and nothingelse. ("Soviet Women")
During the years of "war communism"--the civil war of 1918 to 1921-when the workers' state was surrounded and under siege, internally

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Workers World Aug. 5, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi, trans pride series, part 10

and externally, there is little record of any "gay life."
The revolution had occurred in the weakest link of the capitalist
chain. Russia was semi-feudal and profoundly under-developed
technologically, making the task of raising production to meet theneeds of all more onerous. And the workers' state was an island in asea of raging imperialism, determined to engulf the first successful
socialist revolution.
New Economic Policy
In order to rebuild the productive apparatus, Lenin called for a partial
and temporary return to a market economy in 1921 with the adoptionof the New Economic Policy. His arguments for the NEP included
frank warnings of the dangers inherent in reintroducing capitalist
relations in a planned economy.
Healey has produced valuable accounts on this period. "Surprisingly,
despite the seven-year hiatus of war, revolution, and civil war that
concluded in 1921," he writes, "much of the male homosexual
underworld that existed before 1914 reconstituted itself in the earlyyears of the New Economic Policy. Street cruising and maleprostitution returned to Moscow and Petrograd, with the same toilets,parks, and boulevards providing arenas for the market in both paid
and unpaid sex between men." ("Russian Queen")
He emphasizes that the homosexual male "subculture" under tsarism
had relied in part on privately owned commercial spaces likebathhouses and restaurants. These small-scale capitalist enterprises
were closed down by the reorganization of a planned economy,
which impacted on patterns of the "commercialization" of same-sex
relations.
"Despite homosexuals' increasing difficulty under Soviet rule incontrolling private spaces," Healey adds, "they occasionally managed
to use domestic or other semiprivate venues (halls, cabarets) togather. ... The relative openness of homosexual entertainments
tapered off rapidly after the civil war, but a few sources hint at theirmore discreet continuation. Many of the best records of gatherings
come from the Petrograd-Leningrad subculture, where a tradition of
popular private homosexual assemblies was well established."
During the NEP, he documents, "Antinoi (Antinous), a private arts
circle devoted to the appreciation of 'male beauty' in prose, verse,
drama, and music, functioned in Moscow during the early 1920s,
staging readings of consciously homosexual poetry, recitals of musicby 'our own' composers, and even an all-male ballet. The groupmade plans to publish an anthology of homosexual verse fromancient to modern times, an attempt to construct an ennobling past."
However, the group seemed to have disbanded after finding it
difficult to rent meeting space or publicize its events.
"But it would be misleading to claim that Soviet policies alone 'drove
people into the toilets,'" Healey concludes. "Marginal public spaces
were well-established sexualized territories, geographic expressionsof a lively urban male homosexual subculture. After 1917, male

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Workers World Aug. 5, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi, trans pride series, part 10

homosexuals and their male sexual partners continued resorting to
public lavatories and other civic amenities like parks and boulevards
because they were spaces where participants could recognize andmeet each other according to familiar rituals."
The position of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s was very clear. They
opposed the economic exploitation of women, men and children
represented by prostitution, but they were not for penalizing theprostitutes. And they did not believe that sexuality was a matter forstate intervention.
Next: 1920s: Scientific, not utopian

Reprinted from the Aug. 5, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
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Workers World Aug. 12, 2004: Soviet Union in 1920s

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63
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 11

Soviet Union in 1920s: Scientific, not utopian
By Leslie Feinberg
During the 1920s, in the first decade of the Russian Revolution, signs that the struggle to build socialism could makeenormous social gains in sexual freedom--even in a huge mostly agricultural country barely freed from feudalism, thenravaged by imperialist war and torn asunder by civil war--were apparent.
The Russian Revolution breathed new life into the international sexual reform movement, the German Homosexual
Emancipation Movement, and the revolutionary struggle as a whole in Germany and around the world.
It was a historic breakthrough when the Soviet Criminal Code was established in 1922 and amended in 1926, andhomosexuality was not included as an offense. The code also applied to other republics, including the Ukrainian
Republics. Only sex with youths under the age of 16, male and female prostitution and pandering were listed. Soviet
law did not criminalize the person being prostituted, but those who exploited them.
For example, author Dan Healey states, "The revolutionary regime repeatedly declared that women who sold theirbodies were victims of economic exploitation, not to be criminalized, and campaigns to discourage them from taking
up sex work were launched." The growth of prostitution had of course been spurred by the chaos and dislocation ofpeople accompanying war.
Historian Laura Engelstein summarizes, "Soviet sexologists in the 1920s participated in the international movement forsexual reform and criminologists deplored the use of penal sanctions to censor private sexual conduct." ("Soviet
Policy")In 1923, the Soviet minister of health traveled to the German Institute for Sex ual Science and reportedly expressed
there his pride that his government had abolished the tsarist penalties against same-sex love. He stated that "nounhappy consequences of any kind whatsoever have resulted from the elimination of the offending paragraph, nor has
the wish that the penalty in question be reintroduced been raised in any quarter."
Also in 1923, Dr. Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Soviet Hygiene, published a pamphlet titled "TheSexual Revolution in Russia." It stated, "Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle: it declares theabsolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, as long as nobody is injured, and no one's
interests are encroached upon."
And the pamphlet spelled this out clearly, "Concerning homosexuality, sod omy, and various other forms of sexual
gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality--Soviet legislation treatsthese the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse."
In Germany, the vicious Prussian Paragraph 175 was the law of the land in 1923. That same year in the U.S., whereanti-"sodomy" laws aimed to padlock closet doors, the FBI had labeled anarchist Emma Goldman "most dangerous
woman in America" because of her vocal support for gay rights and other forms of social equality.
(gaysouthafrica.org)
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Workers World Aug. 12, 2004: Soviet Union in 1920s

In Britain the "Buggery" Act of 1533 had proscribed death by hanging--the death penalty not formally removed until
1861. But the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalized any form for male homosexual expression that
offended a jury--"gross indecency"--with up to two years with or without hard labor. Oscar Wilde, a feminine
homosexual, was convicted under this law in 1895. It took 82 more years to repeal this repressive measure.
(lawyerscollective.org)
Ups and downs
On Jan. 15, 1921, a raid took place in Petrograd that may have been sparked by official fears of a large private
gathering of soldiers and sailors. It turned out those gathered were carrying out a wedding ceremony.
Some 95 soldiers, sailors and civilians were arrested in the only such raid known during that period on a party of malehomo sexuals and cross-dressers in Petrograd.
Healey explains, "A lone Justice Commissariat lawyer argued that this raid was justified despite the decriminalizationof sodomy, for public displays of 'homosexual tastes' endangered suggestible personalities. He proposed prosecuting
such overt demonstrations of these tastes ... ."When the Bolsheviks struck down the tsarist anti-gay laws, that political act challenged the prejudices that were deeply
embedded from centuries of class rule. But it could not change everyone's attitudes in the population overnight. Fromthat standpoint, however, Healey's findings are very significant: No such charges based on cross-dressing or public
displays of homosexuality have come to light. "Few other jurists advocated such a criminalizing approach, and mostexplained the absence of a sodomy ban as a feature of the sexual revolution." ("Russian Queen")
The eminent psychiatrist V.M. Bekh terev wrote about those arrested as "sexual deviants." It's worth recalling that hebegan his career of professor of psychiatry at the Academy of Military Medicine under the tsar--the same military that
had adopted legislation in 1706 and 1716 mandating the death penalty as punishment for male same-sex love between
soldiers.
While feminine males were generally not as socially accepted as masculine females, Healey notes, "Soviet sources of
the 1920s continue to mention the use of female nicknames and occasional indulgence in cross-dressing, althoughthese practices were evidently reserved for private events and spaces."
The great Russian novel "Wings," by Mikhail Kuzmin, about same-sex love bet ween men, was re-published andbrought out in Berlin in 1923 by a literary house owned by the Soviet government. (Simon Karlinsky's essay in"Hidden from History")
Modern anti-communist historians have denounced the early Soviet workers' state based on reports that the Bolsheviks
used charges that male clerics were having sex with boy children during public trials of church officials.
While not underestimating the impact of political backwardness about same-sex relations in the trials of clerics fromthe church hierarchy, more study must be done to find out how much of these measures resulted from outrage at sexual
abuse--much like the outrage over exposures of the rapes of boy and girl children in the modern Catholic Church
scandal.
More thorough primary research about these trials is needed. Any attempt to gloss over instances of backwardness only
sets back the struggle to build socialism in the long run. However, simplistic, anti-communist arguments do far greater
damage.
'Survivals of primitive custom'
While the October 1917 Revolution in Russia--the heart of the tsarist oppressor nation--eradicated the laws against
homosexuality, Soviet governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where homosexuality was reportedly
widespread, did enact laws against some forms of same-sex expression in the 1920s.

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Workers World Aug. 12, 2004: Soviet Union in 1920s

In 1928 the People's Commissariat of Justice of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic replied to a requestfrom Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humani tarian Committee in Germany, which wrote to ask the state ofhomosexuals in the Soviet Union.
The response stated in part that "pederasty"--sexual abuse of boy children by adult men--was punished "[i]n particular
republics where pederasty is especially common." ("Sexual Desire")
The Bolshevik's struggle against sexual exploitation of children is a matter of public record. However, there is also
backwardness in this attitude towards the Republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus that cannot be examined outsideof the context of the "national question" and the centuries of entrenched "Great Russian" chauvanism towards theseformerly oppressed nationalities.
These vast new republics of the Soviet Union had different customs, languages, and economies than Russia had--anddiverse attitudes towards the sexes, gender expression and sexuality. Some of these societies, closer to the legacy of
their communal pasts, appeared to retain more widespread acceptance of same-sex love and trans expression, even
where class divisions had formed.
Historian Laura Engelstein writes that in the early 1900s in tsarist Russia, jurist V.D. Nabokov had noted that laws ofhomosexuality "had changed over time and still varied across cultural traditions; there was no single, absolute standard
common even to the Christian world upon which to base consistent legal norms."
She concludes that "Nabokov must have been aware of the testimony of judges from the Muslim areas of the Russian
empire, who explained the impossibility of enforcing the [tsarist] antisodomy laws among peoples who did notdisapprove of homosexual behavior." ("Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia")
Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, the early Bolsheviks unlocked the cell door of the tsarist "prison house ofnations" by forming a voluntary Soviet Union of Russia with the formerly oppressed nations that had been coerced
under tsarist rule. Lenin steeled his party to support the right of self-determination, including the right to separate from
Russia, of nations that had been forcibly held in bondage by the imperial state. At the same time, the Bolsheviks
organized unity and class solidarity of the workers and peasants in the oppressed and oppressing nations to fight thepropertied classes that exploited their labor.
Even the seizure of state power and the setting up a government that defended the right of self-determination,
however, did not end racism, national chauvinism or anti-Semitism among "Great Russians" with a single blow. The
effort to eradicate every vestige of national oppression and the attitudes it engendered was a process, and an unevenone.
And there had been as yet no thorough historical materialist view of sexuality. The painstaking task of examining
questions of society and culture in order to weed out bigotry and superstition that had resulted from centuries ofruling-class ideology was severely impeded by the relentless imperialist onslaught.
The Soviet Union had no Homosexual Emancipation Movement like the one that had arisen in Germany and had
gathered and archived vast cross-cultural, cross-historical information about the sexes, gender expression andsexuality.
Sexual exploitation
Laws were enacted against sodomy and the keeping of "bachi"--cross-dressed, feminine boy dancers kept as
prostitutes--in the Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan in 1923, Uzbekistan in 1926 and Turkmen istan in 1927.
The 1928 Uzbek Soviet Socialist Repub lic criminal code, for example, grouped eight laws against male same-sex
relations with others adopted against "survivals of primitive custom."The role of Russian national chauvinism and backward attitudes towards same-sex love and what today would becalled "transgender" needs to be thoroughly examined. The greatest contributions, of course, will be made by
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Workers World Aug. 12, 2004: Soviet Union in 1920s

revolutionary researchers from those nationalities, who can disentangle historical forms of gender expression andsexuality in their historical context--both ancient and enduring--from forms of commercial exploitation that arose withthe development of class relations.
The struggle against sexual exploitation was an important focus of these Soviet laws.
Healey gives the most thoughtful account of this aspect of the laws' intent. "Just as revolutionary jurists had rejected
the criminalization of female prostitutes in the Russian republic, in Uzbek and Turkmen law the male prostitutehimself was not banned, but virtually every other aspect of the masculine sex trade was prohibited." ("Desire")
Healey elaborates, "The men who kept youthful male prostitutes were regarded by Bolshevik legal drafters as classaliens, capitalists making deals with families to maintain male children and youths, 'educating' their charges, andexploiting them sexually while providing public entertainment. In their first Soviet criminal code of 1927, Bolshevik
jurists in the Turkmen SSR adopted similar but less elaborate language, primarily directed against those who
committed offenses involving bachi who were minors."
And, "In Uzbekistan, the sexual harassment of men was made a crime, in language that mirrored the Russian republic's
pathbreaking 1923 statute protecting women from the same offense."
Next: Soviet 1920s: Lesbians, transgenders and transsexuals
Reprinted from the Aug. 12, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper

This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Aug. 18, 2004: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals

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SearchRights for lesbians, transgenders,transsexuals
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 12
By Leslie Feinberg
p class="first">According to historian Dan Healey, "Unlike their malecounterparts, Russian women who had erotic relations with members of theirown sex had less access to the public sphere and so were less able toconstruct for themselves a coherent subculture with the attributes of the malehomosexual world. This is not to suggest that no female homosexualsubculture existed in revolutionary Russia."
Healey has made a great contribution towards digging up some of
the records of the lives of lesbians, masculine females andtranssexual men in revolutionary Russia during the 1920s. Much ofthis research can be found in his book "Sexual Desire in
Revolutionary Russia." (Univer sity of Chicago Press, 2001)
He offers this caveat: "Adequate sources about this love between
lower-class women have yet to emerge, and its character must be
judged through the distortions of a single ubiquitous occupation,
prostitution."In the business of prostitution during the capitalist era, "same-sex
relations could be sheltered and even tolerated, particularly inlicensed brothels, and the freedom (or opportunity) to express samesex love in this environment was evidently sought by some womenas prostitutes and as clients." Brothels, he writes, "constituted asocial sphere that undoubtedly sheltered some same-sex
relationships," but "this harsh environment offered sex workers rather
limited prospects for agency and self-expression."
But the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution both abolished licensed brothels
and took over privately owned hotels and other businesses. This had
an impact on prostitution. "The abolition of licensed brothels," Healey
says, "turned prostitution into a very unstable and dangerous
livelihood for female sex workers."
During the 1920s, "The housing shortage and the decline in private
control over sheltered urban spaces appeared to drive illicit
heterosexual sex into the streets, railway stations and carriages,
restaurants, bathhouses, and taxicabs.
"Russian historians have argued that more urban women and moredeclassed women from the former elite supposedly turned to casualor occasional heterosexual prostitution in the 1920s as urban

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Workers World Aug. 18, 2004: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals

unemployment hit them hardest."
The Bolsheviks tried to abolish sexual exploitation, but they did notprosecute the women. "The revolutionary regime repeatedly declaredthat women who sold their bodies were victims of economic
exploitation, not to be criminalized, and campaigns to discouragethem from taking up sex work were launched."
However, ending the economic need that drove people into
prostitution required raising the living standard for all. The constantimperialist sabotage of the Soviet economy from within and without,and the devastation that was the legacy of the world war, made thatessential economic task difficult.
Demanded right to same-sex marriage
In both Europe and the U.S. at that time, very rigid social codes
enforced what was deemed appropriate behavior and dress for males
and females. In Soviet Russia, however, "masculine" females were
finding a prominent place in the early revolutionary society. They
included many "out lesbians." Masculine, cross-dressing females
could be found in academic and cultural institutions as well as in the
military--even high up in the Red Army command.
This acceptance sheds light on the vulgar anti-communist typecastingof Soviet women as so "mannish" that they might really be males indrag.
"If there was any sign of a lesbian subculture moving into the public
realm of urban streetscapes, the workplace, or halls of study,"
Healey elaborates, "it was in the 'almost masculine' styles cultivatedby some women entering public life. Medical and lay sources confirm
that, at least in towns, the woman regarded as 'masculine' was a
fixture of early Soviet society."
Healey says: "Their image as energetic and enterprising participantsin the new society's political, economic and military life earned theso-called 'active' (that is, imitative of 'masculine' traits) female
homosexual admiration from some sexological authorities."
In an earlier essay Healey notes, "In a 1929 discussion about'transvestites' and the 'intermediate sex' conducted by the Expert
Medi cal Council of the Com mis sariat of Health, women of the'masculinized type' (cross-dressing army commanders, for example)
were considered with fascination and indulgence."
And some of these cross-dressing females demanded the right tosame-sex marriage. ("Russian Queen")
But while there was an "out" social current of masculine females who
were identified with same-sex love, other female-bodied individuals
sought to live as males.
Was the motivation of all these female-bodied individuals to express
their masculinity and/or cross-dress driven solely by sexuality? Inother words, in today's U.S. terms, were they all "lesbians"? Or
would some of them be more accurately identified as "transgender"

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Workers World Aug. 18, 2004: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals

or "transsexual"?
Transgender and transsexual lives emerge
The Bolsheviks tried to replace mysticism and idealism with ascientific approach to all social and economic questions, including
gender expression and sexuality and what in modern terms would becalled "transsexuality.""Soviet psychiatry of the 1920s took an interest in women who
convincingly occupied a male gender identity," Healey states, "and inaccordance with the evolving sexological categories of European
science, labeled them 'female homosexuals' or occasionally,'transvestites.'"Healey adds that "The reasons why some women decided to acquire
manhood by changing their identity documents, assuming malevariants of their names, and altering their dress, manners, andhairstyle, are hard to reconstruct."
One of the most famous of these individuals was the soldier Evgenii
Federovich, born Evgeniia. While posted with a regiment, Federovich
married a woman postal employee in a provincial town in 1922.
When Federovich's birth sex was discovered, local authorities
charged the marriage was a "crime against nature." But theCommissariat of Justice found that the marriage was "legal, because
concluded by mutual consent."
Evgenii Federovich wrote using concepts of the period in which
homosexuality and intermediate sex were intertwined. Federovich
argued for acceptance of "same sex love ... as a particular variation"of human sexuality and stated with conviction that once individuals of
the "intermediate sex" were "no longer oppressed and smothered bytheir own lack of consciousness and by petty-bourgeois disrespect,"their lives would become "socially worthwhile."
Demand for sex reassignment
As the Bolsheviks tried to examine social questions in a scientificlight, individuals came forward to press social demands on thescientific community. That included the request for medical sex
reassignment.
A 23-year-old female-bodied respondent to a 1923 sex survey ofstudents at Sverdlov University in Moscow wrote, "I want to be aman, I impatiently await scientific discoveries of castration andgrafting of male organs (glands)." The student expres sed optimismthat science would one day be able to achieve this desired goal.
Healey explains that this request was not exceptional or unusual.
However, "The medical techniques of gender reassignment in Soviet
Russia in the 1920s were as rudimentary and broadly unsuccessful
as those then available in the West."
Despite this limitation, individuals began seeking out "clinicalpsychiatrists and biologists engaged in the emergent study of themechanisms of sex differentiation" to request sex reassignment.

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Workers World Aug. 18, 2004: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals'Passing' in the countryside?
It's not clear from the following description by Healey whether he istalking about the pre- or post-revolutionary epochs, or both. "Outsideof Russia's great cities, some 'female homosexuals' turned to more
traditional methods of appropriating the privileges of masculinity,
effecting self-transformations with clothing and ges ture that allowed
them to 'pass' as men."
Healey ascribes sexuality as a primary reason why some would live
as another sex. "Some used their acquired masculinity as a pathway
to sexual relations with other women," he writes. "These totaltransformations typified the survival of the 'passing woman' in
Russian culture."
Sexuality may, or may not, have been a driving factor for someindividuals, but it doesn't explain the entire phenomenon. Many ofthese individuals must certainly have lived without a sexual partner
for fear of being "outed." Therefore, going "underground" with an
identity would not have easily facilitated finding sexual partners.
And it was no secret in any village or rural area that there were jobs-and greater anonymity--in the cities.
At the time, of course, homosexuality was inextricably linked to the"intermediate sex." However, in actuality, a feminine homosexual
female would have found it difficult to live as a male. Comfort withmas culine gender expression and body type certainly also played an
important role.
It would also be of great interest to know whether these individuals
were "in the closet" or whether some found social acceptance-unspoken or not--among the peasantry. While peasants had been
chained to the land under medieval conditions in the tsarist era andforce-fed superstition and prejudice as a class, they were keenobservers of variance in nature. And Healey himself notes that thesexual patterns and practices of the mass of Russians was marked
by pagan survivals. The pre-class beliefs about the sexes, gender
expression and sexuality still held some sway amongst the peasantry.
Healey found the research of a lexicographer who, gathering material
in the 1830s and 1850s in central Russia, discovered numerous
terms for masculine females, and none of them were insults. And theresearcher found that female-bodied peasants were defined as"resembling a man in their appearance, movements, voice, etcetera," "by structure, by body formation," or because they might"even approach the condition of a 'hermaphrodite-woman.'"This fact from Healey's study of the peasantry is very illuminating:"Rural and lower-class Russians possessed an array of terms todescribe individuals who appeared or behaved like members of the
opposite sex. They associated this gender marginality withhermaphroditism observed in domesticated animals, linking social
qualities with the familiar phenomenon of physical sexualindeterminacy."

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Workers World Aug. 18, 2004: Rights for lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals

Next: 1930s--Political reversals

Reprinted from the Aug. 18, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Workers World Aug. 26, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13

1930s USSR: Survival with setbacks:: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchBy Leslie Feinberg
Male same-sex love was re-criminalized in the Soviet Union in 1933.
In 1936, measures were introduced banning abortion and making
divorce more difficult to obtain. (Abortion for medical reasons wasrestored in 1955, and free abortion on demand was re-legalized in1968.)
Upon seizing state power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks had struck
down the tsarist laws against homosexuality and abortion and eased
restrictions on divorce. Why, then, this political reversal after morethan a decade and a half?
For diehard anti-communists, no explanation of why setbacks
occurred in the Soviet Union will convince them that in its more thanseven decades of development there was still much worth defending
from the point of view of the working class.
But for those who study past revolutions in order to strengthen themodern movement to achieve socialism--a system that will flourish ina planned world economy--a much more thorough examination ofthis period is essential, and no glib answers should be accepted as
good coin.
The seizure of state power by the numerically small Russian working
class, allied with the vast peasantry, did not establish socialism. A
revolution is not a single act. It is a process.
The state based on this workers' revolution liberated turf on which tobuild a planned economy which, to be socialist, had to build theeconomic base of the impoverished, war-torn country, in order tobreathe life into the demands of the revolution: peace, bread andland.
Russia was still semi-feudal and semi-colonial--the weakest link in
the capitalist chain. Technologically under-developed.
This was the material reality.
People "make their own history," Karl Marx wrote, "but they do notmake it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstanceschosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past." ("The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte")
Cleaning the Augean stable

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Workers World Aug. 26, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13

If all the Bolsheviks had to do was get rid of the dominant ideas ofthe old exploiting class, ideas which had permeated the population oflaborers in the fields and the factories--national chauvinism, antiSemitism, misogyny, anti-gay and anti-trans attitudes, superstition-the task of cleaning this Augean stable would have been formidable.
But in order to change social ideas, it was necessary to change thematerial conditions--to raise the productive level in the workers' state.
And world imperialism, howling like ravenous wolves at its borders,
did everything possible to hamper that historic effort.
Lenin wrote concretely about this in 1919 in relation to women'sliberation. "Not a single democratic party in the world, not even themost advanced bourgeois republic, had done in decades so much asa hundredth part of what we did in our very first year in power. We
actually razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in aposition of inequality, restricting divorce and surrounding it with
disgusting formalities, denying recognition to children born out of
wedlock, enforcing a search for their fathers, etc., laws numerous
survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism,
are to be found in all civilized countries."
However, he concluded, "Notwith standing all the liberating laws thathave been passed, woman continues to be a domestic slave,
because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades
her, chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes herlabor on barbar ously unproductive, petty, nerve-wracking, stultifying
and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women ... will begin
only when a mass struggle is started against this petty domestic
economy, or rather when it is transformed on a mass scale intolarge-scale socialist economy." ("A Great Beginning," Collected
Works, vol. 29, pp. 408-34)
Herculean tasks
The "dead hand of the past" handed the Russian Revolution three
enormous responsibilities. "The new, infant workers' state, the Unionof Soviet Socialist Repub lics," wrote Workers World Party founder
Sam Marcy, "had thrust upon it three Herculean tasks utterly
unprecedented in the entire history of the class struggle.
"It had the duty and obligation to reorganize on a revolutionary basis
the left wing of the social democratic movement, put it on acommunist basis, and lay the foundation for a new and revolutionary
international. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were thus obligated from thestart not only to give revolutionary leadership at home but, in a way,
to become the general staff of the world revolution which seemedvisible on the horizon, especially in Western Europe and later in theEast, in China.
"Its second task, no less urgent and intimately connected with it, wasfor the new workers' state to defend itself against the most barbaric
assaults by the united front of the imperialists, from Vladivostok to
Murmansk.
"And thirdly, it had to begin to lay socialist economic foundations andhttp://www.workers.org/ww/2004/lgbtpride130826.php[2/3/2011 3:48:43 PM]

Workers World Aug. 26, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13

raise the living standards of the workers and peasants who had
passed through a most horrible period of destruction, civil war andfamine." ("The Signi fi cance of Euro-communism," WW, July 11,
1977)
Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik seizure of power, was no utopian.
He had no illusions that the capitalist class in Russia, or the enraged
imperialists who surrounded the young workers' state, would be won
over by "moral suasion" to stop attacking the revolution. In fact, heand other revolutionary leaders did not think the workers' state could
survive long without the support of workers and oppressed peoples'around the world rising up in a groundswell of revolution in order toprovide material support--globalizing socialism.
In Lenin's report to the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party on
March 18, 1919, on behalf of the Central Committee, he said that "itis inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside of theimperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must
triumph in the end." (Collected Works, vol. 29, p. 153)
A year earlier, on April 23, 1918, Lenin had explained to the Moscow
Soviet, "We are a revolutionary working-class contingent that has
advanced to the forefront, not because we are better than otherworkers, not because the Russian proletariat is superior to theworking class of other countries, but solely because we were one of
the most backward countries in the world. We shall achieve final
victory only when we succeed at last in conclusively smashinginternational imperialism, which relies on the tremendous strength of
its equipment and discipline.
"But we shall achieve victory only together with all the workers ofother countries of the whole world. ... Our backwardness has put us
in the forefront, and we shall perish unless we are capable of holding
out until we receive powerful support from workers who have risen in
revolt in other countries." (Ibid, vol. 27, p. 233)
Something had to give, Marcy stressed. While the result was not thedismantling of the workers' state and its economy, as the imperialists
had hoped, some of the social gains of the early revolution were set
back. The most left-wing militants in the Bolshevik Party, if they had
not died on the front lines defending the revolution, were being
pushed back in an internal struggle. And the population was
exhausted by imperialist war and intervention, famine and want.
Revolution bent, but did not break
Any study of how and why important political rights that had been
won for same-sex love and women were reversed in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s has to take into consideration the effects that
encirclement, economic embargo and isolation, sabotage, civil war
and other weapons of unrelenting attack by world capitalism had on
this vast but economically underdeveloped country.
Stripping historical reality from these steps backward does historic
injustice to the tens of millions of workers and peasants of manynationalities, sexes, genders and sexualities who built the revolution

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Workers World Aug. 26, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13

with their sweat and defended it against the onslaught of world
imperialism with their blood.
And it merely fans the flames of anti-communism, serving to derail
the forward motion of the planet's working class and oppressedpeoples towards genuine liberation.
An honest look at the measures taken against male homosexuality
and abortion in the 1930s Soviet Union must ask: What effect did thelow level of the productive apparatus and the high level of scarcity
and deprivation have on the political goals of the Bolshevik Party?
How did this frustrate the early goals of achieving the liberation of
women and greater freedom of sexuality from state regulation?
With the danger of a new and even more destructive imperialist war
gathering like a storm against the workers' state, creating animperative need to quickly build a military force capable of defending
the Soviet population, how did the industrialization and rapid
collectivization of the peasantry in the 1930s produce a sea change
in the spheres of women's societal role, and official attitudes towards
gender expression and sexuality?
And perhaps most importantly, did these political reversals mean, as
some said, that the Soviet Union ceased to be a workers' state thatdeserved the support of laboring and oppressed peoples around theworld as it fought for its very life against world imperialism?
Next: Political setbacks for gays and women, and the 'seismic gendershift'

Reprinted from the Aug. 26, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Workers World Sept. 16, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series, part 14

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Lesbian, bay, bi and trans pride series part 14:: Donate now ::1930s Soviet Union: 'Seismic gendershift'
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
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SearchThe political backslide that resulted in the re-criminalization of malehomosexuality and banning of abortion in the 1930s in the Soviet
Union did not take place in an economic, military or social void. The
point of examining these conditions is not to them away" but to serve
as a tool for today's movement for socialism to strengthen its
understanding of revolutionary process.
Women's and same-sex rights had been politically catapulted aheadby the 1917 Russian Revolution. But when the isolated,
impoverished and embattled workers' state could not raise the living
standards of the population quickly enough to provide economic andsocial freedom from the old patriarchal, heterosexual nuclear familybequeathed by class society, then both women's rights and samesex rights suffered setbacks.
The broadest outlines of this economic crisis are apparent in theefforts to liberate Soviet women.
William H. Mandel, in his book "Soviet Women," noted that after the
seizure of state power in October 1917, "In a matter of months, the
new government legislated more than the upper-class feminists had
ever asked for: suffrage of course, divorce and civil marriage laws
which made marriage a voluntary alliance, elimination of distinctions
between legitimate and illegitimate children, employment rights equal
to those of men, equal pay for equal work, universal paid latepregnancy and early-maternity leave. Overnight, the status of womenin Russia became far and away the world's most advanced."
But the revolution had been made in a single city--Petrograd--whichat that time was the capital, and then spread to Moscow. The country
was left technologically underdeveloped as a result of feudalism andthe greed of foreign imperialism. And its working class was tiny.
The cities were isolated and famished. By early 1918, with German
troops still occupying much of the grain-producing west, workers in
the cities were surviving on starvation rations: nothing but four
ounces a day of bread.
A combined force of the imperialists, forces loyal to the ousted
Provisional Government and the monarchists tried to launch a
counter-revolution.

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Workers World Sept. 16, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series, part 14

Trying to roll aside obstacles
Writing in 1971, Soviet scholar Helen Emelianova commented about
the early workers' state, "An acute contradiction had arisen: theparticipation of female workers in the socialist revolution wasconsiderable, but immediately after the revolution their numbers were
extremely few among members of the party, in the soviets, in factorycommittees, in trade unions." (Quoted in "Soviet Women.")
Mandel stressed, "Peasant women (four fifths of the total female
population), housewives (a majority among urban women), andhouseworkers (an extremely large group) had hardly been involved atall" in the revolution.
To address the critical need to reach out to masses of women, theBolsheviks organized the First Russia-Wide Congress of Women
Workers and Peasants in November 1918. No men were present at
the meetings.
About 300 to 500 women were expected; 1,147 attended.
One delegate described the goal of the congress's work: "to explain
their rights to the millions of women in even the most remote cornersof the country, and call upon them to take an active part in building a
new life."
One of the resolutions of the congress stressed that "housework is aheavy burden on female workers and peasants and ... negating theeight-hour workday for them, interferes with their becoming
revolutionaries."
The delegates decided to organize special groups for women. And
the communists urged their party to set up a women's department.
Although some currents of men in the party reportedly argued that
this would "divide the working class" along sex lines, they did not
predominate. The Bolshevik Party Women's Department, known as
Zhenotdel, was established in 1919, even as civil war ravaged theworkers' state.
The following year, in 1920, 60,000 women were elected to organize
women. At Lenin's insistence, this work was paid so that they could
be full-time organizers. However, even with small stipends, these
women could reach only about 2 percent of the female population,
mostly urban.
During the 1920s, Zhenotdel worked to liberate women fromexhausting individual housework, and led attempts to createsocialized childcare, large-scale dining halls and public laundries.
Zhenotdel's rationale was that "socializing this work would bolster the
new socialist economy by replacing the inefficiencies of individual
women's household labor with economies of scale and would also
raise productivity by shifting millions of new workers into Soviet
industries," according to historian Thomas T. Shrand, in his essay"Socialism in One Gender."
Women would not only be socially "equal" to men, they would break

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Workers World Sept. 16, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series, part 14

out of stultifying isolation, become productive members of society inthe fullest sense of the word, and thereby contribute their skills andinsights to the revolutionary process for social progress.
Dead hand of history, iron fist of imperialism
These Bolsheviks were not utopian socialists, however. "TheZhenotdel approach to liberating women involved integrating theminto a super-productive socialist economy that would be createdfollowing a global (or at least, continental) revolution," Shrand notes.
"In this scenario, Russia would have access to the rest of Europe's
technology and resources, which would allow it to modernize its
economy and to invest in the infrastructure of nurseries, daycare
centers, and other institutions that would make women's
emancipation possible."
The defeat of revolutions in Germany and elsewhere dashed thesehopes. The fists of capital were clenched and striking the workers'
state externally and internally. The country was surrounded andinvaded by imperialist armies soon after it first liberated territory to
begin building socialism.
And as a result, the dead hand of the past weighed heavily on therevolution.
The population was hungry and exhausted by war. The Bolshevik
Party had lost many of its most revolutionary elements in the struggle
to defend the workers' state. Lenin, the leader of the October 1917
Revolution and architect of the early years of socialist construction,
had died in 1924 from complications resulting from an assassination
attempt. It took many years before the benefits of a planned
economy reached the people.
Between 1924 and 1934, the phenomenon of "postcard" divorces
grew. Under the new marriage laws, a spouse could simply informthe authorities that the marriage had dissolved. Mandel wrote that, "ifthe other party was not physically present, a form postcard would
break the news. The major intent of the law was to free millions of
women who had been married off against their will under traditional
patriarchal procedures. It proved catastrophically counterproductive.
Women lost the protection against abandonment with a child orchildren that they had formerly had." Material need, not love, was still
the most important impetus for many marriages.
The technologically underdeveloped workers' state continued to be
wracked by internal class warfare. During the New Economic Policyin the early 1920s, when the market in agricultural goods wasrestored after the war, rich peasants--kulaks--withheld food from thecities in order to drive up prices. This virtual starving of the city
workers spurred on the decision by the leadership to collectivize
agriculture.
Industrialization and its impact on women
The task was still clear and compelling--the workers' state had tobuild up industry and hike productivity to meet the needs of its vast
population. But a constant state of capitalist siege hampered that

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Workers World Sept. 16, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series, part 14

urgent objective.
"Rather than retreating from the goal of socialism," Shrand states,"Stalin and his followers decided that the USSR would have to create
the economic prerequisites for it in isolation, while surrounded byhostile capitalist powers. From this perspective, the campaign forindustrialization and modernization became, among other things, adesperate struggle to arm the Soviet Union for the defense ofsocialism."
The first five-year plan, ratified by the party in 1928, set a goal of a
250-percent growth in overall industrial development and a 330percent increase in heavy industry. All industry and services were
nationalized by the workers' state, thousands of new factories andindustrial centers were constructed throughout the Soviet Union andproductivity was planned by quotas. However, the investment
required to build heavy industry created painful shortages in
consumer goods and services.
The five-year plan also attempted to rapidly convert small-scalepeasant agriculture into large-scale state collective farms. Resistancefrom the peasantry--particularly the wealthy kulaks--created adisastrous and widespread famine.
The threat facing the workers' state--from within and from without-was enormous.
Shrand offers his insight into the enormous impact that this swift
industrialization had on Soviet women. "Between the years of 1929
and 1941, Soviet society experienced what might be described as agender-quake, a seismic shift in sexual divisions of labor producedby the largest national peacetime expansion of women's employment
in world history.
"As a result of this rapid industrialization campaign, over 10 million
women began wage-labor in the industrial and service sectors of theSoviet economy," he continued."The Soviet government actively
recruited women for industrial employment, created affirmative action
programs to train female technicians and skilled workers, and greatly
expanded childcare and cafeteria facilities to free working womenfrom some of their domestic obligations."
Steps forward and backward
The continuing threats from imperialism required a mobilization to
defend the Soviet Union, and that demanded development of heavy
industry and military growth.
The marshaling of so much investment of the USSR's resources inthese branches of manufacturing, Shrand stressed, "came at theexpense of the light industries, which not only employed many
women, but also produced the consumer goods that might havelightened their domestic labor.
"The new priorities also restricted the construction of cafeterias,
laundries, daycare centers, and other institutions necessary for
Bolshevik-style women's emancipation."

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Workers World Sept. 16, 2004: Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series, part 14

In 1930 Zhenotdel, weakened since the late 1920s, had beenformally abolished.
"The Soviet government actually began developing a Five-Year Plan
for Women's Labor, but the effort to mobilize women was notaccompanied by a commitment to freeing them from domestic labor,"
Shrand concluded. "Although social services did expand somewhat
during the 1930s, they did so within limits, and only to the extent
necessary to recruit a certain number of women workers."
The formal liberation of peasants from serfdom in 1861, the creationof urban industrial centers and the dislocation and carnage of the firstimperialist war had shaken the medieval patriarchal family structure.
Now this rapid industrialization was also having a profound impact on
the sexes.
And it was in this period that official attitudes towards gender
expression and same-sex love were also shifting.
Next: Gender, sexuality and national defense: Dual nature of 1930s
Soviet state

Reprinted from the Sept. 16, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
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Workers World Sept. 30, 2004: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR

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Progress and regression

Sex and gender in 1930s USSR:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 15

Email thisarticleBy Leslie Feinberg

Printable
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SearchThe question of when male homosexuality was re-criminalized in theSoviet Union is easy to determine: 1933-1934. Why such a
regressive move occurred is, while politically indefensible, notinexplicable.
The czarist anti-homosexual legislation had been removed by therevolutionary Bolshevik leaders immediately after the October 1917
Revolution. When the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic first
codified its own laws in 1922 and 1926, no anti-gay laws were
written.
As late as 1929, the top medical body in the Soviet Union--theExpert Medical Council of the Commissariat of Health--held aconference to take up questions of homosexuality, cross-dressing,transsexuality and intersexuality (referred to as "hermaphroditism").
These deliberations did not demonstrate a uniform view, nor were
they devoid of the prejudices or limitations on understanding of thatera, but they were taken up with genuine scientific concentration.
And the impact of, and respect for, the work of Dr. Magnus
Hirschfeld--a leader of the German Homosexual Emancipation
Movement--was still apparent in the USSR.
Prominent clinical psychiatrist P. B. Gannushkin said that he"constantly encountered" requests for surgical sex change.
Biologist N. K. Kol'tsov asserted, ahead of his time, "Of course, there
is no intermediate sex, but rather an infinite quantity of intermediatesexes."
Some doctors defended cross-dressing females, described as very
masculine, and proposed that they have a right to marry women.
Kol'tsov, showing his confines of consciousness, disputed this, saying
a law should be written to block a cross-dressed female fromwedding a woman.
But historian Dan Healey notes in his book "Sexual Desire in
Revolutionary Russia" that "the minutes record no support fromcolleagues," and Kol'tsov's suggestion didn't find its way into the final
conference resolution.
However, the two-line struggle taking place in the USSR at the time-

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Workers World Sept. 30, 2004: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR-"nature" vs. "nurture"--was visible even during the 1929
deliberations. And this ideological battle would have great bearing on
subsequent official views of homosexuality and transgender.
A strong current of scientists looked favorably on cross-dressing,masculine females believed to be lesbians. Their condition was seen
as biologically based. They were considered strong and loyal to theworkers' state, particularly those in the Red Army.
But they considered feminine, cross-dressing males, presumed to all
be homosexual, a dangerous weakness in the ranks of the military.
And this form of self-expression and sexuality was seen to be a
problem of byt or social life.
This nature vs. nurture debate at the 1929 conference later emerged
more visibly as a two-line struggle that reshaped the direction of thescientific and political approach to questions of same-sex love.
The 1930 Great Soviet Encyclopedia extended strong support to
Hirschfeld's Homosexual Emancipation Movement. "In 1930,
Sereiskii's Great Soviet Ency clopedia article on the same topic
linked the endocrinological hypothesis to a robust endorsement of
Hirschfeld's campaign for homosexual emancipation and for the
integration of the alienated homosexual 'into the new collective,'"
Healey notes.
The encyclopedia entry stressed that criminalizing homosexual men
was an illustration of the cruel and irrational acts of bourgeois jurists.
But an "ethnographic sketch," included by the editors as an appendix
penned by P. Preobrashenskii about "homosexual love" among thepeoples of the Far North--the Chuchki, Koriaki and Kamchadal--andin the Islamic cultures in the Soviet Republics revealed the fault line.
Preobrashenskii argued that the origins of the widespread expressionof same-sex love in these cultures, enjoy ing ancient acceptance,
was not biologically based but "to a significant extent bear a social
character."Historian Laura Engelstein in "Soviet Policy" explains that by thesecond edition of the 1930 encyclopedia, the editors "denounced
homosexuality as a feature of capitalist society, in which, theyasserted, homosexuality was left 'de facto unpenalized.'"
The question is why. In what soil were these changes rooted?
Economic, military pressure cooker
Famine, and military and economic warfare by world capital, wereburning the revolutionary fuel of the population and the left wing of
the Bolshevik Party at a rapid rate in the 1920s. The subsequent
need to build an industrial base with the speed of lightning--at thesacrifice of civilian goods and services for the vast tens of millions-was requisite in order to defend the USSR militarily and lay thefoundation for a rise in the overall living standard.
The industrial component of the first five-year plan--steel andmachinery product ion, coal mines and oil fields--exceeded

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Workers World Sept. 30, 2004: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR

expectations. Begun in 1929, the goals were met in 1932, before theplan's end date. A second plan was set in motion in 1934.
The transportation network grew, beginning to link the vast country,
canals were dug and the Moscow Metro began running in 1935.
This industrial boom and its accomplishments in the planned Soviet
economy shone against the chaos of the Great Depression in thecapitalist countries.
But everything is relative. The USSR, the only workers' state in theworld, was trying to pull itself up out of extreme material
underdevelopment and at the same time advance from semi-feudalsocial relations to ones more advanced than in the capitalist
countries. This would have been a huge task even in times of peace.
But, while the depression in the West gave the USSR a breathing
space for a few years, by 1933 it was clear that the revolutionary
potential of the proletariat in Western Europe had been crushed andthat German imperialism was on the road to military expansion once
again.
By 1938, when Britain signed the Munich Pact with Germany, Italy
and France, it was because the "democratic" imperialists in Europe
were giving Ger many the go-ahead to expand eastward. Another
war was on the horizon. The Soviet Union had to industrialize at
break-neck speed, much of it channeled into military defense of theworkers' state.
In the face of relative scarcity and economic inequality, and an urgent
need for the skills acquired during the czarist era in order to build theeconomic and military infrastructure, more conservative elements
gained ascendancy on the shop floor and in the Bolshevik Party. The
working class was increasingly politically disenfranchised and theworker democracy that Lenin and the left-wing Bolsheviks had tried
to foster--even during war-time conditions--suffered.
The state did not, could not, wither away. In fact, military spending
and social prioritizing took its toll on efforts to build socialism andadvance revolutionary consciousness-building.
In this economic, military and political pressure cooker, official
attitudes shifted, bolstering old prejudices against women andreinforcing ideals of gender expression.
'Masculine professions' movement
Economic underdevelopment and the need to free men for military
defense had spurred the massive recruitment of women into theprocess of rapid industrialization as early as the first five-year plan.
To do so required confronting gender stereotyping of skilled work.
Acquired skills were viewed as socially "masculine."
The temporary reintroduction of some capitalist relations within theplanned economy in 1921--known as the New Economic Policy--wasdesigned to help stimulate the economy. Lenin had warned of therisks inherent in the measure.

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Workers World Sept. 30, 2004: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR

One result of the NEP was the emboldening of male managers andskilled workers who had acquired their trade during the czarist
period. As they regained some shop-floor predominance, they tried toblock women from gaining these skills, defining mechanical ability asa "masculine trait."
However, notes historian Thomas T. Shrand: "As the USSR beganmobilizing for war with Poland and Finland in Sept ember 1939, theparty instructed union, Komsomol and industrial organizations to
support the so-called 'masculine professions' movement, which
aimed to recruit women into fields that had previously been
considered too skilled or physically demanding for women. In
anticipation of a military crisis that would drain off skilled maleworkers, industrial officials began encouraging women to work as
locomotive engineers, engine machinists, open-hearth furnace
workers, and to enter other occupations from which they had
previously been excluded."
But rather than emphasizing the need to employ women as part of
the revolutionary process of liberating them, the official explanation
now was that recruiting women workers would free men to defend
the socialist state.
The military motto used to describe this industrial shift was "workthat strengthens the rear of production, which assures theuninterrupted and precise work of production itself."
The slogan also elevated a tactic to a theory--and one that contained
a theoretical error, at that.
In reality, as important as the front lines of armed defense of theworkers' state were, they were not producing goods and services.
Workers in the industries of the USSR--more than 10 million of them
women--were the front lines of production.
Gender contradiction: old alongside the new
During the Second Five-Year Plan, 1932-1937, an estimated 82
percent of all new workers joining industry was female. The birth rate
was dropping.
On the one hand, old patriarchal "family values" re-emerged against
this backdrop of economic and social upheaval.
During the 1930s, health studies and legislation protecting industrial
laborers focused on the impact specific jobs involving heavy lifting or
tractor driving had on women's reproductive capacities. While thisshows a concern for women workers, similar studies were not doneon the hazards of jobs, no matter how dangerous, on men's
reproductive capabilities.
This trend towards encouraging all women to be mothers reached its
zenith in 1936 when abortion and the sale of contraceptives werebanned. Women received economic incentives and medals forbearing seven or more children.
Pravda criticized "so-called free love" and "all disorderly sex life."

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Workers World Sept. 30, 2004: Sex and gender in 1930s USSR

Femininity was upheld as a virtue. However, Healey noted, womenviewed as masculine or lesbian were not demonized or pathologized.
In political educational campaigns, soldiers were portrayed as
masculine heroes, women as feminine producers and reproducers.
From a class standpoint, the working class as a whole was portrayed
as masculine and the peasantry as feminine.
However, even as old thinking was regenerated, new and profoundsocial changes were breaking like waves.
Healey writes that as women peasants, collective farmers and urban
workers were called up in massive numbers during the 1930s toenter public life and wage labor, "Women in these spheres werecompelled and encouraged to emancipate themselves frompatriarchal fathers and husbands, who were not to stand in the wayof their progress towards careers beyond the home."
But specifically and concretely, how and why did these social,economic and military conditions specifically warp a sector of official
attitude regarding homosexuality, beginning in 1933?
These questions have vital meaning today, because this politicalbacksliding is held up by virtually all anti-communist historians of theperiod as "proof" that socialism is not viable to liberate humansexuality from state regulation.
It's time for the communist movement as a whole to become expert
on these developments and to lay claim to the historical lessons inorder to fortify its own revolutionary analysis.
Next: 1930s struggle--'Can a homosexual be a member of theParty?'

Reprinted from the Sept. 30, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Workers World Oct. 7, 2004: Can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?

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Lesbian, gay, bit and trans pride series part 16:: Donate now ::Can a homosexual be a member of theCommunist Party?
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
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Email the editor
SearchYears before the actual 1933 law recriminalizing male homosexuality
appeared on the books in the Soviet Union, the shift in official
attitude within the ascendant political current was becoming
apparent.
The political error evolved out of how scientists and jurists posed the"nature vs. nurture" debate in regard to homosexuality. But what fed
the ideological problem were the deep prejudices left over from
centuries of unequal and unjust economic relations, some of whichwere revived as the revolution, isolated and embattled, struggled tosurvive.
Furthermore, there were no cross-cultural, cross-historical annals ofancient evidence from which to draw a materialist view of how
variance in human sexuality, gender expression and sexes has beenpresent in all societies and was once accepted.
And, to be fair, the same debate about a biological vs. a social
explanation for homosexuality was taking place on a world scale
among progressive sexologists of that epoch. Some of the leading
activist figures of the German Homosexual Eman cipation Movement
were arguing that homosexuality was a biological anomaly.
While the debate in the Soviet Union may have taken the same form,
however, context is everything in politics.
In Germany, a significant segment of the biological determinist wingof science and medicine would go on to "justify" the fascist state's
extermination of millions of people based on a eugenics argumentthat these "birth defects" should be eradicated.
The opposite happened in the Soviet Union. The revolution brought
increasing tolerance for those whose difference was believed to be a
product of birth chemistry. At the same time, lawmakers andscientists worked to eradicate what they believed was harmful social
conditioning left over from class society.
For example, in October 1917, revolutionary Bolsheviks abolishedthe tsarist anti-homosexual law. The Soviet Criminal Codeestablished in 1922, and amended in 1926, did not include
homosexuality as an offense. This reflected the belief that science,not law, should deal with matters of sexual difference.

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Workers World Oct. 7, 2004: Can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?

Historian Laura Engelstein summarized: "Soviet sexologists in the
1920s participated in the international movement for sexual reformand criminologists deplored the use of penal sanctions to censor
private sexual conduct." ("Sexual History of the Political Left")
But conversely, laws were passed against sodomy and theprostitution of young cross-dressed, feminine boy dan cers in theSoviet republics of Azerbaijan in 1923, Uzbekistan in 1926 and Turk
menistan in 1927. While in part aimed against sexual exploitation,
they were explained as trying to eradicate the prevalence andacceptance of homosexuality and trans expression that were
"survivals of primitive custom." (From "Homosexual Desire" by Dan
Healey)This attitude, steeped in unexamined national chauvinism, wassummed up by P. Preobrazhenski in his appendix to the 1930 Great
Soviet Encyclopedia, where he argued that the origins ofhomosexuality among the peoples of the Far North or the Asian
Republics "bear a social character," not a biological root.
Two-line struggle
The same two-line struggle surfaced in science. It was glaringly
apparent in a 1929 conference of the leading Soviet medical body-the Expert Medical Council of the Commissariat of Health--held todiscuss questions of homosexuality, cross-dressing, transsexuality
and intersexuality.
Historian Dan Healey writes that underlying the 1929 council'sdeliberations "was a sense that the male member of the 'intermediate
sex' was the product of nurture, of conditions of byt [social life,
lifestyle--L.F.] gone wrong. These were deviations that were
evidently preventable (except in a small number of congenital cases).
"Their sense of the female 'transvestite' was more deeply 'biologized'
and intract able: no hormonal injections could apparently restore her
femininity, and indeed, to doctors it appeared that society might haveto adjust to the female 'transvestite' by conceding same-sex
marriage."In the "nature vs. nurture" scientific debate, however, those seeking a
biological explanation for social phenomena were losing theideological battle. Accord ing to Healey, a political struggle opened
up against "biologizing" scientists, charging that to search for thebasis of social ills in individual biology was a form of Menshevik
idealism.
This campaign against "biologizing" was rooted in the economic
needs of the Five Year Plan to rapidly industrialize and raise
agricultural production, Healey explained. "The pragmatic turn inpublic health was signaled by a change of leadership and a shakeup
in the provision of medical care. A reorganization of theCommissariat of Health was ordered by a decree of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party on 13 December 1929, directing
the commissariat to place more emphasis on the needs of industrial
workers and collectivized farmers."

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As a result, for instance, the interdepartmental commission, whichcame out of the 1929 medical conference and had planned to meet
about transgender expres sion, no longer even existed by 1933.
And science increasingly lost its dominion over social questions likehomosexuality, which became more relegated to the realm of thestate.
Gay-baiting class enemies
Extra-legal raids in Moscow and Leningrad in which 130 males werearrested in late summer 1933 were the harbinger of the recriminalization of male homosexuality later that year. The men wereaccused of being "pederasts"--adult males who have sex with boys.
Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time areavailable, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely tolabel homosexuality.
Healey examined what was going on in the Soviet Union in 1932 and1933 that led to these raids and the subsequent law. Large-scaleattempts to collectivize agriculture were met by such resistanceamong the peasants that a mass famine developed in Ukraine andsouthern Russia, which reportedly claimed 3 to 5 million lives.
Millions of peasants were pouring into the cities from the countrysidelooking for work in the factories.
"The flow of new arrivals in the cities 'ruralized' them," Healey
observed, "bringing thousands of new residents who knew little ofurban and industrial ways."
Officials carried out a purge of the Communist Party in December
1932-1933, scrutinizing the ranks, which had seen an influx ofworker and peasant members.
"In 1933, urban male homosexuals would fall within the larger net ofthese trends. In the case of this group, international developments
also significantly contributed to justifications for the decision torecriminalize sodomy."
Massive military conscription campaigns for defense of the Soviet
Union had been underway since 1928. They promoted the role ofsoldiers as hyper-masculine heroes.
Reports of homosexuality in the German fascist leadership had been
made public in 1931 and 1932. The more conservative current in theSoviet party, which had by then assumed the reins of leadership,
gay-baited the fascists, as did the imperialist powers.
On Sept. 15, 1933--shortly after German -Soviet relations weresevered by the rise of Hitler to power--G. G. Iagoda, deputy chief of
the Soviet political police, proposed the stricture against malehomosexuality.
Iagoda reportedly wrote to Joseph Stalin that the legislation was amatter of state security because of the establishment of "networks ofsalons, centers, dens, groups and other organized formations ofpederasts, with the eventual transformation of these organizations

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into outright espionage cells.... Pederast activists, using the castelike
exclusivity of pederastic circles for plainly counterrevolutionary aims,
had politically demoralized various social layers of young men,
including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army
and navy."
Stalin then allegedly forwarded this letter to his Politburo associate L.
Kagano vich, saying that "these scoundrels must receive exemplary
punishment, and a corresponding guiding decree must be introducedin our legislation."
At no point was lesbianism raised. Masculine lesbians in the ranks
and leadership of the military were seen as strong and loyal.
Feminine male homosexuals were viewed as weak anduntrustworthy.
On Jan. 11, 1934, the Ukraine--the second-largest republic in the
USSR--became the first republic to incorporate a statue against
public homosexuality and male prostitution in its penal code. No
minimum sentence was set.
And in 1933 and 1934, a prohibition against male homosexuality
throughout the USSR--which created a 5-year prison penalty--waspassed without public fanfare or explanation. In a study of eight
Moscow trials of males accused of public homosexuality from 1935 to
1941, only one case in 1935 showed awareness of the new law.
'Can a homosexual be a party member?'
The most publicly raised voice of the left-wing opposition to this legal
move was that of a British communist living in Moscow. Harry Whyte,an editorial employee of the Moscow Daily News, challenged Stalinon the decree in a long letter received in May 1934.
"Whyte's long missive opened with a question for Stalin: 'Can ahomosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of theCommunist Party?' The journalist laid out Marxist arguments against
the blanket prohibition of sodomy, which, he claimed, introduced
unwarranted contradictions in Soviet social life by imposing 'sexual
leveling' on a harmless minority and by ignoring science on theissue." ("Homosexual Desire")
Whyte also drew analogies with arbitrary discrimination against
women, national minorities and people of color.
The letter, once received, was promptly archived. Yet it was acontinuation of the history of left communist struggle for a
progressive position.
While publicly ignoring Whyte's letter, Stalin apparently turned to
cultural icon Maxim Gorky. An article by Gorky entitled "Proletarian
Humanism" appeared in both Pravda and Izvestia on May 23, 1934.
In that now oft-cited article, Gorky offered the "first public explanationof the recriminalization of male homosexuality, and it placed thequestion squarely within the terms of the propaganda war between
Fas cism and Communism." ("Homo sexual Desire")

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Gorky maintained that homosexuals were not a social minority thatneeded to be defended in a workers' state--an obvious polemic
against Whyte: "In the land where the proletariat governs
courageously (muzhestvenno; also translated as manfully) andsuccessfully, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on the young, isconsidered a social crime punishable under the law. By contrast, inthe 'cultivated land' of the great philosophers, scholars and musicians[Gorky meant Germany--L.F.], it is practiced freely and with impunity.
There is already a sarcastic saying: 'Destroy homosexuality andfascism will disappear.'" ("Soviet Policy Towards Male
Homosexuality")
Gay-baiting class enemies
In addition to gay-baiting fascists and fascist-baiting homosexuals,
currents of officialdom also used epithets of "effeminacy" and "effete"
homosexuality to label elements of the old ruling classes and to help
build the image of the proletarian society and its soldiers as hypermasculine.
Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko referred to the anti-gay law in
his 1936 speech to the party's Central Executive Committee as aimed
at "the remnants of enemies ... who do not wish to admit that they
are doomed by history to finally concede their place to us."
These charges were also leveled at political opponents. Some,
presumably, were not enemies of the revolution; some were.
For example, Nikolai Kliuev, the unofficial poet laureate of thepeasantry who wrote openly about being a homosexual, was arrested
on Feb. 2, 1934, and charged with counter-revolutionary agitation.
He had earlier refused a demand by Ivan Gronski, chief editor of
Izvestia, to "write normal verses." But his arrest, Healey wrote, was"probably because of the inflammatory invective of his poems
denouncing collectivization."
Certainly the visible social current of the "people of the moonlight" in
Russian history had always come from the upper classes and theintelligentsia--musicians, dancers, literati and others. But the point is
not to untangle the knotted charges of homosexuality andsubversion. The real matter is that it is flat-out wrong to link theissues.
Homosexuality and transgender expression appear in all economic
classes in society. Communists need to be able to stand up against
all forms of discrimination and prejudice in waging the class struggle.
Strengthen the union, don't bust it
A great deal of information about the Stalin period has been lost
today. The Soviet Union was ravaged by World War II, worker
democracy was eroded and a counter-revolution finally overturned
the workers' state in 1991.
But what is clear is that the left-wing leadership of Lenin and the
Bolshevik Party carried out a profound revolution that uprooted
private ownership of social wealth and laid the basis for socialist

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Workers World Oct. 7, 2004: Can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?

construction. It was immediately assailed by the whole capitalist
world. When, after years of imperialist and civil war, which
exacerbated the economic isolation and technological underdevelopment, the revolutionary momentum waned and left-wingleaders were suppressed, what was needed was political renewal,
not counter-revolution.
Every rank-and-file labor militant today who is faced withbureaucratic leadership in their union knows that what's needed is
not to bust up the union but to make it stronger.
The population of the Soviet Union did fight for its existence, andfought hard. More than 20 million gave their lives to defend theworkers' state against the German imperialist invasion in World WarII.
And despite all the problems and weaknesses of the USSR, and theerrors of leaders, on March 17, 1991, some 75 percent of the Soviet
people, representing the 15 republics of the USSR, went to the polls
and voted not to allow the workers' state to be dismantled. The
highest percentage of this vote came from the peoples of Central
Asia and the Caucasus, formerly oppressed under tsarism.
Yet world imperialism and the Russian moneyed class trampled on
this exercise of worker democracy by dismantling the workers' statesoon thereafter. Every error from the Soviet period--including the
backward law against homosexuality--was used as an excuse andcover to overturn the state. But the aim was not liberation. It was tosubject the vast population of the USSR to the exploitation of thecapitalist world market.
Today, the modern struggle for world socialism can be strengthened
through an honest analysis of the problems and weaknesses thatdeveloped in the first successful workers' state, but only if it
thoroughly rejects the anti-communism behind so much of theexisting criticism.
Next: Defeat of fascism and birth of "East Germany."

Reprinted from the Oct. 7, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
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Workers World Oct. 14, 2004: Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 17

Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany:: Donate now ::By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticleWhen it came to turning around prejudices and discrimination against
same-sex love, the newly formed German Democratic Republic had
to clean up the toxic waste dump of centuries of class prejudice.

Printable
page

The GDR faced particularly huge obstacles in carrying out thisonerous task.

Email the editor
SearchThe Nazi state had been defeated in 1945 not in a revolution frombelow but by the advancing Soviet Red Army. The German
population as a whole had been fed 12 years of Nazi propaganda,
including demonizing and dehumanizing cant about homosexual men
and women. After the war, Germany was partitioned by the Allied
powers. In the eastern sector, after four years of Soviet occupation inwhich not only the Nazis but the bourgeois class behind them were
removed from power, the German Democratic Republic wasestablished in 1949 and began to construct a socialist economy.
The mass German Homo sexual Emancipation Move ment had beencrushed during the rise of fascism. Many thousands of gay, lesbian,bisexual and trans activists had perished in the death camps.
The Soviet Union was in the grip of its own political regression
concerning male homosexuality. As the leader of the Communist
International, the Soviet Union's political retreat had an impact on theworld movement and the positions it took on gay rights.
The revolutionary struggles in Germany and Russia were intrinsicallyconnected. The crushing of the November 1918 Revolution inGermany had dealt a blow to the young Soviet workers' state, which
had hoped that class solidarity, material aid and economic
cooperation from a more technologically developed socialist country
would soon be on its way.
The face of counter-revolution
After years of economic crisis and the growth of a large but divided
workers' movement, Hitler's party got the support of the big German
capitalists in 1933 to crush any resistance to their rule. In the violent
repression that followed, aimed first at the Communists and the left
generally, both anti-Semitism and anti-homosexual terror were raised
to heights not seen in Europe since the feudal Inquisition.
Once he became second in command in the Nazi Party, Heinrich
Himmler--chief of the SS stormtroopers as well as the police--on

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Workers World Oct. 14, 2004: Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany

June 17, 1936, created the Federal Security Office for Combating
Abortion and Homosexuality. Himmler had included homosexuality as
one of four illnesses that threatened the existence of Germany. He
vowed: "[L]ike stinging nettles we will rip them out, throw them on aheap, and burn them. Otherwise, without being able to fight it, we'll
see the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world."
Today the pink triangle has become recognized around the world as
the emblem that those labeled homosexual were forced to wear inGerman concentration camps. Some were gay, others were accusedof same-sex fantasies or fell victim to trumped-up charges by
opponents. Estimates of the total number of prisoners forced to wear
the pink triangle on their uniforms in Nazi concentration camps range
from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
German historian Richard Plant, in his now-classic book "The Pink
Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals," estimated thatbetween 50,000 and 63,000 males were convicted of violating
Paragraph 175--the Prussian anti-homosexual law--from 1933 to
1944. More than 25,000 youths were convicted between 1933 and1940. Some 3,976 were between 14 and 18 years old.
Plant, who fled Frankfurt am Main on Feb. 27, 1933--the day theReichstag burned to the ground and several weeks after the arrest of
his Jewish Socialist father--wrote that "from 1935 on, every gay
German man knew that if he was caught he risked being shipped toa concentration camp. There, disease, degradation and almost
certain death awaited him." Those who survived faced castration.
Although Himmler made no known statements railing against
lesbians, Plant added, "Nevertheless, some--albeit very few--German
lesbians were caught in the machinery of the secret police."
He noted that "The major campaign against Germany's homosexuals,
which began after the Roehm purge, lasted until about 1939 or 1940,
when most German men joined the armed forces. Because
Himmler's Gestapo agents had no jurisdiction over the military, itoffered a relatively safe refuge for most homosexuals of military age."
As the German military machine rolled over national boundaries in
Europe, gays in Alsace-Lorraine and Holland--lands expected to
become part of the new Reich--also faced death if captured. All
German laws were applied to the people of Alsace-Lorraine,
including the newly amended Paragraph 175.
However, the anti-homosexual rampage and violent targeting of theGerman Homosexual Emancipation Movement was mainly an internal
campaign aimed at Germans. It was part and parcel of the domestic
counter-revolution that smashed the organization of millions ofcommunists, socialists and progressives, crushing the trade unions
and all vehicles of working-class organization.
German capital, which controlled few colonies, had to take over newmarkets, extract raw materials of new territories and super-exploit avast labor force. Like all its competitors, it had to expand or die. The
German industrialists and financiers thought that the Nazis had both

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Workers World Oct. 14, 2004: Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany

the will and the means to carry out this military expansion: rocket
technology, a strong air force and Panzer tank divisions, and a
military-industrial complex.
But by the end of the war, imperial Germany lay devastated anddefeated, a significant part of its territory under the control of its
mortal enemies, the communists. The workers' state in the east now
had to pick up the pieces and change social relations.
And in the struggle to build new social relations in the workers' state,gays and lesbians made great strides.
Next: Concrete gains of East German lesbians, gays

Reprinted from the Oct. 14, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
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Workers World Oct. 28, 2004:

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 18:: Donate now ::Denazification in socialist Germany
opened door to gay rights
By Leslie Feinberg

Email thisarticlePrintable
page
Email the editor
SearchThree major English-language sources written over the course of adecade and a half offered rich examples of the advances for gays
and lesbians that took place in the German Democratic Republic-"East Germany"--after it was established in 1949.
Canadian historian Jim Steakley wrote the earliest of these accounts,"Gays under Socialism: Male Homosexuality in the German
Democratic Republic." The article, containing material from his sevenmonths of research in the GDR during the 1970s, appeared in the
December 1976-January 1977 issue of The Body Politic.
A noteworthy contribution of Steakley's extensive research was his
initial admonition that each socialist country has local features that it
inherits from its past and its material realities.
He was followed by John Parsons, who made four research trips to
the GDR over a six-year period. Parsons elaborated on the arduous
political task the young workers' state had inherited. In his publishedfindings--a 10-page article entitled "East Germany Faces Its Past: A
New Start for Socialist Sexual Politics" (OUT/LOOK, Summer 1989)-he wrote: "The work of both the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
and the Communist Party was put to an end with the Nazi rise topower. Homosexuals, Communists, Social Democrats, and especiallyJews were all ruthlessly persecuted and murdered.
"The Nazis succeeded, moreover," he continued, "in thoroughly
tearing out the roots of cooperation that had existed among various
people on the issue of sexuality. During the Nazis' 12-year rule, they
reorganized the medical, legal and teaching professions--promoting
confirmed Nazi ideologues, searching out those who were not, andraising a generation on Nazi propaganda. What few threads of theearlier cooperation the Nazis themselves did not destroy, thedevastation of the war and the battle lines drawn in the Cold War
finished off."
Even before the founding of the German Democratic Republic on
Oct. 6, 1949, the United States and Britain were maneuvering to stopsocialist revolution from spreading across Germany.
By the end of World War II, the Soviet Red Army had crushed theNazi invaders and forced them to retreat westward. As the collapsingarmy of German imperialism fled, the Red Army marched into Berlin

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Workers World Oct. 28, 2004:

and the fascists were defeated. But under pressure and threats fromthe U.S. and British, the Soviet Army was forced to pull back.
Nazis: Uprooted vs. replanted
After the defeat of fascism, Germans in the east, with Soviet help,
worked to root out the Nazis and their capitalist collaborators andmobilize the population to rebuild.
Steakley offered an overview of conditions for gays and lesbians--his
particular focus was on gay men--in the period of "Anti-fascist
Democratic Renewal" from 1945 to 1949.
He wrote: "During this period of de-Nazification, the gay scene in theSoviet Occupied Zone was marked by a rapid recovery from the
genocidally homophobic politics of German fascism. Homosexuals
came out of hiding or returned from concentration camps, and gay
bars began to reopen in both the East and the West.
"Overall," he added, "the de-Nazification program carried out in theSoviet Occupied Zone was far more aggressive and thorough thanthose in the Western zones."
In fact, in the West, the occupying forces of imperialism tried to prop
up capitalist rule with massive infusions of financial aid, most fromthe U.S. Marshall Plan, while permitting tens of thousands of Nazi
war criminals to emigrate or to re-enter Bonn's political arena. The
United States and Britain allowed these former Nazis to resume theirplace in West German industry and government because they were
the anti-communist bulwark.
Richard Plant emphasized this point in a June 1990 article in
Outweek, "East German Journal: East German Gay Laws Years
Ahead of West." Plant had been forced to flee Germany on the dayof the infamous 1933 Reichstag fire that Hitler used to consolidate
his power.
After the war, he wrote, "East German leaders tried to indict andconvict as many high-ranking former Nazis as possible.
"The West German government, on the other hand, continued to
employ some notorious Nazis in high positions long after the beloved
Fuehrer's suicide."
The first chancellor of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, who wasapproved by the U.S. occupiers, continued to keep Hans Globke as
his secretary of the chancellery despite protests. Plant explained,"Globke was instrumental in drafting Nazi laws, enacted during the
1930s, which deprived Jews of their citizenship." Even after an East
German court indicted Globke in absentia in 1950, Adenauer would
not budge.
"Neither did Adenauer rescind the tough anti-gay Nazi decrees of
1935, which, for example, declared that a man observed 'glancing
lewdly at another man' could be taken into police custody."
That law, Paragraph 175A, was a Nazi amendment to the 1871
Prussian anti-homosexual Paragraph 175. The amendment allowed

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Workers World Oct. 28, 2004:

the Nazis to criminalize and snare those they accused of evenhomosexual fantasies or intent.
In the East that Nazi amendment--Paragraph 175A--wasimmediately removed from the books. Steakley stressed that in the
GDR: "The immediate benefit for gay people came with the repeal of
Paragraph 175a, the Nazi law which had led to the arrest andimprisonment of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands ofhomosexuals. This law was struck down by the Superior State Courtof Halle in 1948. By contrast, it remained in effect in West Germany
until 1969."
Paragraph 175, however--the Prussian law against malehomosexuality that had long been part of German criminal code-remained on the books in the Soviet Occupied Zone. It made sex
between men punishable by up to four years in jail. The law
remained on the books in West Germany, too.
Picking up the torch
Parsons gave thoughtful attention to the early struggles in the East
to repeal Paragraph 175 itself.
"At the end of the war," he explained, "the earlier difference within
the Communist Party again appeared as a discussion arose about
how to reconstruct the society. Some people argued that thedemocratic reconstruction of the country should include progressive
reforms of the laws and customs regarding sexuality.
"Articles appeared in many newspapers advocating the elimination of
Paragraph 175. In Saxony, which later became a part of East
Germany, the legislature endorsed repeal of the Paragraph."
One communist in particular deserves credit for these efforts: Dr.
Rudolf Klimmer.
As a medical student in Dresden during the Weimar Republic,
Klimmer, a gay man, had traveled to Berlin many times to follow
developments within the homosexual emancipation movement. He
particularly developed an association with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's
Scientific-Human itarian Committee.
Klimmer was a member of the Communist Party. So was thecommittee's secretary and later chairperson, Richard Linsert.
During 12 long years of fascism, Klimmer kept his political views andsexuality under wraps, marrying a lesbian for mutual protection. Afterthe Nazis were defeated, he chose to live in the Soviet Occupied
Zone and joined the Communist Party once again.
Steakley noted, "He launched a one-man campaign which aimed at
repealing all laws against homosexuality, re-establishing Hirschfeld's
Institute for Sexual Science, and agitating with Soviet and local
authorities for the full equality of gay people."
Klimmer, Steakley said, "also embarked upon a career similar to
Hirschfeld's, continuing his medical practice and appearing as anexpert witness in numerous court cases involving homosexuals,

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Workers World Oct. 28, 2004:

arguing at every turn for the repeal of Paragraph 175."
Although his tireless efforts were successful in helping to overturnthe amendment to Paragraph 175, he was not able to repeal the oldlaw itself. Nor was he able to win the establishment of a new Institutefor Sexual Science.
Instead, he was appointed medical director of Dresden's Polyclinic,
where he set up the first Marriage and Sexual Counseling Center of
the Soviet Occupied Zone, which became a forerunner of dozens ofsimilar centers across the GDR.
Cleaning up old cesspool
John Parsons examined the struggle for sexual liberation in amaterial context. He stressed that the efforts of Klimmer and others
proved to be exceptional for two key reasons.
The GDR had to pull itself up out of the ashes of wartime
devastation--hunger, homelessness, dislocation and poverty. The
USSR, unlike the United States, had suffered tremendous destruction
during the war and had no resources to send to Eastern Europe.
Furthermore: "A generation of children had been raised and educatedin Nazi schools. The problems of de-Nazifying the country, of
creating new, democratic educational programs and new legal andmedical professions took center stage.
"The Communist Party turned its attention to mobilizing the
population for the barest of economic needs and towards stabilizing
social life in the most orthodox of all structures."
The second cause, he wrote, "lies with developments in thecommunist movement itself."
The rise of a bureaucratic current in the Soviet leadership and there-establishment of an anti-gay law in the USSR were to have an
impact in East Germany as well. "Stalin's rise ended the Communist
Party's advocacy of sexual reform. The same reversal occurred inGermany, with the growth of the influence of Stalinism throughout
the world communist movement."
As a result, he stated, "Between 1948 and the late 1960s, lesbian
and gay liberation lost any place in broad public discussions."
Steakley concluded that during the period of the AntifascistDemocratic Renewal, "Homosexuals were generally able to return tothe place in German society which they had held before Hitler's rise
to power"--gains that had been made possible in the Weimar
Republic because of the mass German Homosexual Eman cipation
Movement--"but no further."
However, the work to provide jobs, education, housing and healthcare for the East German population as a whole continued to raise
living standards. As material conditions improved, the struggle forsexual emancipation reached new heights.
Next: 1968--Paragraph 175 is abolished in the East, but not in theWest.

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Workers World Oct. 28, 2004:

Reprinted from the Oct. 28, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Nov. 4, 2004: Same-sex rights in East Germany

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Same-sex rights in East Germany

Legal and material progress:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 19

Email thisarticleBy Leslie Feinberg

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Email the editor
SearchAfter World War II, as productivity and social reorganization in theGerman Democratic Republic--"East Germany"--rose to meet theneeds of the population as a whole, the more specific needs ofindividuals and groups within society, including gay men andlesbians, could be more easily addressed.
Canadian researcher Jim Steakley, who published the results ofseven months of research in East Germany in 1976, outlined someof the concrete conditions under which East German workers tried toconstruct a planned economy--socialism.
He paid careful attention to the period between the establishment of
the GDR in 1949 and the construction of the defensive Berlin wall in
1961. "With the formal founding of the GDR in 1949," Healey
explained, "the cold war hostilities between socialism and capitalism
intensified and entered a period of chronic crisis. The West usedevery means at its disposal to destroy the GDR, ranging from
economic sabotage to CIA subversion."
He noted that a calculated "brain drain" lured away some 10 percentof the GDR's population--mostly middle-class professionals--and thata campaign of smuggling across the open border also served tobleed the resources of the workers' state.
"By subsidizing the costs of food, rents, and basic commodities, theGDR held living expenses at their 1945 level (which they continue tohave today)," he wrote at the end of 1976. "Faced with costs five to
10 times higher at home, many West Germans did all of their
shopping in the GDR, particularly in Berlin. Thus the GDR maderelatively slow economic and social advances during this period,
which was closed in 1961 by the construction of the tragicallynecessary wall along the border between the German states."
During the period between 1949 and 1961, he said, the "gay scene"in both Germanys was generally similar. Gays could visit a variety ofclubs on either side of the border. He added, however, that somegays from the GDR felt uncomfortable about their clothing not being
considered as "fashionable," and the price of drinks was steep in theWest.
However, he added, considering that at 17 million the GDR had only

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Workers World Nov. 4, 2004: Same-sex rights in East Germany

about 30 percent of the population of West Germany, "the GDRmatched the West in terms of subcultural institutions such as dancebars, steam baths, access to homophile periodicals, and so on."And, Steakley stressed, "West Germany was scarcely a haven forhomosexuals during these years. Ruled by the Christian-Democratic
Party (the name tells it all), the federal government was adamantly
opposed to law reform which might improve the situation of gay
people; and local authorities were extremely intolerant of the gay
subculture. Police entrapment and raids on bars and baths, unheardof in the GDR, were common in the West."
The published curators' notes from a 1997 Berlin art exhibitcommemorating the 100th anniversary of the German Homosexual
Emancipation Movement stated that the number of convictions ofindividuals accused under the anti-gay statutes in West Germany
was 1,920 in 1950; by 1959, the number soared to as many as
3,530--an all time record.
"Even people not sentenced suffered a great deal," the exhibit
curators pointed out, "as employers and family members found out inthe course of proceedings that they were gay."
Progress, not perfection
The Nazi anti-gay amendment was immediately struck from the lawsof the newly created German Democratic Republic in 1949.
Formally the old Prus sian Paragraph 175 remained on the books in
the GDR. But the activist efforts of Dr. Rudolph Klimmer--a gay
communist and physician--during the 1950s had an impact.
Steakley explained that Klimmer set out to win the support ofprominent people in the GDR for the campaign to rescind Paragraph
175 and win full equality for homosexuals. "His efforts were strongly
backed by the GDR's then Minister of Justice, Hilde Benjamin; sheurged repeal of Paragraph 175 in the country's leading legal journals.
There was (and still is) a high degree of acceptance of homosexuals
within the cultural sector of the GDR," he reported, "but the GDR's
then Minister of Culture, the poet Johannes R. Becher, refused totake a public stand on law reform."
Becher's homosexuality was well known, since West German
reporters had "outed" his relationship with a male construction
worker.
"Klimmer did, however, receive the support of numerous otheragencies and individuals," Steakley said, "including one of the GDR's
most famous writers, Ludwig Renn, a party veteran whose novels
frequently turned on gay themes."
The 1950s and 1960s were defined not by perfection, however, but
by progress.
Backward views about root causes of homosexuality still circulated.
And when Klimmer wrote a 1958 opus to answer this old prejudice,he could not find a publisher in the East. Klimmer had written that

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Workers World Nov. 4, 2004: Same-sex rights in East Germany

only two things differentiate homosexuals from heterosexuals: theobject of sexual attraction and social discrimination.
However, Steakley wrote, "Klimmer's efforts during this period wererewarded by the judicial decision in 1957 to discontinue prosecutions
on the basis of Paragraph 175 except in cases involving assault,
coercion or minors."
Gains in East push West to follow
The year 1961 marked a period of economic change in the GDR thatbrought social change in its wake.
"Beginning in 1961," Steakley continued, "the GDR finally took
measures which had long been delayed: the complete collectivizationof farmlands and the expropriation of privately owned stores andindustries. Since most bars and baths were privately owned andmanaged up to 1961, this had a direct impact upon the urban gay
scene."
However, Steakley found that virtually every city with a population of
more than 50,000 had a gay bar; Dresden and Leipzig each had
four; and Berlin had five and a steam bath. In some cases thesestate-owned clubs were frequented by heterosexual patrons in thedaytime, and gay clientele in the evenings. "Frictions have developed
when a homophobic manager was assigned to a gay bar," heconcluded, "but such managers generally request a transfer after ashort time."
At last, in 1968, the hated Paragraph 175 was removed fromlawbooks after almost a century of struggle since its inception in
1871--but only in the GDR.
Richard Plant, a Jewish gay man forced to flee Germany in 1933,
hailed this progressive move in his 1990 article "East German Gay
Laws--Years Ahead of West."
Plant wrote that "finally in 1968, perhaps spurred on by sexologists,scientists and gay activists, East Germany revoked all penalties
concerning sexual relations between consenting male adults. This
caused consternation for the leaders of other Eastern European
nations. Officials in Prague, Budapest and Bucharest were
bewildered.
"But more troubled were conservative power brokers of West
Germany."
Plant said the legislative move by the GDR pushed West Germany tofollow. "In 1969 the Bonn government began timidly to draw up new
regulations; the legislators, however, were so scared of right-wing
fanatics that another year passed before the rulings resembled thosedrafted in the East."
While the welcome legal move in the GDR did not in and of itself
wipe out centuries of homophobia that lingered as a legacy of classsociety, the Communist Party in the GDR would soon demonstrate
what strides in social progress could be made when the workers'

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Workers World Nov. 4, 2004: Same-sex rights in East Germany

party and the workers' state put energy into the efforts.
Next: Stunning gains for same-sex rights.

Reprinted from the Nov. 4, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Nov. 11, 2004: East Germany in the 1970s

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East Germany in the 1970s

Lesbian & gay movement blossoms:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 20

Email thisarticleBy Leslie Feinberg

Printable
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Email the editor"The legal situation of GDR [East German] gays improved
considerably in 1968 with the elimination of Paragraph 175," historianJim Steakley concluded in his published research. He credited theabolition of the almost century-old Prussian anti-homosexual law to
the pioneering work of Dr. Rudolph Klimmer, a gay communist
physician.

SearchThis move, part of an overhaul of the criminal code, elevated the
GDR to the same progressive level as Hungary, Poland andCzechoslovakia, which also decriminalized homosexuality in the mid1960s. (Body Politic, December 1976-January 1977)
Writing in 1976, the Canadian researcher described an East German
gay population characterized by long-term relationships, apparently
more so than in West Germany or the United States. "The durabilityof such relationships may also reflect the relative lack of anomie andcompetitiveness in socialist society, yet the prevalence of gay
couples is all the more striking in light of the fact that at 50 percent
and still climbing, the GDR's divorce rate is the highest in the world.
"Although it deserves a more detailed analysis," he continued, "GDR
citizens properly interpret the divorce rate as an index of women's
emancipation rather than social collapse. In any case, the gay
couples are seldom burdened by the ideology of pure monogamy,
and affairs on the side as well as casual sexual encounters are
standard.
"Parks, beaches (where nude bathing is widespread), and otherpublic places have never been the locus of police entrapment, andarrests for public indecency are virtually unknown."
However, one last thorn of legal discrimination remained in the bodyof East German law. While the age of sexual consent was the samefor same-sex and heterosexual minors, under the provisions ofParagraphs 150 and 151, homosexual adults penalized for
relationships with under-age youths could be sentenced to three
years behind bars, while heterosexuals only faced two-year
sentences.
Steakley met with Klimmer during his research in the GDR. "Dr.
Klimmer regards it as his greatest success," he reported, "that these

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Workers World Nov. 11, 2004: East Germany in the 1970s

paragraphs explicitly contain a provision allowing prison terms to besuspended in favor of probation, and court practice shows that thisoption has been widely adopted in cases which do not involveassault or coercion."
Before the GDR was overturned, even this legal inequity wasremoved.
Housing and employment, however, continued to be sites of struggles
for equality after 1961. Partly this was due to lack of resources in theworkers' state that made the early goal of socialism--equal
distribution--difficult to attain. And age-old prejudice was also an
obstacle.
Steakley gave voice to the frustration of gays with the GDR's
governmental housing agency, which allocated space based onfamily size. This made it virtually impossible for single men to rent
more than a studio apartment. But he did not examine this social
crisis out of its economic context.
"Housing is still at a premium in the GDR, and it was only in 1975
that Berlin, for example, attained the per-capita level of housing thatit had prior to World War II," he explained, "In order to keep thecountry from sinking below its current zero population growth, thegovernment makes no bones about rewarding childbirth; and whileabortion and contraceptives are freely available, premarital sex andunmarried motherhood are promoted in pop songs."
While the housing crunch Steakley described in 1976 constrained
singles, he found that gays in East Germany were "optimistic that the
GDR's ongoing, high-priority construction program will open new
options within the next decade."
When examining the housing crisis in the GDR, it's important toreiterate that, by law, rent could not exceed 10 percent of anindividual's income.
And when it came to jobs, Steakley stressed, "homosexuals areoccasionally fired by a homophobic superior. But gays havesuccessfully argued their cases in special GDR workers' courts andhad their jobs restored with back pay."
Unlike a capitalist economic system, where wages are always indanger of being driven down by an "army of unemployed" competing
against the employed, jobs are a right in a planned economy.
Steakley stressed, "In a country with the right (not the obligation) towork and a serious labor shortage, job performance has become thesole criterion for hiring and firing."
Flowering of lesbian, gay subculture
In his 10 pages of results of a study of the lesbian and gay
movement in the GDR, published in 1989, researcher John Parsons
explained that during the 1950s and 1960s an underground gay
subculture had developed. But, he continued, "The 1970s and early
1980s were a time when this lesbian and gay subculture grew andflowered, creating a broad self-consciousness and assertiveness."

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Workers World Nov. 11, 2004: East Germany in the 1970s(OUT/LOOK, Summer 1989)
The Berlin Association for Homosexual Concerns (HIB) wasestablished in the spring of 1972 by both women and men. They
organized public and private discussion groups and programs, held
film showings and book readings, and hosted speakers from thefields of medicine, psychology and sociology.
Steakley added an important point about the class character of theassociation. "Unlike most gay organizations in West Germany, the
HIB is largely made up of workers and professional people rather
than students." Two of the three members of the steering committee
belonged to the Communist Party.
Parsons noted the role of women. "Parallel with these efforts,
lesbians and feminists were organizing their own discussion groups
centered on questions of women's liberation."
He added that although public discussion focused on male samesexuality, "One fact that is striking, however, is that lesbian and gay
cultural institutions and friendship circles in East Germany historicallyhave been integrated much more across gender lines than those ineither West Germany or the United States."
Steakley, writing closer to the period of the formation of HIB, said
that while the organization waited until 1976 to apply for state
recognition, "it by no means had an underground status during its
first four years."
In its first year, the group approached the Ministry of Health torequest public meeting space. But the HIB delegation angrily
withdrew its request after a psychiatrist offered to turn those weekly
meetings into group therapy.
So the group turned to the national labor union--the FDGB. Steakleyreported, "The FDGB was unable to provide rooms but urged the
HIB to continue its search, noting that gays had legitimate concernsand should not be required to continue meeting in private homes."
He added that activists protested a lack of protection from anti-gay
bashers to the Berlin police "and the HIB got a positive response."
The group also lodged complaints with city administrators when one
of Berlin's gay bars was closed in 1975. "Protests to municipal
authorities brought assurances that the measure was not intentionallyanti-gay but part of a larger urban renewal program designed toenhance the capital's 'cosmopolitan character' which would soon leadto the opening of several new bars 'for every taste.'"And Parsons pointed out that during the 1970s, a number of gayidentified clubs and cafes opened up in major East German cities.
Answering the "Rat Man"On June 1, 1976, HIB organized a very successful forum publicly
sponsored by the Urania Society--a public education agency.
The event, a talk by Dr. Peter G. Klemm entitled "Sex Roles in

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Workers World Nov. 11, 2004: East Germany in the 1970s

Socialist Society," filled the meeting hall to capacity. Of the 500 who
attended, only an estimated one-third were gay or lesbian.
Klemm's speech and the discussion that followed demonstrated a
progressive current in a raging polemic against the work of Dr.
Gunter Domer, a Berlin endocrinology researcher dubbed "Rat Man"by HIB activists.
Dorner claimed to be able to produce "homosexual" or "heterosexual"
litters of rats based on injecting pregnant rats at different stages in
the gestation period. Steakley emphasized, "Dormer's experiments
raise the specter of pregnant women being tested for hormonal'normalcy' and given booster shots if the results indicate that the
fetus is 'homosexual.'"East German gays and lesbians recalled all too well that undercapitalism, the fascist eugenics wing of biological determinism rose topower with Nazism. But in the GDR, Dorner's theories and thefaction of science he represented did not prevail.
Klemm argued against drawing broad generalizations about humansexuality based on animal research. His eloquent elaboration of thisposition, clarifying even today, appeared in a 1975 article in Fur
Dich, a women's magazine with the largest circulation in the GDR.
"It is one of many human achievements to have liberated sexuality
from its function as biological reproduction and to have made it into
an independent source of pleasure and life enrichment. Once wehave acknowledged this and accepted the fundamentally human, andtherefore social, function of sexuality, we must also grant that thesource of pleasure cannot be set by biological criteria; the 'wrong'
taste in pleasure cannot be declared a 'sickness' in need oftreatment.
"Homosexuals suffer only in an intolerant milieu! Homosexuality is aform of 'deviance' only in terms of traditional sex-role concepts! Any
halfway imaginative heterosexual couple deviates from the 'natural'-e.g., the sexual behavior of rats--just as much as a homosexual
couple.
"It is therefore quite proper to doubt whether the problem of bi-,homo- or hyposexuality can be actually solved with a shot of
hormones in the fourth month of pregnancy, or even should be.
Changes in the traditional concept of sex roles are certainly the morecorrect and above all the humane approach, and these remarks areintended as a contribution to that goal." (Body Politic)
Steakley concluded in 1976 that these views by Dr. Klemm were "asample of the progressive psychological standpoint which is
becoming increasingly influential in the GDR. It is perhaps significant
that the founding of the gay movement has come since 1971, when
the government announced that the GDR had achieved the level of a'developed socialist society' and could now begin to lay thegroundwork for the transition to communism.
"Not just experts but gay people from all walks of life are playing arole in the broad, democratic discussion of the socialist personality

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Workers World Nov. 11, 2004: East Germany in the 1970s

and sexuality, feminism and the future of the family."That was East Germany in the 1970s. But by the 1980s, efforts by
the Com munist Party and the state created a historic milestone forsame-sex emancipation.
Next: 1980s East Germany: stunning social gains in workers' state.

Reprinted from the Nov. 11, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Dec. 2, 2004: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle

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East Germany:: Donate now ::Email thisarticlePrintable
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Forming of gay groups ignites church
struggle
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 21
By Leslie Feinberg
In January 1982, in East Germany, the Evangelical Academy BerlinBrandenburg held a conference titled, "Can One Speak About It?
Homosexuality as a Question for Theology and Pastoral Care."

Email the editor
SearchLesbians and gay men took part in the conference. The agenda
reportedly focused on how to use insights of modern sexology to
reduce prejudice and harmful concepts about homosexuality, andhow to provide a structure for lesbians and gay men to get together
and discuss their own issues.
This conference generated a public forum about same-sex love.
Later that year, some gay and lesbian activists in Berlin and Leipzig
formed the Homosexual Working Group within the Youth Section of
the Lutheran Church.
The group quickly spread to more than 20 cities, not just the big
urban areas like Magdeburg, Chemnitz and Rostock, but in small
towns like Zwickau, Plauen and Neu strelitz. The Leipzig andDresden groups were founded by theologians who had been denied
ordination because they were an out gay man and an out lesbian
woman.
Buried in that last fact is a reminder that organizing by lesbians andgays continued to face opposition from the Protestant hierarchy,
even if tactically it was a useful political tool for the church.
Like the Catholic Church in the Polish workers' state, the ProtestantChurch battled the socialist German state. Raelynn J. Hillhousestated that during the early years of the GDR, "the church and state
often were in an undeclared war in which neither expected the otherto survive. Because of its close relations with the West German
church, the East German church was seen by the state as a foreign
institution." (Slavic Review 49, 1990)
The East German church had close ties to the hierarchy in thecapitalist West.
While the young workers' state curtailed the church's social role, it
did not seize church property and continued to use public funds for
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Workers World Dec. 2, 2004: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle

in 1978, the state signed accords which opened the door for the
church to expand its outreach.
As a result, close to 200 groups formed under the organizationalumbrella of the church. These included lesbian and gay,environmental, disabled--and the dubiously vague category of"human rights."
Specifically, the objectives of the gay groups--offering support andcounseling and educating parishioners about homosexuality--was notpolitical in nature. However, the goal of addressing social problems,
while vague, did open the door to criticisms of the socialist state.
The overall coalescing of more than 200 organizations under theiraegis gave the church hierarchs a wider social base from which topursue their anti-communist opposition to the workers' state.
Struggle broke out within church
Not everyone at the top of the church ladder was so happy aboutallowing lesbians and gays into the fold under any circumstances.
Hillhouse observed in her 1990 article on sexual politics and socialchange in the GDR that, "The presence of lesbian and gay
organizations has brought about a major controversy both within the
church, which has customarily condemned homosexuality, andamong gays and lesbians, who have traditionally been persecuted by
the church."
She explained that in 1986, based on the results of a churchcommissioned study, a bishops' conference did conclude that biblicalcondemnations of same-sex love should no longer be used asjustification for discrimination. However, she stressed, "Although thebishops settled one controversy by officially allowing gay and lesbian
groups to meet within the church, they refused to take a clear
position on the ordination of homosexuals. The church has, however,demonstrated the limits to its acceptance of homosexuals in its
repeated denial of ordination of Eduard Stapel, the director forhomosexual work of the Magdeburg city mission, because he lives ina homosexual partnership."Denis M. Sweet, a researcher quite unsympathetic to the socialist
state, did note the hostility to gays within the church. "These working
groups did not advance without concerted resistance from withincertain well-situated Lutheran and charismatic factions within the
church, particularly from the south of the GDR with its own traditionsof theology and piety--so much so that the church authorities in
Saxony felt obliged to append within the territory of theiradministration a publication that countered the largely positive andtolerant brochure Homosexuelle in der Kirche? (Homosexuals in the
Church?) issued in 1984 by the central office of theological study of
the East German Church (Theolo gische Studienab tei l ung derEvangelischen Kirchen).
"This Saxon alternative bro chure warned about 'militanthomosexuals' forcing an entry into the church to advance the'ideology of homosexual emancipation.'" (Sexual History of the

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Workers World Dec. 2, 2004: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle

Political Left)
And lesbians and gay men were not so thrilled about working under
the auspices of the church, either. John Parsons made this point
sharply: "Of course, many homosexuals, including those who weremembers of the Communist Party, were not comfortable with thechurch and did not find this association helpful." (OUT/LOOK 1989)
Hillhouse added, "As was the case with groups from the other social
movements within the church, the gay and lesbian associations were
not entirely religious: Perhaps as few as 10 percent of the members
identified themselves as Christians."
But a new and dramatic development was emerging in the mid1980s that allowed the lesbian and gay movement to burgeon. The
GDR workers' state opened up a widespread secular campaign tocombat prejudice and discrimination against same-sex love.
Next: Unprecedented gains

Reprinted from the Dec. 2, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Workers World Dec. 9, 2004: Great gains in 1980s East Germany

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Lesbians and gay men

Great gains in 1980s East Germany:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 22

Email thisarticleBy Leslie Feinberg

Printable
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Email the editor"Finally, in the late 1980s, public discussion backed by theCommunist Party and the state was revived," wrote researcher John
Parsons in his extensive article about gains for lesbians and gay men
in the German Democratic Republic. "It included lesbians and gay
men speaking out as self-conscious voices for their community."(OUT/LOOK, Summer 1989)

SearchScientists and health professionals convened a conference in June
1985 on "The Psycho-Social Aspects of Homosexuality."
Parsons stressed, "An important feature of this conference was that it
was organized with the open participation of lesbians and gay men,both as contributors and discussants."
He continued, "Two major demands were voiced at the conference:
first, that the discussion should be taken outside of these exclusively
professional circles and made a public one; second, that the stateshould sanction institutions through which lesbians and gay men
could discuss and organize among themselves."
A year earlier, this same demand for independent groups had been
voiced by a Humboldt University interdisciplinary research group that
had been organized at the request of the Berlin city administration.
This was the first official gay and lesbian studies committee at a
German university, according to researcher Raelynn J. Hillhouse.
The Communist Party's 11th Congress in 1986 debated therecommendations of the research group. Parsons said that a memberof the Humboldt University group relayed that there was "a good dealof success in moving the national Party apparatus to support thework of these groups." Parsons talked to other acquaintances who
added that there was continued backwardness from some Party
officials.
But what is indisputable is that in 1985, an historically
unprecedented, state-sponsored campaign set out to eradicate allforms of discrimination based on sexual and emotional preference
and to raise social consciousness about same-sex love.
The momentum of gains for sexual liberation in the German
Democratic Republic that resulted was dramatic. The facts speak for

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Workers World Dec. 9, 2004: Great gains in 1980s East Germany

themselves.
Gov't-backed media campaign
A government-supported public discussion broadened and deepenedin the period between the 1985 conference and a second held in thecity of Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1988.
Hillhouse concluded in her 1990 article that "The new openness
concerning homosexuality was evident not only in literature andscientific publications, but also in print and broadcast media. In 1984
the popular monthly health magazine, Deine Gesundheit (Your
Health), began printing a series of readers' letters on homosexuality;
soon after, several other major publications published substantial
articles on sexual orientation."
More than 200 articles on homosexuality were printed in the GDR
during the 1980s, she continued, mostly about gay males. (Slavic
Review, Winter 1990)
Articles about same-sex love appeared in the press and wereincorporated into some state radio and television station
programming. Much of this information was aimed at youth--anaudience with many questions about sexuality.
When public media focused on AIDS education, same-sex relations
were not portrayed as a central feature. And it is important to recall
that everyone in the GDR enjoyed free medical care.
The television health program "Visite" broadcast a report in
September 1987 "that described homosexuality as an entirely naturalvariation of human sexuality." (Hillhouse)
The following year, the state film company DEFA, working with gay
and lesbian activists, produced East Germany's first documentary
about "the satisfactions and problems" facing same-sex couples,
called "Die andere Liebe" (The Other Love).
In 1989 DEFA also released "Coming Out," a feature film about agay teacher.
The same year, literature with gay themes was published, including abook about the life histories of several gay men in the GDR,
compiled and written by a gay man.
Mass education campaign"Important social institutions also began to implement reforms withgreat speed," Parsons continued.
"For example, the Commission on Marriage and the Family, which is
responsible for running a system of counseling centers, passed a
resolution asserting that the national network of sexuality and family
counseling centers should aid in dismantling prejudices regarding
homosexuality and foster the integration of gay men and lesbians into
society."Same-sex love was significantly included in a new sex education

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Workers World Dec. 9, 2004: Great gains in 1980s East Germany

curriculum for the public school system.
A chapter on lesbian and gay identity in the 1984 edition of thestandard sex-education textbook presented homosexuality as anatural variation of sexual identity. Lesbianism was part and parcel ofthis chapter. The book included among its sexually frank andromantic photos two men together and two women lying naked ineach other's arms.
And most significantly, the book acknowledged that the main
problems faced by homosexuals result from persecution andisolation, which themselves stem from social discrimination andhomophobia.
Next: More gains.

Reprinted from the Dec. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Dec. 23, 2004: Gay/lesbian clubs in Party, state

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Late 1980s East Germany

Gay/lesbian clubs in Party, state:: Donate now ::Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 23

Email thisarticleBy Leslie Feinberg

Printable
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SearchIn a landmark ruling on Aug. 11, 1987, the Supreme Court of East
Germany set the minimum age of consent for all sexual relations at
14.
This addressed an important legal inequity. In 1968, when the 19thcentury Prussian anti-gay laws had been abolished, paragraph 151
was established which set 18 years old as the minimum age ofconsent for same-sex relations. The minimum age for heterosexual
relations remained 14.
The 1987 court decision overturned the conviction of a man who had
sex with a youth. The judges found that the minor was openly gay,
had visited gay clubs and parties and had sought sexual contact. The
only basis for conviction, they ruled, would have been if the sex had
not been consensual or the youth had been harmed.
The written ruling created a legal milestone. The justices wrote,"[T]he starting point for a judgment about the sexual relations
between persons of the same sex must be the principle thathomosexuals just as much as heterosexuals are members of thesocialist society and are guaranteed the same rights of citizenship."And, the court continued, " ... homosexual relations between an adultand a person between the ages of 16 and 18 do not necessarily leadto an abnormal development and do not have any other harmful
consequences than homosexual relations between two youths or
heterosexual relations between an adult and a youth."
The justices concluded, " ... discrimination against homosexuals andbigotry is therefore to be opposed. Homosexuals are to be protectedby legal regulations and judicial punishment against attacks on theirintegrity--for example by slander or physical violence or rowdiness-through civil as well as criminal proceedings." (OUT/LOOK, Summer
1989)
In 1988, the government in East Berlin declared all discrimination
based on sexual orientation illegal.
And in July 1989, the East German parliament officially removed theage of consent discrepancy from the law books.
Satisfying material needs

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Workers World Dec. 23, 2004: Gay/lesbian clubs in Party, state

But the gains for lesbians and gays in the GDR were not merely
legal.
As the planned economy demonstrated momentum, even while
encircled and undermined by the capitalist West, living standards
rose for all in the GDR--including gays and lesbians. And as the
economic struggle for survival eased, so did social relations.
An extensive article in the Winter 1989 Slavic Review by researcher
Raelynn J. Hillhouse was not particularly sympathetic to theCommunist Party and the state, which were shouldering the task ofbuilding socialism in the GDR.
But Hillhouse made this pithy observation: "When a socialist statesatisfies basic material needs and provides its citizens with a senseof material security, its citizens may gradually shift their politicalinterests to moral matters, gender issues, environmental concerns,
and similar issues. ... The relatively and reliable levels of satisfactionof basic material requirements in the GDR makes such transitions
there probable and East German values concerning marriage, genderroles, and sexuality indeed have been liberalizing."
These important advances in social progress were made possible bycommunist political campaigns to raise consciousness and in turnresulted in raising mass consciousness even higher.
One important indication of this political commitment to change wasthe creation of gay and lesbian clubs within party and state
institutions. And gay and lesbian organizations won official
recognition from state officials and moved into the public arena.
The most significant of these was the Berlin "Sunday Club"(Sonntags-Club). The group emerged from private discussion circles
in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, the group became more semiofficial when officers of a neighborhood youth club worked with gays
and lesbians to organize Sunday discussions, cultural events andtrips.
The club's application for a "Cultural and Consultation Center" forgays and lesbians was denied in 1983 and 1984 by the city. But theapplications, in part, helped propel the Berlin administration torequest the creation of the research group at Humboldt University in
1984--the first official gay and lesbian studies committee at a
German university--to study the conditions facing the estimatedthree-quarter of a million gays and lesbians in the GDR.
Next: Lesbian/gay liberation--active support from Communist Party.

Reprinted from the Dec. 23, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net

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Workers World Dec. 23, 2004: Gay/lesbian clubs in Party, state

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Workers World Dec. 30, 2004: Gains cut short by 1989 counter-revolution

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Gains cut short by 1989 counterrevolution
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 24
By Leslie Feinberg
The official gay and lesbian studies research group, formed at
Humboldt University in 1984 at the behest of the Berlin cityadministration, examined the conditions of life for some threequarters of a million gays and lesbians living in East Germany(GDR).

SearchThe following spring, this group issued the following findings. The
lack of a clear social policy on homosexuality in the GDR had
resulted in a lack of state-sponsored social services for gays andlesbians and contributed to emigration. And discrimination andintolerance led to sexual activity which could exacerbate the AIDS
crisis. The study recalled the historic role of German revolutionary
workers' parties in supporting the German Homo sexual
Emancipation Movement's demand to remove 19th-century anti-gay
legislation. And it concluded by calling on the Communist Party(SED) to aid in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights.
Researcher Raelynn J. Hillhouse says the Humboldt group proposed
that, "The state should help homosexuals to integrate into socialist
institutions and should strive to eliminate public prejudice towardhomosexuality. These goals, the report held, should be accomplishedthrough legal reform, continued research, the creation of gay andlesbian clubs, expansion of counseling centers and media
campaigns. All these proposals were implemented on various
government levels." (Slavic Review, Winter 1990)
This recommendation was sent to the party. In 1985, Hillhouse
noted, "The Politburo responded to the study with therecommendation that the integration of homosexuals into GDR
society should be encouraged."
And when the party responded to this call, it also recalled the historyof German Communism's early and strong support in the battle
against anti-gay laws.
East Germany issued an electrifying call for an end to all forms oflegal and social discrimination against lesbian and gay people thatsent shock waves around the world.
In the United States, The Advocate, a gay and lesbian news

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Workers World Dec. 30, 2004: Gains cut short by 1989 counter-revolution

magazine, reported: "East Germany's official ADN news agency has
issued what appears to be an officially approved call for an end to
discrimination against gays in all levels of East German society. The
news agency asserted that socialist guarantees of proletarian equality
extended to gay people and that nongays should assist their gay
comrades in casting off the bonds of anonymity, discrimination anddisadvantage." (March 4, 1986)
Even if this had been merely lip-service to the struggle for gay andlesbian liberation, it would have been a striking call to raise societal
consciousness. But the sweeping progress made within just a few
short years showed that the left current of the Communist Party andthe workers' state was taking action.
Walking the talkThe gay and lesbian Sunday Club (Sonntags-Club) won official
recognition in 1986, becoming the first state-sponsored gay andlesbian group.
Researcher John Parsons added, "Other parts of the subculture havealso come into greater public view, including regularly organized
dances in public halls." (OUT/LOOK, Summer 1989)
In 1987, the Sunday Club affiliated with the House of Culture of
Berlin-Mitte. Similar organizations were formed in Dresden, Gera,
Leipzig, Magdeburg, Potsdam and Weimar.
"Also in Berlin," Hillhouse wrote, "the Kulturbund (League of Culture)
has allowed the Magnus Hirschfeld Arbeitskreis (Magunus Hirschfeld
Study Group) to organize under its auspices to promote scientificinquiry about homosexuality. The state-supported Ehe, Familien-,und Sexualberatunsstellen (Marriage, Sex and Family Coun selling
Centers) began special staff training programs in issues of sexual
identity. In addition, other organizations occasionally sponsorededucational projects on homosexuality as well as social functions forgays and lesbians."
In 1987, she added, the ministry of health commissioned a volume
on homosexuality in the GDR; it appeared in two unusually large
editions. "The author, Reiner Werner, urged that lesbian and gay
counseling centers be created, allocation of apartments to same-sex
couples be expedited, new contact forums for gays and lesbians beestablished, and legal partnership for nonmarried couples toadminister their common property be considered."A national conference, similar to the "Psycho-Social Aspects of
Homosexuality" in 1985, was convened in 1988, "explicitly to include
lesbians and gays in East German society." Several speakers at thesecond conference emphasized the importance of changing family
law to ensure state recognition of gay couples and families.
(OUT/LOOK)The Communist Party youth group, the FDJ--a mass organization,
not a cadre party organization--produced several programs abouthomosexual and bisexuality on its radio station. A film and a forum
on homosexuality, and a social for gays and lesbians, were

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Workers World Dec. 30, 2004: Gains cut short by 1989 counter-revolution

components of the May 1989 FDJ Youth Festival. And the FDJ
central council directed its local groups to help create gay andlesbian clubs wherever they were needed.
The former first secretary of the central council of the FDJ issued astatement that emphasized the importance of equality forhomosexual youth. The statement added, "I can assure you that the
FDJ will continue to give great attention toward the complete equalityof homosexual youth and other citizens in its diverse forms of politicaland ideological work." (Slavic Review)
The process of liberation
When John Parsons, a Canadian researcher, published his 10-page
report in 1989 on gays and lesbians in the GDR, he wrote from thevantage point of six previous years of research. "Back in 1983,"
Parsons recalled, "the lesbian and gay subculture in East Germany
was still very much underground, although not illegal."But, he explained, "By 1989 things have changed dramatically. Public
displays of homosexual affection remain rare, but gay liberation has
made significant and surprising progress in a short period of time.
Not only is the gay subculture in the early stages of coming
aboveground, but the process of liberation is now developing with theactive support of the Communist Party. Lesbians and gay men,communists and non-communists alike, are exploring anew what
sexual liberation means in a socialist society."
He stressed, "The public discussion of homosexuality now being
promoted by the Communist Party is one in which homosexuality is
finally recognized as a natural aspect of sexuality and society."
The lesbian and gay movement in the GDR debated whether todevelop an autonomous community or integrate into society. The
leading view of the movement and the state, Parsons reported, "isone in which autonomy is not set in conflict with integration.
Lesbians and gay men have a need to meet together for personal,
cultural, and political reasons. Their ability to collectively discuss anddecide their views on their oppression and needs is an important
step in enabling the society as a whole to address the issues.
"Integration, however, is also seen as a positive goal--not an
integration in which lesbians and gays hide their identity, but one inwhich their unique identity contributes to and changes the whole."
Parsons reported these gains without glossing over the problems thatstill existed, bringing great sensitivity and objectivity to his
observations.
He noted for example, "The Communist Party itself is not amonolithic institution. There are millions of members with various
views on sexuality and sexual politics, and it is no surprise thatdifferent views should win sway at different times.
"But," he added, "what is striking is that the Party has moved soquickly from a position of, at best, benign neglect to one of clear
advocacy for a reasoned, humanistic and in many ways radically

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Workers World Dec. 30, 2004: Gains cut short by 1989 counter-revolution

progressive position."
Counter-revolution
During the late 1980s, as the more compliant Gorbachev leadershipwas weakening the socialized economic base of the Soviet Union in
the name of perestroika, the imperialists--from Wall Street to Bonn-exerted tremendous pressure on the Soviet leaders to withdraw theirsupport for East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.
The deal was finally made in a 1989 meeting between Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and U.S. Secretary of StateJames Baker while boating on Jackson Lake in Wyoming. The USSR
would not intervene if capitalism were restored in Eastern Europe.
This left the GDR sandwiched between imperialist West Germany
and Poland and Czecho slovakia, which themselves were being
taken over by bourgeois elements.
In 1989-1990 the workers' state was overturned and the GDR was
incorporated into capitalist West Germany. East German workers lost
free health care and education, low-cost rent and the guarantee of ajob.
And for lesbians and gay men, "re-unification" with capitalist West
Germany meant the re-imposition of the hated 19th-century Prussian
law against homosexuality--Paragraph 175--which had still not been
repealed there, although that did finally happen in 1994.
Not to be forgotten is that in the relatively short space of little morethan four decades after World War II, lesbian and gay liberation had
made swift strides in socialist East Germany that had no parallel inthe capitalist world.
In fact, during that same span of time, life for lesbians and gays in
the U.S. and Western Europe was characterized by the iron fist of
state repression.
Next: Post-World War II U.S.--capitalist anti-gay witch hunt.

Reprinted from the Dec. 30, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World Feb. 3, 2005: Struggle for decriminalization

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Struggle for decriminalization
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 25
By Leslie Feinberg
In the "Cold War" following World War II, imperialist ideologues
sought to make capitalist democracy synonymous with "freedom" andthe workers' states out to be "totalitarian."

Email the editor
SearchIn fact both were based on the dictatorship of one economic classover another. However, the class character of the two social systems
was the opposite.
The capitalist state brutally upheld the social relationship of exploiterand exploited, oppressor and oppressed. East Germany (GDR) andthe Soviet Union (USSR)-while not the pinnacle of workers' demo cracy that is possible in asocialist society--were based on liberating the working class from the
exploitation and oppression of capitalist rule.
As this series has demonstrated, at the same time that the U.S.,
Britain and West Germany were excoriating East Germany as
despotic, workers there enjoyed jobs, free health care and education,
rent that could not exceed 10 percent of their income, vacations. And
the advances made towards lesbian and gay liberation far surpassed
anything that had been wrested by struggle under capitalism.
What was life like for gay men and lesbian women in other capitalist
countries in Europe and in England during and after WWII?
An extensive historical exhibition at the Art Academe in Berlin in thesummer of 1997 provided some important historical details. The art
exhibit, co-sponsored by the Schwules Museum, was entitled,"Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Years of Gay Liberation." A limitation of theexhibit is that it did not incorporate the role of lesbians in the century
of struggle.
This following information was provided in the published curator's
notes.
FranceWith the rise of German fascism, Paris supplanted Berlin as theEuropean gay center--that is, until Nazi troops goose-stepped into
Paris.

http://www.workers.org/ww/2005/lgbtseries0203.php[2/3/2011 3:51:10 PM]

Workers World Feb. 3, 2005: Struggle for decriminalization"The end of the Third Republic in the late thirties was accompanied
by social and political struggles. The Spanish Civil War and thePopular Front in France forced homosexuals to take a stand either
on the right or left."
While the southern part of France was unoccupied, the northern
region, including Paris, was under the rule of German Nazi forces.
The quisling Vichy government, led by Marshall Pétain, collaborated
with German fascism.
"One group of homosexuals took up opposition to Pétain and any
form of collaboration with the Germans, joining the resistancemovement. A second group, including André Gide and Giraudoux,
waited. A third group collaborated. Once again, homosexuals wererepresented on both sides of oppressors and victims, collaboratorsand resisters."
In 1940, Pétain's regime instituted the Code Penal, which included
statute 334, making homosexual behavior punishable byimprisonment.
"Although most of the laws initiated by the Vichy govern ment were
rescinded when the Nazi regime was defeated, this clause wasmaintained under a new name, [Statute] 331, paragraph 3, and was
enforced throughout France."
Homosexuality between consenting adults had been legal in the
country since the Napoleonic Code was introduced in 1804. Thatcode, following the French bourgeois revolution, formally removed
the anti-gay vestige of feudal law. It was the first time in Europe thata criminal code omitted consensual same-sex relations.
"In the course of the 19th century, Holland, Italy and sev eral Swisscantons adopted the revolutionary French penal code. The
prosecution and persecution of 'pederasts' continued, however, in thescope of police disciplinary powers under which alleged offenses
could still be pursued."
The end of German fascist occupation did not lead to gay andlesbian liberation in France.
In 1960, while transgender was celebrated entertainment in the Paris
Variétés performances, the repressive De Gaulle government beefed
up penalties for homosexuals.
Switzerland
Some gays who fled the rise of fascism in Germany emigrated toBasel and Zurich, Switzerland.
"There have been initiatives for organizing homosexuals in Germanspeaking Switz erland since 1922. After several failed attempts in
Zurich and Lucern, the Schweizerische Freund schafts bewegung(Swiss Friendship Move ment) was founded in 1931 with the decisive
participation of lesbian women in Zurich and Basel."
Together with the Damenclub Amicitia and the Excentric-Club Zürich,they published the first Swiss magazine for homosexuals. The first

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Workers World Feb. 3, 2005: Struggle for decriminalization

issue of the "Friendship Banner" was published in January 1932.
Beginning in 1941, women took a less active role and the groupbecame an exclusively male organization which called itself Liga für
Menschenrechte.
"During World War II, when the Nazis destroyed the beginnings of agay movement in occupied Czechoslovakia and Holland, the Zurichbased group was the only worldwide organization that could preserve
the idea of homosexual emancipation.
Although the legal restriction against homosexuality had beenformally lifted in Switzerland in 1942, anti-homosexual campaigns
continued. The leader of the Swiss Homo erotic Movement, Karl
Meyer--known by the nom de guerre "Rolf"--advocated "unobtrusive
behavior" in public.
The gay group called the Reading Circle (Der Kreis) survived thewar. "In 1945 Zurich's Reading Circle (Der Kreis) had an unbroken
13-year history which served as a model for other countries in theimmediate post-war years. The group's magazine, Le Cercle, had aninternational focus."
After the war, the The Circle held regular meetings which drew
members from many counties. "In order to protect themselves frompolice action, only subscribers to the magazine who were above 20
years old and had valid identity cards were allowed into themeetings. Members also had to vouch for any guests they had
brought."
Near the end of the 1950s, the meetings ended altogether after themagazine "Tat" (Action) complained that The Circle was allowed tomeet on state property.
England
The curators note, "The sexual openness that existed in England
during the Second World War was pushed back in the years
immediately afterwards.
"The gay spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean defected to theSoviet Union in 1951, events which became the subject of intense
investigation by a press that had few limits."
And the case of Lord Montague of Beaulieu, charged with having
had sex with working-class youths, exploded into another mediafueled scandal.
Calls to clamp down on the "increasing threat" of homosexuality led
to the establish ment of a government commission in 1954.
Three years later the commission recommended decriminalizing
homosexuality between consenting adult males.
It took another decade before the law was changed.
Demand for decriminalization"The need for international contacts and exchange was very strong

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Workers World Feb. 3, 2005: Struggle for decriminalization

after the experiences in the Nazi period," the curators conclude. "Inparticular, the Inter national Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE),
which had been founded in Amsterdam shortly after the end of thewar, made efforts to create an international network of newly formed
gay movements."
Interdisciplinary conferences focusing on homosexuality took place inAmster dam in 1951, Frankfurt on the Main in 1952, Amsterdam in
1953, Paris in 1955 and Brussels in 1958.
"The newest research results were presented by doctors,
psychologists, lawyers, sociologists and staff from various homophileorganizations in Europe and America.
"In addition, demands for worldwide decriminalization of consenting
homosexuality were formulated, individual cases of homosexual
discrimination were denounced, and new strategies in the fight for
legal equality were decided upon."
The Swiss "Circle" continued to hold influence. It played a role increating an international connection. Editor Karl Meyer (Rolf)
maintained contacts with homophile groups in France, Germany,
Scandinavia and Holland.
In addition to poetry and short stories, The Circle reported on
activities of homosexual organizations around the world.
"It created not only a singular forum for the most recent discussions
about the theme of homosexuality, but also contri buted greatly tothe international exchanges within homosexual movements."
Beginning in the mid-1950s, the trilingual magazine even reached
the shores of the United States, where a ferocious storm of anti-gay
state repression was reaching hurricane proportions.
Next: McCarthyite witch hunt.
Feinberg spoke at the Berlin Art Acad eme in July 1997, an event
sponsored by the Spinnboden--the German lesbian archive. The
event was part of the 100th anniversary of the start of the German
Homosexual Emancipation Movement.

Reprinted from the Feb. 5, 2005, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Before McCarthy, the Pentagon

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Before McCarthy, thePentagon00

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 13, 2005 8:53 PM

Even before McCarthyism menaced gays and lesbians in the United States in thelate 1940s and early 1950s, the Pentagon brass had ratcheted up an antihomosexual witch hunt in the ranks of the military that left its impact on civilian
life, as well.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Historian Allan Bérube's book "Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men
and Women in World War II" makes a great contribution towards understanding
this particular period of repression.
World War II was a period of great
exodus--voluntary and involuntary.
Sixteen million men were conscripted into
the military, leaving their farms andtowns, campuses and cities behind.
An estimated equal number of civilians,
mostly women, left their homes to find war From the time of the Revolutionary
War, the Navy and Army hadtime employment. Millions more moved
criminalized same-sex acts, notfrom rural areas and smaller towns to the homosexuals themselves. But inburgeoning port cities and industrial hubs. World War II the Pentagon's
policy changed drastically. GIs

Women, Bérube notes, "filled jobs in heavy suspected of being gay or lesbian
industry and other defense work, widely
faced witch hunts, humiliation,
expanding their presence in the paid labor brutality, dishonorable discharges
and being locked up inforce and increasing their ability to live
'queer stockades,' like theindependently."
one shown above.

African American women and men
migrated from the South to Northern and West Coast cities where jobs wereavailable in the military industries.
Bérube stressed that the uprooting of such a large segment of the population"disrupted the everyday lives of a generation of young men and women, exposing
them to the power of the federal government and the vast expanse of the UnitedStates, the great variety of its people, and ways of life they had not imagined."
In particular, "The massive mobilization for World War II relaxed the social
constraints of peacetime that had kept gay men and women unaware ofthemselves and each other, 'bringing out' many in the process. Gathered together
in military camps, they often came to terms with their sexual desires, fell in love,
made friends with other gay people, and began to name and talk about who they
were.
"When they could get away from military bases, they discovered and contributed
to the rich gay nightlife--parties, bars, and nightclubs--that flourished in warboom cities."
But, Bérube points out, gay and lesbian GIs caught in sexual acts, netted in

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RespondBefore McCarthy, the Pentagon

methodical roundups at stateside or overseas bases, or seeking medical or
religious advice about their sexuality, found themselves fighting another war.
"As officers began to discharge homosexuals as undesirables, the gay GIs who
were their targets had to learn how to defend themselves in psychiatrists' offices,discharge hearing rooms, hospital wards, and 'queer stockades.' There they wereinterrogated about their sex lives, locked up, physically abused, and subjected tosystematic humil iations in front of other soldiers."
Some 10,000 gays and lesbians were forced to endure this harsh repression--afraction of their estimated total numbers in the ranks, but proof of a climate of
terror.
However, some brave individuals took on the military establishment. Bérube
concluded, "Those veterans who fought to upgrade their undesirable discharges
for homosexuality began to define their struggle with the government as one forjustice and equal rights, ideas that became a prerequisite for a politicalmovement."
Witch hunt!
After World War II, with the ascendancy of McCarthyism in the late 1940s andearly 1950s, the campaign to demonize homosexuality and transsexualism and to
enforce Dick-and-Jane gender conformity became essential components of theanti-communist witch hunt.
In fact, McCarthyism inseparably linked sexual and gender "queerness" with
commu nism, making them virtually synonymous.
Mouthpieces for reactionary titans of capital tried to define the Cold War as abattle between capitalist democratic "freedom" and communist "totalitarianism."
These spin doctors even tried to equate German fascism with workers' states in
the Soviet Union and East Germany (German Democratic Republic).
Capitalist democracy is itself a form of dictatorship--of the class that owns the
pro ductive apparatus over the class forced to work for wages. During the 1950s,
however, even the limited democratic features of this form of state rule wereseriously eroded under the weight of political reaction.
While the period of political reaction in the U.S. during the 1950s was notfascism--it did not try to crush all the workers' organizations or carry out thesystematic genocide of millions--the epoch does carry with it this lesson.
As long as the social relationship of capital rules, with exploiter against exploited,
oppressor versus oppressed, hard-won social and economic gains can be quickly
wiped away.
In order to understand the domestic repression during the 1950s, it's necessary
to look at the international relationship of forces.
Global class war
The Cold War was fundamentally a class war against the socialist countries aswell as oppressed peoples in this country and around the world.
World War II had so weakened most of the colonial powers in Europe and Japanthat oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa and the Middle East seized the historic
moment and rose up for real independence. The U.S. imperialists hoped to gainfrom this against their imperialist rivals, but in many countries, liberation
movements led by communists defeated pro-imperialist puppet governments.
The triumph of the Chinese Revolution sent the U.S. capitalist class into an
enraged frenzy.
The ruling class in this country was also deeply worried about the developing
relationship between China, the Soviet Union and those fighting colonial

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries_0217/index.html[2/3/2011 3:51:29 PM]Before McCarthy, the Pentagon

domination.
By 1952, the Pentagon was mired in a war to keep Korea under its capitalist
dominion.
Does this look like 'freedom'?
Life in the U.S. didn't look much like an ad for "freedom," either.
Jim Crow apartheid-like conditions predominated, not only in the South but inmany Northern cities, as well.
Post-war "Father Knows Best" campaigns were designed to push "Rosie the
Riveter" out of the factories and back into the kitchen.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy was empowered to hunt down communists andprogressives, and to crush or intimidate dissent or resistance. Gains in civil
liberties, union organizing and political expression were overturned.
Jewish revolutionaries and progressives who had been in the forefront of
movements for social and economic justice bore an onslaught of anti-Semitism
and anti-communism, unleashed in relative tandem.
It was in this political context that a wave of anti-homosexual and antitranssexual rhetoric and repression reached a fevered pitch.
Next: Homosexuals, transsexuals in McCarthy's sights.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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1950: 'Lavender scare'!

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1950: 'Lavender scare'!

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 27
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By Leslie Feinberg
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Published Feb 17, 2005 11:32 PM

Life got a whole lot harder in the U.S. during the late 1940s and early 1950s forpeople who were attracted to others of the same sex, who were consideredgender-different, or who lived in a sex other than the one assigned them at birth.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe domestic witch hunt of the McCarthy era, whose main purpose was to crush
any opposition to the Cold War, also led to the firing, red-listing and publicly
outing of people who didn't fit the straight-jacketed classification of "straight."
And anything considered "queer" was branded "subversive."
As early as 1947, some congressional Republicans veiled their partisan political
attacks against the State Department with claims of "concern" about homosexuals
working there.
In 1948, a public attempt to link anti-capitalists and homosexuals waspromulgated in blaring media coverage that suggested Whittaker Chambers had
an amor ous fondness for Alger Hiss.
Chambers, a Time magazine editor and journalist and former Communist Party
member, was accused of collecting intelligence information for the Soviet Union.
Chambers flipped and offered "evidence" for the anti-communist campaign. He
implicated Alger Hiss, who headed the Carne gie Endowment, in Soviet
espionage. Chambers also allegedly told the FBI that while a member of the Com
munist Party he had been sexually active with men.
But the "Lavender Scare"--like the other hue of terror and repression, the "RedScare"--began in earnest in 1950.
Before it ended, the two had become inextricably linked as one vicious slur:"pinko f-g."
While this kind of language is painful to reprint, it is important to get a feel forthe tenor of that period.
'Panic on the Potomac'
On Feb. 9, 1950, notorious red-baiter Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) waved apiece of paper before the cameras thathe claimed contained a list of 205"card-carry ing Communists in the State Department."
Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury on Jan. 21, just weeks before this nowinfamous Wheeling, W. Va., speech.
McCarthy railed that the Democratic Truman administration was harboring
traitors who were plotting to give away top-secret information.
John Peurifoy, undersecretary of state, denied the charge in February before a
Senate Appropriations Committee hearing investigating "subversives." But he didraise the specter of a sinister "homosexual underground" in Washington that wasin cahoots with the "Communist conspiracy." ("Becoming Visible: A Reader in
Gay and Lesbian History")

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries_0224/index.html[2/3/2011 3:51:47 PM]

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Respond1950: 'Lavender scare'!

He said that 91 "sexual deviants" were among those who had been dismissed fromthe State Department as "security risks."
This sounded a tocsin, observes
David K. Johnson in his book "The Laven der Scare: The Cold War Perse cutionof Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.""Members of Congress demanded to know who hired the 91, whether they foundjobs in other government departments, and if there were any more. Seeming toconfirm McCarthy's charges about subversives in the State Depart ment, Peuri
foy's revelation prompted concern and outrage throughout the nation, heateddebates on the floors of Congress, congressional committee investigations,countless newspaper articles and numerous White House meetings.
"It eventually led to the ouster of thousands of government employees. It marked
the beginnings of a Lavender Scare."
While some politicians labeled the campaign the "purge of the perverts," somejournalists ridiculed it as the "panic on the Potomac."
McCarthyism, not just McCarthy
While the domestic witch hunt of lesbian, gay men and gender-variant people
was an integral component of McCarthy ism, Joe McCarthy himself was not themover and shaker behind the anti-homosexual frenzy, and perhaps for goodreason.
True, the senator from Wisconsin did pep per his tirades with references to"Communists and queers." (The Lavender Scare)
But as the political crusade took off, McCarthy was nowhere to be seen. "Though
he was a member of the congressional com mit tee that spent several months
examining the homosexuals-in-government issue, McCarthy mys teriously
recused himself from those hearings," Johnson notes.
McCarthy, the middle-aged, perennial bachelor, was vulnerable to questions
about his own sexuality that were to circulate soon enough.
Instead, senior colleagues took up the cudgel, including Senators Styles Bridges(R-N.H.), Kenneth Wherry (R-Neb.) and Clyde Hoey (D-N.C.).
In April 1950 Republican National Committee Chair Guy Gabrielson charged thata "conspiracy" was underway. Gab riel son's statement read in part, "Perhaps as
dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated
our government in recent years."
While Gabrielson claimed the media was not doing enough to alert the
population to the "homosexual menace," this was merely self-serving demagogy.
The media helped whip the frenzy to a fevered pitch. The New York Times took
the lead, running at least seven stories promoting this anti-homosexual campaign
in May and June of 1950.
In May 1950, Wherry quoted "reliable police sources" that 3,750 homosexuals
were ensconced in federal jobs. A month later, the Senate authorized an official
investigation, the first of its kind in U.S. history. It was popularly dubbed the"pervert inquiry." (glbtq)
The politically motivated results of these hearings, issued in December, charged
the Truman administration with indifference toward the danger of homosexuals
in government. The official "justification" for this witch hunt against gay andlesbian employees was cited as "lack of emotional stability" and "weakness of ...
moral fiber" that allegedly made them likely victims of Soviet propaganda andrecruitment.
By November of that year, close to 600 federal civil workers had lost their jobs.
In the State Department alone, security officials bragged that they were firing one

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1950: 'Lavender scare'!

homosexual per day, more than twice the rate of those charged with political
disloyalty to capitalism.
Wherry concluded in December, "You can't hardly separate homosexuals fromsubversives. ... Mind you, I don't say that every homosexual is a subversive, and I
don't say every subversive is a homosexual. But [people] of low morality are amenace in the government, whatever [they are], and they are all tied up
together." (New York Post, December 1950)
Next: Publicity dies down, anti-gay witch hunt does not

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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1950s witch hunt:: Even McCarthy was gay baited

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1950s witch hunt:: Even
McCarthy was gay baited

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 28

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 2, 2005 10:45 AM

In the 1950s, more bombshells were to detonate in the overall offensive against
the "Lavender Menace," which had become a foil for the right-wing in thedomestic Cold War.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two gay double-agents working in
British intelligence, fled to the Soviet Union. This was grist for the mill, linking
homosexuality with communist "treason."In 1952, worldwide publicity accompanied the entrapment and arrest of British
mathematician and computer innovator Alan Turing. He was one of 1,686 menrounded up and charged with "gross indecency with males." Turing had risen tofame during World War II after he deciphered a Nazi secret code.
Turing was sentenced to a year of hormonal treatments, which reportedly caused
impotence and breast development, and became the target of British government
scrutiny as a potential "subversive." He killed himself two years later, at the ageof 41.
In the U.S., transphobia also took center stage in 1952. When Christine
Jorgensen's plane touched down carrying her home from Denmark, where she'dsought hormonal and surgical help with sex reassignment, 300 reporters surged
forward, shouting questions as flash bulbs popped.
She became the brunt of a dehumanizing and degrading campaign from the bully
pulpits of radio, newspaper and television.
And that same year, even cold warrior Sen. Joseph McCarthy was publicly baited
as a homosexual.
Hoisted by their own petard
After the 1952 election, in which the Republicans won back Senate control,
McCarthy took over as chair of the Investigations Subcommittee of theCommittee on Government Operations. He hired 25-year-old attorney Roy Cohn
as his chief counsel. Cohn in turn recruited David Schine, later rumored to be hislover, to become chief consultant.
Cohn had close contacts within the FBI. That was important for McCarthy, whoreportedly worked hand-in-glove with J. Edgar Hoover's bureau between 1950
and 1953.
One of Hoover's agents, William Sullivan, later conceded, "We were the ones who
made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he wasusing."
This information sharing was covert and quite illegal. Although bound by law toshare information only with the executive branch, the bureau had also reportedly
leaked background checks to Congress.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0310/[2/3/2011 3:52:11 PM]

Respond1950s witch hunt:: Even McCarthy was gay baited

Hoover was said to have recommended Roy Cohn for the post with McCarthy
because he was impressed by the young attorney's railroading of Communist
Party members Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair on
charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hoover himself has beenrumored to have had a long-term affair with an assistant, Clyde Tolson.
"As McCarthy's henchman and chief counsel he [Cohn--LF] was responsible forgrilling suspected communists on their own sexual tendencies and on whether
other people had 'homosexual tendencies.' Cohn and McCarthy subpoenaed gay
men in the arts and threatened to out them if they did not produce a list of'suspected Communists.' (wikipedia.com)
McCarthy had made a name for himself as point man for a far right-wing current
that attacked the Truman administration for the "loss" of China from imperialist
exploitation after the monumental Communist-led revolution there.
But when McCarthy leveled his guns at the Eisenhower administration for not
being "tough enough" on communism, he got his comeuppance. That was when
he found himself in the cross-hairs of the anti-homosexual witch hunt.
In 1952, journalist Hank Greenspun wrote a column about the ambitious senator
which could not have found its way into print without powerful support. It said
that "Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years. ... He seldom dates girls and if hedoes he laughingly describes it as window dressing. It is common talk amonghomosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator
Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities." (Las Vegas Sun, Oct.
25, 1952)
While McCarthy was said to have briefly threatened to sue Greenspun for libel,
he later declined to do so, reportedly after lawyers told him it meant he'd have to
testify about his sexuality. Less than a year later, McCarthy married his secretary,
Jeannie Kerr.
In March 1953, McCarthy tried to defeat Eisenhower's appointment of Charles
Bohlen as ambassador to Russia. Bohlen was a shrewd imperialist diplomat who
had participated in the February 1945 Yalta Conference at which Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin had negotiated over the shape of post-war Europe.
McCarthy tried to enlist Hoover's help. But although Hoover allegedly said that
Bohlen had "associated" with homosexuals and that an FBI investigation had
found him weak from "the security and morals angle," Hoover said he couldn't
provide evidence. Bohlen was confirmed.
McCarthy also tried to cast aspersions on Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens.
But when the senator from Wisconsin attempted to probe the echelons of the
Army brass for subversives, at the height of the Korean War, he had crossed theline. His self-promoting witch hunt was now being extended to anyone whostood in his way, including seasoned members of the imperialist military-politicalestablishment itself.
Eisenhower, a former Army general and in many ways the architect of themodern military-industrial complex, allowed the hearings to be televised to
publicly expose McCarthy's tyrannical bullying. This was a tactic to arouse publicanger at his intimidation tactics, and it provided the basis for the Senate tocensure McCarthy in December 1954 by a vote of 67 to 22.
Whether McCarthy, Hoover, Cohn and other Cold Warriors in their circles
thought of themselves as homosexuals, and whether or not they had sex withother men, is not really the issue.
Seen from the standpoint of sexuality, it seems inexplicable, like when Ernst
Roehm and other gay Nazis helped to violently smash the German Homosexual
Emancipation Movement.
However, McCarthy, like Roehm, hated the grass-roots, working-class movementthat challenged capitalist rule from below. And like so many other right-wingers,

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0310/[2/3/2011 3:52:11 PM]

1950s witch hunt:: Even McCarthy was gay baited

he was willing to use every prejudice and reactionary attitude in this struggle.
McCarthy had made crystal clear on his very first day in the Senate which side of
the class barricade he was on. He called together the media to publicize his"solution" to a coal strike then underway. He demanded that miners' union
leader John L. Lewis and the striking workers be conscripted into the Army. If
miners in uniform still refused to dig coal, McCarthy proposed they be courtmartialed for insubordination and shot to death.
Full fury of state fist
The media fanfare over the federal anti-homosexual witch hunt died down after
1950. Historian David K. Johnson stres ses, however, that the lessening of
publicity was "not a testament to the lack of antigay efforts but to theirroutinization and institutionalization in the aftermath of the national security
state." ("The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Perse cut ion of Gays and Lesbiansin the Federal Government")
The Democratic Truman administration had caved in to the right wing, ramping
up firings of federal employees accused of being homosexuals, after the Senate
issued the results of its "investigation" into gays and lesbians in government
employ in December 1950. Firings in the State Department, for example, climbed
from 54 in 1950, to 119 in 1951, to 134 in 1952.
Within three months of being sworn in at his inauguration in 1953, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450. This act empowered all
federal agencies to investigate and fire workers on the grounds of "sexual
perversion." Johnson adds, government shared police and military records withprivate employers, resulting in the dismissal of hundreds."
He emphasizes that this overall repressive campaign must be understood asmuch broader than the work of Joseph McCarthy, alone. "To attribute the purges
to McCarthy serves to marginalize them historically. It suggests that they were
the product of a uniquely unscrupulous demagogue, did not enjoy widespread
support, and were not part of mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party."
And he concludes, "It ignores how the purges predated McCarthy, became
institutionalized within the federal loyalty/ security system, and continued to be
standard government policy until the 1970s."
In his book, "The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution," David Carter offers adetailed and important overview of the iron-fisted state repression during theCold War.
"The Civil Service Commission and the FBI complied by initiating an intense
campaign to ferret out homosexuals by, for instance, correlating morals arrests
across the United States with lists of government employees and checking
fingerprints of job applicants against the FBI's fingerprint files."He recalls how states wrote new, more repressive laws or beefed up sentencing.
"For example, California governor Earl Warren thought the sex offender problem
so serious that in 1949 he convened a special session of the state legislature todeal with the issue. That session passed laws that increased the penalties forsodomy and invented a new crime: loitering in a public toilet." The names ofeveryone convicted of lingering in a toilet were added to a state register.
"Twenty-nine states enacted new sexual psychopath laws and/or revised existingones, and homosexuals were commonly the laws' primary targets. In almost allstates, professional licenses could be revoked or denied on the basis ofhomosexuality, so that professionals could lose their livelihoods."
And conviction brought with it terrible suffering. Carter emphasizes that by 1961,"An adult convicted of a crime of having sex with another consenting adult in theprivacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, 10, or 20
yearseven life--in prison. In 1971 20 states had 'sex psychopath' laws that

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0310/[2/3/2011 3:52:11 PM]

1950s witch hunt:: Even McCarthy was gay baited

permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania
and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, andin seven states they could be castrated."
Carter adds, "At California's Atascadero State Hospital, known soon after its
opening as 'Dachau for Queers,' men convicted of consensual sodomy were, as
authorized by a 1941 law, given electrical and pharmacological shock therapy,
castrated and lobotomized."
The state machinery--police, courts, prisons, military--had already been used as aweapon to besiege gay/lesbian/trans and bisexual people in the U.S. in the 1920s
and 1930s. What changed in the ensuing two decades to unleash the state in sucha ferocious, cruel and widespread effort to control sexuality?
And was there resistance? Oh, yes.
Next: Resisting state terror predated McCcarthyism.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Early resistance to state repression

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Early resistance to state
repression

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 23, 2005 1:39 PM

In the inhospitable social climate of the Cold War, struggles were taking root in
the U.S. that would later flower in the gay and trans liberation movement of thelate 1960s.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

How was it possible, some may wonder today, for gays to have resisted andorganized in the 1940s and 1950s when state repression and a reactionary
ideological offensive were at their height?
In the war between exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, therelationship of forces may change many times, but those under siege never cease
to find ways to struggle for their freedom.
Much of the history of the struggle for homosexual and gender and women’s
rights in the decades of greatest political repression has been buried under thereactionary weight of the Cold War propaganda machine. Under standing how
the early stirrings of the homophile movement of the 1940s and 1950s began
serves to arm today’s movement, which has much greater opportunities forresistance against political reaction.
Also, the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion and the mass political wave of struggle itunleashed can seem almost accidental or episodic without a general overview of
the acts of resistance and attempts to organize that preceded the four-night-longuprising.
The choice of language to describe these earlier decades is difficult. Similar words
may be used to describe sex, love and affection with regard to different historicalperiods, economic classes, nationalities, ethnicities and regions. However, theways people saw themselves and each other and the ways medical authorities,
police, courts and military brass categorized and criminalized people and their
behaviors have undergone many changes.
The world of same-sex love among many blue-collar and oppressed people in thefirst half of the century in the U.S. was intertwined with gender and sex variance—or what today might be referred to as transgender and transsexual. It’s also
hard to separate bisexuality from the exclusive expression of same-sex love inearly periods.
Here “LGBT” will be used, not to stamp the past with a modern acronym thathas come to symbolize a united front coalition of sexuality, gender and sex
minorities, but to show the inability to parse the population into distinct
categories.
Centralizing force of capitalism
The rise of the 1940s and 1950s homophile movement itself is hard to fathom
without taking into account the awakening of LGBT people in the 1920s and1930s. Material developments in life under capitalism made this not only possible
in those early decades of the 20th century, but necessary.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0331/index.html[2/3/2011 3:52:29 PM]

RespondEarly resistance to state repression

By the end of the 19th century, Northern industrial capital and banking had
consolidated its victory over the Southern slave-owning landed aristocracy. The
overturning of Black Reconstruction through lynch “law” and Jim Crow fascist
conditions had brought a violent end to an unfinished revolution. This createdhuge shifts in the population from agriculture to urban areas in search of jobs. In
these vast, anonymous cities and port towns, with same-sex boarding houses andparks and piers, nascent LGBT subcultures took shape.
U.S. capitalism, unable to satiate its hunger for profits through domestic
expansion alone, emerged as an imperialist power, exporting war for empire andprofits to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898. A decade and a halflater the world’s imperialist powers dragged the workers into a gory struggle overredividing the world’s colonies in the first World War.
The military deployment and wartime industry also pulled massive numbers of
women and men from rural areas, small towns and cities into same-sex living
conditions and new social conditions that broke down the old order.
It was workers’ revolution that scared the imperialists into finally ending the war.
The Cold War really began in the U.S. after the workers and peasants of Russia
rose up in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and established the first lasting workers’
state. The revolution reverberated around the globe, lifting the heads of laboringand oppressed peoples in every part of the world.
The communist government in Russia immediately struck down the antihomosexual laws. In the U.S., however, the capitalist government made LGBT
people one of the early targets of repression, along with communists, anarchists,trade unionists and immigrants.
Military witch hunt
In the spring of 1919, the brass at the Newport Naval Training Center covertly
sent a group of young enlisted men into the base and the nearby community tolure “sexual perverts” and bring back evidence about “immoral conditions.”
After entrapment had provided the necessary “evidence,” naval and municipal
officials rounded up more than 20 sailors and 16 civilians. They faced naval andcivilian trials.
It was one thing when the dragnet ensnared enlisted sailors, mostly from theworking class. But when a prominent minister from the Episcopal Church of
Newport got caught in the nets, and civilian and later military officials forced him
to stand trial, all hell broke loose.
“Protests by the Newport Ministerial Union and the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode
Island and a vigorous editorial campaign by the Providence Journal forced the
Navy to conduct a second inquiry in 1920 into the methods used in the firstinvestigation,” historian George Chauncey Jr. wrote.
“When the inquiry criticized the methods but essentially exonerated the seniornaval officers who had instituted them, the ministers asked the Republicancontrolled Senate Naval Affairs Committee to conduct its own investigation.”
The Republicans agreed, eager to attack the Democratic administration.
The Senate committee issued its report in 1921. It exonerated the minister.
Although the report, Chauncey noted, “expressed deep anti-homosexual loathing,it condemned the conduct of the highest naval officials involved, includingFranklin D. Roosevelt, President Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy and the1920 Democratic vice-presidential candidate.” (“Homosexual Identities and theConstruction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era”)
Smoke, lilies and jadeThe mass migrations to large cities, port towns and military bases in the 1920s
and 1930s had created the basis for larger and more concentrated subcultures.

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Early resistance to state repression

Chauncey provides evidence that LGBT life flourished more in the first third of
the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, than it did after WorldWar II.
He described same-sex love and gender variance in New York, one of the capitalsof LGBT life, as “a working-class world, center ed in African American and Irish
and Italian immigrant neighborhoods and along the city’s busy waterfront, anddrawing on the social forms of working-class culture.”
The most visible, organized and eloquent LGBT expression in the pre-World War
II era came from the Black movement in the United States.
As the Great Migration from the South to the North burgeoned into Black urban
capitals, LGBT expression became a part of their histories.
Thousands attended LGBT balls in Harlem, Chicago, Baltimore and Wash ing
ton, D.C., which were widely reported on in Black community newspapers.
In New York the balls were held at the Rockland Palace, the Astor Hotel and Mad
ison Square Garden. The most famous was the annual Hamilton Lodge Ball in
Har lem, which dated back to 1879. The majority of those who attended were
working class. About 800 took part in 1925; 1,500 in 1937. Attendance peaked at
8,000 in 1937 before police raids shut it down.
Harlem was the heart of one of the great cultural and political high-water marksof U.S. history—the Harlem Renaissance—which ran from the end of World War
I in 1918 until the capitalist depression.
This flowering of literature, art, music and political organizing—all of which was
influenced by aspirations for national liberation and hope for an end to dreams
deferred, sparked by the socialist revolution in Russia—also gave voice to LGBT
concerns.
Richard Bruce Nugent, a self-identified gay man, published the classic “Smoke,
Lilies and Jade” in 1926. It was the first known work by a Black author clearly
about same-sex love. He said about LGBT life in Harlem during that period,“Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closets.”
Next: German Homosexual Emancipation Movement inspired 1920s U.S.
organizing.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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German movement inspired U.S. organizing

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German movement inspired
U.S. organizing

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 30, 2005 10:16 AM

The German Homosexual Emancipation Movement inspired organizing in the
U.S., too. As early as 1906 and 1907, spokes people from the Scientific-Humani
tarian Committee traveled to New York to talk about their movement building.

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Anarchist Emma Goldman, who said she was influenced by the writings ofGerman gay leader Magnus Hirschfeld as well as women prisoners, madehomosexual freedom a theme of her 1915 lectures across the U.S.
Male soldiers shipped overseas to Europe during World War I came into contact
with the gay, trans and lesbian movement in Germany. At least one GI became
enthused about bringing that organizing back to the U.S.
In December 1924, Henry Gerber founded the first known homosexual rights
group in the United States: the Society for Human Rights.
This early attempt to organize was solely male. Lesbian historian Lillian
Faderman notes that, “By the 1920s there were already a few establishedcommunities of women who identified themselves as lesbian, in some astonishingplaces such as Salt Lake City as well as in more likely areas such as San
Francisco.” (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers)

WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA
African American lesbians, including cross-dressers, were part of the rising
Harlem Renaissance.
And although the widespread baiting from pundits and pulpits about the“mannish women” of the women’s rights movement was meant to be a slur,lesbians were drawn to the struggle.
But it wasn’t until World War II, when large numbers of U.S. women were
mobilized in the ranks of the military and in wartime industry, that lesbianorganizing—in its own name—took hold.
Inspired by German struggle
Gerber was a Bavarian-born GI whose family had emigrated to the U.S. around1913. He was institutionalized briefly in 1917 for being homosexual. During WorldWar I, Gerber was forced to choose between joining the U.S. Army or being
interned as an “enemy alien.”
He chose the Army. He was later deployed to the Rhineland as part of the Armyoccupation force there from 1920 to 1923. He worked as a printer andproofreader in Coblenz.
While there, Gerber was inspired by the German Homosexual Emancipation
Movement.
He wrote, “In Coblenz on the Rhine I had subscribed to German homophilemagazines and made several trips to Berlin, which was then not occupied byAmerican forces. I had always bitterly felt the injustice with which my own

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RespondGerman movement inspired U.S. organizing

American society accused the homosexual of ‘immoral acts.’“What could be done about it, I thought. Unlike Germany, where the homosexual
was partially organized and where sex legislation was uniform for the wholecountry, the United States was in a condition of chaos and misunderstanding
concerning its sex laws, and no one was trying to unravel the tangle and bringrelief to the abused.”
Gerber came back to Chicago determined to start organizing homosexuals.
“The beginning of all movements is necessarily small,” he wrote. “I was able togather together a half dozen of my friends and the Society for Human Rights
became an actuality. Through a lawyer our program was submitted to theSecretary of State at Springfield, and we were furnished with a State Charter. No
one seemed to have bothered to investigate our purpose.”
The group’s statement of purpose in the incorporation documents reads, in part,“... to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reason of mental
and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit ofhappiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and tocombat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of facts according tomodern science among intellectuals of mature age.”
The name “Society for Human Rights,” he noted, was “the same name used by
the homosexuals of Germany for their work.”
Gerber was reportedly rebuffed by prominent sex reform advocates heapproached. “I needed noted medical authorities to endorse us. But they usuallyrefused to endanger their reputations.”
Gerber recalled, “The only support I got was from poor people: John, a preacher
who earned his room and board by preaching brotherly love to small groups of[African Americans]; Al, an indigent laundry queen; and Ralph whose job withthe railroad was in jeopardy when his nature became known. These were thenational officers of the Society for Human Rights, Inc.”
The group, which consisted of about half a dozen people, concentrated theirefforts on the state of Illinois. There, anal intercourse was the only prohibited sex
act—punishable from one to 10 years in prison. This was not unusual. The
penalty in Georgia for “sodomy” at that time was life behind bars.
“It is hard to believe that Mother Nature needs our police to protect her from her
creatures,” Gerber bitterly observed.
Busted!
The Society set out to organize homosexuals, create a series of lecture events andpublish a newsletter. Gerber quickly produced two issues of the first-known
homophile publication in the United States: “Friendship and Freedom.”
The primary goal of the society, Gerber stressed, was to decriminalize same-sex
acts in Illinois. That objective proved harder to achieve.
In July 1925, police raided the homes of the group’s leaders. They had no
warrants for the arrests. Henry Gerber, Al Meininger and the Rev. John T.
Graves were jailed.
A reporter from the Chicago Examiner was allowed to accompany the detective
who arrested Gerber in his home. The newspaper ran a front-page story
declaring “Strange Sex Cult Exposed.”
Gerber endured three trials that cost him his life savings of $800. The charges
were finally dismissed. He lost his job; his bosses at the post office fired him for
conduct unbecoming to a postal worker. Gerber concluded, “That definitely
meant the end of the Society for Human Rights.”

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German movement inspired U.S. organizing

Gerber re-enlisted in the Army. While stationed on Governor’s Island in New
York, he wrote articles in homophile publications under a nom de plume. He
briefly wrote for Chanticleer, a mimeographed 1934 gay publication.
And throughout the 1930s Gerber ran Contacts—a homosexual correspondence“pen pals” club that served as a national communication network for gay men.
“When he folded Contacts club in 1939, member Monwell Boyfrank pestered him
to get something started; and he, Frank McCourt, Boyfrank and others wrote one
another for years, arguing how to organize homosexuals,” Jim Kepner recalled in
his 1985 pamphlet, “Gay Movement History & Goals.”“They never realized that their radically different views on the nature ofhomosexuals and of society left little chance for them to agree on how to improve
the homosexual condition. Without common goals, they couldn’t evolve clear orpractical tactics.”
Kepner concluded, “A Gerber friend who’d lacked the nerve to join SHR brought
out young Harry Hay in Los Angeles’ Pershing Square in 1930, and told him
about the group, inspiring Harry to imitation. But to start a group, you need atleast one other person, and it took Harry 20 years to find that other—the latefamed fashion designer Rudi Gernreich.”
The seeds of the early homosexual rights movement took root.
By the end of World War II, recalls Barry D. Adam, “The first stirrings of move
ment activity in the United States appeared among recently demobilized men in
the Veterans Benevolent Associ ation in New York and among working women in
Los Angeles. Both groups developed out of existing friendship networks andmade no attempt to go public.” (“The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement”)
In 1947 and 1948, “Lisa Ben”—an anagram for lesbian—published nine issues of apublication she titled “Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine.”“Lisa Ben” had come out as a lesbian in the World War II era. She moved fromthe small agricultural community in Cali fornia where she’d been born and raised
to Los Angeles in search of a job. There she also found a women’s boardinghouse
where “she met for the first time lesbians who took her to gay bars andintroduced her to other gay women.”
And in 1950 Harry Hay did start an organization—Mattachine. Hay’s vision oforganizing was much more like that of some of the radical leaders of the German
Homosexual Emancipation Movement. Because Harry Hay was a communist.
Next: Communist impact on homosexual and women’s rights organizing.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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Young Harry Hay and the Wobblies

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Wobblies00

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 31

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 14, 2005 9:35 PM

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CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe Mattachine movement for homosexual emancipation in the United States
was initiated by a core group of five leftists in 1950 at the height of the anticommunist and anti-gay McCarthyite witch hunt. Two of the founders weremembers of the Communist Party (CPUSA), another had been active in the party
in the Midwest after the war, and the other two leftists could be described as“fellow travelers.”
The short-lived Mattachine movement drew an estimated 5,000 homosexuals in
California to its ranks in the early 1950s. And, Will Roscoe noted, “its name,carrying the promise of freedom, spread throughout the United States and theworld.” (“Radically Gay”)
The political beliefs and experience of the founding members were far fromincidental to organizing for homosexual emancipation.
That was particularly true for Harry Hay, the key figure in launching the
Mattachine movement.
Hay had spent more than 17 years in the CPUSA. He wasn’t just a member; hehad been a respected Marxist teacher and a tireless organizer. Communist
politics, a Marxist world view, a historical materialist vista of history, andimmersion in the class struggle gave material shape to Hay’s vision ofhomosexual emancipation.
Ticket to the working-class struggle
Hay had been born in England in 1912 with a silver spoon in his mouth. He spent
his early years in Chile, where his father was a wealthy mining engineer
employed by Anaconda Copper. The family returned to the U.S. in 1917, where hegrew up in southern California.
Hay so loved theater and opera that at the end of his freshman year in highschool, at the age of 13, his father sent him to labor for the summer in the hay
fields of Western Nevada to “toughen him up.”
Hay worked alongside miners who did farm work in the summers. Many wereWobblies—members of the Industrial Workers of the World—whose ambition was
to organize workers into “one big union.”
Those hay wagons became a school of Marxism for Hay. In his biography, “The
Trouble with Harry Hay,” Stuart Timmons described, “Among the greasy,
thumbworn pamphlets, Harry remembered Karl Marx’s Value, Price and Profit
and Wage-Labor and Capital. By day, they drilled him in the principles of
exploitation, organization and unity. By campfire, they told him stories. ‘I was
immersed in the first great railroad strike of 1887, the Haymarket Massacre, andthe dreadful Ludlow Massacre, where Rockefeller goons gunned down 14 womenand children in the snow on Christmas Eve, 1913.’”
Hay also recalled being chilled by the anti-gay attitudes that many workers,

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0421/[2/3/2011 3:53:18 PM]

RespondYoung Harry Hay and the Wobblies

including Wobblies, had been societally imbued with and which remained
unexamined and unchallenged.
However, the Wobblies gave Hay an IWW card that was his ticket to work on a
tramp steamer. The experience with these militant miners gave him more thanthat.
Timmons summed up, “Though he had already been earning money for several
years, and the silver spoon of his infancy had long tarnished, he now had words
to identify himself as ‘a working-class kid.’ He played down any class rebellion on
his part, and said that his new politicization merely gave a theoretical basis forhis personal hatred of his father’s staunch conservatism.
“The Wobblies’ praise for his honest toil strengthened this new political bond,and each winter he eagerly awaited the return of summer and theircompanionship.”
Hay’s first ‘bulls-eye’Hay’s first gay experience was with someone who had ties to the much shorterlived 1924 Society for Human Rights based in Chicago, whose founder, Henry
Gerber, had been deeply inspired by contact with the Germany Homosexual
Emancipation Movement.
Hay, who never lost his early love of theater, moved to Los Angeles—an urban
magnet for many homosexuals—and became a struggling actor during the depthsof the capitalist economic Depression of the early 1930s.
It was Will Geer, perhaps best remembered today as “Grandpa Walton” of the
1970s television series “The Waltons,” who first introduced Hay to the left-wingcurrent in Los Angeles and to the Communist Party. Over coffee with Geer and
Maude Allen, said Timmons,“They hashed over the anti-socialist Palmer Raids made by the federal
government in the 1920s, the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, and various strikes—
fascinating stuff to this young man.”Geer and Hay helped organized demonstrations during these hard Depression
years to support unemployed workers, exploited field laborers and labor unions.
They chained themselves to a lamppost at the old UCLA campus while
distributing leaflets for the American League Against War and Fascism.
One of the most life-altering demonstrations for Hay, which he reportedly loved
to rehash, was in Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. Says his biography, “TheMilk Strike was an action called in 1933 by the wives and mothers of the poor
and unemployed to make the government stop allowing surplus milk to bepoured down the storm drains to keep the price up. They wanted it for theneedy. A crowd of thousands turned out downtown in the shadow of the newly
built City Hall.”Hay saw police posted atop nearby buildings aiming their machine guns at thecrowd. Cops charged, swinging their clubs at protesters’ skulls. “Women were
grabbing and shielding their children, and every so often you would see someone
go down with a bloody head. The police were being absolutely brutal, without
provocation. I think they may have wanted to incite a riot so they could clear thecrowd.”As he backed away from the police melee towards a bookstore, Harry grab bed
one of the bricks used to keep stacks of newspapers from flying away in a breeze.
“I made no conscious decision. I just found myself heaving it and catching a
policeman right in the temple. He slid off his horse and a hundred faces turned
to me in amazement. No one was more amazed than I. Always before, I had been
the one who threw the ball like a sissy. This ‘bull’ was my first bull’s-eye ever!”Timmons described what happened next. “Sym path izers murmuring in Yiddish,Portuguese and English grabbed him. He heard, ‘We’ve got to hide this kid

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Young Harry Hay and the Wobblies

before the cops get him.’” They guided him through a labyrinth of connected old
1880s tenement buildings. “He was pushed through rooms that immigrant
women and children rarely left, across catwalks and planks, up, up, hearing theoccasional reassurance, ‘Everything’s fine. Just don’t look down.’”
Hay arrived at a living room in the slums filled with men. Presiding over them
was Clarabelle. Hay heard the other men refer to Clarabelle, who was born malebodied, with the female pronoun. Clara belle had hennaed hair and wore apeasant blouse slung low over one shoulder.
“Harry had heard of Clarabelle as one of the most powerful of the ‘Queen
Mothers’ who traditionally oversaw the temperamental comings and goings in
the districts of town where they lived; Harry felt that such figures formed a
regional network of salons among some pre-Stonewall gays,” Timmons explained.
Hay himself recalled, “Clarabelle controlled Bunker Hill and had at least a dozen‘lieutenants’ covering stations, one called the Fruit Tank—that was our nickname
for the jail cell for queers. Clarabelle was legendary, a [1930s movie star] Mary
Boland type who really knew how to pin a curl while giving an order.
“‘My dear,’ she said to me, ‘we saw what you did, knocking that old cop off hishigh horse, and it should have been done years ago. We’ll have to hide you; they’ll
be after you soon. Cup of coffee first? No, no time. They’re already on their way.”
Next: Answering the “siren song of revolution.”

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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Harry Hay heard ‘siren song of revolution’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 20, 2005 2:06 PM

Harry Hay, who had been living his life as a gay man as “out” as he could be,joined the Communist Party USA in 1934.

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At that time, the CPUSA barred openly gay and lesbian members. Particularly
ideologically harmful was the formulation to “justify” such a membership rule:the view that homosexuality was a degeneracy that arose from a decadenteconomic system.
That policy was indefensible, doing damage to homosexuals as well as to therevolutionary movement as a whole.
This political stance did not arise out of a vacuum. While the Bolshevik Party
under Lenin’s leadership had abolished the tsarist anti-homosexual law in 1917,
by 1934 under a more politically conservative and bureaucratic grouping, an antihomosexual law was back on the books in the USSR.
There were homosexual members in the CPUSA; they just didn’t say they were. It
would be wrong to glibly refer to this as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Thatphrase refers to the reign of terror the Pentagon—the military arm of thecapitalist state—conducts against its own GIs.

WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe CPUSA was nose-to-nose against that state. The party leadership may wellhave feared the opening for state repression the organization could face by having
openly gay, lesbian and bisexual, and trans members. After all, the party was
struggling in a capitalist country in which same-sex love was illegal.
Tragically, however, the CPUSA’s position on homosexual members helped createa much greater political and state vulnerability. Within a decade, the right wingof the U.S. capitalist class would unleash a witch hunt to crush revolutionary
resistance to its rule by equating communists with homosexuals. And the
CPUSA’s position weakened the struggle to politically answer and defend victimsof the anti-communist and anti-gay witch hunt.
In fairness, there was not as yet a historical materialist overview of the roots ofstate regulation of sexuality and gender expression. The greatest Marxist
theoretical contributions had been to reveal the class basis of the oppression of
women.
It would be Harry Hay who would take that Marxist analysis further, to look at
the origins of oppression based on homosexuality and what would today be called
transgender and transsexuality.
‘You might have to start it yourself!’
Hay thrived as a communist. He caught a glimpse of the future in his work.
Hay described those experiences in the biography “The Trouble with Harry Hay,”
written by Stuart Timmons.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0428/[2/3/2011 3:53:41 PM]

RespondHarry Hay heard ‘siren song of revolution’Hay recalled, “We were involved in organizing the unorganized; the CIO had awide open field on the West Coast. Along with the waterfront, the newspaper
guilds began to organize, as did the department stores.”Hay and Will Geer continued doing “agitprop” theater— shorthand for shortstreet dramas that taught political lessons while mobilizing audiences to takeaction. Hay defined it as “a responsibility for keeping spirits high at picket lines
and keeping attention focused at large meetings.”
Geer took Hay to Communist Party theory classes. Hay attended, but reflected,“It was disorienting to sit there with urban people, mostly film workers,
discussing rural worker models of Marxism.”Geer discouraged Hay’s talk of organizing a “team of brothers.”
Hay recalled, “I said I wanted to get a society of ‘just us’ together. Bill argued thatthat was the theater.”
Only Maude Allen encouraged Hay’s dream of organizing homosexuals. While
Hay and Geer argued about the possibility, she interrupted that, “this was
possible, but you might have to start it yourself.”
The experience that changed his life
Hay explained how the West Coast longshore workers’ strike transformed him.
The 1934 strike in San Francisco inspired all the maritime workers to shut down
the waterfront. The militant action by longshore workers won the support of 120
local unions.
The CPUSA sent Hay and Geer and many other organizers from Los Angeles tohelp the strikers. Hay and Geer collected food for the striking workers as theydrove up the coast.
In early July, bosses tried to bring scabs past the picket lines, igniting battles.
Gov. Frank Finley Merriam called out the state militia. This sparked the call bylabor leaders for the July 1934 San Francisco General Strike.
Hay was there when troops were ordered to open fire on a crowd of more than
2,000 workers. He remembers a bullet whizzing past his left ear. Two workers
were shot dead; 85 more were hospitalized.
Later, at the huge funeral procession for the two men, Hay remembered that “aposse of dock workers knocked the bowlers off the heads of bankers who refused
to show respect. It was pretty damn impressive.”“The strike was just something tremendous!” Hay later told historian John
D’Emilio. “You couldn’t have been a part of that and not have your life completelychanged.”He was 23 years old. And he was answering what he called “the siren song ofRevolution.”
Hay in the thick of struggle
In 1935 and 1936, Hay was in the thick of the struggle. He took part infundraisers and demonstrations against the rise of fascism in Spain andGermany, and in support of African American civil rights and union organizing.
From 1936 to 1938 he worked on the End Poverty in California campaign, theHollywood Writers’ Mobili zation, the American League Against War and Fas
cism, the Mobilization for Democracy, the Workers’ Alliance of America andLabor’s Non-Partisan League.
He was active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, organized by Dorothy Parker
in the spring of 1936. Supporters included Paul Muni and Boris Karloff.
Biographer Stuart Timmons wrote, “The Anti-Nazi Lea gue was a typical mass

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0428/[2/3/2011 3:53:41 PM]

Harry Hay heard ‘siren song of revolution’org ani zation, which, while indepen dent, relied heavily on leadership from the
CPUSA and served to introduce sympathetic people to Marxist principles and to
the Party. The structure of the Mattachine Soci ety, 14 years later, was strongly
influenced by this model.”Hay still frequented gay bars, describing his experiences this way: “Gay life was
not so much a life as an aggregate of cliques.”
Just as earthshaking as the 1934 San Fran cisco General Strike had been in changing his life, Hay explained how three years later a panoramic Marxist viewtransformed his thinking.
Screen writer Viola Brothers Shore invited Hay in late 1937 to a Marxist
discussion group in the home of film director Frank Tuttle.
This experience was “wildly exciting,” Hay described. “Suddenly it all madewonderful sense.”
Next: Bringing communist experience to building a new mass movement.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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Harry Hay tried to 'close chapter' on his gayness

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Harry Hay tried to 'close
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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 33

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 4, 2005 5:15 PM

In 1938, Harry Hay—only a decade away from launching the first mass politicalmovement for homosexual emancipation in the United States—married a woman
comrade in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

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Since the CPUSA at that time did not allow openly homosexual members, itwould be easy to jump to the conclusion that Hay, a member of the CPUSA, felt
so isolated as a gay man that he married merely in order to hide his sexuality
inside the organization.
But Hay knew he wasn’t the only gay party member. He wrote, “I knew a number
of Black and white men from the performing arts in the Communist Party whowere gay, but the Party didn’t seem to suspect. I realized that since they weren’tthat unnoticeable, certain Party people saw the necessity of tolerating andcovering for them.” (Stuart Timmons, “The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
Simply attributing the pressure towards heterosexual marriage to the CP’sinternal policy removes the historical context. Outside the party, homosexuality
was illegal; state regulation of sexuality was enforced by police entrapment andraids, imprisonment and institutionalization.
As biographer Timmons succinctly summed up, “Marriage was common for bothmale and female homosexuals of Harry’s generation. The most famous modern
homosexual, Oscar Wilde, was married with children. Matrimony, in one ofHarry’s more philosophical letters, seemed ‘the casting couch for society.’”
As historian Jim Kepner noted, “In the forties, for many gays who wanted to besocially productive, marriage was a necessity.” While there were a few professions
in which a gay man might remain unmarried—dance, design, dressmaking—thosewere not political hot spots of organizing.
Harry Hay was an organizer who wanted to be in the thick of the working-classstruggle.
‘If only she’d been a boy!’In the late 1930s, Hay had talked to psychologist Dr. Saul Glass, while taking partin Glass’s experiment that sought physiological markers for same-sex love. Hay
was part of a control group whose blood and urine was compared to that ofgay/bi/trans prisoners held in the “Fruit Tank” of the county jail.
Hay lamented to Glass that he felt hopeless “in not being able to find a flowerfaced boy who was a Marxist like me, who would stand with me in the classstruggle against oppression.”
Glass’s suggestion was creative, within the confines of accommodation to
oppression: “Maybe instead of a girlish boy, you’re looking for a boyish girl.”
Hay recalled, “He told me that all I needed to do to change my orientation was todeliberately close one book and open another.”

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0512/[2/3/2011 3:54:00 PM]

RespondHarry Hay tried to 'close chapter' on his gayness

Shortly afterward, Hay was drawn to Anita Platky. She was a 6-foot tall, strongjawed athletic woman described by some as “boyish.” And much to the dismay of
Hay’s well-to-do Catholic family, Platky was Jewish.
Timmons wrote, “Harry told Anita about his homosexual past. She assured him
she understood, that she already knew several men who were ‘that way.’ At least
one of Anita’s few boyfriends before Harry had also been gay.”
The two marched in the same demonstrations, walked the same picket lines, andshared the same hatred of oppression and the same commitment to the socialist
future of humanity.
So in 1938, Harry Hay and Anita Platky exchanged wedding vows. At the requestof the couple, the ceremony left out any “God stuff.”
They remained married for 13 years. Hay said, “Anita and I loved each otherdearly and had a wonderful time doing anything together. We rarely quarreledbecause I usually understood her point of view. Most of her family and friends
thought we were a perfect match—I never looked at another woman. (But oh themen!)”
Timmons concluded, “Harry once said, with awkward sincerity, ‘If she had been aboy, we would still probably be together.’”
Learning communication skills
In 1939, the couple moved to New York and as communists became immersed in
the movement there.
In 1940 they were part of the many thousands who marched through the streetson May Day. Hay described, “Everyone was singing the Leftist anthem, the‘Bandiera Rossa Trionfera.’ It echoed through the canyons of the city. People
were hanging out of windows singing. You’d really think the whole of Manhattan
had signed up with the Party.”
Hay was assigned to the Artists and Writers branch of the New York CP.
He became interim head of the New Theater League in 1941. This trade union
theater staged actual shop floor battles that workers had fought in order toeducate and organize.
Harry explained that as workers successfully organized their shops into unions,“Somebody would eventually say, ‘Jeeze, somebody ought to write a play about
what we went though. … If we told our story, other shops could learn from us.’”Hay organized a fund-raising concert for the theater effort that brought thelegendary blues singer Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, the famous voice of theHarlan County coal workers’ struggle, and others to the Auto Workers’ Hall in
lower Manhattan.
Hay taught acting to workers in unions, including the Longshore, Cooks andStewards, and Bus Drivers unions. Timmons concluded, “In their classes, people
often re-enacted actual confrontations with their bosses, living out the idea ofshops learning from one another’s struggles.
“So Harry joined the clan of theater teachers, from whose distinctive bag ofcommunications tricks he would draw heavily in his future activism.”
Next: Turning to struggle and history for answers.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

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Harry Hay tried to 'close chapter' on his gayness

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‘Historical materialism in ¾ time’

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Long before Harry Hay made his landmark contribution to a historical
understanding of how sexuality and gender diversity evolved over the millennia,
he honed his theoretical tools by delving into a deep and comprehensive study of
Marxism—particularly the historical materialist view of the past patterns ofchanges in the organization of human society.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Hay carefully studied anthropology from a Marxist vantage point and appliedand developed this knowledge in his teachings on the history of folk music.
“During his years in New York City, between 1939 and 1942,” observed editor
Will Roscoe, “when he had access to the [Communist] Party’s library, he read thehistorical writings of Marx and Engels and took advanced classes in Marxist
theory with the intention of becoming a Party educator.” (“Radically Gay”)
In addition, Hay turned to anthropological studies. Biographer Stuart Timmons
noted, “Many Marx ists, particularly Europeans, published extensively in thefields of history and anthropology in the thirties and forties, and Harry read theirbooks avidly.”(“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
As early as 1933, Hay found Robert Briffault’s “The Mothers,” which contrasted
the important social role of females in ancient, cooperative societies to theoppression of women in class-divided societies.
By 1945, Hay was studying the findings of Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe.
He also read the works of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Jane Harrison, Gilbert
Murray and Robert Graves. Hay remarked that he found the writings of the
British Marxist scholar George Thomson, who wrote “Studies in Ancient Greek
Society,” to be “an absolute eye-opener.” Hay was also influenced by British
Marxist Christopher Caudwell. (Roscoe)“Harry’s teaching put him in contact with information that later influenced his
gay thinking,” noted Timmons. “While digging through books about the historicaldevelopment of economics in Europe, he amassed data about pagan religion, theoppressive campaigns of Christianity, and roles seemingly assigned to gay men incertain former societies. (The latter subject was, of course, a secret study.) He
rediscovered Edward Carpenter in ‘The Making of Man,’ by V.F. Calverton, ananthology of anthropological articles. Carpenter and Edward Westermarck
discussed these roles.”Hay also found information about sexuality/gender/sex diversity among Native
nations in North America. The umbrella term “two-spirits” is the language
chosen by many Native activists today to describe sex/gender/sexuality-variant
people in their nations.
Roscoe, who has himself written extensively about two-spirit people, stressed,“[Hay] was particularly impressed by (and often cited) Ruth Benedict’s account of
Two-Spirits in ‘Patterns of Culture.’ As Benedict relates, Two-Spirits enjoyed areputation not only for excellence in crafts and domestic work, but in many
tribes they were religious specialists as well.”

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Published May 12, 2005 3:23 PM

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Hay: ‘Theoretician of People’s Songs’
While living in Manhattan, Hay became excitedly swept up in the left-wing folk
music movement.
The impact of the African American struggle was so enormous that, Roscoe
stated, “Leftist performers and folklorists began to collect and record Black
spirituals, folk songs and jazz music. Because this culture had emerged from thechrysalis of a struggle against oppression, progressives argued that it was avaluable resource for present-day movements, as well.”Roscoe added, “Hay dates his own interest in folk music to the summer of 1937,
when he worked on his grandfather’s ranch in central California and helped
organize a dance for local people where he heard a variety of traditional music.
In 1940, while living in New York, he met Pete Seeger and followed his efforts torevive folk music. Five years later, after he had returned to Los Angeles, heattended an early ‘hootenanny’ organized by Earl Robinson, Ray Glazer and Bill
Wolfe.”
Together with those three men, Hay established Los Angeles People’s Songs inearly 1946, which later affiliated with Pete Seeger’s New York-based “People’s
Songs, Inc.”—which had been set up to make folk music accessible for left-wingorganizing campaigns and struggles.
That same year, the People’s Educational Center—which unionists and otherprogressives set up as part of adult education programs—asked People’s Songs todevelop a music history class.
Hay enthusiastically took up the challenge. He began with a 10-lecture series, but
it quickly expanded to 20.
By the fall of 1947, Timmons explained, “Harry had outlined and begun to teachhis music class, ‘The Historical Development of Folk Music.’” In retrospect, Hay
called it “a survey of historical materialism in three-quarter time.”
Historical materialism is the lens with which Marxists view stages of humaneconomic development. Increasing efficiency of human labor in producing food,clothing, shelter and other necessities of survival lies at the root of changing
social organization.
Hay’s research, Roscoe stated, armed him with the historical data and theoretical
tools he would need to draw on less than a decade later in organizing the
Mattachine movement—the first successful mass homosexual emancipation
organization in the U.S.
Folk music: barometer of class struggle
According to progressive composer Earl Robinson, who wrote “Joe Hill” and“That’s America to Me,” Hay became “the theoretician of People’s Songs.”
In response to an e-mail query asking if the lectures are still preserved in any
form, Timmons wrote back: “Unfortunately, Harry’s lecture series was neverrecorded in any form to my knowledge.”
All that exists is an outline, which is included in the book of Hay’s writings
entitled “Radically Gay,” edited by Will Roscoe. (Hay and Roscoe, Beacon Press,
1996)“Radically Gay” provides the following information.
In his lecture notes for Session 1 on Music and Survival, Hay wrote: “To all ofhistory and to two-thirds of the world today, music is a language, anencyclopedia of patterns, a science—or organization. A method ofcommunicating, organizing, educating, mobilizing in ways beyond the scope of
language or static illustration.”

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‘Historical materialism in ¾ time’

He added, “But it talked to you only because you knew its patterns and no matter
where you encountered the pattern you recognized it.”Hay looked at the inextricable relationship of music to group labor in early folk—or cooperative—societies.
“The vast majority of music that we know is the social production of the world’s
people—and 90 percent of it was never written down,” he observed. “Yet theforms, the patterns, the melodic ingredients have been remembered and passed
on, as we shall see, for at least 5,000 years. Why? Because they were used, wereneeded, were vital, were basic to survival.
“Most folk collectors find that folk singers can remember neither words nor tune
without doing the ‘movement.’ Thus the form and pattern of the dance-song are
the production-tools of the work required—and not products of the fun. And thepeople preserved these patterns as long as the work these patterns produced wasnecessary to the struggle of daily existence ....”
Roscoe stressed that while Hay was not the first Marxist musicologist, “Hay’s
approach to the study of folk music was unique, however, in treating it as an
example of dialectics in action—the same way Marxism viewed science, as acomprehensive system to knowledge and communication. Somewhat parallel tothe work of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who developed
structural anthropology, Hay sought to derive the ‘message’ of folk music from ananalysis of the musical form itself.”
As a Marxist, Hay studied the earliest and longest form of human economic
organization: communal societies. He refers to them as “matriarchal” or“matriarchate.” Today these terms may conjure up the image of a society basedon the television cult classic “Xena, Warrior Princess” or Amazons, hatchets inhand, ruling over men.
In reality communal societies are more precisely defined as matrilineal, meaning
blood descent was traced through females as mothers, not males as fathers, andmatrifocal, which means that the extended family lived in the collective
household of the mother’s bloodline, not the father’s.
Struggle to defend communal life
Hay traced the resistance of collective farmers against attempts to turn them into
serfs, forced to till the earth as laborers by the land-owning feudal class. Since
the work and music of the folk farmers were tightly woven, Hay argued that thebattle to retain folk ways—including rituals and music—was part of the struggle
against the emerging threat of economic domination.
Roscoe explains, “In cultures without written records, Hay argues, music serves
not only to preserve information, it provides the means of implementing
knowledge as well, through songs and dance steps that organize work functions.
For this reason, it was impossible for the folk to separate the tasks of planting
and harvesting from the rituals that had always surrounded these acts.
Consequently, European tribal villagers clung to their pre-Christian customs andcultural forms, including music, not only to preserve their social identities, but
because these forms were indispensable to their modes of production.”
Hay also appeared to believe, as did Marxist Christopher Caudwell, that what arereferred to as “magical beliefs” in pre-class societies were an early attempt tounderstand the patterns of nature and humankind’s relationship to it. In otherwords, they contained both supernatural beliefs and scientific knowledge about
nature.
Hay believed the pre-class rituals and belief systems that survived into feudalism
still reflected communal values. “Ritual and magic are usable only on a grouplevel, and serve to promote unity, to maintain identity, and even to offer thecollective security needed to continue the struggle for survival so long as thegroup maintains a daily drive to maintain integration between all of its

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0519/[2/3/2011 3:54:18 PM]

‘Historical materialism in ¾ time’components.”
Music of resistance
Hay traced the communal struggle to hold on to the old belief system and its
rituals against feudal ruling-class religion, which sought to ideologically justify
the enslavement of peasants and the brutal exploitation of their labor. In Europe,
the demonizing of “pagans” and “witches” was in reality a bloody weapon against
free farmers and rebellious serfs.
Roscoe noted, “In the context of feudalism and Christianization, these culturalforms took on an added dimension, becoming modes of political resistance andcultural survival as well.”He described, “Hay often had participants do exercises, such as composing andsinging their own rounds or developing variations on a ballad to demonstrate
how cultural and political resistance could be communicated beyond the spoken
word.”
Hay pointed out that folk songs can communicate beyond the lyrics alone. He
stressed that the tune later known as “Bergen-op-Zoom” was used as anorganizing tool in 1622 to unite the Dutch against an invading army from Spain.
They had no common tongue with which to speak to each other because they had
grown up in different regions with distinct languages.
Roscoe concluded, “They all had their own words for the song, but its rhythms
were everywhere associated with the same dance steps, which included, at one
point, the formation of a double file—exactly the organization needed to start thesoldiers on their march to rescue the town of Bergen-op-Zoom from the
Spaniards.
“The song was also used by the Dutch resistance during World War II.
“At Hay’s suggestion, the Mattachine organizers adopted it for their membershipinitiation ceremony.”
Next: ‘Bachelors for Wallace!’

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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‘Bachelors for Wallace’00

Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 35
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By Leslie Feinberg
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Published May 26, 2005 4:14 PM

On Aug. 10, 1948, Harry Hay first formulated the organizational and political callfor what would become in just a few short years the Mattachine movement forhomosexual emancipation.

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CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

That was the night that Ray Glazer—who wrote for both the left-wing People’s
Songs and for the popular radio program “Duffy’s Tavern”—invited Hay to be
one of 90 people at a public signing of presidential hopeful Henry Wallace’s
candidacy petition in California. (Stuart Timmons, “The Trouble with Harry
Hay”)
Hay was thrilled about Wallace’s campaign. Henry Agard Wallace was runningfor president on the Progressive Party ticket against incumbent Democrat Harry
Truman and Republican Tho mas Dewey. Wallace had been Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture during the Depression and then vice president
from 1941 to 1945.
Wallace was still publicly championing the “New Deal” reforms he helped craftfor FDR’s administration—economic concessions designed to save capitalism
from a potentially revolutionary movement of workers and oppressed people. Asa third-party candidate, he opposed the Cold War already begun by the rightwing of the U.S. capitalist class, which had emerged from World War II withmilitary, political and economic supremacy over the world.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), of which Hay was an active leader, wasputting its weight behind the Wallace campaign. Some Democrats became
enthused and were registering as Progressives. And for many who hungered forprogressive change, Wallace’s slogan of faith in “the quietness and strength ofgrass”—the grassroots—infused them with hope and energy.
In virtually every campaign speech, Wallace denounced Jim Crow segregation—even in the rural Deep South. Wallace spoke to 16,000 cheering people in
Louisville, Ky., in 1947—the biggest unsegregated meeting ever held in that city.
(“Subversive Southerner,” Catherine Fosl)
Students for Wallace at UCLA marched in protest against “whites only” barbershops near the Westwood campus. (Timmons)Bachelors for Wallace
That night of Aug. 10, still exhilarated by the signing event, Hay went to a party
in which the two dozen guests were all men who he later said seemed to be “ofthe persuasion.”
A French seminary student at the party asked if Hay had heard about the
recently published “Kinsey Report.” Hay himself had been interviewed andbecome part of that study eight years earlier.
It was a bit of a code for a male stranger to open up with talk about the Kinsey
Report. Timmons points out, “Its first volume, ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male,’ was the season’s most talked-about book, especially among homosexuals,
with its claim that 37 percent of adult men had experienced homosexual

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Respond‘Bachelors for Wallace’

relations. To Harry, that newly revealed number suggested the dimensions of anorganizable minority. He voiced the idea. When his friend protested thatorganizing homosexuals was impossible, Harry rebutted him. There could be
millions of people who might fall into a group that would find great benefit inorganizing. Certainly it would be difficult, but it was not impossible.”
Others at the party were drawn to this debate. They reportedly disagreed with
Hay: “There was too much hatred of homosexuals. Any individual who went
public could be entrapped and discredited. There were too many different kindsof homosexuals; they’d never get along. And anyway, people belonging to such anorganization would lose their jobs.”
As Hay batted away at each argument, he reportedly became more convinced
himself that it was possible to organize homosexuals. He raised the idea ofcreating a “fast bail” fund and seeking out progressive attorneys for victims ofanti-gay police entrapment. This was an important concept, since getting caught
in a sting operation by cops meant shelling out lots of money to shady lawyers
and crooked officials.
Hay also suggested incorporating education about homosexuality in high school
hygiene classes.
Soon Hay was leading a discussion about building a gay male organization to
support Wallace’s presidential bid, which in turn might win a sexual privacy
plank in the Progressive Party platform. (John D’Emilio, “Making Trouble”)
By then, Hay was winning over some of his audience. They suggested somedefiantly campy names, but Hay put forward a more subtle one: “Bachelors for
Wallace.”
While still at the party, Hay wrote out all the ideas that had been discussed thatnight about homosexual organizing on a sheet of butcher block paper.
‘It was high time!’
Biographer Stuart Timmons offers the following detailed account of what Hay
thought about and did that night after the party.
As he drove home, Hay thought about how the reactionary post-war period “wasalready of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was goingto look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was predictable.” African Americans
were galvanizing a movement for civil rights, buttressed by world horror at themass extermination of Jews by German fascism. But those he called “the Queers”
would be a natural scapegoat.
“They were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they
were a group because they had never formed as a group. They—we—had to getstarted. It was high time.”
That night he sat up in his study writing two papers. The first was a proposedplank for the Progressive Party platform. The second was a proposal for an
organization of gay men that could continue after the party convention was over.
Timmons described the document concerning homosexual organizing in somedetail. “This second, much more elaborate paper, based in a Marxist perspective,
forged a principle that Hay had struggled years to formulate: that homosexuals
were a minority, which he temporarily dubbed ‘the Androgynous Minority.’”
Hay referred to the shared characteristics of what
constitutes a nation to argue that homosexuals were a cultural minority. Hay
wrote, “I felt we had two of the four, the language and the culture, so clearly wewere a social minority.”‘Some day a reckoning!’
Hay’s thinking in that document reflected the profound impact of the fight

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0602/[2/3/2011 3:54:38 PM]‘Bachelors for Wallace’against racism on a white activist. Being a gay man whose sexuality made him an
outlaw in every state, and who lived in fear of police and right-wing violence,certainly magnified his rage against other forms of inequality and injustice—particularly racism.
Hay often recounted a trip he had made to a political conference in Chicago in
May 1940 with a Black married couple and a white man. En route, the four
stopped at an all-night diner in Gary, Ind. The waitperson poured coffee for Hay
and the other white man, but she balked at serving the African American woman
and man. Instead, she dusted off a little sign and placed it in front of the cash
register. It read: “We reserve the right to refuse service to customers whose
patronage is unwelcome.”
Hay and the other white man gave their coffee to their friends, waited until theiromelets arrived and then ground their meal checks into the freshly-delivered
meals. The four walked out, knocking over the racist sign as they all left.
Years later Hay recalled vowing as he left the restaurant, “Someday, someday,
there’s going to be a reckoning if I can help it.”Hay also remembered being part of an anti-racist protest in autumn 1945 in
Silver Lake, Los Angeles, when Josephine Baker came to town. The management
at the Thistle Inn refused to seat some 50 to 60 luminaries from Los Angeles’s
African American community who were waiting for Baker to arrive.
Hay described his excitement as those who were turned away immediately set upa picket line outside the restaurant. And, he recalled, when Baker and herentourage arrived, she immediately joined them in protest.
One culture or many cultures?
Hay’s attempt to compare homosexuals to African Americans as a “cultural
minority” demonstrated how powerful the Black movement was in the UnitedStates.
However, African peoples, who had come from many nationalities and cultureswith different languages, were forged into an oppressed nation by mass
kidnapping and chattel slavery historically imposed by the landowning class withcomplicity from the captains of banking and commerce and industry.
Hay and others who wanted to struggle against the degrees of discrimination anddisenfranchisement that they experienced were inspired by the rising resistanceof African Americans, who had been blocked from achieving even basic equal
democratic rights with whites by the overturning of the revolutionary effort at
Black Reconstruction.
The period in which the CPUSA had recognized the right of African Americans to
self-determination as an oppressed nation—including the right to a separate statein the South—must surely have inspired Hay to consider that it was not acontradiction to fight against oppression while waging the class struggle tooverturn capitalism. In fact, fighting oppression is a prerequisite for buildingclass unity.
Hay’s early formulation that homosexuals were a cultural minority was also a
political approach that in many ways was aimed at answering the social currentof opinion, voiced by the men at the Aug. 10 party, which argued thathomosexuals were not “organizable” because they shared nothing in common
except their sexual attraction.
However understandable and well-meaning Hay’s political equation was,attempts to compare gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people as a group with
oppressed nationalities as a political model—a political equation which continues
to this day among many in the modern LGBT movement—has not brought
greater theoretical clarity to the movement for sexual and gender liberation.
Where this view has not been dealt with thoughtfully, it has done harm to

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0602/[2/3/2011 3:54:38 PM]‘Bachelors for Wallace’solidarity with nationally oppressed peoples as a whole.
In truth, homosexuals and bisexuals—female and male—transsexual, gendervariant and intersexual people, then and now, belong to many diverse culturesand nationalities.
And they are represented in every economic class in capitalist society. In thiscountry, for example, the vast numbers of men who are sexually and affectionallyattracted to other men are not all white and small-business owners or mega-rich—as they are often divisively portrayed in the spin of the modern monopoly
media machine.
The overwhelming majority are from the laboring class—and this is even moretrue for lesbian and bisexual women. And certainly the segment of thetranssexual and transgender population that is socially visible and recognizable
in the U.S. is particularly marginalized in the workforce, if able to find work atall.
As workers they all have nothing to rely on to survive economically but their own
labor or that of their families—chosen family as well as those related throughpatrilineal blood lines.
However, even among LGBT workers as a whole, those from oppressednationalities—Black, Latin@, Arab, Native, Asian—face a much different social,political and economic reality overall based on inequality, discrimination andother forms of institutionalized racism than do white LGBT workers.
Cold War created fear of fascism
As Hay worked throughout the night on his first manifesto, certainly easier toassess from today’s historical vantage point, he farsightedly aligned the struggleof “androgynes” with the left. However, he saw them uniting against what hethought was the encroachment of fascism.
Timmons wrote, “He suggested a comparison of the political manipulation andmurder of homosexuals in Nazi Germany to recent firings of gays by the State
Department. This particularly alarmed him; could what happened in Germany
happen here?”
Hay’s incorrect view that a fascist takeover was looming was shaped by the
CPUSA’s similar assessment. This led the party to send its cadre undergroundand it also resulted in Hay later stressing the need for Mattachine to be aclandestine organization.
In the statement Hay worked on all night, he did emphasize that civil rights forhomosexuals was a struggle that would have an impact on the civil rights of allheterosexuals, as well. He explained that “guilt of androgynity BY ASSOCIATION,
equally with guilt of Communist sympathy by association, can be employed as athreat against any and every man and woman in our country as a whip to insure
thought control and political regimentation.”In this very accurate line of reasoning, he was sadly far ahead of the overall
CPUSA leadership, which was caught in the Cold War between the anvil of the“Red Scare” and the hammer of the “Lavender Scare” without being able topolitically arm the movement against both forms of capitalist reaction.
Arguing that U.S. laws were rooted in fundamentalist religion, Hay called for
application to homosexuals of international laws that he believed more broadly
protected overall human rights.
When the sun came up, Hay had signed this five-page organizational outline andmanifesto which he termed “the Call” with his nom de guerre: Eann MacDonald.
This original document was lost during the 1950s. (A version he revised andexpanded on July 7, 1950, is included in “Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the
Words of its Founder—Harry Hay,” published by Beacon in 1996)

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries-0602/[2/3/2011 3:54:38 PM]‘Bachelors for Wallace’

That morning, Aug. 11, Hay phoned everyone from the party who had shown
serious interest in this prospectus for organizing homosexuals. But in the light ofday, their hope for its possibility burned off like the mist.
Hay described how during the next two years he faced a “Catch 22” situation.
When he approached progressive social workers, teachers and ministers with his
idea, they told him to come back when he got a discussion group on his ideas
underway. When he talked to progressive-minded gays, they told him to get
prominent support first.
“So—there it was!” he concluded. “I couldn’t get a list of sponsors until I got a
discussion group going, and I couldn’t get a discussion group going until I had acommittee of sponsors.”
It took two more years before Hay found one other person who shared his vision.
Once this “society of two” discovered each other in 1950, the history ofhomosexual organizing in the U.S. accelerated.
Next: Communists ignite dry tinder of material conditions

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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1950: Gay leftists organize against Korean War

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1950: Gay leftists organize
against Korean War

00

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 36

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 2, 2005 9:03 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Harry Hay met young Rudi Gernreich, a costume designer and dancer, at Lester
Horton’s Dance Theater on Melrose Avenue on July 8, 1950. “The day he met
Gernreich, he often said, they created a ‘society of two’ that became theMattachine,” biographer Stuart Timmons recalled. (“The Trouble with Harry
Hay”)

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, The 28-year-old Gernreich, a left-wing Jewish gay man, had fled fascist Austria
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

when he was 16.

In the days after they met, Hay excitedly revised his call for organizing
homosexuals. This third revised draft is the only one that still exists in print.
Hay gave his prospectus to Gernreich, who exclaimed after he’d read the written
ideas, “It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m with you one
hundred percent.”
While Gernreich was enthusiastic, he also reminded Hay of the dangers. Before
escaping fascism, Gernreich said, he had known about the German Homosexual
Emancipation Movement led by Magnus Hirschfeld. Gernreich explained thatwhen the Nazis destroyed the movement’s Institute for Sexual Research, theyused its records to send homosexuals to concentration camps.
Hay poured out his frustrations about the two years since he’d written the firstprospectus. He had approached homosexuals about organizing a public forum toobjectively discuss the Kinsey Report. And he talked to professionals about being
sponsors. Neither group would move until the other did. “I had talked tohundreds of people between Bachelors for Wallace and Mattachine, and people
on both sides were afraid to take the first step. It was like being told you had tohave a harp to get into heaven and that you had to go to heaven to get a harp.”
Gernreich had connections in Hollywood. He had worked as a sketch artist for
Edith Head. Marlene Dietrich and Dorothy Dandridge had befriended him. And
being a dancer with the Horton dance company put Gernreich in touch with bothaudiences and cutting-edge artists from a socially-conscious current.
Gernreich asked Hay for 60 copies of the manifesto, took Hay to social eventsand introduced him around.
Gay activists against Korean War
Just 10 days before Hay and Gernreich met for the first time, the Pentagon had
unleashed war against Korea.
The two young activists actively opposed the war and organized to bring thetroops home. For the next two months, they walked up and down the stretches ofbeaches in Los Angeles and Santa Monica collecting signatures on an anti-war
petition demanding the return of the first GIs deployed to Korea.
Hay later wrote: “At that time, all over the country there was a movement,

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Respond1950: Gay leftists organize against Korean War

sponsored by progressives, to get as many signatures as possible for the
Stockholm Peace Petition against the war.”
This anti-war organizing took strength of conviction. W.E.B. DuBois, the 82-yearold founder of the NAACP, was arrested and handcuffed by police for trying to
get signatures on the same petition. The case against him? That he had notregistered as a “foreign agent” as mandated by the reactionary Smith Act. Afterwidespread struggle that won multi-national support, the charge was later
dropped.
Hay and Gernreich canvassed beaches where many gay and bisexual men
gathered. They hoped that individuals courageous enough to sign the anti-war
petition might also be brave enough to be interested in organizing forhomosexual emancipation.
“We set about discovering new adherents on the two slices of beach Gays had
quietly made their own,” Hay later told historian Jonathan Katz. “The section ofbeach below the Palisades just west of Marion Davie’s huge waterfront estate, andthat slice of Malibu between the pier and the spit—which would be taken over by
the surfers in the 1960s.
“From August through October 1950, ‘X’ [Gernreich’s nom de guerre] and I
undertook to get 500 of these petitions signed on the Gay beach in Los Angeles,in Santa Monica. And we got them, too, by God! We went down to the Gay beachand got them filled! And the Korean War was going full blast!
“We also used this petition activity as a way of talking about our prospectus. We’dgo up to them on the beach—of course, this is an entirely different period, youunderstand, so when people went to the Gay beach then they’d talk about
everything else except being Gay. We would tell them what we knew about thewar, about the story of North Korea attacking South Korea being a fake.
“They we’d get into the Gay purges in U.S. government agencies of the year
before and what a fraud that was. Then we’d ask, ‘Isn’t it high time we all got
together to do something about it?’ Everybody agreed, but nobody could think ofanything to do without committing themselves. But at least they signed thepetition, and some of the guys gave us their names and addresses—in case weever got a Gay organization going. They were some of the people we eventuallycontacted for our discussion groups.” (1974 interview, “Gay American History”)
Fellow travelers!
Hay had met two like-minded activists earlier that year—Bob Hull and Chuck
Rowland. In the spring of 1950, historian John D’Emilio noted, “The three menmet one evening at a concert, and Hay, who suspected that the pair might be gay,decided to broach the subject of a homosexual rights organization.
“As it turned out, they had more in common than their homosexuality, since Row
land and Hull had also been Com munist Party members.” (“Sexual Politics”)
D’Emilio explained that Rowland had “come out” at the University of Minnesota,
where the militant mood of 1930s Min neapolis also swept him into campus pro
tests “in support of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and against
compulsory military training for students.” (“Sexual Politics”)
Hull attended the university at the same time, but the two men didn’t meet eachother in the Twin Cities until 1940. By that time Bob Hull, who had a graduate
degree in chemistry, was following his passion as a pianist. The two men became
lovers, and later, remained dear friends.
Hull and Rowland moved to Los Ange les together. Rowland had left the Com
munist Party USA by then, for personal reasons. Hull, who was still active in the
CPUSA, took part in one of its southern California cultural units and the People’s
Educational Center, where he enrolled in Hay’s music class.

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1950: Gay leftists organize against Korean War

But after that class ended, Hull and Rowland lost touch with Harry Hay.
In November 1950, Hay told Gernreich that Bob Hull had re-registered for hismusic course, and that he had a friend: “I think they might be interested.”
Hay described the anxiety he felt as he later physically handed the prospectus in
an envelope to Hull after class.
“On the following Saturday afternoon he calls up and asks whether he could
come over. He sounds kind of distant. Well, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland and Dale
Jennings come flying into my yard waving the prospectus, saying, “We could
have written this ourselves—when do we begin?”
Next: Cold War ‘Lavender Scare’ sparks struggle

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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When idea for gay political organizing finally ignited

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When idea for gay politicalorganizing finally ignited

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 37

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 7, 2005 9:45 PM

Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Dale Jennings, Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland met for
the first of a series of weekly meetings at Hay’s home in the Silver Lakeneighborhood in Los Angeles on Nov. 11, 1950, to discuss organizing forhomosexual emancipation.

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HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Each of the five brought their own history of activist
mettle and revolutionary perspective to this bodacious
initiative.
Rudi Gernreich was a gay Jewish immigrant from
Vienna who knew about the rise of the German
Homosexual Emancipation Movement. He had fled
fascism and immigrated to the U.S. as a 16-year-old.
Gernreich and Hay had been organizing to stop the U.S. war against Korea andto bring the GIs home.
Hull and Hay were still members of the Communist Party USA, although Bob
Hull was not as active as Harry Hay.
Hull and his lover Chuck Rowland--a former CPUSA member--had briefly lost
touch with Harry Hay in the spring of 1950 when they moved to Mexico.
Rowland stressed, “That was not just a wild, romantic spree; we were fleeing thewitch hunts along with thousands of other [North] Americans from all parts ofthe country.” Months later, the two decided it was safe enough to return to the
U.S. to continue their work there. (“Making Trouble,” John D’Emilio)
Dale Jennings was a writer and an activist who worked to defend the civil rights
of Japanese-Americans who had been interned in the U.S. during World War II.
“Though Jennings was not a Party member,” Hay biographer Stuart Timmons
wrote, “Harry knew his sister and their mother, ‘Ma Jennings,’ from Party circlesof the thirties, and Hay and Rowland regarded Dale Jennings as ‘one hell of afellow traveler.’” (“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
Chuck Rowland had worked for the American Veterans Committee, which drew
progressives, when he returned to civilian life after World War II. “I was madeorganizer for North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri,
Iowa, and Wisconsin. … I was making speeches and advocating all the leftish
things.
“We did some very daring things in the AVC. To start with, we were interracial-and I was organizing chapters in places like Missouri and southern Iowa. It wasincredible. I didn’t know of any other interracial organizations at that time. …
Plus, women were admitted on an equal basis. We didn’t have a women’s
auxiliary or anything like that.” (“Making History,” Eric Marcus)
AVC national officers charged in 1946 that communists had “infiltrated” thegroup. “Rowland’s own inquires established that Communists were prominent

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RespondWhen idea for gay political organizing finally ignitedamong the AVC organizers, but in his opinion they invariably turned out to be‘the most dedicated workers and sounded strategists.’” (“Sexual Politics,”
D’Emilio)
Rowland joined the party and was finally forced out of the AVC as a result. After
that, he said, “I became head of the youth division of the Party, which was called
the American Youth for Democracy, for both Dakotas and Minnesota. … “I left
the Communist Party in 1948, not because I was kicked out, not because I
disagreed with anything, but because I just wanted out.” (“Making History”)
Timmons noted that neither Hull nor Rowland had experienced problems in the
CPUSA because of their homosexuality. Rowland elaborated: “All the kids I
worked with in AYD knew I was gay. It was not an issue you discussed, but theyknew. Leaders of the Party in Minnesota knew. But I don’t recall the issue arisingin the two years I was active. I didn’t even discuss it with Bob or another gay
friend who was in the Party.”
Rowland held on to his revolutionary perspective. “To most [North] Americans,Communists were wicked, horrid people. Even to liberals. But the so-called
liberals sat around and talked about socialized medicine, integration, and therights of women. The Communists, on the other hand, were out there on thebarricades or picketing or closing down something—doing something about it
instead of just talking.” (“Making History”)‘I could have written this myself!’
The November 1950 meeting of these five revolutionary activists in Los Angeles
was not the first time that the idea of organizing homosexuals had been
discussed.
Rowland recalled, “I don’t think there was any thinking gay person who hadn’t, atsome time back in the 1920s or 1930s, said at a bar one night when feeling alittle happy, ‘You know, we should have an organization. We should get together
and have a gay organization.’ And usually you would be laughed out of the place.
“I think we started talking about a gay organization in Los Angeles in 1949, but I
know the Mattachine wasn’t formally organized until 1950. I don’t think we hadanything written down. It was just something my lover, Bob Hull, and I talked
about. …
"Bob had a music class taught by Harry Hay. One day Harry showed Bob
something he had written about a gay organization. Bob brought this home andshowed it to me. When I read what Harry had written I said, ‘My God, I could
have written this myself!’“So Bob said, ‘You’ve got to meet Harry.’“Harry lived up in the Silverlake district on Fargo. We drove up there. Harry says
I jumped out of my car waving the document saying, ‘I could have written thismyself!’“I don’t think I would have approached a stranger in that way at that time, but
that’s the way Harry tells the story.”
Tinder for the sparks
If the idea for homosexual organizing had been discussed for decades, why did it
suddenly ignite? Like flint striking flint, the idea needed the dry tinder ofmaterial conditions in order to catch fire.
D’Emilio explains, "The movement's history cannot be understood merely as achronicle of how activists worked to mobilize masses of gay men and lesbians andto achieve a fixed agenda. Instead, the movement constitutes a phase, albeit adecisive one, of a much longer historical process through which a group of men
and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority.

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When idea for gay political organizing finally ignited“Before a movement could take shape, that process had to be far enough along sothat at least some gay women and men could perceive themselves as members ofan oppressed minority, sharing an identity that subjected them to systematic
injustice.” ("Sexual Politics”)
The centralizing force of capitalism had drawn populations from rural and small
town life into large cities. The second world imperialist war accelerated thishistoric process.
This massive migration was not just numerical. Large-scale war-time industry
and military conscription of millions transformed the economic landscape, shookup the old family structures, and brought vast numbers of people who might
never have come into contact with each other in the past into anonymous--often
same-sex--employment, rooming houses and barracks.
After the war, many chose to stay to live and work in urban areas, which helped
create milieus and subcultures that were the material precondition for gay
organizing in 1950. (It would take another five years after that for the first largescale lesbian organization to coalesce.)
Subhead: ‘Lavender Scare’ sounds the tocsin
The five activists who met at Harry Hay’s home in November 1950 were also
alarmed into action by the ominous and mounting Cold War “Lavender Scare.”This targeting of gays and lesbians, meshing with the “Red Scare” anticommunist campaign, helped ignite homosexual organizing.
In February, Sen. Joseph McCarthy had delivered his infamous speech in which
he declared that “card-carrying” communists were moles in the State
Department. A month later, Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy testified
before a congressional subcommittee that no communists were found in thedepartment’s employ, but that homosexual employees were the “security risks.”
Peurifoy’s testimony about gay and lesbian workers in the State Department,
noted David K. Johnson in his comprehensive book “The Lavender Scare,”generated “heated debates on the floors of Congress, congressional committee
investigations, countless newspaper articles, and numerous White House
meetings. It eventually led to the ouster of thousands of government employees.
It marked the beginnings of a Lavender Scare.”
The anti-communist drum beat was growing louder as the Pentagon waged
imperial war against Korea. The federal government established “loyalty
commissions” to spy on government workers.
This government snooping also worried federal workers who fell along the LGBT
spectra. Barry D. Adam explained: “The commissions scrutinized their personal
lives for what they thought were ‘tell-tale’ details: ‘communist associates,’ ‘unAmerican’ magazines or books, affiliation with Henry Wallace’s Progressive party—even ‘too great sociability with Black people or unorthodox styles of dress.’”(“The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement”)
Adam noted that a 1949 Newsweek article headlined “Queer People” had “alreadynamed homosexuals as ‘sex murderers,’ echoing a consistent media theme
identifying homosexuals as destroyers of society. From there, it was but a small
step to brand gay people as traitors and to call for their expulsion from publiclife.”David K. Johnson documents the chilling effect the government witch hunt hadon what he described as “the vibrant lesbian and gay subculture that had
developed in Washington as a result of the large influx of young people during
the New Deal and World War II.”
But he adds this very important conclusion: “Though intended to contain what
was perceived as a growing homosexual menace, the Lavender Scare inspired not
only the founding of the first sustained gay organization in the United States in

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When idea for gay political organizing finally ignitedsouthern California in 1951--an area heavily dependent on governmentsponsored defense work--but also the later radicalization of the movement in
1960s Washington.”
An idea whose time had comeHay had been tipped off by an acquaintance about the State Department
expulsions two years before they became media headlines in 1950. In notes hemade in July 1950, Hay made clear he thought the purge of homosexual civil
servants was part of an imminent takeover of the federal government by fascists.
As a communist organizer, Hay felt the hot breath of the House Un-American
Activities Committee in Hollywood. Johnson adds, “Moreover, California had its
own anti-communist investigating committee, and the two organizations in which
Hay was most active had already come under its scrutiny.”
Hay also feared that the federal purge of government workers accused of being
gay or lesbian would set the stage for mass firings in privately-owned industries,
particularly as U.S. capital’s war against Korea deepened. “With ‘theGovernment’s announced plans for eventual 100 percent war production
mobilization,’ Hay reasoned that all commerce would be conducted bygovernment contract, ‘making it impossible for Androgynes to secure
employment.’ Working in Southern California, an area already heavily dependent
on government contracts for much of its manufacturing base, Hay knew very well
the influence the federal government could have on private enterprise.”(Johnson)In 1946, after the foundry he worked in was closed by the government, Hay had
been employed at Interstate Aircraft. He was fired from that job after he and a
co-worker organized about 15 employees into the Federation of Architects,
Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians. He also had to pass up some jobs because
as a communist he couldn’t get security clearance. (Timmons)
So Hay understood that the federal anti-gay and anti-communist witch hunts
would also have a broad impact on manufacturers that relied on big government
contracts.
The whole state depended on government contracts--they fueled half theeconomic growth in that region in the decade after the war. And there were aquarter of a million federal workers in California, which was dubbed “a second
United States capital.” (Johnson)“Given this experience and his fears about the future,” Johnson concluded, “Hayfelt that homosexuals in California had to organize a response to the encroachingfederal purges.”
Organizing--it was an idea whose time had finally come. And althoughcommunists didn’t create these conditions that had made the political organizingof homosexuals possible, it was gay revolutionaries who took action.
Next: “We need a theory!”

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’

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Mattachine: unmasking a‘masked people’

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Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 38

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 13, 2005 8:12 PM“We sat there, with fire in our eyes and far-away dreams, being Gays.” That’s
how Harry Hay described the first meeting on Nov. 11, 1950, of what would
become the Mattachine movement.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The five founders--Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Dale
Jennings, Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull--formed aleadership core that met weekly. They took seriously
the historic task of building what they hoped would
become a homosexual emancipation movement.
Hay stressed that at the start of their organizing they“felt that if we made bad mistakes and ruined the thing
it might be many, many years before the attempt toorganize Gay people would be tried again. So we had to do it right, if possible.
That’s why we operated by unanimity and were very slow moving.” (“GayAmerican History”)
Social oppression leveled against same-sex love and gender variance was sogreat, and political repression was becoming such an audible drumbeat, that thetask appeared daunting.
One Mattachine founder explained to Stuart Timmons, Hay’s biographer, “It was
dramatic because anyone in the early fifties who was gay had a strange feeling offear. Everyone had experienced something. For instance, picture walking into a
bar you’d been going to for some time, not a gay bar but one where gay people
had been welcome to drink. Drinks were a quarter there, but one day thebartender says, ‘That’ll be a dollar to you.’ You’d realize with a shock that hedidn’t want you there. That’s a minor example.”
Timmons added, “The laws and customs of the era were stringently antihomosexual; in California, as in most states, any sexual act except the missionary
position between a heterosexual couple was a crime punishable by up to 20 years
in prison. Anyone caught doing anything else could be made to register as a sex
offender. Repeat offenders and those whose partners were minors were often
sent to Atascadero state prison and given electroshock ‘therapy,’ or evensubjected to castration. Since any public mention of homosexuality was equatedwith scandal, few workplaces would retain an employee whose involvement withsuch an organization became public.” (“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
As the Mattachine founders met to discuss organizing, the “Lavender Scare” wasbecoming a sensationalized propaganda component of the McCarthyite anticommunist witch hunt. The Senate was making public its report rooting out“sexual perverts” from government employment.
The deep-freeze Cold War climate was meant to have a chilling effect on all
progressive and revolutionary organizing. And the Mattachine founders, as young
revolutionaries, understood the powers of the state that the capitalist class could

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RespondMattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’unleash. They were well-aware that the German Homosexual Emancipation
Movement and communists were early targets of the Nazi state capitalist regime.
Gernreich had been forced to flee fascism in Vienna. Jennings had worked todefend Japanese-Americans detained in U.S. internment camps during WorldWar II. Anti-communism had forced Rowland out of his job as an organizer with
the American Veterans Committee.
“Above all, Hay was acutely conscious of the growing climate of repression. With
much of his party work centered on cultural activities, he was aware of thetargeting of leftists in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC). California, moreover, had its own anti-communist
investigating committee whose head, Jack Tenney, came from Lost Angeles, andwhich held highly publicized hearings throughout the postwar years. The twoorganizations in which Hay was most active, People’s Songs and the People’s
Educational Center, had already come under its scrutiny.” (“Making Trouble,”John D’Emilio)
This inhospitable political environment shaped the organizational form of
Mattachine—the first sustained gay liberation organization in the United States.
Clandestine organizing
Hay revised his original 1948 plan for an above-ground “Bachelors for Wallace”
model of political organizing. Instead, he proposed an underground organization.
“The first thing we did was set up a semipublic-type discussion group,” Hay
explained to interviewer Jonathan Katz, “so you didn’t have to reveal yourself if
you didn’t want to. Only certain persons would be invited at first, but later they’d
be invited to ask some friends.” (“Gay American History”)
Katz asked Hay where the idea of the underground organization came from. Hay
replied, “In July 1950, I was still a well-sought-after teacher of Marxist
principles, both in the Communist party and the California Labor School. I wasteaching a course in music history at the Labor School, and was dealing with the
Guild System and the Freemasonry movement, particularly at the time of[Austrian Hapsburg Queen] Maria Teresa, when to be a member of theFreemasonry was to court the death sentence. Both Mozart and Haydn had been
Freemasons, courting punishment.
“This is also the way the Communist party had moved as a political organizationin 1930-37, when it had been truly underground. I thought of the Freemason
movement and the type of Communist underground organization that had existed
in the 1930s, which I had known and been part of.
“So I began to work up the structure specified in the prospectus from the old left
and, interestingly, was not too different from that structure employed by Algeria
in its successful liberation struggle with France in the sixties.”
Hay described how his thinking had changed in the two years since he’d written
his original 1948 prospectus for homosexual organizing. “At first I had not been
so concerned with planting the organization underground. The goals andideology never changed particularly; I felt that what we had to do was to find out
who we were, and that what we were for would follow. I realized that we had
been very contributive in various ways over the millennia, and I felt we could
return to being contributive again. Then we could be respected for our difference,
not for our samenesses to heterosexuals. To a large extent that’s what the whole
movement was about.
“The 1948 prospectus outlined the basic idea. The 1949 version described how wewould set up the guilds, how we would keep them underground and separated sothat no one group could ever know who all the other members were and theiranonymity would be secured.”
The founding members created a centralized organization with five levels—known

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Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’as “orders”—of leadership, “with increasing levels of responsibility as one
ascended the structure and with each order having one or two representatives
from a higher order of the organization,” wrote historian John D’Emilio.
“As the membership of the Mattachine Society grew, the orders were expected to
subdivide into separate cells so that each layer of the pyramid could expand
horizontally. As the number of cells increased, members of the same order but indifferent cells would be largely unknown to one another.” (“Sexual Politics”)‘A masked people’Hay described the first organizational attempts. “We talked about the prospectusof the foundation, made our contacts with a fighting lawyer, who had defended
one of us in court on a Gay charge, applied for a preliminary charter for a
nonprofit corporation, and began (as of late November 1950) to have our
discussion groups.” (“Gay American History”)
In the spring of 1951, the leadership core—the “fifth order”—formally changed
the interim name of the organization from “Society of Fools” to the Mattachine
Society.
“One of the cultural developments I had discussed and illustrated in my Labor
School class on ‘Historical Materialist Development of Music’ was the function of
the medieval-Renaissance French Sociétés Joyeux,” Hay recalled. “One was
known as the Société Mattachine. These societies, lifelong secret fraternities ofunmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, were dedicatedto going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during theFeast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox.
“Sometimes these dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against
oppression—with the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of agiven lord’s vicious retaliation.
“So we took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also amasked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in moralebuilding and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward
total redress and change.”
Fear of police raids, Timmons emphasized, required that the Mattachine founders
meet in secret. “When the occasional guest was invited, it was a standard security
process for him to meet a Mattachine member at some public landmark, then to
be driven around for a few blocks before being taken to the meeting place.”
Rowland said, “We did not want to lead the police to our meetings, so we did notgive guests the address.” They changed locations regularly and kept the shades
and curtains drawn—men meeting together in one room would appear
suspicious.
Timmons added, “Because they had read that telephones could be used to bug aroom, Rowland always put the phone in a dresser drawer and put a pillow over it.
When people left the meetings, they kept their voices down.”‘People were able to bloom’
In April 1951, Konrade Stevens and James Gruber became the last new membersof the fifth order—affectionately dubbed “Parsifal,” after the operatic knights on aquest to find the Holy Grail.
Neither Stevens nor Gruber had any experience with communism or knowledgeof Marxism. After several months of meetings, Gruber related, “We would meetin various homes, and once, when we met at Chuck and Bob’s, I was sitting on
the couch and innocently picked up a newspaper. It was the Daily Worker. I
thought it was a gag and made some sort of funny reference to it. Bob just took
the paper. He didn’t find it funny.”
When other founding members took the opportunity to talk about their

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Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’communist beliefs and activism, they discovered that neither Stevens nor Gruber
proved to be very anti-communist.
The fifth-order founder drafted the “Missions and Purposes” of Mattachine in
April 1951 and ratified them on July 20. The stated goals were as follows:“To unify” homosexuals who were “isolated from their own kind,” and to create aprinciple from which “all our people can … derive a feeling of belonging.”“To educate” all of society—homosexual and heterosexual alike, by developing an“ethical homosexual culture … paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellowminorities—[African American], Mexican, and Jewish Peoples.”“To lead,” providing leadership of more “socially conscious homosexuals” to thewhole mass of the homosexual population.
The goals included the “imperative” need for “political action” against“discriminatory and oppression legislation.” And they concluded with the need toassist “our people who are victimized daily as a result of our oppression,” terming
this group “one of the largest minorities in [North] America today.” (“GayAmerican History”)
By summer of 1951, the number of discussion groups began to grow. The firstparticipants were drawn from those courageous enough to sign the anti-Korean
War petition Hay and Gernreich had circulated on southern California gay
beaches. (“The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement”)
The fifth-order group drew up a questionnaire to facilitate the discussion aboutfirst-hand experience with discrimination or encounters with police and courts,
meeting sexual partners and going to bars, and coming out to family and coworkers.
“Few participants had ever before been asked such questions systematically, andthe questionnaire fueled extended discussions,” historian John D’Emilio
explained. “Group members speculated on causes of homosexuality, reasons forsocial hostility to it, and where sexual ‘deviants’ could lead well-adjusted lives.
They described the pain of discovering their sexual identities and the surrounding
tragedies, as well as the strengths that survival in a hostile society had produced.
Together they imagined how life might be different, how a gay subculture might
emerge to provide emotional sustenance, and how homosexuals and lesbians
might act to change social attitudes.” (“Sexual Politics”)
Hay noted, “The meetings were mostly male. A few women came and protested
that they were not included, and after that more women came.”
At first, Mattachine leaders adopted noms de guerre. Rudi Gernreich wasreferred to as “X” or “R”; his role in Mattachine was not revealed until after his
death.
Those who took part in the discussion groups were “petrified that the government
might get a list” of participants and feared that “the cops would come barging inand arrest everybody.” (“Sexual Politics”)“But as time passed and no raids materialized, men and women dropped theirdefenses, friendships formed, and the meetings took on the character of intimate
gatherings,” D’Emilio continued.
James Gruber described the experience: “All of us had known a whole lifetime of
not talking, or repression. Just the freedom to open up … really, that’s what it
was all about. We had found a sense of belonging, of camaraderie, of openness in
an atmosphere of tension and distrust. … Such a great deal of it was a social
climate. A family feeling came out of it, a nonsexual emphasis. … It was a brandnew idea.”
Geraldine Jackson, who became active in Mattachine, said that “people were able
to bloom and be themselves. … [It] was something we didn’t know before.” She

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Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’

added that, finally, there was the chance to “say what you wanted to say and feel
accepted.”
She concluded, “You felt that you were doing something terribly worthwhile forour people.”
Next: Impact of Black civil rights struggle on pre-Stonewall gay liberation.

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Pre-Stonewall gay organizing

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Pre-Stonewall gay
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Impact of early Black civil rights struggle

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 21, 2005 10:58 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

All five founders of Mattachine had at least some training in Marxism. Harry
Hay, as a long-time teacher of the Marxist analysis of the development of society
and the science of change, had the most theoretical experience. So rather thanmerely organizing to form an activist group, historian John D’Emilio points out,
“The founders also brought to their planning meetings a concern for ideology thatgrew out of their leftist politics.”
And, D’Emilio adds, “the worldview of its adherents
rested on an analysis of society that saw injustice asrooted in the social structure. Exploitation andoppression came not from simple prejudice ormisinformation, but from deeply embedded structural
relationships.” (”Making Trouble”)
D’Emilio explores the attempts by Mattachine founders
to bring ideological clarity to the social condition ofhomosexuals in the 1950s United States. “The founders’ lack of an alreadydeveloped analysis of the oppression of homosexuals forced them to generate one
by scrutinizing the main source of information available to them—their own lives.
Throughout the winter of 1951 the five men met frequently to share theirpersonal histories.”
They talked about their isolation, loneliness and fear of being the only one in theworld with such feelings; how they’d come out as gay men and found others likethem.
D’Emilio explained, “Trying to make some collective sense out of their individual
experiences, they posed such questions as: How did one become a homosexual?
Were homosexuals sick as the medical profession claimed? Was it possible toovercome the isolation and invisibility of the gay population and organize
homosexuals? Were homosexuals, perhaps, a minority group, or merely aconglomeration of individuals sharing nothing but a sexual orientation?”
From these discussions they gleaned their early analysis of the oppression ofsame-sex love.
Rowland: ‘What is our theory?’
Chuck Rowland, one of the original five founders of Mattachine, recalled, “We
had been saying, ‘We’ll just have an organization.’ And I kept saying, ‘What is ourtheory?’ Having been a Communist, you’ve got to work with a theory. ‘What isour basic principle that we are building on?’“And Harry said, ‘We are an oppressed cultural minority.’ And I said, ‘That’s
exactly it!’ That was the first time I know of that gays were referred to as an
oppressed cultural minority.” (“Making History”)
Rowland, with broad strokes, painted the outlines of two different political

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-39/[2/3/2011 3:56:07 PM]

RespondPre-Stonewall gay organizing

approaches. “But gay people didn’t want to be an oppressed cultural minority,‘Why, we’re just like everybody else, except what we do in bed.’ They wanted tobe like everybody else. But that isn’t true; we’re not like everybody else. I don’t
think or feel like a heterosexual. My life was not like that of a heterosexual. I had
emotional experiences that I could not have had as a heterosexual. My whole
person, my whole being, my whole character, my whole life differed and differsfrom heterosexuals, not by what I do in bed. I believe there is a gay sensibility.
”When we tried to explain this to somebody, I would say, ‘There is a gay culture.’
People would say, ‘Gay culture? What do you mean? Do you actually think we’remore cultured than anybody else?’ I would explain that I was using ‘culture’ inthe sociological sense, as a body of language, feelings, thinking, and experiencesthat we share in common. As we speak of a Mexican culture. As we speak of an
American Indian culture. We had to say that gay culture was an emergent
culture.”Rowland continued, “The word gay itself is a marvelous example of what I mean
by gay culture. You’ll get a lot of arguments about this. But I know that gay was
being used back in the thirties, and we didn’t mean ‘merry’ or ‘festive.’ We meant‘homosexual.’ This does not constitute a language in the sense that English is alanguage and French is a language, but it’s more comparable to Yiddish culture.
A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews, used Yiddish words like schlep andmeshuga. These words separate them culturally from my mother, for example,
who would never have heard of such words.”
Hay himself tried to clarify what he meant by “gay culture.” He wrote, “TheHomophile common psychological make-up manifests itself in a community ofculture so phenomenologically remarkable that it transcends the mechanicalbarriers of formal language by creating an international behavioral language of its
own, in addition to sharing the pedestrian language of each parental community.
To be sure, the communities of culture differ in detail from one national
community to another. But they are enough alike that no one need be a helplessstranger whatever the port of call.” (”Radically Gay”)
An expression of anti-racist solidarity
Today, these attempts by the early Mattachine founders to compare theirsituation to that of the Dine (Navajo) and Pueblo nations, Mexican culture andlanguage, and the relationship of Japanese-Americans to Japan and of African
Americans to Liberia may not seem very sensitive to those struggling for national
liberation.
But in the 1950s these white men were anti-racists and anti-imperialists. They
dedicated their lives to fighting all forms of oppression. Identifying themselves asa cultural minority was partly an attempt to express solidarity with those battlingracism and anti-Semitism, as they stated clearly in their 1951 Missions andPurposes. They called African American, Mexican and Jewish people “our fellow
minorities.”
The written prospectus that the Mattachine movement was built on, penned by
Hay in 1948 and amended by him in 1950, began: “With full realization thatencroaching [North] American Fascism, like unto previous impacts ofInternational Fascism, seeks to bend unorganized and unpopular minorities into
isolated fragments of social and emotional instability; ... in order to earn forourselves any place in the sun, we must with perseverance and self-discipline
work collectively ... for the first-class citizenship participation of Minorities
everywhere, including ourselves … .” (”Radically Gay”)
Those white gays and lesbians who later argued against this early Mattachine
concept of gays as a cultural minority often used the most vile racist language
because they did not want to be identified with African American, Mexican andJewish people.
Many cultures raising their voices

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Pre-Stonewall gay organizing

The idea that lesbians and gays are one “culture” or comparable to oppressednations obscured the fact that the vast population these movement founders were
trying to organize was made up of many cultures and nationalities.
In 1950, for example, Merton Bird, a Black gay man, and Dorr Legg, a white gay
man, formed the “Knights of the Clock” group in Los Angeles. The organization
brought together inter-racial gay and lesbian couples and their families. This
support network was necessary to provide a safe space to discuss social problems.
The Black gays and lesbians in the group not only faced the additional burden of
racism, they were also part of an oppressed nationality with its own culture(s).
Some of the racism directed at them also spilled over as discrimination andviolence against their white loved ones—something not experienced by whites
who partnered with whites.
Altogether, that’s what made the formation of the Knights of the Clock necessary.
The underground LGBT bar crowds, largely blue-collar, were also made up ofdifferent nationalities. While the Mattachine founders were struggling in 1951 tofind a political identity for homosexuals as a shared culture, Langston Hughes
was publishing “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” which included “Café 3 a.m.”That poem, about a police raid on a gay bar, began “Detectives from the vicesquad/with weary sadistic eyes/spotting fairies.”
Hughes was part of the Harlem Renaissance, an exquisite artistic expression of aculture demanding its own liberation. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans artists andwriters were among the visible, central figures who articulated that just demand.
‘The Nightingale of Montgomery Street’
The formulation of a single culture was too narrow to fit the boldly groundbreaking 1951 San Francisco battle led by Jose Julio Sarria—a transgender
Latin@—which demonstrated that bar life had its own “cultures.” These included
drag culture, which in reality was various cultures based on nationality, region
and economic class.
Sarria, child of a Colombian mother and a Nicaraguan father, worked as a waiterand greeter at the Black Cat bar on Montgomery Street in San Francisco afterWorld War II. Sarria drew audiences of hundreds when ze began singing arias on
the job. Sarria gained local fame for leading patrons every night in singing “God
Save Us Nelly Queens,” which became a defiant gay anthem.
Sarria infused performances with the demand for gay rights and coined early gay
pride slogans such as “There is nothing wrong with being gay—the crime isgetting caught” and “United we stand, divided they catch us one by one.”
Sarria showed courage in the face of police repression. When undercover cops
infiltrated the bar, Sarria would point them out to the crowd by asking for around of applause for the individual. And Sarria interjected warnings in song
lyrics if there was a tip-off that police were about to raid. The “Nightingale ofMontgomery Street” also led bar crowds and other transgender performers to the
nearby jail to stand outside and serenade the LGBT prisoners. (www.sfpride.org)
When the state’s vice and alcohol control agencies tried to shut down the Black
Cat, in part because of the popularity and activism of Sarria, the owners andpatrons sued and won a landmark decision. The California Supreme Court ruledthat no state law allowed a bar to be closed solely on the basis of the clientele it
drew. (www.qx.net)
Struggles were emerging from many cultures, particularly oppressed cultures, todemand LGBT rights and freedom.
Impact of Black civil rights struggle
The momentous organizing for African American civil rights, long overdue after

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Pre-Stonewall gay organizing

the overturning of slavery and the crushing of Black Reconstruction, lifted theaspirations of all who were discriminated against, downtrodden anddisenfranchised.
A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had
begun organizing a mass mobilization in 1941—the original March on
Washington. Randolph, like the Mattachine founders, had been influenced by thestruggle for socialism in his early years. He said that his discovery of socialism as
a young man was “like finally running into an idea which gives you your whole
outlook on life.”
Harry Hay in particular must have been aware that the demands of the 1941
March on Washington challenged discrimination by some of the same capitalistclass enemies—the military, armament industries and federal government—that
homosexuals were up against during the Cold War.
And Hay must have been inspired to see Roosevelt surrender to the demands ofthe March on Washington, which led to the cancellation of the demonstration,and the president publicly issuing the first executive order protecting the rights
of Black people since the Emancipation Proclamation.
Two decades later, Randolph would turn to Bayard Rustin—a dynamic gay Black
activist—to coordinate the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. delivered his now historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
Hay and other early gay rights activists were influenced by the Black civil rights
movement in a broader sense, too. The rising tide of African American organizing
raised all boats, and the hopes of all whose dreams had been deferred.
Edward Sagarin published “The Homosexual in America” in 1951 under thepseudonym Donald Webster Cory. Sagarin, who was a white member of the
NAACP in his progressive years, had grasped the argument that there was no“race problem”—the problem was racism.
That led him to formulate his ground-breaking argument in “The Homosexual in
America” that there is “no homosexual problem except that created by theheterosexual society.” He may have been the first U.S. writer to describe
homosexuals as a persecuted minority. And he urged homosexuals to rise up anddemand their rights.
What set the Mattachine Society founders apart from others who were raising
their voices for gay and lesbian rights, however, was that they wererevolutionaries.
D’Emilio concluded, “As believers in a theory of social change that stressed action
by masses of people on their own behalf, the founders kept the society focused on
mobilizing a large gay constituency and wielding it into a cohesive force capableof militancy.” (”Sexual Politics”)
Next: Busted!

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Harry Hay: Painful partings

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Harry Hay: Painful partings

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By Leslie Feinberg

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RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
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CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Published Jun 28, 2005 8:30 PM

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As Harry Hay’s dream of organizing homosexuals took on material reality withthe formation and growth of the Mattachine Society in 1951, he faced painful
partings.

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Hay approached Anita, his partner of 13 years withwhom he had adopted two children. He told her about
the therapist who had said that Hay could “close thebook” on his gay sexuality. “I told her that what thepsychiatrist had said wasn’t true, that the book would
not close.” Hay explained that he saw homosexuals asa scapegoated minority that had to be organized. The
two were legally divorced in September 1951. (”The
Trouble with Harry Hay”)
The end of his heterosexual marriage resulted in the loss of almost all thefriendships the couple had shared.
One of the closest of those friends, Martha Rinaldo, remembered theconversation she had with Hay weeks after his breakup with Anita. “He explained
why this had happened and that he hoped it wouldn’t make any difference in theway I felt about him.
”Because of the witch hunts that were starting up on leftists,” Rinaldo continued,“I remember saying something to the effect of, ‘Harry, are you sure you aren’t
trying to jump out of that fire—and that you’re not jumping into a bigger fire?’”None of us who weren’t gay knew anything about the intensity of feeling thatmust involve,” she concluded. “Looking back, I don’t see how I could have said
something like that.” (”The Trouble with Harry Hay”)‘Coming out’ to his party
Hay still faced another huge loss in his life.
In autumn 1951, Hay recalled, “I decided that organizing the Mattachine was acall to me deeper than the innermost reaches of spirit, a vision-quest more
important than life. I went to the Communist Party and discussed this ‘total call’
upon me, recommending to them my expulsion.” (”Gay American History”)
The most details about why Hay called for his own expulsion, and what
happened when he approached party leaders, can be found in Stuart Timmonsbiography, “The Trouble with Harry Hay.””At that time,” Timmons explained, “the Party was calling upon each member in
one of its periodic re-registration campaigns. This was a project of the County
Verification Committee of the Party, to make sure there was nothing politicallyvulnerable about the membership and to protect against a growing number of
infiltrators and informers.”
Communists were being witch hunted, ordered to register as “foreign agents” andplans for internment of leftists were not just talk.
”Hay took this opportunity,” Timmons wrote, “to present his situation, in a

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RespondHarry Hay: Painful partings

considered, formal and political manner, to his district section organizer, Miriam
Sherman.” Sherman and Hay had been friends since they’d met at the Horton
dance company in 1934, where she was an accompanist.
When they sat down to talk about his membership, Hay handed Sherman areport. “It was two or three typed pages,” Hay later said, “that outlined myservices to the Party and my current involvement in the Mattachine.”
Timmons added, “His continuation in the Party, he concluded, even under thebest of circumstances, would be a liability to the organization, so herecommended his own expulsion as a security risk because of his homosexuality.”
Hay elaborated on how he arrived at this serious decision. “Since homosexuals
were forbidden membership in the Party, according to its own constitution, I feltthat those members in California who knew my Party work would know I had
never endangered Party security. But, were this matter to be aired in the People’s
World or the Daily Worker, members in other states might feel the Party had
been lax about safeguarding the membership. I felt that a proposal for my
expulsion would exonerate the California Party in their eyes, and that was theimportant thing.”
Hay and Sherman sat talking for hours at her kitchen table. “I said that I felt that
this was an important conversation she and I were having politically, and that
one of these fine days, when it had been made clear that my people were socially
responsible, maybe we could all come back together again. But at that moment
we couldn’t.”
Sherman later described, “It was traumatic for me. I felt this guy was such an
original thinker and hard worker and asset to the Party.”
Timmons said that Sherman “probed uncomfortably” to see if Hay knew other, as
she described them, “AC/DC” party members.
Hay responded by describing to her “the ancient and traditional pact faithfully
adhered to in the Homosexual Brotherhood wherein one never reveals theidentity of another without his permission—under any circumstances—even in
the face of Party membership requirements.”
Hay continued, “I suddenly realized what that could mean, and so did she, andwe both got involuntarily teary-eyed. Like so many other Party people in those
Loyalty Oath and McCarthy-ridden times, we had both experienced best friends
who turned out to be FBI spies. We all had friends and relatives whose Jewish
cousins in Poland or Germany had their hiding places and identities revealed to
the Nazis by friends, neighbors, and even family members.
”After looking at each other for that long, blurry moment, Miriam blurted out,
‘Could that be why the Party always insisted that homosexuals shouldn’t become
Party members or shouldn’t be allowed to come close to inner Party life?’”Hay concluded, “If I had gotten involved with a guy who had been an FBI snitch,
this reason would have been very legitimate as regards Party security.”
Any sympathetic reader can understand how difficult it was for these two
comrades and friends of many years to try to sort all this out at the kitchen table.
But this needs sorting out, even now.
Mixing apples and oranges
Yes, gays and lesbians were considered “outlaws” by the state at that time. The
cops and courts actively hounded and persecuted them, and tried to use this legal
vulnerability to manipulate anyone in their custody so as to extort cooperation orprovide information.
However, having to hide their sexuality in order to remain members of the
CPUSA made lesbian and gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual comrades
more vulnerable to extortion and state pressures, not less.

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Harry Hay: Painful partings

And wasn’t the state bearing down on communists, too? Weren’t communists
being fired and hounded on the basis that they were “security risks”? The CPUSA
actually went underground during periods in which the leaders feared fascism
was imminent.
It is important to remember that the CPUSA did have real security concerns—all
communists did at that time. But the party’s stance that prohibited gay andlesbian members can’t be justified on that basis. The CP officially barred gay andlesbian members from joining, putting it on a political basis: that homosexuality
was a result of the degeneracy of a decadent capitalist system.
This position flew in the face of the revolutionary leadership of Lenin and theearly Bolshevik Party in Russia. Within weeks after the 1917 seizure of state
power by workers and peasants, the Bolsheviks had removed the czarist anti-gay
law that had made same-sex love vulnerable to state repression. They explainedthat this was a political action to tear down the walls dividing homosexuals fromthe rest of society.
It was an amazingly bold step for the new workers’ state to take—one far inadvance of anywhere else in the world at the time. And this advance was madenot in a country with a long history of bourgeois enlightenment, but in one
recently emerged from feudalism and medieval authoritarianism.
By the time the Communist Party had been firmly established in the UnitedStates, however, it took its outlook on homosexuality from the regressive recriminalization of homosexuality that emerged in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s
leadership. As imperialism continued to surround and isolate and menace theworkers’ state, making it harder to build socialism, the grouping that took overthe leadership after Lenin’s death retreated from earlier revolutionary positions
on many social issues.
Marx stressed that, since the partitioning of society into exploiting and exploitedclasses, the dominant ideas of any epoch have been the ideas of the owningclasses. The bureaucracy Stalin came to personify in the USSR was not a newowning class. But its growth reflected the problems arising from the
preponderance of capitalism on a world scale. These problems derived not froman inherent weakness in a socialist, planned economy itself, but from not enoughsocialism.
Under the weight of imperialist pressures and lack of material resources, olddivisive prejudices—learned like habits over centuries of life under feudalism andcapitalism—crept back in.
In the U.S. during the Cold War, the inability of the CPUSA to take arevolutionary position on same-sex love weakened the communist movement.
The capitalist class here seized the opportunity to gay-bait communists and tosubversive-bait homosexuals as primary weapons in the Cold War.
‘Lifelong friend of the people’It says a lot about Hay’s character and his commitment to the struggle for acommunist future that he put the party ahead of his own life’s struggle. But his
attempt to justify his organization’s position on the basis of security really only
illuminates how hard it was for him to face the fact that he had to leave the party
in order to organize a movement against same-sex oppression and state
repression.
The CPUSA leadership didn’t take lightly the loss of Harry Hay, a party educatorand theoretician.
Sherman described Hay’s coming out as a gay man to her as “less a shock thanan eye-opener,” because it made her think about homosexuality in political terms
for the first time.

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Harry Hay: Painful partings

Timmons explained, “She added that the manner in which he handled it posed achallenge to the Party. For a respected, valued Party member to make such a
declaration was ‘something new,’ she said. ‘Nobody knew how to handle it.’”
The paperwork regarding Hay’s membership was taken up on county, state andnational levels of the CPUSA before a decision was made.
Hay concluded, “They rejected ‘expulsion,’ and, in honor of my 18 years as amember and 10 years as a teacher and cultural innovator dropped me as ‘asecurity risk,’” but they added that he would be considered “a life-long friend of
the people.” (”Gay American History”)
The CPUSA lost a committed communist from its ranks. And the work that Hay
was setting out to accomplish in building a movement for same-sex
emancipation, and developing a historical and theoretical understanding of theroots of this form of oppression, had to take place outside the Communist Party.
Next: ‘We had no words!’

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Finding the right word

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Finding the right word

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By Leslie Feinberg

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RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Published Jul 8, 2005 10:25 PM

Like“We had no words for ourselves,” stressed Harry Hay.
“That’s the important point—we didn’t have words.”

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Organizers of the Mattachine Society were trying tobuild a movement to battle same-sex oppression in
1951. But how could they organize—write a leaflet or anarticle or hold a consciousness-raising discussion—
without language that precisely conveyed the same
meaning to large numbers of people?

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Descriptions of sex between two people of the same sex existed in writing—it was
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

codified in every law book, with harsh penalties attached. But the word
“homosexual” didn’t first become an entry in a U.S. dictionary until 1938. Moredictionaries only followed suit after World War II.
Mattachine leaders rejected the word. The term had been so criminalized andpathologized that it didn’t socially invoke the meaning “same-sexual.”
Other terms did exist, of course. Most were epithets and slurs that cut painfully
deep.

Chosen language and euphemisms for same-sex love and variant gender
expression developed among smaller social circles of what today would bereferred to as LGBT people in towns and cities, among different nationalities andeconomic classes. But there was no recognizable term of pride that could be used
for mass political organizing.
Instead, the Mattachine founders set out to coin what they thought was a newword: “homo phile.” The term was drawn from the New Latin philia—friendship—which in turn had derived from the Greek word philos—loving.
Homophile: The word meant same-sex affection and loving.
“I really thought we had invented something new,” recalled Hay. “I was
astonished when Rudi [Gernreich] told me that he remembered the same wordfrom the Hirschfeld movement.”
The voice of the European movement had been so violently silenced or dispersed
by fascism that it took those who had escaped—like Gernreich, a gay Jewishémigré from Austria—to retain and spread the knowledge of its gains in language
and concepts.
As the Mattachine leaders crafted a term, it in turn helped hone their own
thinking, like a sharp shovel blade. Hay in particular began digging around inhistory, sifting for answers: “Who are gay people? Where have we been in
history? And most important, What might we be for?”
Early socialists like Edward Carpenter had asked these same questions half acentury earlier. So had the leaders of the German Homosexual Emancipation
movement.
But now these questions were being asked by a new generation of communist
organizers looking to give their movement a historical foundation.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-41/[2/3/2011 3:56:48 PM]

RespondFinding the right word

Marxist tools
Harry Hay was the Mattachine member most concerned with finding thehistorical roots of same-sex expression in order to understand where and why
the oppression arose. He had for many years been a Marxist educator. He’dtaught a series of popular lectures examining folk music from the standpoint ofwhat it revealed about the historical conflicts between the laboring and rulingclasses.
He was a voracious researcher who had spent years scouring the work ofanthropologists, particularly those writing from a historical materialist viewpoint,
looking for mention of those who lived in a social role outside of “heterosexualman” or “heterosexual woman.”
Hay had explored the role of women in pre-classsocieties and the remnants of matrilineal traditions on the European continent.
The Catholic Church—characterized by Frederick Engels as the political party of
feudalism—had carried out a counter-revolutionary wave of terror to eradicate
them.
Hay also studied the more complex paths of sex/gender/sexuality in Native
nations on this continent.
He found a great deal of what he was looking for. Enough to develop his own
ground-breaking survey and analysis of the history of “gay” people—a study hecontinued for many years.
The gist of the early conclusions he drew from his research can be found in talks
he began to present at Mattachine meetings and discussion groups in 1953. “TheHomosexual and History—An Invitation to Further Study” is reprinted in“Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder,” edited by Will
Roscoe. (Beacon Press: 1996)
Hay stressed that “Since a proper coordination of the social history of the
Homosexual in Society has yet to be attempted, some of my materialorganizations and coordinations must be regarded as speculation. But, even so, it
is speculation carefully molded in the anthropological tradition of Lewis Morgan,
whose 19th-century speculative reconstruction of American Indian clan or tribe
culture out of similarities between the Iroquois Matriarchate and the Hawaiian
group marriage culture was authenticated completely in the 20th century by
Boas, Benedict and Densmore in the Americas, Herskovitz in the Caribbean, andMead in Melanesia.”
Frederick Engels and Karl Marx thought the work of Morgan was as profoundand revolutionary a contribution to anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution
was to biology.
Morgan documented “family” relationships among communal peoples that werecompletely unlike the father-dominated families in class-divided societies.
Descent in these cooperative, pre-class societies was determined through themothers, creating radically different familial formations—what Hay is referring to
as Matriarchate.
Engels based his book “The Family, Private Property and the State” on Morgan’s
research. Engels made a landmark contribution to the struggle for women’sliberation by showing how, as group labor grew more skilled, the accumulation of
more than what was needed for immediate survival became wealth. He
documented how this wealth developed in the male sphere of labor—primarily
through animal domestication—and eventually led to the overthrow ofmatrilineal societies and their replacement with patriarchal family units designed
to pass on wealth to male heirs.
“Leaning upon the coherent picture presented by these great scholars,” Hay said
he was “attempting a new correlation in assigning similar roles andhttp://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-41/[2/3/2011 3:56:48 PM]

Finding the right word

developments to identical historical and cultural artifacts as they appeared
earlier in the Mediterranean and later in Western Europe.”
It was in this historical nexus between pre-class and class-divided societies that
Hay looked for what he described as “the long-hidden outline of truth—andwithin that truth the real measure of the Homosexual’s great contribution tosociety, to history, and to progress.”
Hay traced the modern legal hounding of homosexuals in California back to thatearliest accumulation of wealth at the dawn of class society.

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provided this notice is preserved.
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Hay studies ancient history, finds pride

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 14, 2005 12:45 AM

Harry Hay’s broad study of same-sex love throughout the changing history of theorganization of human society and the method of his approach are achievementsin themselves. He also made some important contributions of thought.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Hay talked about his discovery that “Within this matriarchal
village structure, we find a new type of household, a separate
household consisting of either one or two men. This household iscalled, anthropologically, the Berdache, or Bardache, a word
applied to this phenomenon by 16th-century French and Spanish
explorers.”
The word Berdache, when applied to Native peoples on this continent by
European colonialists, was used as a pejorative. It also lumped together diverse
forms of social expression in disparate Native nations. In the decades since Hay
made his study, Native peoples have made definitive and landmark reclamationsof their own histories. Gay American Indians, for example, published “Living theSpirit” in 1988, which documented alternative sex/gender roles in more than 135
Native nations in the Americas, as well as the language used to describe them.
Today, the term Berdache has been rejected; Two-Spirit is the language thatmany Native people have chosen instead to describe those with diverse gender
expression, sexualities and sexes. Out of deep respect for Native nations,
therefore, the word Berdache is used here only when Hay refers to his
observations about European traditions.
Developing a division of labor
Hay speculated that Two-Spirit people, in contrast to the family households, had“no old ones or young ones to care for” and “could provide for their own needs in
one-quarter of the time spent by the rest of the village. …
“In many cultures of Asia, Africa and South America, [Two-Spirits] carried the
responsibility as the medicine-men, or shamans, of their village cultures. In
medieval Europe, Donald Webster Cory reports that homosexuals were known as‘witch-men.’”Hay drew the conclusion that, freed from the primary division of labor between
females and males, a new work sphere developed. Two-Spirit people, he said,
began to record social history and patterns of agricultural knowledge and taught
new generations. began to make signs and designs to record the ritual festivals ofdance, which were nothing more than the necessary natural imitations by whichwind, rain, heat, and cold were summoned—which everyone must know and beable to perform if nature were to respond.”
Hay surmises “Thus, in the [Two-Spirit] we see arise the great social division oflabor which becomes the groundwork of industry as we know it today—theartisan and the cultural craftsman.”

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-42/[2/3/2011 3:57:11 PM]

RespondHay studies ancient history, finds pride

Hay theorized, “Thus, in America, Asia, Africa and Europe the [Two-Spirit] was
not only the initiator of arts and crafts as specialties, but he begins to prepare
the organization of teaching through design, story-telling, singing and organizing
the practice of ritual—of these women’s prerogatives and inventions—but also
cultural patterns for which the women never had quite enough time. But thisdevelopment of community tools and weapons, as a craft specialty of the [TwoSpirit], gives the men, in their leisure time from hunting, an opportunity todevelop a new food-producing technique—the capture and domestication ofanimals.”
Editor Will Roscoe, who has himself made contributions to research about TwoSpirit people on this continent, notes that “In the ethnographic literature, the roleof Two-Spirits as specialists in arts and crafts is constantly stressed.” But noother historian or anthropologist had made this link with economic
specialization.
‘Priests’ or priestesses?
Hay explored the role of the Berdache in early slave and later feudal societies in
Europe. He saw the remnants of the division of labor from pre-class society inthe prominence of cross-dressed individuals in festival traditions that endured
throughout European feudalism.
“Games and festival, in this social relation of ritual agriculture—equally true inthe European feudal villages—were not times of fun and recreation. Rather, they
were very serious and vitally important sociopolitical necessities through which
everybody practiced and rehearsed, by formulas recorded in work-dance songs,
the calisthenics of labor-patterns that would be needed in the coming season.”
Hay tried to connect the “administrative role” of the Berdache in pre-class
European soci eties with the fact that in villages in Cro atia, Serbia, Bulgaria andThracia “the mayors were men who were married to other men.”
And he inferred that with the development of class society, when science andreligion split into irreconcilable opposites, the role of Two-Spirit people as“priests” in pre-class societies led to what he called the “State Berdache” or “state
priest craft”—the religious institutions and church clergy that worked with rulingpowers and maintained a hold over agricultural knowledge.
“It must be conceded that under State Berdache, as under its original form oftribal priestcraft, there was a percentage of recruits that were not Homosexually
inclined,” Hay noted.
What? Here’s cause for pause.
Hay used the term Berdache as synonymous with homosexual men. But historicalevidence suggests that Hay, in reality, was looking at much more complex andvarying sex/gender and sexuality roles throughout history.
It might be more accurate to refer, not to gay male “priests,” but to a tradition
that more resembles what would today be described as transsexuality.
Roman historian Plutarch described the “Great Mother”—worshipped by preclass societies throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, western Asia andEurope—as an intersexual deity.
The Great Mother’s priestesses were born male-bodied and were inducted
through ancient and sacred rituals that included castration. This is documented
in Mesopotamian temple records from the middle of the third millennium B.C.E.,
and also in Assyrian, Akkadian and Babylonian records.
These ancient rituals demonstrated an understanding of surgical technique. Folk
medicine, before the advent of Western medicine, also recorded ancientknowledge of herbal, root and floral properties. Did these ancestors also have thehormonal knowledge to aid in “sex reassignment”?

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-42/[2/3/2011 3:57:11 PM]

Hay studies ancient history, finds prideMore than 2,100 years ago, the poet Ovid, exiled to a colony bordering theScythian steppe, wrote about the priestesses there. Referring to them as witches,
he wrote that they knew “how to extract that stuff from a mare in heat.”
The hormone estrogen is distilled from the urine of pregnant mares.
Ovid repeated in the poem “On Facial Treatment for Ladies”: “Put no faith inherbals and potions, abjure the deadly stuff distilled by a mare in heat.” (Timothy
Taylor, “The Prehistory of Sex”)
Les Mattachine
Hay also delved into research about
the societies or guilds of “fools” in Renaissance France.
Enid Welsford in her 1935 classic “The Fool: His Social and Literary History,”
explained, “Always masked in public, the members of this society, through theirplays, or sotties, gave voices to the people’s complaints against both Church andking. … Not even the highest dignitaries in the country escape their satire.”
Their politically barbed performances were outlawed in 1547.
Will Roscoe noted that during the medieval Feast of Fools celebrated by the lower
clergy throughout Europe and England, “All sanctity towards religion andauthority was suspended. The mass was burlesqued, asses were led into thechurch, and priests and clerks wore masks, danced in the choir, and dressed as
women.”He continued, “Another Fool tradition, perhaps even older, was represented by
the folk dance known in France as Les Bouffons or Les Mattachines. … Someform of this dance appears to have been known throughout Europe—as the
Matachin in Spain, the Mattacino in Italy, and the Moresca elsewhere.”
Roscoe added, “The literature on European folk traditions provides many
examples of the Fool dressed as a woman or in both male and female clothes, ofcross-dressing by men and women during the Feast of Fools, and even crossdressed Mattachine/Sword dancers. In this capacity, the Fool served as a deputyof pre-Christian goddess figures, a practice Hay traces back to the Berdache
priesthoods of the ancient societies of the Near East.”
This is what Hay drew from his study of the medieval Feast of Fools tradition:“Thus the pyrrhic mime of Les Mattachine portrayed in vivid drama, for all tounderstand and take courage from, the ancient imitative ritual of initiation mademilitary and political—that the lowly and oppressed would rise again from theirdespair and bondage by the strength of their own faith and their own selfcreated dignity.”‘Take a leaf from history’The early Mattachine founders discussed holding a “Feast of Fools” dance as an
educational component of organizing a homosexual movement. (“The Trouble
with Harry Hay”)
They were trying to bring a historical understanding of homophile oppressionthat would lift individuals out of guilt, shame and fear and help instill them withpride. Hay urged those who attended Mattachine discussions to “take a leaf fromtheir long and productive history. They can learn to realize in all previous
economies where the Berdache was an accepted institution, it was so because the
Berdache, like the Albanian Berdache mayors, having no household and children
to care for, could devote most of their time—aside from filling their own two
bellies—with the social, economic and educational needs of their communities
generally.”
The Mattachine founders, all influenced by a Marxist economic view, saw themodern heterosexual nuclear family as the “established vehicle for the outlet ofsocial impulses” that enforced a “socially predetermined pattern” for human

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-42/[2/3/2011 3:57:11 PM]

Hay studies ancient history, finds pride

relationships. Being raised in these patriarchal nuclear families, they emphasized,
molded women and men to believe that this model of social roles was “natural”—
a prescribed role “which equates male, masculine, man ONLY with husband andFather and which equates female, feminine, woman ONLY with wife andMother.” (“Making Trouble”)
Homophiles, they argued, “did not fit the patterns of heterosexual love, marriage
and children upon which the dominant culture rests.” Excluded from thiseconomic and social unit under capitalism, homophiles found themselves “anenclave within society … an undesirable and despicable group worthy only ofridicule and rebuke.”
Hay invited further study, and that is just what is still needed today. Of course,many LGBT couples now are parents or are an integral part of extended families—related through patrilineal bloodlines or chosen through love. Others are inpolygamous formations.
But the early Mattachine founders were trying to reveal a deeper institutionalizedmechanism for oppression in a patriarchal class-divided society. Historian John
D’Emilio explained further that the Mattachine leaders understood that
“Exploitation and oppression came not from simple prejudice or misinformation,
but from deeply embedded structural relationships. … This led them to reject anarrowly pragmatic approach to the problems of the homosexual, one that
focused only on a set of reform goals, and instead pushed them to seek atheoretical explanation of the sources of the homosexual’s inferior status.
(“Making Trouble”)
The first task of this emancipation movement, D’Emilio wrote, “was to challenge
the internalization of that ideology by homosexuals, to develop among the gay
population a consciousness of itself as an oppressed minority. Out of that
conscious ness homosexuals could then evolve a ‘highly ethical homosexual
culture and lead well-adjusted, wholesome and socially productive lives.’ And,
from the cohesiveness that such a process could stimulate, the founders expected
to forge, in time, a unified movement of homosexuals ready to fight against theiroppression.”
These communist leaders “held the Marxist view that capitalism required theoppression of minorities. They believed that homosexuals had to organize so they
could explore their sexuality, become aware of how it equipped them tocontribute to a more humane society, and prepare to join with other organizedminorities in the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism.” (“The Politics of
Homosexuality”)
Jim Kepner, a Mattachine leader, summed up, “[T]here was really the feelingthat for thousands of years we’d been secret and hiding and alone. Now we wereon the march and were convinced of the idea, ‘We’ll solve this problem within a
few years!’”
Next: Mattachine takes up fight against police brutality.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-42/[2/3/2011 3:57:11 PM]

1952: Mattachine battles police harassment

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1952: Mattachine battles
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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 18, 2005 10:13 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

By the autumn of 1951, the seven founders of the Mattachine society wereorganizationally confronted by the growth of their discussion groups. They began
to develop more leadership in response. As in the consciousness-raising groups
that later sprang up in the women's liberation movement, the goal was not
merely to discuss oppression but to take political action to end it.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, The first public action the Mattachine leadership took was to
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

weigh in on the side of the Chicano community against racist
police repression. "Brutal incidents of police harassment of the
Chicano community in Los Angeles had received considerable
attention in the press," wrote John D'Emilio, "and mountingpressure for an official investigation of police practices had finally succeeded inforcing the city government to hold public hearings.
"The founders of the Mattachine Society attended the hearings and spoke infavor of disciplinary action against offending policemen. Their rationale for their
participation was their conviction that all socially oppressed minorities had
something in common." ("Making Trouble")
Laws criminalized same-sex love and gender variant "cross-dressing." This madepeople who today are referred to as lesbian, gay, bi and trans vulnerable toarrest, beatings and rape in jail, financial extortion by shady lawyers who might
be the only ones to handle such cases, and fines and prison sentences.
Just weeks after the hearing on police repression in the Chicano community,
Dale Jennings--one of the Mattachine Society founders--was busted in February
1952 by a plainclothes Los Angeles vice squad cop, who charged him with "lewdand dissolute" behavior.
Harry Hay told how Jennings explained "that he had met someone in the can at
Westlake Park. The man had his hand on his crotch, but Dale wasn't interested.
He said the man insisted on following him home, and almost pushed his way
through the door. He asked for coffee, and when Dale went to get it, he saw theman moving to the window blind, as if signaling to someone else. He got scaredand started to say something, when there was a sudden pounding on the door,and Dale was arrested." ("The Trouble with Harry Hay")
Jennings described the nightmare that followed. "Then there was the badge andthe policeman was snapping the handcuffs on me with the remark, 'Maybe you'll
talk better with my partner outside.' I was forced to sit in the rear of a car on adark street for almost an hour while three officers questioned me. It was aparticularly effective type of grilling. They laughed a lot among themselves. Then,in a sudden silence, one would ask, 'How long have you been this way?' I refused
to answer. I was scared stiff. …
"At last the driver started the car up. Having expected the usual beating before,
now I was positive it was coming--out in the country somewhere. They drove

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Respond1952: Mattachine battles police harassment

over a mile past the suburb of Lincoln Heights, then slowly doubled back. During
this time they repeatedly made jokes about police brutality, and each of the three
instructed me to plead guilty and everything would be all right." ("Making
Trouble")Plead guilty--that was the standard advice from police and lawyers to defendants
who were arrested on "vag-lewd" charges, even though the vice police enticed theadvances, or even participated fully in the sex that resulted, inspiring a bitter
joke: "It's been wonderful, but you're under arrest."
Fearing the beatings and rapes that often took place in the back seat of a police
cruiser or the cold cement floor of a precinct cell, many did plead guilty and paidfines anywhere from $300 to $3,000. Hay said the terror made "everyone plead
guilty, and plea bargaining was a tactic not yet in practice. So to the averageribbon clerk this could mean years of debt."
Another Mattachine founder, Rudi Gernreich, had bravely tried to plead innocent
several years earlier when he had been entrapped. He demanded a jury trial andspoke out in court about what had really happened. Gernreich was reportedly
stunned by the guilty verdict.
Mattachine fights back!
After Jennings got booked by police and released, he told Hay about the arrest.
Hay later said he responded, "Look, we're going to make an issue of this thing.
We'll say you are a homosexual but neither lewd nor dissolute. And that cop islying." ("The Trouble with Harry Hay")
Mattachine leaders immediately convened an emergency meeting at Jennings'
apartment in Echo Park that evening.
Hay argued forcefully "on how this is the perfect opportunity to press the issue of
oppression." The group agreed.
Hay contacted attorney George Shibley in Long Beach about taking Jenning'scase. Shibley was an Arab-American left-wing lawyer who had earned a welldeserved reputation for political courage. He defended embattled labor unions in
1930s and 1940s courtroom battles. In the 1940s, during World War II, he fought
legally on behalf of 22 Mexicano youth in the "zoot suit" murder trial--also
known as the "Sleepy Lagoon" case--which became infamous as a racist frameup.
When the Mattachine leaders--the Fifth Order--approached Shibley, thefirebrand attorney agreed to defend Jennings. "He explained to the group that heknew almost nothing about homosexuality, however, and needed to be educatedabout it," wrote Hay's biographer, Stuart Timmons.
The group met with Shibley for weeks, pooling and relaying their experiences tohim. "Harry recalled that at these intense meetings, the Fifth Order probably
learned as much about homosexuality as did the lawyer," Timmons added.
'Innocence or guilt is irrelevant'In his book "Making Trouble," D'Emilio detailed how the Mattachine leadershipmobilized discussion groups during the spring of 1952 around the topic of theupcoming trial.
The activists leading the groups were initially disheartened to discover that many
participants in the discussions had qualms about the case.
If Jennings had been arrested by police, he must have done something wrong,many seemed to assume. Jennings later gave sarcastic voice to this stance:"Innocent people don't get into such a situation. Nice people just don't getarrested!"
D'Emilio provides a record of the political far-sightedness of the leading activists

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1952: Mattachine battles police harassmentthat is important, even today, for anyone fighting state repression: "The
Mattachine leadership, however, took the position that innocence or guilt was
irrelevant to the question of support. The law itself was unjust, they argued, andneeded to the questioned, and the abusive police practices toward homosexuals
must be stopped."
This progressive argument held sway, which eventually rallied the whole
Mattachine Society behind Jennings' case.
'An Anonymous Call to Arms!'
Rather than leave the internal Mattachine Society members open to harassment
and arrest, the group used the external and more public Mattachine Foundation
to establish an ad hoc "Citizens Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment."
Committee organizers sent news releases to newspapers and broadcast media
about the group's determination to fight Jennings' charges. The media ignored
the case.
Committee activists opened up a mass campaign, as well. They addressed a seriesof leaflets to "the community of Los Angeles," vowing to take the struggle to theSupreme Court if necessary.
One was headlined "Now is the Time to Fight!" Another flier was titled "AnAnonymous Call to Arms!" These may have been the first in the United States topublicly articulate demands by this oppressed segment of the population.
The "Call to Arms" leaflet explained the dangers of "guilt by association," apolitical line of reasoning that was part of Hay's original prospectus forhomosexual organizing. ("Sexual Politics")
The leaflet text argued in part, "We the CITIZENS COMMITTEE AGAINSTENTRAPMENT, an anonymous body of angry voters in full sympathy with thespirit of rebellion in our community concerning police brutality against
Minorities in general, ARE CONVINCED THAT NOW, ALSO, IS THE TIME TOREVEAL IN THE CLEAREST POSSIBLE MANNER THE FULL THREAT TO
THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY OF THE SPECIAL POLICE BRUTALITY AGAINSTTHE HOMOSEXUAL MINORITY."
Mattachine members distributed the leaflets at Santa Monica beaches and Los
Angeles bars, in parks and at bus stops in areas frequented by LGBT people, andin public bathrooms where gay men were known to gather.
Hay recalled that "Mattachine even had a couple of supermarket clerks in the
Hollywood area who surreptitiously dropped fliers into the packages of their gay
customers." ("Sexual Politics")
The power of mobilization
The bold public campaign act electrified those who lived under the threat ofpolice entrapment. The Citizen's Committee began receiving mail offering help
and donations to defray legal costs.
Shibley only needed $750 to represent Jennings. But Mattachine leaders wanted
to raise another $3,000 to cover the cost of sending trial transcripts to at least 40
other attorneys across the U.S. who might take up similar court challenges.
One fund-raising event--a dance and raffle at a private home north of Los
Angeles--drew close to 500 people and netted more than $1,000.
Lester Horton offered an evening's box office earnings from his dance troupe tothe committee; one of the Horton dancers had also been entrapped that year.
The unofficial Mattachine benefit was a virtually sold-out success that raised$1,500--enough to pay for the lawyer's fee and 10 copies of the trial transcript.
Next: 'A great victory!'

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-43/[2/3/2011 3:57:32 PM]

1952: Mattachine battles police harassment

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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1952 court victory against anti-gay charges

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Print this page1952 court victory against
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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 8, 2005 10:26 PM

The decision by Dale Jennings, a Mattachine founder, to fightcatch-all "lewd-vagrancy" charges, stemming from an attempt bypolice to sexually entrap him, was not the first time a gay man in
the U.S. had pleaded not guilty.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

But the way Mattachine organizers fought the charges was a landmark. They took
the struggle public, issuing leaflets explaining, "The issue is civil rights."
The leaflet argued that when the police are allowed to use extortion, intimidation,
shakedowns for money, entrapment, search and seizure without warrant, andimprisonment without charge against people based on their sexuality, then theseterror techniques can be wielded against others, as well.
The moment subcategories of the overall population are denied rights, the rights
of all are threatened.
The committee invited the public to the courtroom and sent out a lengthy press
release. Harry Hay noted that not one media representative showed up. ("GayAmerican History")'One true pervert in the courtroom'
The trial began on June 23, 1952. Jennings described what happened in an article
he wrote later in "One" magazine.
Arab-American attorney George Shibley opened up with a bodacious courtroom
argument. "The attorney, engaged by the Mattachine Foundation," Jennings
explained, "made a brilliant opening statement to the jury in which he pointed
out that homosexuality and lasciviousness are not identical after stating that his
client was admittedly homosexual, that no fine line separates the variations ofsexual inclinations and the only true pervert in the courtroom was the arresting
officer."
Under questioning from Shibley, Jennings explained that he was indeed ahomosexual, but that he was not guilty of the charges against him
This political defense was a bombshell approach. Rather than just deny the police
account of the attempted entrapment, this Mattachine leader was affirming his
sexuality--a sexuality that was illegal in every state.
Jennings later explained, "Even if I had done all the things which the prosecution
claimed … I would have been guilty of no unusual act, only an illegal one in thissociety."
At the trial's close, Shibley delivered what Hay called "a military exposition ofwhat it is like to be a homosexual in today's sociopolitical climate." ("Making
Trouble")The jurors deliberated for close to 40 hours. One lone juror said he would vote

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Respond1952 court victory against anti-gay charges

for a guilty verdict until hell froze over. But the 11 other jurors held out for
acquittal. The jury was deadlocked.
The judge called for a retrial, but within a few days the district attorney's office
dropped the charges.
'Victory!'
Mattachine sent word about the win against the state to the media. "We informed
every paper in Southern California, every journal, radio and television station, on
every hearing date and on the date of the judge's decision not to renew--to noavail.
"This was a deliberate conspiracy of silence," Hay concluded.
So Mattachine activists took the news to the streets the same way they had built
this case--with widely distributed leaflets hailing the decision in a one-wordheadline: "Victory!"
The July 1952 leaflet read in part: "You didn't see it in the papers, but it … didhappen in L.A." For the "first time in California history an admitted homosexual
was freed on a vag-lewd charge." This win was "the result of organized work" andcontributions of funds, work and time by "people who believe in justice for … thehomosexual."
Mattachine member Jim Kepner said he'd heard of other cases that werereportedly won around the same time. But Dale Jennings' defense against thecriminal charge, and the committee that took his case public, fought and won thecase on a political basis.
In his ground-breaking book "Gay American History" (1976), Jonathan Katz
provides further elaboration by Dale Jennings about the struggle that rose up to
support him.
"Actually I have had very little to do with this victory," Jennings wrote. "Yes, I
gave my name and publicly declared myself to be a homosexual, but the moment
I was arrested my name was no longer 'good' and this incident will stand onrecord for all to see for the rest of my life. In a situation where to be accused is to
be guilty, a person's good name is worthless and meaningless.
"Further, without the interest of the Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment
and their support which gathered funds from all over the country, I would havebeen forced to resort to the mild enthusiasm of the Public Defender. Chances are
I'd have been found guilty and now be either still gathering funds to pay the fineor writing this in jail.
"Yet I am not abjectly grateful."Jennings explained that he understood that the hundreds of people "who helped
me push this case to a successful conclusion" were not doing so out of personal
support for him. They were being "intelligently practical and helping establish aprecedent that will perhaps helps themselves if the time comes."
In this sense, the bond of solidarity is not mere blanket "generosity," Jennings
noted. "It is unification for self-protection."
He concluded, "Were all homosexuals and bisexuals to unite militantly, unjust
laws and corruption would crumble in short order … Were heterosexuals to
realize that these violations of our rights threaten them equally, a vast reformmight even come within our lifetime.
"This is no more a dream than trying to win a case after admitting
homosexuality."
Sources for this article: "Gay American History," "The Trouble with Harry Hay"and "Making Trouble."

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-44/[2/3/2011 3:57:52 PM]

1952 court victory against anti-gay charges

Next: Victory launches Mattachine like a rocket.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-44/[2/3/2011 3:57:52 PM]

Headwaters of first mass political gay movement rise

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Headwaters of first masspolitical gay movement rise

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Lavender & red, part 45

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 23, 2005 10:11 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Mattachine´s successful defense of one of its founders, Dale
Jennings, against criminal charges of sexual solicitation of a Los
Angeles vice cop in 1952 opened up a floodgate. The headwatersof the first mass political movement for homosexual
emancipation in the United States quickly flowed through it.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, “During the waning summer of 1952, word of the victory spread like wildfire,’
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

wrote Stuart Timmons. “In circles of friends, among ‘ribbon clerk´ professionals
like costumers and clerks, in the gay crowds at bars like the Golden Carp on
Melrose Avenue and the Pink Poodle on Pico Boulevard, people talked of little
else.’
Dorr Legg, who later was a founder of ONE magazine, heard the buzz in theoffice where he worked as a city planner. “A guy asked me, ‘Have you heard
about the guy here who has fought the police and won?´ I said no. ‘Well he has,and there´s an organization about it.´’
Mattachine discussion groups that had been drawing 15 or 20 members suddenly
doubled in size. Groups subdivided and then subdivided again, only weeks later,as the influx of new members continued.
By early 1953 the matrix of discussion groups had spread across Southern
California—from the northern beach communities around Santa Monica to San
Diego in the south and inland to San Bernardino.
Dorr Legg recalled, “Before long, hundreds of men and women were joining in
excited discussion and arguments in a veritable flood of social protest and calls
for action throughout Southern California.’
The small core of Mattachine founders scrambled to develop new leadership forthe multiplying number of discussion groups.
By May 1953, the Mattachine Foundation surmised that more than 2,000 weretaking part in the movement. But Stuart Timmons notes that Harry Hay believed
the number, based on the geographical spread, was closer to 5,000. Both were
estimates, however, since there was no centralized membership list.
Movement spreads north
The Mattachine movement inspired organizing beyond its base in southern
California. Gerry Brissette, a young lab technician at the University of California
at Berkeley, wrote to the Mattachine Society in February 1953.
Brissette was more politically conservative than the communist founders of
Mattachine. He was a pacifist, active in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He
wrote to Mattachine about his “dream of freedom’ for homosexuals. He stressed“<I>my<I> responsibility to work for the kind of world I believe in, to help
create in the hearts of people like me a belief in themselves, a dignity, and acapacity for loving.’ His letter concluded, “If Mattachine means this, then I am

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-45/[2/3/2011 3:58:11 PM]

RespondHeadwaters of first mass political gay movement risewith you all the way.’
The Mattachine founders invited him to Los Angeles in March to holddiscussions about organizing in the northern part of the state. Plans were laid out
to send other organizers up the coast to support Brissette. Soon, discussion
groups took root—first in Oakland, then Berkeley and the Bay Area of San
Francisco. These meetings immediately began drawing 60 or more participants.
Other groups were popping up like mushrooms: Bakersfield, Capistrano, Fresno,
Laguna, Monterey, San Diego and Whittier.
The groups each had a different character. Chuck Rowland described the Laguna
group as “Junior Chamber of Commerce’ types, the Long Beach unit as “swishy’feminine homosexuals. Another drew a contingent of factory workers, whilefaculty from UCLA formed yet another.
The growth in the movement gave rise to a division of labor. Establisheddiscussion groups took on different tasks.
“The group composed mostly of UCLA faculty members embarked upon studying
the literature of the natural and social sciences in an attempt to make sense of
the current theories about homosexuality,’ explained historian John D´Emilio.
“Another group surveyed creative literature with homosexual and lesbian themes.
Others compiled clipping files on vice squad actions and morals arrests, and mostof them gathered affidavits from participants who had suffered from abusive
police behavior.’
Birth of ONE Magazine
The idea for a magazine, written by and for male and female homosexuals, wasborn out of a West Hollywood discussion group in late 1952.
Martin Block was chairing the meeting. Block was a writer from New York whocame out of an anarchist current and, long before joining Mattachine in
California, had heard about the German Homosexual Emancipation Movementfrom older East Coast refugees. Block recalled, “You always heard that there
should be a gay organization.’
The idea to publish a magazine struck a chord. The bitter experience of media
silence about Mattachine organizing to defend Dale Jennings was still fresh ineveryone´s mind.
And a magazine could connect and inform the organizing that was reaching fromsouthern to northern California.
Block recalls that the discussion about a homophile magazine grew so excitedthat Block scolded the group for diverging from the meeting´s agenda. He told
anyone who wanted to talk about the magazine to please go to the kitchen to do
so.
“Then I turned over the chair of the discussion group and joined them,’ Blocksaid, “because I was just as excited about it as everybody else.’
In October 1952 a multinational group of men gathered in Block´s bookstore on
Hollywood Boulevard to found and incorporate the first mass-distributed
homosexual publication in the United States.
Martin Block was voted president; Dale Jennings was elected vice president.
Other signatories included Merton Bird and W. Dorr Legg. Bird, a Black activist
and Legg, a white activist, had been founders of the Knights of the Clocks—asocial support organization for inter-racial gay and lesbian couples in Los
Angeles. Dorr later described the organization as the establishment of “theearliest of the ‘Gay Community Centers´ which are now found all across thecountry.’

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-45/[2/3/2011 3:58:11 PM]

Headwaters of first mass political gay movement rise

Antonio Reyes and Bailey Whitaker were the other two founders of the magazine.
Reyes was a Latino dancer and ceramics designer from El Paso. Whitaker was ayoung Black student.
It was Whitaker —whose nom de guerre was Guy Rousseau —who came up with
“ONE’ as the name and the masthead of the magazine. Whitaker drew this ideafrom a quote by Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle: “A mystic bond ofbrotherhood makes all men one.’
Both Carlyle and the 1950s homosexual activists were living in historical epochs
in which the word “mankind’ was thought to embrace women as well —anassumption the women's movement later rejected. However, lesbians did play animportant role in the development and distribution of this publication.
‘ONE´ magazine read across U.S.
Three months later, in January 1953, the first issue of ONE magazine—not aleaflet, not a pamphlet, but a magazine—was published.
The monthly magazine was established as a separate entity from Mattachine. But
Mattachine supplied the first mailing list—some 3,000 names.
The magazine included articles about the Mattachine Society, and about
entrapment arrests and police harassment of bars.
Within months, sales of ONE magazine were topping 2,000 copies. But thereadership base was considerably larger, as the magazine passed from hand tohand. D´Emilio wrote, “Since, as letters to the editor revealed, the magazine wascirculating throughout the country, it also helped spread word that a homosexual
emancipation organization had formed.’
Chuck Rowland, a Mattachine founder, summed up the entire political period
after the 1952 court triumph: “Mattachine really took off. … We moved into a
broad sunlit upland filled with whole legions of eager gays. Mattachine wassuddenly IN! No combination of people in our limited leadership could handle
them.’
But storm clouds of anti-communism were gathering.
Next: Victory sparks internal debate over reorganization of Mattachine.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-45/[2/3/2011 3:58:11 PM]

Mattachine victory sparks internal debate

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Mattachine victory sparksinternal debate

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 1, 2005 12:15 AM

The successful defense of a Mattachine founder against criminal charges
stemming from police entrapment in the summer of 1952 was a heady victory,
expanding the membership at a geometric rate.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe campaign against police entrapment had successfully taken
the organization’s activist work into the public arena. However,the campaign itself had been organized in the name of an adhoc, single-issue committee, which provided greater freedom formobilizing the grassroots effort.
Almost immediately this presented a crisis for Mattachine. New leadership wasneeded for the growing number of discussion groups. Unlike the small circle offounding members, who built a leadership based on a “consensus of principle,”the gay men and lesbians who flocked to Mattachine now did so because it spoke
to social needs that arose from their oppression. However, they did notnecessarily share the political view of the founding leaders that homosexuals werean oppressed minority who needed to unite in collective political activism tobring about social change.
These new members wanted to know who the leaders were and where thedirection for the discussion groups was coming from. During the frenzy and fearof the McCarthyite witch hunt, all such anxieties were directed against
communists. And the founding members were communists.
The secret “underground” structure of leaders that protected the anonymity of
the founding core—the Fifth Order—strained the need for above-ground politicalorganizing. Same-sex love was still illegal, though, making the problem ofcreating a homosexual rights organization a thorny one.
Split in leadership
How could Mattachine reorganize to meet the needs of a burgeoning movement?
This question split members of the Fifth Order almost immediately after theJennings legal victory. The Fifth Order held an urgent weekend conference inFebruary 1953 to hash out their differences.
Most of the inner group demanded the creation of an above-ground membershiporganization. Voicing the concerns of this grouping, Chuck Rowland wrote toHarry Hay. Rowland argued that the conditions under which the originalunderground organization was formed in 1950 had drastically changed, and that“a radical new approach” was needed.
Rowland stressed that the new Mattachine movement had opened up “aqualitatively new situation in which even our Junior Chamber of Commerce
Laguna Group (the exact type of group the secrecy of the Society was designed toprotect)” favored above-ground organizing.
Rowland concluded that he was going to put forward a motion at the next

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-46/[2/3/2011 3:58:29 PM]

RespondMattachine victory sparks internal debate

leadership meeting for a convention and draw up a constitution for a neworganizational structure for the Mattachine Society. “Whether you like it or not,”Rowland warned, “the subject of discussion for today is reorganization.”
Hay was unwavering in his opposition to reorganization. He believed it would do
irrevocable harm to Mattachine to open up the structure at a time when there
was an influx of large numbers of new members who, historian John D’Emilio
relates, “had little if any sense of solidarity with other oppressed gays and noallegiance, Hay felt, to the long-term goal of building a powerful, militant mass
movement for homosexual rights.” (“Making Trouble”)
Skittish professionals
In an attempt to create at least one flexible public organizational vehicle formovement building, the leadership did resolve in February to incorporate theMattachine Foundation in California as a not-for-profit educational organizationin order to take another step into the public arena. Left-wing lawyer Fred Snider
handled the incorporation.
The Mattachine leaders hoped that an incorporated foundation could openly
conduct research into homosexuality and use the findings to create mass
education about homosexual rights. To do so, the foundation could reach out forheterosexual support—including professionals and public officials.
The foundation could also ease the fears of the mass membership in Mattachine
about who the leaders of the organization were and who was organizing thediscussion groups at a historical moment when such doubts always fanned theflames of anti-communism.
Chuck Rowland, a Mattachine founder, drew up a four-page pamphlet
announcing the establishment of the foundation by a group of Los Angeles
residents. Basing its arguments on Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s study of male sexuality,
published in 1948, the pamphlet debunked many of the pejorative attitudes abouthomosexuality. “But homosexuals as such have only limited social and legal
rights,” the pamphlet emphasized, “in fact, our whole society is organized to keepthem completely oppressed.”
Mattachine founders asked prominent individuals to join the foundation’s boardof directors.
UCLA research psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker and novelist-screenwriter
Christopher Isherwood both turned down the invitation, although each reportedly
said they supported the aims.
Isherwood argued that he was not a “joiner,” but he donated money to the effort
and offered to spread the word about the foundation. Hooker, who had justopened up her study of male homosexuality, expressed concern that membershipwould open her up to peer scrutiny about her objectivity.
Wallace de Ortega Maxey did say yes to participation in the foundation’s work.
This pastor of the First Universalist Church in Los Angeles was known for his
support of progressive political causes. San Bernardino physician Richard
Gwartney also agreed to take part.
In general, however, the contradiction of approaching professionals andofficialdom became immediately apparent. The Mattachine founders, all with
communist backgrounds or influences, wanted to organize a grassroots
movement that would fight for every right.
The public figures Mattachine was approaching, however, did not share its
revolutionary outlook, or even a similar class outlook.
Hay charged that Isherwood was “rude and sneering” to Mattachine leaders. Hay
stressed, “Isherwood made no bones about his contempt for our socialist massorganization approach.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-46/[2/3/2011 3:58:29 PM]

Mattachine victory sparks internal debate“He told us we were recruiting the wrong people—we should aim for theimportant people among the film colony, the queens with money and influence,
not the workers, not the ribbon clerks.”
Mattachine leaders arranged a sit-down with Dr. Alfred Kinsey in 1953 while he
was in Los Angeles on his travels. But Kinsey couldn’t make it at the last minute.
The cancellation may have been more than a scheduling problem. Kinsey may
have wanted to distance himself from homosexual rights. Kinsey’s scientificconclusion that human sexuality could best be represented as a spectrum helped
equip homosexual activism. But it also made Kinsey the target of the red-baiting,lavender-hating ideologues of McCarthyism.
The Mattachine founders found themselves in the same crosshairs.
Next: Twisting the knife of anti-communism.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-46/[2/3/2011 3:58:29 PM]

Mattachine red-baited

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Mattachine red-baited

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Lavender & red, part 47
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By Leslie Feinberg
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Published Sep 13, 2005 8:20 PM

The communist leaders of the Mattachine organization were red-baited soonafter they publicly defended Dale Jennings, one of the founding members of thegroup, against anti-gay police entrapment charges.
Arab-American attorney George Shibley, who defended Jennings,
became the target of McCarthy ite red-baiting.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Harry Hay, a founding member of Mattachine, was “outed” in a
Los Angeles daily paper in February 1953 as having been aformer Marxist teacher. Mattachine itself was characterized by a
February Los Angeles Times article as organizing dangerously subversive
activities.
In response, the Mattachine Foundation—as the above-ground voice of theorganization—hastily published an “Official Statement of Policy on Political
Questions and Related Matters.” The document disavowed any relationship withany other organization—which of course at the height of the McCarthyite witch
hunt meant the Communist Party USA—and from any political, religious, orcultural ideology or “ism.”
No matter how wise or tactically sound this public statement may have seemed to
the Mattachine leadership at that time, it’s hard to imagine that such a politicalretreat could have provided any respite from the anti-communist Cold War witchhunt.
The defensiveness of the stance was made even clearer by the unanimous
agreement by the core leadership—the Fifth Order—that since Hay had been
publicly singled out, he had to remove himself from public association with the
Mattachine Society and Foundation. It’s not clear from accounts of the groupdecision how Hay himself felt about it. But he agreed to pass on all speaking
engagements to other Mattachine founders and thereafter only wrote under his
nom de guerre, Eann MacDonald. (“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)‘A movement in motion’With the Foundation as its public face, Mattachine sent questionnaires to all the
candidates in the local Los Angeles elections.
Candidates running for the Board of Education received letters charging the
public school system with “a high percentage of responsibility for the social
tragedy” faced by homosexuals. The questionnaire polled each candidate about
where they stood on “non-partisan” counseling about homosexuality in highschools.
Electoral hopefuls in the race for mayor, city council and board of supervisors got
letters detailing the “growing body of evidence” that Los Angeles police werecarrying out “explicitly unlawful” actions against homosexuals. Candidates were
canvassed about their view on these police activities.
Few candidates replied. But the Mattachine founders were on a roll. With newnumbers swelling their ranks, they attempted to take this nascent movement tohttp://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-47/[2/3/2011 3:58:48 PM]

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RespondMattachine red-baitedunprecedented heights. Konrad Stevens remembered, “[W]e were meeting very
often. We just lived Mattachine. We didn’t do anything else. We never went
anywhere just for pleasure. When we went, it was organizing.”
Chuck Rowland wrote to Harry Hay that they had all “set a movement inmotion.”Twisting the knife of red-baiting
The Mattachine leaders were not just vulnerable because they were anonymous.
They were also a core of dedicated revolutionaries, most with communist
backgrounds. But because they were underground they could not speak out about
their political beliefs and try to win over others in the organization to their world
view. While speaking out may not have seemed to them to be an option—because
they feared McCarthyism presaged a fascist takeover of the federal government—
it left these revolutionaries voiceless to defend themselves against red-baiting.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy had taken over the chair of the Government Operations
Committee as well as its permanent subcommittee on investigations in January
1953. A month later, while the Mattachine leaders were holding their urgent
meeting to discuss reorganization, McCarthy’s probe to find communists in theState Department was accompanied by scare headlines.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had terrorized
Hollywood with six years of investigations, was back in Los Angeles in March andApril, holding public hearings focusing on the Communist Party USA, of which
Harry Hay had been a member for 18 years.
It was in this political context of repression and whipped-up fear that a
syndicated columnist at the Los Angeles Daily Mirror, Paul Coates, wrote anarticle on March 12 describing the Mattachine Foundation to readers as “astrange new pressure group.”
At first glance, Coates’ article appeared to be a real media breakthrough. He
explained what the Mattachine name meant.
“It is not inconceivable,” he argued, that homosexuals, “scorned” by thecommunity at large, “might band together for their own protection. Eventually
they might swing tremendous political power.” He added that homosexuals, “oneof the largest minorities in the country,” could exercise a voting bloc of 150,000
to 200,000 in the local area alone.
Pointing to the Foundation’s demand for protective laws against police
harassment, Coates wrote that this “scorned part of the community” could turnout to be “a group of responsible citizens seriously concerned with a tragic social
problem.”
However, he dropped the other shoe: there were some matters that should be
alarming to the organization’s membership and the public at large.
Claiming that he had tried to track down the foundation’s treasurer, Romayne
Cox, to no avail, he ran a provocative subhead in his article: “Where is Romayne?
”“If I belonged to that club, I’d worry,” he wrote with mock concern.
Coates claimed to have checked and found no record of the foundation’s
incorporation. In fact, Mattachine attorney Fred Snider had filed the papers
already, but there had been a bureaucratic delay.
Coates twisted the knife of red-baiting. He reported that Fred Snider had beencalled before HUAC and that he had been an “unfriendly witness.”
Baiting the leadership, Coates concluded that, “A well-trained subversive could
move in and forge that power into a dangerous political weapon.

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-47/[2/3/2011 3:58:48 PM]

Mattachine red-baited“To damn this organization, before its aims and directions are more clearly
established, would be vicious and irresponsible.
“Maybe the people who founded it are sincere. It will be interesting to see.”To the Mattachine leaders, the article seemed like good publicity during a periodof such political reaction.
“We all thought it was pretty good,” Hay recalled in a later interview, “and so weran off 20,000 copies to send out to our mailing list and to be distributed cityand statewide. Wow! Whammo! We’d forgotten what the detail about Fred
Snider’s being unfriendly to the House Un-American Activities Committee would
do to the middle-class Gays in Mattachine. We had been getting in this statusquo crowd; the discussion groups had been growing by leaps and bounds.
“When Paul Coates’ article appeared, all the status-quo types in the discussion
groups were up in arms; they had to get control of that damn MattachineFoundation,” he recalled with sarcasm, “which was tarnishing their image, giving
them a bad name. This is when the real dissension began between the founders
and the middle-class crowd.”
Next: Left wing loses battle for Mattachine.
Sources for this article: "Gay American History," "The Trouble with Harry
Hay," “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities” and "Making Trouble."

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-47/[2/3/2011 3:58:48 PM]

Left wing speaks, opposition unites

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Left wing speaks, opposition
unites00

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 21, 2005 12:14 PM

Faced with louder red-baiting both outside and inside theMattachine movement, the left-wing founders called for adelegated convention in April 1953.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe convention was unprecedented. It drew together the firstlarge-scale political assembly of those who identified as homosexual to address
movement building. The conference also allowed the founding members to speak
to the membership directly, for the first time.
But the convention also brought into the same room, for the first time, rightwing members of Mattachine. This gathering allowed them to fuse as an
opposition hell-bent on purging the left-wing leadership.
The founding members of Mattachine—the Fifth Order—who had been leading
the burgeoning West-Coast-based homosexual emancipation movement in early
1953, were faced with enormous obstacles.
McCarthyism was in its ascendancy. The anti-communist, anti-gay witch hunt
threatened to crush any demand for economic, political or social change.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in March and April cameto Los Angeles, where Mattachine had first been organized, to investigate local
communist activism and organizing.
Mattachine and one of its founders, Harry Hay, had recently faced red-baiting.
Hay was “outed” as a former teacher of Marxism.
The public arm of the organization, the Mattachine Foundation, and its left-wingattorney, Fred M. Snider, had been red-baited in a March 1953 newspaper
column by columnist Paul Coates, who described the lawyer as an “unfriendly
witness” at a recent HUAC hearing.
And among the influx of new members, many were far to the right of thecommunist organizers who set the movement in motion. They were demandingthat the underground leadership—the Fifth Order—which had operated in anunderground manner because of fear of arrest and red-listing, create a more
above-ground form of organization.
Guild councilor Marilyn Reiger, soon to become part of the reactionary
opposition, was one of those who argued for restructuring. She stated that she
was already an out lesbian at work, and that openness was essential.
Hay’s biographer, Stuart Timmons, elaborated, “The Fifth Order was delugedwith demands for change. The foremost concern was about secrecy. Coates’
accusations of ‘subversion’ made the rank and file uneasy with the anonymous
structure. Even before the Coates piece, many guild members reacted to the city
council letter by saying, as Konrad Stevens recalled, ‘They think we’re activists!
We’ll all get into trouble.’

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-48/[2/3/2011 3:59:12 PM]

RespondLeft wing speaks, opposition unites“He further remembered that a growing faction was ‘scared to death that
Mattachine was being run by the Communist Party and was part of a plot tooverthrow the U.S. government!’ One guild member even called for a loyalty oathdenouncing Communism as a condition for Mattachine membership. Harry
termed this attitude ‘the middle-class mentality more concerned withrespectability than self-respect.’ In his view, the organization was growing withthe wrong people.” (“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
Below-ground or above-ground?
Hay was opposed to lifting the secrecy under which the leadership structure
operated. He felt it was an important protection against police and government
retribution. Others in the core leadership criticized Hay as being out of touchwith the changed realities of the organization and the large meetings it was
helping to inspire and to coalesce.
“Harry was the theoretician and the consultant, but he was not present at theseenormous gatherings,” observed Chuck Rowland. “It became evident to Steve,
Bob, Dale, and me, that there simply were more people than we could handle.”
Chuck Rowland recalled, “Mattachine was growing so fast in the first few years
that it became obvious to me there was no way we could control it. It was a very
tight top-down organization, where no one who attended the meetings knew who
the leadership was. It was kept very secret, but it had become unmanageable.”(“Making History”)
It is arguable whether the founders of Mattachine themselves would havemantled their leadership in secrecy had they not feared a fascist takeover in the
United States was imminent. However, given the illegality of same-sex love, theemployment purges and the overall period of political reaction in which they
organized, it certainly is understandable that they chose that form oforganization.
The sudden new influx of members put the question of reorganization on theagenda for immediate discussion. The fact that there were members who werebrave enough to function as openly gay or lesbian in their daily lives, particularly
at work, marked a new phase in the homophile movement.
But it quickly became clear that the forces calling for a “democratic”
reorganization of Mattachine had a political objective, not an organizational one.
Their real goal was to unseat the left-wing leadership.
Leadership issues call for convention“Harry Hay has never quite forgiven us for what happened next,” Rowland later
recalled, “but several of us said that it was obvious we couldn’t go on like this. I
said that the only thing to do was to open up Mattachine, to make it a fully
democratic organization. To this end I proposed that we call a constitutional
convention.” (“Making History”)
In response, the Fifth Order called a democratic convention to change thestructure of Mattachine. They called on several hundred members at various
stages of membership and responsibility to come to a two-day April conference
to draw up a constitution, vote on by-laws and elect the leadership. The Rev.
Wallace Maxey made his Universalist Church available for the political gathering,an unparalleled event in the United States.
Rowland argued for restructuring with a more visible leadership. “So I wrote a
constitution, which I thought was a damn good one. And then we at the highest
echelon of Mattachine worked on it for weeks and months. I thought it was areally marvelous document. We thought it was so good and so workable that itnever occurred to us that anybody would come up with another constitution. Or
if they did, that they could get anybody to vote for it.”
The founding Mattachine members braced themselves to hold a principled

http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-48/[2/3/2011 3:59:12 PM]

Left wing speaks, opposition unites

position against anti-communism at the convention. Rowland wrote Hay at thattime, “Come hell or high water, we will oppose all idea of a non-Communist
statement by any group using the name Mattachine … [and] will have nothing to
do with any group which has a loyalty oath as a condition of membership.”(“Sexual Politics”)
Hay stressed that since the Mattachine Foundation had been publicly red-baitedin the article by Paul Coates, Sen. Estes Kefauver and his red-baiting committee
would zero in on the Mattachine Foundation as part of its “investigation” into
local nonprofit groups.
Hay stated, “We had made a mutual pledge in the Fifth Order to invoke the Fifth
Amendment if questioned, which, I felt, was the best protection for us and forthe membership of the society.”‘I got some applause, but most were in shock”
The convention spanned two weekends that April and May. The founding
members invited two leaders, or “councilors,” from every guild in California. Eachdelegate was believed to represent up to about 10 members.
The first weekend of the convention began on April 11. Timmons described, “On
the opening weekend, the convergence of such a large number of gay people in
one room was emotionally overpowering. Harry insisted that close to 500 were
there, though Jim Kepner, who saved voting tallies, counted fewer than 150. But
Kepner and Hay agreed on the exhilaration of the occasion.”
Hay remarked in a later interview, “Can you imagine what that was like? This is
the first time it’s ever happened in the history of the United States.”
However euphoric members initially felt about being brought together in one
room, though, the group quickly split along political lines.
Founders Chuck Rowland and Harry Hay delivered the keynotes in the opening
session.
Rowland argued from the podium that homosexuals were a distinct cultural
minority. His political position did not take into account that within the broad
category of “homosexual” were the national identities and cultures of Black,
Latino, Native, Asian and other nationally oppressed peoples. Today, thisdrawing of an equal sign between oppressions based on nationality and sexuality
would sow disunity, not solidarity.
But at that 1953 convention, Rowland was calling on more politically conservative
white gay men and lesbians to see the necessity for unity with the liberation
struggles of oppressed nationalities--in particular African American andChicano/Mexicano peoples, and with Jewish people in the post-war era, as well.
Rowland ended his speech with a moving prediction. “I remember saying, ‘The
time will come when we will march arm in arm, 10 abreast down Hollywood
Boulevard proclaiming our pride in our homosexuality.’“One of my friends in Mattachine said he almost had a coronary at such an
outrageous thought at the time. I deliberately built this speech up to what I
hoped would be a rousing climax. I got some applause, but people were more inshock than anything else. To me, it seemed perfectly reasonable.”
Hay takes the podium
Hay spoke next from the dais. The title of his speech, “Are You Now or Have You
Ever Been a Homosexual,” satirized the increasingly familiar question put tocommunists by McCarthy.
Hay took on the red-baiting attacks against the Mattachine Foundation andagainst lawyer Fred Snider for having been an “unfriendly witness” at a recent
HUAC hearing.

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Left wing speaks, opposition unites

Historian John D’Emilio wrote that Hay “reminded his listeners that, with thefederal government removing homosexuals and lesbians from its payroll, each ofthem had something to hide from investigators. Hay urged Mattachine members
to see that it was in their interest to defend the Fifth Amendment rights ofeveryone, regardless of political belief, since some day they might be the target ofCongressional questioners.” (“Sexual Politics”
Hay characterized the Mattachine Foundation as “strictly non-partisan and nonpolitical in its objective and in its operations.” The foundation merely articulated
the need for a debate about the position of homosexuals in U.S. society.
“But,” he added, “in the very raising of the need for such debate, the MattachineFoundation deliberately put itself squarely in opposition to a dominant section of
the status quo, and elects to become a victim of the myriad implications andslanders derivative of that opposition.”
Hay noted that, “It would be pleasant if the social and legal recommendations of
the Foundation could be found impeccable both to the tastes of the mostconservative community as well as to the best interest of the homosexual
minority. But since there must be a choice … the securities and protections of thehomosexual minorities must come first.” (“Gay American History”)
It was brave of Hay to take that position in 1953, when “the most conservative
community” really meant the forces of a domestic anti-gay and anti-communist
witch hunt.
But here was the chance, finally, for Hay and the other leaders to do more thanallude to “myriad implications and slanders.” Hay, Rowland and the otherleaders could have spoken out against anti-communism, pointing out that anyone
who called for progressive change--and revolutionary change--would face redbaiting. And since those whose sexuality made them criminals were calling forchange, they needed the broadest and most resolute defense of all left-wingcurrents within their ranks.
Was that a hard position to take in the spring of 1953? Of course it was. And it
could have meant defeat for the leaders who took the red-baiters head on. But
Hay did not take them head on--he made an egregiously conciliatory move in his
speech.
Hay attacked the left.
Hay reminded those gathered that recent anti-gay purges of workers ingovernment agencies were based on the argument that homosexuals were“security risks” because they could be easily extorted by a “foreign power.”“It is notable,” Hay said, “that not one single political or pressure group among
the liberals, let along the left wing, lifted either voice or finger to protest themonstrous social and civil injustice and sweeping slander of this dictum. The
complete hostility with which the [homosexual] Minority was surrounded by thisindictment was a clear barometer of the outright antipathy unitedly maintainedby every color of political opinion. …”
Hay continued, “It should be stated here that the Left was the first politicalgrouping to deny a social potential to the Minority by going on public record withthe opinion that the perverts were socially degenerate and to be avoided as one
avoids the scum of the earth. The Foundation idea was conceived only when the
Right, in the substance of the State Department actions, followed suit some years
later.”
That’s where Hay caved in to the growing anti-communist opposition in theranks of the Mattachine movement.
Appeasement never works
Those who are not politically attuned might argue, “Wasn’t what Hay said true?

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Left wing speaks, opposition unites

Didn’t the left movement--particularly the Communist Party USA of which Hay
was a member for 18 years--take a terrible position regarding homosexuality,and exclude openly gay and lesbian members?”
Yes, that was true. But timing is everything in politics. When Hay left the CPUSA
in order to devote his time and energies to building a homosexual emancipation
movement, he defended the party as though its position was merely a matter oforganizational protection.
Yet now he was standing up in front of a convention called because the volume of
red-baiting was so loud--and he attacked the left. His speech drew an equal sign
between the political backwardness of some on the left and the state repression
by the right. The CPUSA at that time, no matter how bad its position on
homosexuality, was itself in the bull’s-eye of the Cold War target.
Of course, had the CPUSA supported homosexuals who were also under the gun,it would have made it easier for all communists--especially Hay and the otherfounders--to withstand and combat the “red scare” and the “lavender scare”
unleashed by the capitalist class against all left-wing challenges.
Whether or not Hay knew that Lenin and the Bolshevik Party had abolished thetsarist anti-gay laws, Mattachine founders like Rudi Gernreich were mostcertainly aware that German communists supported the homosexual
emancipation movement before World War II.
All in all, it was a low blow to hit “the left” to deflect red-baiting. Hay hadn’t justbeen a member of the CPUSA for 18 years, he had been a leading theoretician
and teacher in the party. Rowland and the other Mattachine founders were
either communists or fellow travelers and continued to be part of the left wing in
the U.S. That’s why they were all being red-baited by the right wing.
Yet Hay tarred the left with the same brush he used against the right. If hethought that this political conciliation would appease the right-wing in the room,
he was dead wrong. Instead, this sop to the reactionaries merely whetted theirblades.
Next: May convention: Right wing ousts left-wing leaders.

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provided this notice is preserved.
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Right wing ousts left leadership

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 28, 2005 7:41 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,The left-wing founders of the Mattachine movement—the Fifth
Order—thought the anti-communist opposition had been pushed
back at their convention in April. But when the May segment of
the delegated conference resumed, the right wing came back witha vengeance and, wielding McCarthyite red-baiting as its
primary weapon, successfully unseated the leadership.
The first segment of the two-week conference, held on the last weekend in April,
had concluded with small work groups given the task of drafting a constitution
and bylaws. Since the opposition's rallying cry was for a more democratic form oforganization, the Fifth Order may have hoped to diffuse its opponents byassigning the tasks of restructuring to smaller discussion groups.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

However, the job did not appear to lend itself to numerous clusters of discussion.
Frustrated by the lack of results, delegates voted at the closing session to elect a
committee to hammer out the pieces drafted by the small groups into a cohesive
document and bring it back to the second half of the convention in late May.
After the April segment of the convention, the Fifth Order may have breathed asigh of relief. The assembly had proceeded without a floor fight and the rightwing opposition had not shown its strength.
Fifth Order member Chuck Rowland wrote to a Northern California Mattachine
leader, Gerry Brissette, that the opposition had been successfully isolated at the
April conference. Rowland added that he expected "some rumbles from them atthe next session," but felt confident they would not prevail.
Brissette did not agree. He reported the stealth maneuvering of "a real evil
minority at the Convention," which he said had tried to win over his wholedelegation to its side. Brissette warned Rowland that, "smarting under theirrejection, they might return even better organized." Brissette advised the Fifth
Order members to "come to the next session well prepared." ("Making Trouble,"John D'Emilio)
Brissette had a good feel for what was brewing.
Opposition congeals
In the weeks building up to the May session, the reactionary opposition began togalvanize, with Los Angeles guild member Kenneth Burns at its head. Burns, aCarnation Co. engineer, was described as a "Brooks Brothers executive type."
Historian John D'Emilio explained, "Burns presided over a guild whose members,
according to one of them, were 'politically conservative and closety' and which
had reacted vehemently to [journalist] Paul Coates' column." Coates had redbaited the Mattachine Foundation.
"They had been as upset, one member recalled, by the Mattachine's questionnaire
to local political candidates as they had been by the innuendos of Communist

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Respond

Right wing ousts left leadershipsubversion, and felt that any direct political action was likely to destroy theorganization. Nor did they look with favor on Rowland and Hay's opening
speeches which 'shocked, angered, and infuriated' them."
They maintained that any political activism was "likely to destroy theorganization."
Burns's command of parliamentary procedure allowed him to win the chair of theinterim committee delegated to draft the new Mattachine constitution.
Marilyn Rieger was also selected to serve on the committee. Rieger waspolitically isolated in her own guild, which supported the founding leadership.
But the larger body of the convention gave reactionary elements a bigger pond inwhich to fish for support.
Burns and Rieger met with journalist Hal Call from San Francisco. Rumors that
Chuck Rowland had been a communist youth organizer enraged Call. The
militant tones in the keynotes by Rowland and Harry Hay at the first convention
had also angered Call.
This opposition came to the May convention with a single purpose, Call said: to"read out of the roll-call most of the founding members."'Our homosexuality is irrelevant'Rieger took the podium early on at the May convention to articulate the politicalview of the opposition. In a polemic against the concept that homosexuals were a
distinct group, she argued, "We know we are the same, no different than anyoneelse. Our only difference is an unimportant one to the heterosexual society,unless we make it important."
Rieger stressed that "we are first and foremost people." This appeal was meant tosway those in the audience who had felt dehumanized and forcibly alienated fromsociety by their oppression.
Rieger said that equality for gay men and women would be won "by declaring
ourselves, by integrating, not as homosexuals, but as people, as men and womenwhose homosexuality is irrelevant to our ideals, our principles, our hopes andaspirations." She concluded that this was the only way to "rid the world of its
misconceptions of homosexuality and homosexuals."
Irrelevant? What about the fact that homosexuality was illegal in every state?
That police arrested and tortured gay men and lesbians? What about the fact thatthe reactionary Cold War used the "Lavender Scare," like the "Red Scare," tocrush dissent, resulting in a widespread purge of lesbian and gay workers fromwhole industries?
Rieger, in putting forward the views of the opposition, offered no tactics or
strategy to fight back against reaction. Instead, they accommodated themselves topolitical reaction.
Red-baiting weapon unholstered
After having staked out their political position from the dais, Hal Call led theanti-communists' siege on the founding leadership from the convention floor,
allied to another opposition figure, David Finn.
Call raised a motion, backed by the whole San Francisco membership, that "avery strong statement concerning our stand on subversive elements" be written
into the new constitution. "We are already being attacked as Communistic," Call
told those gathered. Adding this wording "guarantees us that we will not be
infiltrated by Communists."
D'Emilio elaborated, "Not restricting himself to parliamentary maneuvering, Callused every available opportunity to abuse Chuck Rowland, whom he especiallydisliked. Finn, too, joined the fray with a blanket accusation of Communist Party

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Right wing ousts left leadership

membership against the Mattachine Foundation directors. Though their attacks
antagonized more delegates than they persuaded, they added an element of
personal bitterness and factionalism that soured the proceedings."
But when it came time for the delegates to vote, the right-wing opposition did
not hold sway. The left wing won every vote. Most significantly, Call's proposal
for anti-communist language in the constitution was voted down.
The preamble proposed by the founding members, which declared the need forthe homosexual minority to develop "a highly ethical homosexual culture," wasapproved by the convention as well.
Mattachine activist Jim Kepner later wrote that the opposition "saw this as
viciously communistic." ("Gay Movement History and Goals")
But the left-wing leadership was taken off guard when the opposition put forward
its own draft constitution. It was written, biographer Stuart Timmons explained,"specifically to eradicate the founders and their most visionary language andideas." ("The Trouble with Harry Hay")
Rowland stated, "What this group of conservative people wanted was an openorganization, which is what we were advocating. But because we were
Communists, we couldn't be trusted. So they came up with their constitution,
which was as strictly top-down in structure as Mattachine had been to begin
with. I said that we couldn't live with this constitution; it was clearly
unworkable."
Kepner described seeing Call "redder in the face than usual, screaming at Chuck,'The Society is not big enough for the two of us—there's no room for Russian
agents.'"Left wing resigns
As the anti-communism mounted, the Fifth Order met to assess the situation.
"We were aware," Fifth Order member James Gruber recalled, "that Communism
had become a burning issue. We all felt, especially Harry, that the organizationand its growth was more important than any of the founding fathers. The
Mattachine had grown beyond our control and it had reached the point where we
had to turn it over to other people. There was no guarantee that they would
continue with what the organization started, but we couldn't help it."
It was a serious threat to be openly red-baited in the spring of 1953. Bob Hullraised at the meeting that the Kefauver Committee, an anti-communist
congressional "investigating" committee, was on its way to Los Angeles toscrutinize "subversive activities."
Hay later observed, "We realized that we couldn't bear investigation. We original
Mattachine founders and our lawyers would all show up as either having been'fellow travelers' or actual Communist Party members. None of us were party
members any longer, but some had been. We couldn't answer that 'Have you everbeen?' question without taking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination."
Hay said Hull told him, "We can't hold this thing."
Recalled Hay, "The middle-class groups were all for pulling out, the whole society
seemed to be falling apart—it looked like the Titanic going down.
"At that moment I suddenly realized for the first time that we weren't
unanimous any more. Our original dream was gone. I thought, 'We'll have todissolve anyway, because of this investigating committee.'"Hull and Rowland argued that the Fifth Order should do away with unanimity indecision making and instead adopt majority-rule voting.
"Harry was the most reluctant of the group to accept what we decided on,"http://www.workers.org/2005/us/lavender-red-49/[2/3/2011 3:59:33 PM]

Right wing ousts left leadershipaccording to Rowland.
Finally, all seven founding members of the Fifth Order agreed to disband as acore group and not attempt to run for office in the new organization, give over
the Mattachine name, and resign openly as a group at the convention—the firsttime the leadership would publicly present itself to the membership.
When the seven members took the stage, "outed" themselves at the final sessionof the May convention, and announced that they were stepping down, Rowland
described the reaction of astonishment from many delegates that these respectedindividuals were the anonymous leaders who had been so demonized. Rowland
said, "When we announced that we were resigning, a lot of people yelled, 'Oh, no,no.' But the Hal Call faction was delighted."
Next: Two-line struggle: Which class will lead?

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without
royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Two-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement

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1950s gay movement

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 6, 2006 11:07 PM

The first mass political gay liberation struggle took a different
political turn after the communist founding organizers of theearly Mattachine movement were forced to step down fromleadership after the May 1953 convention.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

A bitter internal battle created the split.
It’s not enough to say, as some progressive historians do, that the more radical
leadership saw gay people as a distinct group in society and the moreconservative forces saw gay people as not so different from non-gay people. The
differences were much deeper, arising from a battle over which economic class insociety to turn to for leadership in order to create change.
The revolutionary founders of the first phase of Mattachine believed gay people
as a group shared distinct characteristics arising out of the conditions of theiroppression. They were trying to formulate a political approach to what had beenviewed as individual sexual expression—same-sex love.
Founder Harry Hay had stressed that the exclusion of gays and lesbians from thepatriarchal heterosexual nuclear family—the economic unit under feudalism andcapitalism—had led to their isolation in class societies. And these early leaders
built a network of “consciousness-raising” groups to raise political and historical
understanding about capitalism and earlier class societies.
These early leaders tried to find language and concepts that could galvanize
individuals who had felt alone and isolated. They sought to fan the embers ofself-pride in those who were surviving the oppression and struggling for a senseof community. And they hoped to imbue confidence that, collectively, an
independent, political grassroots movement could be built that could fight forchange, particularly if they united with other groups in capitalist society that were
facing police brutality and institutionalized discrimination.
Their approach of taking the struggle to the workers ignited a movement which,as it grew exponentially, brought together people from antagonistic economic
classes.
Stress fractures in theoretical framework
The Mattachine founders—predominantly white gay males—stressed that theysaw gay people as sharing a distinct group culture.
But there was a limitation to the concept of a single “group identity.” The
population that is broadly represented under the umbrella of LGBT is not madeup of people who share the same degrees of social and economic oppression.
The theoretical approach that gay people share a common culture also obscured
the realities of national oppression. And it left little room to address the
additional burden that lesbians face as women in a patriarchal society, or the
ferocity of violence that transgender and transsexual people cannot escape

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RespondTwo-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement

because of their visibility.
Although the founders of Mattachine did lean towards this theoretical concept ofgays as one distinct cultural group in society, they were anti-racist activists intheir day-to-day organizing. And they’d had opposed imperialist war, antiSemitism and fascism. They did so when the going was tough. The revolutionary
Mattachine founders led the movement against the headwinds of Cold War gaybashing and anti-communism.
The left-wing leadership of the early Mattachine movement reached out to thegrassroots with their campaign against anti-gay firings and red-listing, police
raids and jail-cell rapes, electro-shock and castration for the “crime” of same-sex
love.
While they struggled against the daily outrages of the capitalist system—like
police entrapment—they tried to imbue that movement with an understandingthat oppression is part of the machinery of class-divided society. They understoodthat a gay liberation movement had to be part of the struggle to overturn
capitalism and replace it with an economic system that requires planning andcooperation, not cut-throat competition and “let’s-you-and-him-fight” ideology.
However, the labor movement was under siege at the time. Its most militant,revolutionary leaders were being driven out and even underground. This further
isolated the burgeoning young gay movement from being able to reach out to theoverall working class—the economic class that benefits most from defeating
divide-and-conquer rule.
And as the Mattachine movement broadened and deepened its reach, it brought
many from the more privileged classes in society into its ranks—and they wanted
to shape the movement in their own class interests.
The concept of shared gay culture hampered the revolutionary leadership in its
fight against the antagonistic political positions that middle- and upper-classgays were taking within the movement.
That internal struggle was not just about whether gays are “different” or not.
Conciliation, not assimilation
Today, progressive historians characterize the opposition as “assimilationist.” But
that’s not the main problem with those who challenged and eventually defeatedthe communist leadership of Mattachine. Their political crime was that they wereconciliatory to the boss class, which was carrying out an offensive against theworking class as well using police entrapment against lesbians and gays.
The opposition tried to appease and curry favor with the Cold War capitalist
rulers by opportunistically carrying out an internal red-baiting witch hunt within
the Mattachine movement.
The opposition figures tried to mask their reactionary class conciliation with thedishonest claim that they were just trying to “democratize” Mattachine to help
the organization build a broader movement.
Opposition leader Hal Call explained in a later interview, “We wanted to see
Mattachine grow and spread, but we didn’t think that this could be done as longas Mattachine was a secret organization. But we knew that if we became a publicorganization, the FBI and other government agencies would find out about us.
That was okay with us, but before we went public, we wanted to make sure that
we didn’t have a person in our midst who could be revealed as a Communist anddisgrace us all. We wanted to be able to stand up and say who we were and what
we were about and not be accused of these other things.
“Despite the secrecy, we knew that some of the founders of the Mattachine
Society, the inner circle, had been rumored to have some Communist leanings
and maybe connections elsewhere. They had to go.

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Two-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement“So we sort of took the organization out of the founders’ hands. We did this at apair of meetings in the spring of 1953 in Los Angeles. At the second meeting,which was held in May, the founders of Mattachine gave over the Mattachine idea
to those of us who wanted to form a democratic Mattachine Society with elected
officers and with members and officers we knew.” (Eric Marcus, “Making
History”)
Two weeks after the May convention, opposition figure David Finn wrote to
Kenneth Burns, another opposition leader, that the FBI had gotten in touch with
him in San Francisco. Finn reportedly handed over copies of the Mattachine
constitution to government investigators and outlined the opposition’s actions toremove any traces of communist influence within the organization. (D’Emilio,“Sexual Politics, Sexual Community”)
Political surrender
Once the opposition had ousted the left-wing leadership, they dropped the
mantle of concern for “democratic” forms of organization and their real political
agenda became crystal clear.
Hal Call continued, “I didn’t just disagree with how the original Mattachine wasrun. I also disagreed with the philosophy of the Mattachine founders. I felt thatthey were sort of pie in the sky, erudite and artistically included. Take Harry Hay,
the kingpin of the original founders. You could never talk to him very long
without him going way back in history to some ancient Egyptian cult orsomething of that sort. He was always making Mattachine and the homosexual of
today a parallel to some of those things he found out about in his historicalresearch.
“You see, I was a journalist and a public relations man and I felt that educationand getting the word out was the best thing we could do, so the whole society
could ultimately say, ‘Homosexuals are human beings in our midst. They’re only
different in certain ways from the rest of us. Leave them alone.’”How could this be politically achieved while the population was being hammeredby the anti-gay terror of the Cold War “Lavender Scare”?
Hall explained, “We wanted to see those goals achieved by evolutionary methods,
not revolutionary methods. … So public protests were not part of our program.
Not at all. We wanted to see changes come about by holding conferences anddiscussions and becoming subjects for research and telling our story. We wanted
to assist people in the academic and behavioral-science world in getting the truth
out to people who had an influence on law and law enforcement, the courts,
justice and so on.”In order to plead with the rulers of society for social acceptance, the opposition
had to pry up every plank of the demands the Mattachine organization was builton.
In his chapter “Retreat to Respectability,” historian John D’Emilio explained,“Their reliance on professionals as the agents of social change pushed them toabandon collective, militant action by the Mattachine Society. In sum,accommodation to social norms replaced the affirmation of a distinctive gay
identity, collective effort gave way to individual action, and confidence in theability of gay men and lesbians to interpret their own experience yielded to thewisdom of experts. Under its new officers, the Mattachine Society shifted its
focus from mobilizing a gay constituency to assisting the work of professionals.”(“Sexual Politics”)
D’Emilio concluded that the new leaders “urged homosexuals to adjust to a‘pattern of behavior that is acceptable to society in general and compatible with[the] recognized institutions … of home, church and state.’”Such political surrender did not beef up the ranks of Mattachine. Instead, the

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Two-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement

network of discussion groups fell apart and overall membership quickly
dwindled. Within weeks after the May 1953 conference in which founding
Mattachine leaders were forced to step down, the San Diego groups imploded. By
the fall, the three East Bay Mattachine discussion groups that had each drawn up
to 60 participants were reduced to two groups that attracted a total of eight
members.
Doing the state’s dirty work
Mattachine founders Chuck Rowland and Konrad Stevens continued to provide
leadership in the Los Angeles chapter, leading a vote to form a group to be
known as the “Legal Chapter” to continue the struggle against police entrapmentby finding cases “of significance to the whole minority” and fighting the charges“aggressively.”
But the opposition’s “Coordinating Council” overruled the group’s decision.
According to opposition leader Kenneth Burns, the new Mattachine lawyer
warned that, “[T]he very existence of a Legal Chapter, if publicized to society atlarge, would intimidate and anger heterosexual society. … It would be
detrimental to the [Mattachine] Society to let the public know of the existence of
the Legal Chapter; and it would probably bring more pressures on the Society if
the heterosexual felt that the homosexual, whom he hates, was trying to change
the laws to suit himself.” (CC Minutes, Aug. 28. 1953, Lucas papers; D’Emilio,
Sexual Politics, 82)
Instead, the Coordinating Council proposed referring individuals who had beensnared by police entrapment to lawyers.
The new leadership did not want to challenge the anti-gay laws. The
Coordinating Committee made this quite clear in a pamphlet it published inAugust 1953. “Any organized pressure on lawmakers by members of the
Mattachine Society as a group would only serve to prejudice the position of theSociety. … It would provide an abundant source of hysterical propaganda withwhich to foment an ignorant, fear-inspired, anti-homosexual campaign.”
Such a campaign was underway. It was the Cold War. It would take an organizedpolitical struggle to oppose the frenzy of “Lavender Scare” propaganda that was
being used to step up enforcement of anti-gay penal codes.
Instead, the CC proposed the Mattachine adopt a policy of “merely acquainting
itself” with legislation and let members know that the “burden of activity must
rest upon the individual.” (“Sexual Politics”)
The reactionary ideology and political opportunism of the new leadership ledthem to carry out the state’s Cold War agenda within the Mattachine movement.
Under the direction of the Coordinating Committee, the San Francisco and Los
Angeles Area Councils issued pamphlets in the months after the May convention
declaring that Mattachine was “unalterably opposed to Communists andCommunist activity.”
The Los Angeles pamphlet vowed, “Homosexuals are not seeking to overthrow ordestroy any of society’s existing institutions, laws or mores, but to be assimilated
as constructive, valuable, and responsible citizens.” (Kepner papers, “Sexual
Politics”)
The new leadership was at the helm of the organization-wide convention in Los
Angeles in November 1953. Kenneth Burns was by then the official leader ofMattachine.
He won the vote on a resolution rejecting “any direct, aggressive action.” The
resolution called for limiting Mattachine’s activities to “working with andthrough … persons, institutions, and organizations which command the highest
possible public respect.”

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Two-line struggle tore apart 1950s gay movement

When Mattachine founder Chuck Rowland rose to speak out against changing thepreamble on which the organization had been formed, David Finn ruled him “outof order.” Finn then declared, to the outrage of convention participants, that hewould turn over to the FBI the names of everyone there if they did not vote down
the “communistic” values of the old leadership.
Finn’s threat provoked such outrage that it scuttled the Coordinating
Committee’s agenda of getting three loyalty-oath resolutions passed at theconvention.
The first read, “[T]his Society unconditionally subscribes to the American creed.”
The second would mandate that each member sign a statement that included, “I
believe it is my duty to my country to love it; to support its constitution; to obey
its laws; to respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies.”
The obvious and bitter irony of asking members, all of whom were there because
they were breaking the law based on their sexuality, to obey all laws wasapparently lost on those who penned the resolution.
The third resolution called for the formation of a “Committee for Investigating
Communist Infiltration” that would act as a little HUAC body within the group,
questioning members about “subversive” activities and booting out anyone who
didn’t provide the right answers.
All three resolutions did come to a vote at the convention. But in the atmosphereof turmoil and rage over the threat to “out” the membership to the FBI, all threerotten resolutions were voted down.
Despite the claims of the anti-communist leaders that they were trying to build amovement that was more mainstream, membership continued to drop
dramatically.
The group was still called Mattachine, but the shift towards accommodation topolitical reaction derailed the early militant grassroots character of the
movement for years to come.
Founder Chuck Rowland later concluded sadly, “We should never, never havegiven Hal Call our name, never have let him take our name.”
Next: Lesbian organizing, “red feminism” and Black liberation.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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1955: First lesbian organization rises on waves of militant struggles

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Lavender & red, part 51
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 26, 2006 12:36 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The founding of Daughters of Bilitis on Sept. 21, 1955, in San
Francisco—the first known political network for lesbian rights in
the United States—holds important lessons about the era ofresistance to McCarthyism that may not be immediately
apparent.
DOB was not founded by communists. Nor did the organization seek
revolutionary change.
The group’s charter didn’t use the word “lesbian”; it referred only to “thevariant.” DOB’s founding statement of purpose counseled members to adjust andadapt to dominant mandates about proper dress and behavior in order to fit in.
They hoped to gradually win acceptance through education. The organization
drew to its ranks lesbians who most wanted to and were most able to “fit in”—
white-collar workers, professional and middle-class women, overwhelmingly
white.
DOB invited academic and medical “established experts”—some distantly
sympathetic, some outright hostile—to speak at their meetings. East Coast DOB
founder Barbara Gittings later recalled, “We invited people who were willing tocome to our meetings; obviously, it turned out to be those who had a vested
interest in having us as penitents, clients or patients.”
The DOB leadership at that time looked to these establishment figures as vehicles
of social change, who could help them with their goals.
So it may appear to be veering off track for this Workers World newspaper series—that focuses on the relationship between the liberation of oppressed sexualities,
genders and sexes, and the communist movement—to examine DOB’s formation.
But the question must be asked: How could even such a politically moderatedemand by lesbians—the right to fit in and just live their lives—be articulated at
the mid-fifties height of the Cold War, a time of the most focused persecution ofgays and lesbians in U.S. history?
What gave these white lesbians the idea that this was a good time to sit down insomeone’s living room, and later in publicly rented spaces in San Francisco,
Boston and New York, to discuss their rights?
DOB was not formed in a political vacuum. It arose in the midst of militant
struggles against racism and for women’s liberation. Without a deeper
understanding of that period, the establishment of DOB makes it appear that thebest road forward for democratic rights in a period of capitalist reaction is to ask
for them politely, hat in hand—give an inch, get an inch.
The truth is that Daughters of Bilitis objectively rose up on waves of resistance by

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-51/[2/3/2011 4:00:17 PM]

Respond1955: First lesbian organization rises on waves of militant struggles

the Black freedom movement and by communist women—Black and white—who
were fighting for the recognition that women’s oppression was an important
battlefront in the class war.
Dramatic changes in the structuring of the U.S. wartime economy, its impact on
the heterosexual family, and the unbearable burden of Jim Crow apartheid had
helped create the conditions for these struggles.
From ‘Rosie the Riveter’ to ‘Father Knows Best’The deployment of so many men as GIs in World War II, women in military
support roles and the gearing of the economy towards large-scale military
production created many changes for women.
Some 150,000 women were inducted into the military in largely same-sex
surroundings. Many women—white, Black, Latina and Native—and African
American male workers not in the military were able for the first time to getbetter-paying jobs in heavy industry to produce war materiel.
This economic development brought people out of the isolation of their farms
and jobs, homes and neighborhoods, families and friendship circles into morelarge-scale, same-sex, somewhat anonymous social interaction. This gave
individuals the opportunity to learn new ideas and ways of being, to express theirsuppressed identities, to open up larger friendship circles and to network.
But after the war, the Pentagon carried out a purge of the military, loading
lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans soldiers onto “queer ships” and dumping them atthe nearest port town, often far from home. In cities such as San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Boston and New York, this created a very large lesbian, gay, bisexualand trans population.
In the weeks and months after the war ended, the barons of industry gave most
women and Black workers notice—quit or be fired. Move over and make room
for the predominately white male troops returning from mass deployment. It wasa hard sell because many women workers of all nationalities, and Black workers
as a whole, did not want to leave their jobs.
Bosses pitted workers against each other: Training programs for job skills driedup for lack of funding, war-time child-care centers shut down, and college slots
for low-income students were filled with many white male GIs who won student
aid as part of their veterans’ benefits.
A mass psychology and publicity spin aided the bosses’ efforts to restructure thework force after the war. Magazine covers extolled the virtue of heterosexual
marriage with the man as the breadwinner. The image of the “lady” in a spotless
dress, at home in the kitchen, an infant in the crook of her arm, replaced photosof women in hard hats with their sleeves rolled up operating machinery.
The average marriage age dropped, the rate of marriage rose to its highest levelin the history of the U.S. and the birth rate soared.
Lesbians and gays in the cross-hairs
The systematic and sensationalized witch hunt carried out against lesbian, gay,bisexual and trans people in the 1950s Cold War era aided the economic efforts
underway to reinforce the heterosexual nuclear family as the primary economic
unit under capitalism.
Gay and lesbian bars, many of them drag bars, had sprouted by 1940 in cities
across the country—from Buffalo, N.Y., to Denver to San Jose, Calif. During theearly- and mid-fifties, people in these bars were routinely subjected to brutal
police raids and jailing in which sexual humiliation, rape and extortion by cops
was a widespread form of extra-legal “sentencing.”
Mass arrests included 64 lesbians busted in a 1953 New Orleans bar raid. A
similar 1955 Baltimore bar raid ensnared 162 gay men.

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1955: First lesbian organization rises on waves of militant struggles

Miami politicians ordered a police terror sweep on the local beaches in 1953, andpassed a city law against drag. When a gay man was bashed to death in Miami
the following year, local newspapers demanded punishment for homosexuals forhaving tempted “normals” to kill them.
Police entrapment, newspapers printing names and addresses of those arrested,
FBI agents talking to workers’ employers, threats of forced institutionalizationand imprisonment—these were tough times in which to organize a fledgling
lesbian network.
In 1955, the year DOB formed, one of the most nationally publicized anti-gay
persecutions in U.S. history was taking place in Boise, the state capital of Idaho,
resulting in nine men serving 5- to 15-year sentences in prison.
All workers felt the impact of one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first actsin the Oval Office: a 1953 executive order that legalized investigations into thehomosexuality of government workers and all job applicants.
While the terror was directed at those who were oppressed for their sexuality,
gender expression or sex, the indirect message was loud and clear to all workers:
straighten up!
So how did Daughters of Bilitis form amidst this Cold War offensive? In effect,
lesbian organizing rode the crest of turbulent swells of militant politicalorganizing and resistance.
Next: Lesbian organizing and “red feminism.”

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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1955: Lesbian organizing and ‘red feminism’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 5, 2006 12:42 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

During World War II, the nascent military-industrial complex
had pulled 6 million women out of their unpaid labor at home
into the work force. After the war, as the predominately whitemale soldiers were cashiered out of the military, women wereordered back to their family homes again, to dawn-to-darkhousework and no wages.
Historian Kate Weigand, in her well-researched book “Red Feminism,” explainsthat while many women who got pink-slipped did return to the patriarchaldominated, heterosexual family home, “a significant number also fought back.”“Those who liked their jobs and depended on the wages that came with themstaged picket lines and petitioned their unions to protest their forced withdrawal
from the skilled industrial workforce. Some women, particularly those who weremembers of such left-leaning unions as the United Auto Workers and the United
Electrical Workers, made explicitly feminist arguments as they pressed their malebosses and co-workers to abandon traditional sex-based job classifications.”
She added, “But although the UAW women’s postwar efforts succeeded inwinning permanent status for their Women’s Bureau within the union’s Fair
Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department, it would be years before they
made any significant progress in their quest for gender equality.”
Weigand makes this important observation: “The anti-feminism of the postWorld War II period was both intense and widespread, but it did not impede
every segment of the [U.S.] women’s movement to the same degree. Mainstream
feminists lost ground after 1945, but progressive women, who were accustomed
to defining themselves in opposition to dominant political and cultural ideologies,
continued to see the postwar period as an opportunity for new beginnings.”
Red feminism
Communist women—Black and white—helped push the struggle for women’sliberation forward politically and ideologically during that Cold War era. Theirefforts reverberated strongly throughout the West Coast, as well as other regionsof the U.S.
The political and theoretical contributions of Gerda Lerner and Eleanor Flexner
are familiar to women who were a part of “second wave” women’s liberation—thegreat surging feminist and womanist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But therevolutionary moorings of these women’s politics are less known.
Weigand wrote, “These women, along with many others who are less well-known,
worked for women’s liberation within their own political circles and in the
United States at large during the hostile years of 1945-56. The group consisted
primarily of women who had cut their political teeth in the Left and laborstruggles of the 1930s.”

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-52/[2/3/2011 4:00:40 PM]

Respond1955: Lesbian organizing and ‘red feminism’

Weigand stressed, “They revolutionized [feminist theory] by conceptualizing the
dynamics of women’s oppression and liberation within a framework that maderace and class central. They sustained a small but vibrant women’s movement
throughout the 1940s and 1950s and transmitted influential terminology, tactics
and concepts to the next generation of feminists. Their bold new thinking about
the interdependence of gender, race and class, and about the personal andcultural aspects of sexism, shaped modern feminism—both directly and indirectly—and laid absolutely crucial groundwork for the second wave.”
Many of the activists, organizers and theoreticians of the era of red feminism
were members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) or were “fellow travelers.”
In the early 1930s, the Communist Party USA had actively encouraged rank-andfile women to organize women’s councils and neighborhood committees. By
1936, a quarter of the CPUSA was women. By 1943, the number of women in theparty was equal to the number of men.
From 1946 to 1950, the CPUSA initiated the Congress of American Women.
Weigand states that during that time, CAW leaders were able to develop “asophisticated analysis of women’s oppression that recognized both theimportance of women’s race and class differences and the need for women tounite on the basis of gender to fight for their own emancipation.
“Armed with this broad understanding of the factors that limited women in
American society, CAW activists also created a program for women’s liberationthat valued women’s roles as housewives and mothers, challenged the social andcultural structures that excluded them from work and politics, and insisted thatwomen could be different from but still equal to men.”
Weigand concludes, “Why, then, has their story been overlooked? How havefeminists and the general public come to believe that the critique of malechauvinism in personal and family relations emerged for the first time in the
mid-1960s? The powerful legacy of anti-communism in the United States islargely responsible for their obscurity.”
Tragically, red feminism—both the movement and the theory it generated—could
have been so much stronger if its leaders had understood the need to defend
lesbians organizationally, politically and ideologically.
Those targeted by the red-baiting and gay-bashing Cold War repression needed
to be armed with theory that showed why fighting oppression—including thecriminalization and demonization of same-sex love—was key to class unity
against a common class enemy. The basis for unity was there: Same-sex love washounded and criminalized by the state. So were communists. Lesbian and gay
workers were facing widespread employment purges. So were communists.
And a movement of women who wanted to win greater rights had to be able tomove forward against a hurricane of lesbian-baiting from the politicalestablishment of the Cold War capitalists. But the CPUSA membership policy
barred lesbian and gay members. So we will never know how many of thecommunist women were lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual.
The CPUSA’s position towards homosexuality was that lesbians and gay men
were degenerate. This wrong position hurt the communist movement as much as
it hurt unity in the struggle against same-sex oppression.
The experience, insight and organization of lesbians, bisexuals and trans womenand intersexual people could have strengthened the overall struggle for women’sliberation, then and now as well.
Daughters of Bilitis was certainly not a part of red feminism; it was not a radicalorganization in search of revolutionary partnership. DOB sought to secure a
position in society by appealing to the establishment, not by confronting it.
But objectively DOB articulated a lesbian voice, raised to national audibility. The

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-52/[2/3/2011 4:00:40 PM]

1955: Lesbian organizing and ‘red feminism’

fact that this voice had to be raised, to speak in its own name, demonstrates that
not all women shoulder the same burden of oppression, not even all women fromthe working class.
Black working-class women were making that point crystal clear in 1955, as well.
They had a prominent and leading role in the struggle against Jim Crow
segregation and for national liberation.
The civil rights struggle was rising, swift and strong, winning the hearts andminds of people of all nationalities across the United States and around theworld.
The capitalist class unleashed the FBI against the early civil rights movement.
Anti-gay baiting, too, was one of the weapons the political police agency used totry to fracture the movement and break it up.
Next: FBI gay-baited civil rights struggle.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Black movement raised hopes of all downtrodden

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1955

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Black movement raised
hopes of all downtrodden

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 12, 2006 10:19 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Although the 1955 founding of the Daughters of Bilitis in San
Francisco-a group of predominantly white professional andmiddle-class women—was the first time lesbians organized on anational level to win some political rights, it was not the firsttime same-sex loving, bisexual and/or cross-dressing women had
raised their voices loud enough to be heard in the United States.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, No voices could have been sweeter or clearer than those of Ma Rainey, Bessie
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Smith and Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and many otherpowerful Black women performers and authors. Their prominence did not offer
them sanctuary.
Cops busted into Ma Rainey’s home while she was holding a women’s party.
Bessie Smith had to bail her out of jail the next morning. Later ads for Rainey’srecording of “Prove It on Me Blues” showed a Black woman in a “man’s” hat, tie
and suit coat, chatting with two feminine women. Behind them, watching them,is a cop.
It was the Harlem Renaissance that lifted up these voices, along with the strong
and poetic articulation of Black gay and bisexual men like Richard Bruce Nugent,
Alaine Locke, Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman.
The rent parties, buffet flats and other forms of community social and economic
organization, from Chicago to Baltimore, Detroit to D.C. and throughout theSouth helped create a political network for those who were “in the life.”
Harlem’s drag balls, which dated back to the late 19th century and continued
during the early Harlem Renaissance, drew many thousands, rivaling those heldat Madison Square Garden.
African-American scholar and historian Henry Louis Gates concludes that theHarlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black.”
In 1949, James Baldwin tried to spark a public dialogue across the country about
the struggle against racism and anti-gay bigotry in his essay “Preservation of
Innocence.”
Baldwin wrote, “We are forced to consider tension between God and nature andare thus confronted with the nature of God because He is man’s most intense
creation and it is not in the sight of nature that the homosexual is condemned,
but in the sight of God. This argues a profound and dangerous failure of concept,
since an incalculable number of the world’s humans are thereby condemned tosomething less than life; and we may not, of course, do this without limiting
ourselves. … Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly toindicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without
ourselves undergoing falsification and loss.”
Baldwin published fiction in 1951, 1953 and 1956 that also dealt withhomosexuality.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-53/[2/3/2011 4:01:00 PM]

RespondBlack movement raised hopes of all downtrodden

The civil rights movement qualitatively accelerated in 1955. This dynamic stage ofthe ongoing struggle for long-denied democratic rights and national liberation
helped inspire and buoy many in the U.S. and around the world who longed forsocial and economic justice.
Lesbians and gay men of many nationalities were inspired by the struggle andplayed an important role in the movement against Jim Crow segregation andother forms of national oppression.
The late Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., later recalled,“Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma; in Albany,
Ga.; and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights
Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for myfreedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute
their contributions.” (Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1998)‘Thank you sister Rosa Parks’
1955—the year that Daughters of Bilitis formed the first national network for
lesbian rights—the African-American civil rights movement shook up the wholecountry. Black working women, visible in the leadership, showed that oppression
could be fought.
That was the summer that 14-year-old Emmett Till was dragged from his bed
and lynched by white supremacists while he was visiting in Mississippi. His
mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River. His murder was the third
lynching of an African-American male that year.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, with courageous resolve, demanded an open
casket with full publicity at his funeral in Chicago. “I think everybody needed toknow what had happened to Emmett Till,” she said. More than 50,000 people
lined up to view his body, left unrecognizable by torture and mutilation.
Newspapers across the country carried photos.
Ebony magazine later wrote that the decision by Mamie Till Mobley to open thecasket “helped mobilize a fighting spirit in Black people nationally that helped
spark and fuel the Civil Rights Movement.”
One hundred days after Till was lynched, seamstress/activist Rosa Parks refused
to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., municipal bus to a white man.
Parks said she was thinking of the lynching of young Till. She later told areporter, “I just could not get the pictures of Emmett Till out of my mind.”
Parks’ defiance of Jim Crow segregation, the law of the land, lit the tinder of civilrights organizing and anti-lynching efforts already going on in the Deep South.
Her arrest launched a 381-day Montgomery bus boycott in which 40,000 Black
people, mostly all working people, fought the segregationist bosses.
Their hard-fought-for, hard-won victory brought momentum to the mass civilrights movement throughout the South during the 1950s and 1960s to break theshackles of Jim Crow apartheid.
But wherever the civil rights struggle made gains, the FBI and other repressive
police agencies used gay-baiting, as well as red-baiting, to try to break up the
movement against racism.
Next: FBI brandishes weapons: red-baiting and gay-baiting.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-53/[2/3/2011 4:01:00 PM]

Black movement raised hopes of all downtrodden

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Civil rights leaders faced red-baiting, gay-baiting

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 24, 2006 8:24 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans activists—Black and white—
played an important role in the ranks and the leadership of thecivil rights movement. However, the illegality of same-sex loveand the “Lavender Menace” Cold War campaign made theirsexuality a target for state repression.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, may be the bestHEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

known gay Black civil rights leader. Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and otherBlack leaders were the focus of intense surveillance and counter-intelligence—
COINTELPRO—tactics of the FBI and other political police agencies.
Rustin was arrested in 1953 in a car with two white men in Pasadena, convicted
and jailed for “sex perversion.” Author George Chauncey Jr. later asked Rustin if
he believed the charges were politically motivated. Rustin answered, “I think so.
Because way back as far as 1946, ‘47, I had organized all over the country, evenin the Deep South, and I was in California at the time of the arrest, leading
demonstrations against discrimination in theaters, hotels and restaurants.”(“Time on Two Crosses”)
Rustin, an ideological pacifist, organized in the South with Dr. King. In 1960,
labor leader A. Phillip Randolph had asked Rustin to work on civil rights
demonstrations that targeted the national conventions of both the Republican
and the Demo cratic parties. Rustin invited Dr. King to a news conference
announcing the marches. King then left for Brazil.
Great pressure was brought to bear on Rustin. It focused on his sexuality, which
was criminalized by the state. Rustin recalled, “Later [Dr. King] called me from
Brazil very, very agitated indeed, and said that on second thought maybe weought not to proceed with the marches.”
Rustin got back in touch with King to say that Randolph and others were goingfull-steam ahead on the demonstrations. “I called Martin back and told him this,whereupon he told me the whole story. A woman who was well known in the
movement had called him and said that [New York Congress member Adam
Clayton] Powell was going to call a press conference and implicate me and Dr.
King in some sort of liaison if Dr. King did not call off the marches. Now,
obviously this is a case where Powell had been promised something by the
Democratic Party if he’d get rid of me.”Rustin added in another interview, “There, of course, was no homosexual relation
ship with Dr. King. But Martin was so uneasy about it that I decided I did notwant Dr. King to have to dismiss me. I had come to the SCLC [South ern
Christian Leader ship Coun cil] to help. If I was going to be a burden I would
leave—and I did. How ever, Dr. King was never happy about my leaving. He wasdeeply torn—although I had left the SCLC, he frequently called me in and asked
me to help. While in 1960 he felt real pressure to fire me, in 1963 he agreed that I
should organize the March on Washington, of which he was one of the leaders.”

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-54/[2/3/2011 4:01:28 PM]

RespondCivil rights leaders faced red-baiting, gay-baiting(1987 interview with the magazine Open Hands)
In 1963, Rustin was to be named director of the 1963 March on Washington. Roy
Wilkins, then executive director of the NAACP, told Rustin he would object. “He
made it quite clear that he had absolutely no prejudice toward me or towardhomosexuality,” Rustin said. Wilkins told Rustin that he was concerned that theenemies of civil rights would exploit the fact that the director of the March on
Washing ton was gay. Wilkins added that although Rustin was not a communist,he was known to be a socialist and a “draft dodger.”
Rustin replied, “Roy, I just disagree with that, and I think that the time has comewhen we have to stand up and stop running from things. And I don’t believe that
if this is raised by the Southern Demo crats, that it will do anything but spur
people on. We can issue a statement which says they will use anything to try andstop us in our march to freedom, but no matter what they use we will win.”
Unswayed, Wilkins called a meeting of the Black march leaders. Randolph named
him self director, as a compromise. But his first act, he said, would be to appoint
Rustin as his deputy. King and CORE Director Jim Farmer voted for Rustin.
Wilkins reportedly said, “Phil, you’ve got me over a barrel, I’ll go along with you.”
In June 1963, on Capitol Hill, Sen. Strom Thurmond did attack the March on
Washington, denouncing Rustin as a “sexual pervert.” Although Rustin had
politically distanced himself from his early activist work with the Young
Communist League, it did not spare him Thurmond’s red-baiting. Thurmond alsocondemned Rustin for having refusing military induction as a conscientious
objector.
Randolph met with the march leadership and quickly pulled together a statement
by Black leaders of the civil rights movement and labor unions, as well as
progressive religious figures, all of whom were organizing the march. The
statement concluded that Rustin “will continue to organize the March with ourfull and undivided support.”
Gays and lesbians—Black and white—played a significant role in other civil rights
battles, in the Deep South as well. There, in particular, the state honed sharp theweapon of anti-gay bigotry.
Next: Local and regional Black and white leaders in Southern civil rights
movement face ferocious gay-baiting, red-baiting.

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Civil rights activists were gay-baited, red-baited

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Lavender & red, part 55
Published Mar 3, 2006 11:04 PM

As the civil rights movement heated up at the height of the Cold
War, state repression often came in the form of investigations
into the sexuality of those who were fighting for freedom.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAWhite supremacist propaganda—which included virulent racism,
crude anti-Semi tism and brutal sexism—condemned civil rights activists forbeing homosexuals and/or in inter-racial relationships, allegedly having
adulterous sex or living together out of wedlock. The movement was portrayed as
made up of activists who threatened to “queer” the white, heterosexual, fatherdominated family structure.
Jim Crow miscegenation laws enforced apartheid in marriage. Klan ideology,
which propagated the vicious myth of African men as a “sexual threat” to whiteSouthern womanhood, formed the foundation of lynch law. That racist lie wasmeant to cover up the real truth—the widespread rape of Black women by white
men that began during slavery.
It was these Southern patriarchs of property who gave the go-ahead for theirpolice forces, their mobs armed with bricks and bats, and their McCarthyite
committees of inquisition to attack civil rights activists. Gay-baiting was often thespecific point of attack.
As was the case with civil rights activists who faced ferocious red-baiting, somewere not gay and/or communist. But many were.
Gay men and lesbians, Black and white, and presumably bisexual andtransgender people as well, played dynamic roles in the movement to end Jim
Crow apartheid. But the active police repression of same-sex love and the Cold
War demonization of lesbians and gays made civil rights activists who were gay
much more vulnerable to state repression.
Since same-sex love was against the law, police and legislative inquiries into thesexuality of activists conveyed the threat of police and prison torture, including
rape. The threat was meant to terrorize freedom fighters in the struggle for Blackliberation in the Deep South.
Gainesville witch hunt
In 1956, for example, a conservative state senator from northern Florida, Charley
Johns, launched a legislative inqui sition known as the “Johns Com mittee” thatwas to last eight years. Started just two years after the growing civil rights
struggle had compelled the Supreme Court to declare school segregation
unconstitutional, it was bent on pushing back the struggle against
institutionalized segregation.
Former acting governor Johns directed police to carry out an investigation into
the “homosexual menace” at Florida State University in Gainesville. Johns
chaired the committee, which relied on surveillance and police entrapment,

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RespondCivil rights activists were gay-baited, red-baited

informers and extortion. The committee interrogated hundreds of witnesses andpublicly leaked bald-faced lies and sensationalized half-truths about their
testimony.
The committee reported to the legislature that university officials were “soft” oncommunism, homosexual activities, atheism and obscenity. On March 17, 1964,
the committee printed up now-infamous purple-covered pamphlets “to prepare... children to meet the temptations of homosexuality lurking today in the vicinityof nearly every institution of learning.” The portrayal of gay men as looking foryoung children to prey on was the heart of the argument. The committee
distributed this gay-bashing publication to the media, legislators and state
officials.
Johns Committee Direc tor John Evans told a Florida Federation of Women’s
Clubs in Jacksonville that he knew of 123 homosexuals who were responsible fora “flourishing” of same-sex activity in Florida educational institutions. As with
Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s notorious list of communists in the State Department,
later media reports exposed that no such list existed.
As a result of the witch hunt, 16 FSU faculty and staff were fired and many more,
including students, were driven in fear from the state campus—and other Florida
campuses—by the political purge. How many faculty and students then at FSU
might identify—in today’s terms—as gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender,transsexual or intersexual? No one will ever know.
But what is known is that all of those who were fired were activists in the Florida
civil rights movement.
Some of those targeted called on the Florida Civil Liberties Union for help.
Historian John D’Emilio notes that the FCLU “surmised that motives other thana concern for sexual morality were at work. Civil rights forces were beginning toresume the offensive in the South. The first Black student had recently enrolled
in the university’s law school and the FCLU recognized that the Johns
Committee’s ‘intimidation of the faculty and student body would serve as adeterrent against racial integration on the campus or [the establishment of] auniversity chapter of the FCLU.’” (“Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities”)
But the policies of the American Civil Liberties Union made it hard for the local
FCLU to competently and aggressively defend civil rights activists of all
sexualities who had been caught up in an anti-gay dragnet. The national
American Civil Lib erties Union had stated on the public record in January 1957
that “homosexuality is a valid consideration in evaluating the security risk factor
in sensitive positions” and added, “It is not within the province of the Union toevaluate the social validity of the laws aimed at the suppression or elimination ofhomosexuals.”
Lesbians were not the focus of the Johns Committee investigation. But bashinggay males impacts on women who love women, as well. Though women were not
the public political focus of the inquiry, that doesn’t mean that lesbians—Blackand white—were not being oppressed.
Well-known white Southern lesbian Merril Mushroom, a student at FSU during
the Johns Committee witch hunt, explained, “Women were simply not reported
on. ... But we were harassed, we were arrested, and we were subjected to thesame bullshit as the men—but not in the same numbers. ... Sometimes lesbians—
drag queens, too—were beaten up or raped by the cops.” (“Lonely Hunters”)
Next: North Carolina: Black and white gays led civil rights struggles.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

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Civil rights activists were gay-baited, red-baited

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Gay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fight

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Lavender & red, part 56
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 10, 2006 11:15 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Gay youths, Black and white, led breakthrough struggles against
racism and Jim Crow apartheid in North Carolina—the Durham
and Chapel Hill freedom struggles—during the early 1960s, andwon victories that reverberated throughout the Deep South.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Historian James T. Sears, a significant white contributor to Southern struggle
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

history, devotes a whole chapter about three of the main organizers of the North
Carolina movement in his book “Lonely Hunters—An Oral History of Lesbian and
Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968.”
Quinton Baker, African American and gay, was a key leader. Baker was born on
the coastal plain of North Carolina in 1942. He grew up in Greenville, a town of
21,000, making a living by shining shoes. While not transgender in today’s terms,
Baker once explained, “when you speak the way I speak in the South, you standout. For a lot of people my speech pattern was feminine.” But, he added about
growing up in his community, “Back then, you could be funny but not ostracized.
The attitude was one of quiet acceptance.”
Baker was a senior in an all-Black high school on the day—Feb. 1, 1960—when
four African American first-year students at Agricultural and Technical College(A&T) ordered coffee at a downtown Greensboro, N.C., restaurant from a counterthat only served whites. They were refused service.
The next morning, 27 Black A&T students arrived together and ordered coffee atthat counter. “We are prepared to keep coming for two years if we have to,” oneof the youth vowed.
The “sit-ins” electrified the South. One week later, the sit-in movement sparked
similar protests in North Carolina cities with historically Black colleges: Durham,
Elizabeth City, High Point and Winston-Salem. Another week passed and the sitins at lunch counters to protest racist segregation had spread from Nashville,
Tenn., to Tallahassee, Fla.
Sears noted, “By the end of March, 68 cities in 13 Southern states reported sitins, including a wade-in at the all-white swimming pool in Biloxi, Miss., a readin at the library in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a host of kneel-ins at all-whitechurches.”
Hundreds of youth activists were arrested and locked up, where they faced
serious charges. City officials in Orangeburg, S.C., gave the go-ahead to turnpower hoses on student demonstrators and then held them in an open stockadein 40-degree weather. Tallahassee cops teargassed youth activists. Klan mobs
met civil rights demonstrators with bats and pipes in Bessemer and Montgomery,
Ala.
This struggle marked the qualitative opening of a youth-led civil rights
movement, and it was the real beginning of the larger student struggle of the

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RespondGay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fight1960s and 1970s. By the day Baker graduated high school in May 1960, a few
businesses had agreed to end white-supremacist segregation of their lunch
counters. Within one year, the struggle won desegregation of lunch counters in
126 Southern cities.
Baker was drawn into this vortex of struggle. He said he looked forward to thefall of 1960 when he would enter North Carolina College (NCC) in Durham. Black
college students were organizing. Lacey Streeter, another native of Greenville, led
the NAACP college chapter at NCC.
Baker later recalled, “By the time I got to college I was so ready and prepared[for struggle] that it became almost more important to me than the academic
work. It was the force.”
He added, “My first semester I was in the NAACP and I was demonstrating. I
didn’t stop for the four years I was there!”
As Baker organized boycotts, sit-ins, rallies and street demonstrations, his
tactical and organizational skills became renowned. He helped other young
leaders to develop. He became president of the NAACP state youth organization
and an NAACP Commando.
Baker later recalled, “A lot of student leaders and activists were often gay men,”
adding that the men weren’t often aware of lesbian activists.
Baker worked closely with two gay, white anti-racist activists.
Anti-racist struggle awakens white activists
Pat Cusick, like other white youth who were shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle,
had grown up under white supremacist indoctrination. These youth had to breakwith the racist ideology they had been taught in order to put their bodies on theline to end Jim Crow laws.
Cusick worked at a General Electric plant in Rome, Ga., after the Army“honorably” discharged him in 1953. The voice of Lillian Smith, a now-famousSouthern anti-racist white writer, reached Cusick after she sent a letter to theeditor of the New York Times hailing the 1954 Supreme Court decision thatformally ended racist segregation in schools as “every child’s Magna Carta.”
Smith, while she did not use the word lesbian to describe herself, had a female
life partner.
Cusick went to school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill—a sistercity to Durham, but with a much smaller Black population. He worked as a
campus custodian in 1962 while he studied mathematics.
When the writer James Baldwin, African American and gay, came to Durham to
speak to the students, Cusick traveled from Chapel Hill to hear him.
Baker was there, too. He explains, “We were interested in him because of his
racial analysis and his analysis of our condition, more so than his writing having
sexual undertones. Of course there were always attempts to read materials thattalked about homosexuality. He came down in support of what we were doing.”
Cusick first became an activist in the “ban the bomb” movement for nuclear
disarmament. He later said that in his early years as a white Southern activist, “It
was much easier for me to be against the war in Vietnam and form the Student
Peace Union than to get involved in civil rights—I never even considered gay
rights.”An openly gay white youth, John Dunne, also joined the SPU. Sears wrote,“John’s apartment was the first place where Pat [Cusick] talked at length withother gay men who shared his passion for social justice: ‘We talked abouthomosexuality and bisexuality mostly on an intellectual level with a bit of sexual
tension. At the forefront, though, were discussions about the peace movement

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Gay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fightand civil rights.’”
As the SPU grew, Cusick said he realized, “How could we be talking about all of
this peace stuff when there was no peace between the races.” The white SPU
activists began a systematic desegregation effort in Chapel Hill, includingorganizing boycotts of white-segregationist businesses.
Dunne returned to Chapel Hill on May 20, 1963, from Birmingham, Ala., where
he had been arrested on charges of loitering and failure to obey a police officer. It
happened while he was working to locate Black youth who had been arrested
after Bull Connorpolice force turned power hoses on 600 schoolchildren. He wasawaiting appeal of his sentence: a year behind bars and a $200 fine.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” after beingarrested for leading the Good Friday march there. The powerful impact of the
Birmingham demonstrations was felt throughout the South, including Durham—
where young civil rights activists readied themselves to wage “an all-out war
against segregation.”
However, one white, gay North Carolina student journalist actively campaignedon the wrong side of civil rights struggle and desegregation. His name, now
familiar, is Armistead Maupin Jr.—a William F. Buckley admirer. (Sears)
Baker helps lead Chapel Hill movement
Baker had become a prominent and seemingly tireless organizer of the widening
and deepening Durham protest movement. And he agreed in 1963 to work with
the Chapel Hill movement, too. Soon after they met in that struggle, Baker andDunne became lovers.
“With Baker and the Chapel Hill Black teens involved,” Sears explained, “tactics
changed from picketing to sit-ins and marches.” As the summer of 1963 began,
activists were organizing three marches a week, while picketing numerous whiteowned segregated businesses.
Cusick recalls Baker teaching demonstrators how to fall and protect themselvesfrom the police. “This created the ire from the Chapel Hill liberals,” he said,“since we were using nonviolence as a tactic, not a philosophy.”
When criticized by more liberal elements for using these tactics to break the law,
Baker said, “We would reply, ‘If you agree with my cause, then what you need to
do is to act on the fact that you believe in the cause—don’t worry about mytactics. Don’t concentrate on what I’m doing. Concentrate on what you’re doingthat supports the cause that we both believe in.’”
Cusick described the impact of the arrest of 34 demonstrators on July 19—
including himself—in what was to become a turning point in the Chapel Hill
freedom movement. “Like most whites, [for me] a policeman was a friendly
image. There is nothing like it for you to get your head whipped, your teeth
knocked in, and your ribs kicked. You come to a knowledge that is muchdifferent.”
In jail, Pat and fellow activist prisoners read and discussed Baldwin’s “AnotherCountry,” which wove themes of societal racism and homophobia.
Cusick said, “There were more gays than people ever realized in the civil rights
movement. But you wouldn’t see it from the outside.” He added, “In the midst ofa movement that was not directly related to sexual orientation but more involved
in day-to-day social justice issues with a common enemy, the movement would
bring you closer together. During that period there was not a great deal of
conversation about sexual orientation.”
Baker was also imprisoned for his activism in 1963, in Morgantown Prison Camp
—one of two desegregated N.C. state prisons. He observed, “The chain gang was
one of those experiences you say, ‘I’m glad I had it; I never want to do it again.’ It

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Gay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fight

was there I really learned about the struggle of what it means to be human.”Baker wrote letters for Black prisoners and at least one white. He said, “I learned
a lot about people and their emotions when I had to convey their feelings tosomeone who they loved or cared about. Having to read, talk to, and see people,
and understanding what kinds of lives they have, I began to appreciate whatbeing human is about.
“I began to recognize the superficiality of some of the things we surroundourselves with and how we separate ourselves. It was an incredible beginning forme in my quest to understand about being a human being and how to put intothat context my blackness and my sexual orientation.”
In August 1963, as the March on Washington was drawing huge numbers, theimpact of the gay-baiting and red-baiting political attacks on Bayard Rustin—themarch’s leading tactician—was also felt by civil rights activists of all nationalities
and sexualities in the Deep South, including Baker, who had been released from
jail.
‘The tactician who brought the connection’Baker said of some of the white civil rights activists he worked with: “There werereally some good solid white people who came into the movement and got tounderstand where we were at that time. ... Those white people who got beat up
with me, went to jail with me, sat down with me, and got peed on, it is very
difficult to question their commitment. Whether they had fought through all of
their personal racism is a different story—they were struggling with it.”As civil disobedience spread, more activists—Black and white—went to jail. On
Jan. 12, 1964, the Chapel Hill Freedom Committee organized a 13-mile marchfrom Chapel Hill to Durham. There, at least 500 crowded into the First Baptist
Church to hear CORE national chairperson, Floyd McKissick, and John Knowles,
a gay white author of “A Separate Peace,” speak at the indoor rally.
CORE leader James Farmer told the cheering crowd that night, “Unless Chapel
Hill is an open city by Feb. 1, it will become the focal point of all our efforts. All
our resources, staff funds and training will be centered here.”In April 1964, Baker, Cusick and Dunne were sentenced to 6 months, 1 year and3 years of hard labor, respectively. By July 2, the struggle had forced President
Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act that barred racist segregation of
public accommodations
Cusick concluded that in North Carolina, Quinton Baker had been “the tactician
who brought the connection to the statewide movement.”
Next: Black and white, gay and straight—civil rights activists built unity inJackson, Miss., struggle.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Support independent news DONATE

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‘Queer’ activists, Black and white, led the way

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 18, 2006 10:27 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAState repression flowing from the gay-bashing, anti-communist
Cold War witch hunt of the 1950s didn’t really gear up in
Mississippi until the 1960s, says John Howard, a white
researcher of U.S. Southern “queer” history. When Howard uses
the term “queer,”he is including the whole population of those
who experience homosexual desire and or engage in male-male sex, but do notnecessarily identify as “gay.”
Howard focused on non-heterosexuality between males in rural Mississippi, thepoorest state in the country, in his ground-breaking book, “Men Like That—A
Southern Queer History.”
He concluded, “Queer sex in Mississippi was not rare. Men-desiring-men wereneither wholly isolated nor invisible. From the most secluded farms in Smith
County to the densest neighborhoods of the capital, Jackson, homosexuality
flourished between close friends and distant relatives; casual sex between
strangers was clandestine but commonplace. Androgyny, though doubly suspect,also thrived.”
Although broad media coverage of the 1955 gay-bashing murder of John Murrett,a white Jackson, Miss., interior decorator, had created fear, the greatest terror
was unleashed by the police in an era thought of nationally as the “free lovesixties,” not the “conformist fifties.”
But the mid-sixties police crackdown, Howard noted, demonstrated theprevalence of homosexuality “within the ranks of upper-, middle-, and workingclass Mississippi.”
These police raids, carried out against white gay men in public gathering spaces,
coincided with efforts by the white business class to resist the impact of thepassage of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the ongoing demands to dismantle the restof Jim Crow apartheid.
What was the relationship between the Black-led struggle for national liberationand the police entrapment and imprisonment of white men having same-sex
relations?
Howard explained, “By 1965 homosexuality was linked to the specter of racial
justice—what white authorities understood as the most serious threat to thestatus quo. Queer Mississippians black and white found themselves inincreasingly politicized positions. With the bravery earned in lives of local
struggle and everyday resistance, they moved onto the public stage, determined
to win a legitimacy and equity so long denied them.”
At the forefront of struggle
African Americans in Mississippi had to battle Jim Crow segregation after theoverturning of post-Civil War, Reconstruction laws which had lead to many

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-57/[2/3/2011 4:02:46 PM]

Respond‘Queer’ activists, Black and white, led the way

political gains for Black people. The 1890 state constitution reestablished whiterule which was enforced by the Klan’s violence.
The first freedom riders, who arrived in Jackson on May 24, 1961, werepredominantly white youth who had traveled to Mississippi to aid Black activists
in their statewide efforts against white supremacist segregation. Regional
newspapers characterized the riders as “gay crowds.”
In the summer of 1964, more than 1,000 youths—also mostly white college
students from the North—arrived to help Black voters roll aside weighty racist
obstacles to registration. Again, business owners used their newspapers andpoliticians to gay bait—including crudely bigoted references to gay civil rights
leader Bayard Rustin—in order to threaten activists. Since love between people ofthe same sex and love between people of different nationalities were both illegal,
gay-baiting and condemnation of inter-racial relationships were literally attempts
to criminalize civil rights workers.
“[T]he White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi most explicitly linked
civil rights activism and communism to male homosexuality. ... Communists,homosexuals, and Jews, fornicators and liberals and angry blacks—infidels all,”Howard wrote.
There was an element of truth to this charge: There were many gay and lesbianand Jewish activists in the ranks of the civil rights movement, and many
communists—and some were all of the above.
But this was true not just of many who rode the buses into Mississippi to build
the struggle, it was true of those born and raised in the state, as well. Howardsaid, “Support for sexual difference existed alongside varied reformist tendencies
within the movement. And in the heart of the lynching and Bible Belt, queer
Mississippians were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle.”
Aaron Henry, for example, state leader of the NAACP, was busted by police forhomosexual “sodomy” or disorderly conduct at least four times. After Medgar
Evers was gunned down in 1963, Henry was the most renowned Black leader inthe state for more than three decades.
With many “queer” Mississippians—Black and white—in the leadership andranks of the civil rights struggle, in the mid-1960s police unleashed a campaignof violence and repression against the sexually- and gender-marginalized.
“The year 1965 crystallized both a successful civil rights movement and a nascentqueer visibility in Mississippi,” Howard wrote. “The two were commingled—bothin practice and in alarmist rhetoric designed to thwart them. ... Many battles
were yet to be fought. But racial and sexual minorities appeared ever more
prepared and inspired for struggle.”
The police and courts began targeting men inside and outside the movement who
were believed to be gay. A campaign of mass arrests targeted white men who
were entrapped by cops in public toilets in Jackson and Hattiesburg.
This police campaign continued in Jackson during the 1970s, with theharassment of gay males—mostly white, but also Black men—in Smith Park.
Aaron Henry was arrested in one of the park raids.
So was Eddie Sandifer, a staunch white anti-racist, born the son of a Baptist
preacher in a rural Louisiana parish. Sandifer identified himself as a Trotskyistand “a strong believer in armed revolution.” He was a tireless grassroots
organizer who was instrumental in founding the first lesbian and gay politicalgroup in the state—the Mississippi Gay Alliance (MGA).
“Though homosexuality and gender insubordination clearly weren’t just a whitething,” Howard concluded, “gay political organizing for the most part was.”When the MGA set up patrols of the park to monitor police actions, however,

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‘Queer’ activists, Black and white, led the way

they counted among their supporters “ministers, lawyers, reporters, young andold, from babes in arms to 75 years old, male and female, black and white, gay
and straight.”
Next: National liberation struggles—in U.S. and around the world—also
inspired militant demand for sexual and gender liberation.

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provided this notice is preserved.
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Early 1960s: ‘Gay is good’

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Early 1960s: ‘Gay is good’00

Lavender & red, part 58
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By Leslie Feinberg
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RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Published Mar 26, 2006 7:51 AM

The dynamism of the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides of
the African-American civil rights movement gave rise to an East
Coast current of white gay and lesbian activists within
Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis—the national gay andlesbian organizations. These young gay men and lesbians weremore militant and began to reject advice from the homophile movement to try to“fit into” society, to not make waves, and to rely on professionals andestablishment figures to bequeath them social rights.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Historian John D’Emilio said of this new, more militant political current of theearly 1960s, “Inspired by the example of civil rights activists, it abandoned theaccommodationist approach of the 1950s. Militants adopted an ideology based onequal rights for minorities, engaged in direct action techniques of protest, andaffirmed the propriety of homosexuals and lesbians leading their own struggle forjustice. Their confidence and determination won for the movement and for gay
women and men generally a visibility that their predecessors had failed toachieve.” (“Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities”)
For example, Franklin Kameny “argued relentlessly for gay activists to embrace
an aggressive direct action strategy modeled on the civil rights movement.”
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay is good” in 1966 after hearing African Americans
declare “Black is beautiful!” The 1968 North Amer ican Conference of Homophile
Organi zations (NACHO) formally adopted the slogan in 1968.
Kameny had been fired as a government employee in 1957 after his arrest a year
earlier on charges of “lewd conduct” was discovered by investigators. Kameny
continued to fight the Civil Service Commission decision blocking him from any
federal employment until 1961, when it was clear that he had exhausted every
avenue of appeal through the commission and the courts. That same year,
Kameny co-founded a Mattachine chapter in Washington, D.C.
Kameny rejected the accommodationist homophile movement’s “genteel, debating
society approach” that “impelled [it] to present impartially both or all sides” ofevery political position. “We cannot stand upon an ivory-tower concept of aloof,
detached dignity,” Kameny told a New York City Mattachine meeting audience inJuly 1964. “This is a movement, in many respects, of down-to-earth, grass-roots,
sometimes tooth-and-nail politics.” And, he stressed, “[O]ur opponents will do afully adequate job of presenting their views, and will not return us the favor ofpresenting ours; we gain nothing in virtue by presenting theirs, and only provide
the enemy ... with ammunition to be used against us.”
Kameny scorned the dominant medical model that homosexuality was an“illness.” He publicly stated instead, “I take the stand that not only ishomosexuality ... not immoral, but that homosexual acts engaged in byconsenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good anddesirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which theylive.”

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RespondEarly 1960s: ‘Gay is good’

In April 1962, activist Randy Wicker confronted the WBAI radio station publicaffairs director in New York City about a broadcast in which psychiatrists had
discussed homosexuality as a sickness. Wicker demanded, and won, a program inwhich gay men were able to speak as experts about their lives.
Wicker took his media campaign about the homosexual rights movement topublications from the Village Voice to Harper’s.
Kameny and Wicker drew the ire of the more politically right-wing leadership ofthe Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis.
Next: Mid-1960s gay activists target U.S. government.

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Mid-1960s gay activists target U.S. gov’t

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 1, 2006 8:57 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn 1963, activist Franklin Kameny helped set up the East Coast
Homophile Organizations (ECHO). ECHO brought together the
Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia branches ofMattachine, the New York branch of the Daughters of Bilitis andthe Janus Society of Philadelphia. The coalition, meant to foster
cooperation and to debate tactics, was also an attempt to form an activist
network to the left of the accommodationist leaders of the homophile movement.
This more left-leaning activist current of primarily white gay men and lesbians
was not revolutionary. But they were breaking away from the timid, classcollaborationist political approach of Mattachine and the DOB.
And they denounced the gay-bashing U.S. government when the media here
attacked the Cuban Revolution on April 16, 1965, saying it was interning gays inlabor camps.
Although some of these activists were imbued with anti-communism themselves,
they immediately set up demonstrations in front of the White House and United
Nations headquarters. The hypocrisy of the U.S. government criticizing the Cuban
Revolution was not lost on these activists. After all, it was the U.S. that had
carried out the “Lavender Scare” as a Cold War bludgeon, unleashed state
repression against lesbians and gay men, bisexuals and trans people,
marginalized LGBT workers from the labor force, and pathologized sexual andgender variation as criminal and sick behavior.
It was a courageous move by these activists, still living in the chill of the Cold
War, to face red-baiting for holding protests that turned Washington’s charges
against the Cuban Revolution back on the U.S. government.
Author John D’Emilio concluded, “Lest anyone mistake the event as an antiCastro action, the pickets displayed signs that made their target clear: ‘Fifteen
Million U.S. Homosexuals Protest Federal Treat ment,’ one placard read, while
another charged that ‘Cuba’s Government Perse cutes Homosexuals—U.S. Govern
ment Beat Them to It.’”(This series will take up the obstacles facing the Cuban Revolution, and its
subsequent accomplishments, in more detail in the future.)
In May 1965, left-wing ECHO activists won their proposal to organize a series ofpicket lines in the spring and summer demanding gay rights. They chose as theirtargets the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Civil Service Commission
and, on the Fourth of July, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Although the picket lines were tiny, these activists were brave. Homosexuality
was still illegal and actively persecuted.
The boldness of public picketing made the demand for gay and lesbian rights
hard to ignore. ABC-TV filmed the protest outside the White House on May 29.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-59/[2/3/2011 4:03:34 PM]

RespondMid-1960s gay activists target U.S. gov’t

Local affiliates in nine states broadcast the foot age. A report on the wire services
was print ed in papers in several U.S. cities. On the eve of the demonstration
outside the State Department, a press reporter asked Secre tary of State Dean
Rusk about his department’s policy towards homosexuality.
The full day of protest outside the Civil Service Commission forced its officials to
finally agree to a meeting with gay activists.
Next: Old guard Mattachine and DOB blamed bar crowd for drawing police
violence.

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Why 1960s gay rebellions had to erupt ‘from below’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 21, 2006 11:33 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe 1960s rebellions that erupted in response to police raids on
gay/trans bars, culminating in the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion inGreenwich Village in Manhattan, were not led or supported by
the national gay and lesbian organizations. The politics of theseprimarily white, middle-class organizations—Mattachine andDaughters of Bilitis—had kept them from uniting with the most oppressed.
Leaders from both Mattachine and DOB, in their appeal to the establishment forrights, had stressed the need to adhere to manners of dress and gender behavior.
The dress code enforced by both organizations excluded gender-variant lesbians
and gay men, drawing to their ranks instead those who could “fit in.”Those whose gender expression could not conform were drawn to the social
strength of community found in the gay/lesbian bars. As a result, the bars were
often difficult to categorize as gay/lesbian as distinct from drag (transgender, intoday’s language) bars, since those who were gender-variant as well as same-sexloving forged social alliances there. In an era of overall racist segregation, thebars were often integrated—Black, Latin@, Native and white—in some cities, as
well.
The leaderships of both Mattachine and DOB blamed the dress and behavior andsocial visibility of cross-dressing butch lesbians and drag queens in the workingclass bar crowd for drawing violent police raids.
The same political approach that kept Mattachine and DOB from defending themost oppressed ended up dividing them from each other as well. Some of the
Mattachine men blamed the lesbians for being “splitters” by forming their own
organization. This argument ignored the additional burden that lesbians face as
women. It also let the men off their own hook for struggling against sexism.
On the other hand, rather than uniting with the men to confront police brutality
head on, some of the DOB leadership blamed the gay men in Mattachine forgetting arrested while having sex outside their homes.
Ken Burns, who rose to president of Mattachine on a wave of anti-communism,
argued that “we must blame ourselves for much of our plight. When will thehomosexual ever realize that social reform, to be effective, must be preceded bypersonal reform?”
Editorials in the Ladder—the widely circulated DOB newsletter—denounced
lesbians who wore pants and short haircuts, advising them to do “a little ‘policing’on their own.”
Class struggle
Lesbian library worker Barbara Gittings, who founded the first East Coast DOB
chapter in Manhattan in 1958 and who edited the Ladder for three years, talked
to historian Jonathan Katz in a 1974 interview about the DOB drive to “fit in.”http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-60/[2/3/2011 4:03:53 PM]

RespondWhy 1960s gay rebellions had to erupt ‘from below’

Gittings represented a left current in DOB and she later headed the Task Forceon Gay Liberation of the American Library Association.
Gittings recalled, “Appearance and behavior were very important. We needed theacceptance of society, we thought, so we geared ourselves to getting it. There wasan incident at an early Daughters of Bilitis national convention (in Los Angeles, I
think), where a woman who had been living pretty much as a transvestite most of
her life was persuaded, for the purposes of attending that convention, to don
female garb, to deck herself out in as ‘feminine’ a manner as she could, given thatfemale clothes were totally alien to her.
“Everybody rejoiced over this as though some great victory had beenaccomplished—the ‘feminizing’ of this woman. Today we would be horrified atanyone who thought this kind of evangelism had a legitimate purpose. Yet at thetime, I remember, I joined in the rejoicing. At the same time there was somekind of mental reservation in me; I felt there was something grotesque about thiswomen’s trying to look ‘normal’ for the purposes of appearances at thisconvention.”
Both Mattachine and DOB argued that the dress code created safe space for gay
men and lesbians since cross-dressing was against the law. Of course, so was
same-sex love. Trying to distance themselves from gender-variance did notprotect the organization from the state. Lillian Faderman noted in her book “Odd
Girls and Twilight Lovers” that police informants had infiltrated DOB during theCold War and were channeling the names of the group’s membership to the FBI
and CIA.
In reality, the demand to adhere to gender conformity was just one expression ofa class struggle within what was to become the modern lesbian, gay, bi and trans(LGBT) movement. The dress code itself revealed the distance between the needs
and demands of the working class and most oppressed sectors of the LGBT
population and those of the middle class. Historian John D’Emilio noted, “DOB
took special pains to dissociate most lesbians from patrons of the bars. Gay
women ‘aren’t bar hoppers,’ one officer declared, ‘but people with steady jobs,
most of them good positions.’ ”
In addition, this call to “fit in” laid bare that the leadership of DOB andMattachine looked to the rulers of society to lead them to their well-deserved
rights, not to the ruled.
However, letters to the editor of the Ladder revealed that not everyone agreed
with the political approach of scapegoating those who fell outside theorganization’s dress code.
For example, African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry—author of“Raisin in the Sun”—wrote several letters to the Ladder. She called for an end to
the “lecturing … about how to appear acceptable to the dominant social group. …
One is oppressed or discriminated against because one is different, not ‘wrong’ or‘bad.’ ”
Next: Mexico City 1968—lesbian and gay youth voice own demands while
helping lead militant student struggle.
lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Why 1960s gay rebellions had to erupt ‘from below’

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1960s: Youth demand lesbian, gay rights

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Lavender & red, part 61
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 27, 2006 9:51 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

The rising resistance of national liberation movements in the
1960s around the globe—from Asia to Africa, North America toSouth America—many of them led by communists, helped
inspire a militant era of battle for gay liberation.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, The year 1968 saw struggles for people’s power. In South Vietnam, the National
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Liberation Front’s Tet Offensive, which surprised and battered the Pentagon
force, was the turning point in the war. In France, a student struggle generated aworkers’ general strike that shook the capitalist government. In the U.S.,
rebellions ignited in Black communities in more than 100 cities as word spread of
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn urban areas throughout Latin America—from Mexico City to Buenos Aires—arebellious student movement defied repression to insist on greater freedoms incountries economically and often politically dominated by U.S. finance capital.
As the wave of youth rebellion rose, it lifted the demand to end “lesbian” and“gay” oppression. (The quotation marks are recognition that these sexual
identities and the social realities in which they exist are not universal.)
Mexico was a particular political milestone. There, the demand for gay liberation
did not arise in the same way it had in the U.S.—where brutal police raids ontransgender/lesbian/gay people in bars or restaurants sparked spontaneous
rebellions on both the West and East Coast during the 1960s. Nor did a small
group demanding same-sex rights have to struggle to bring their grievances tothe larger left-wing political movement.
In Mexico in 1968, the demand for “gay” liberation was a dynamic component of
the student upsurge, articulated from within its own leadership. Lesbian and gay
Mexican@s organized to make “gay” rights one of the many demands voiced by ahuge and courageous student protest in Mexico City.
Solidarity cemented unity
The student movement rocking Mexico in 1968 was part of the deepest political
upsurge since the Mexican Revolution, observes Max Mejía in his essay “Mexican
Pink.”
An upcoming segment of this Lavender & Red series will provide more details
about the subsequent Tlatelolco massacre and mass arrests of youth and workers
on Oct. 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas during the 1968 Olympic Games in
Mexico City, specifically focusing on the role of the CIA.
Mejía explains, “The demands of the 1968 student movement included those ofan entire generation of Mexican youth. Outstanding among the demands werepolitical freedom and also sexual and personal freedom. Gays and lesbians wereamong the movement’s activists and main leaders.” The movement “expressed

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-61/[2/3/2011 4:04:20 PM]

Respond1960s: Youth demand lesbian, gay rights

women’s desire for freedom, as well as gays’ and lesbians’.”Mejía stresses the way in which solidarity cements political unity. “Their presence
under the banner of solidarity with other oppressed people—political prisoners,
workers, peasants—earned support and sympathy for their cause. Their daring
behavior and their repeated exposure of abuses gained them the support of thefeminist movement and the left, changed the attitude of the traditional yellow
press, and won over prominent intellectuals. Most important, they convinced awide sector of society of the legitimacy of their demands.”
Mejía concluded that the struggle won “greater public visibility of Mexico’s gays
and lesbians; support for their exposure of police abuse from a broad sector of
public opinion; legitimation of the struggle for civil rights; and the emergence,
through the influence of their example, of other gay groups in several cities, mostnot ably in Guadalajara and Tijuana.”‘Desire and militancy’
In his essay, “Desire and militancy: lesbians, gays and the Brazilian Workers
Party,” author James N. Green offers an over view of the lesbian and gay rights
movement in Brazil.
Green recalls, “Brazilian gays and lesbians were living under the most repressive
years of the military dictatorship which ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. ...
Although homosexual men and women were not specifically targeted by the
dictatorship, the increased numbers of military police in the street, the arbitrary
rule of law, and the generalized clamp-down on artistic and literary expression
all created a climate which discouraged the emergence of a Brazilian lesbian or
gay rights movement in the early 1970s.”
In Argentina, however, Green notes that a group of 14 men in a working-class
Buenos Aires suburb met in 1969 to form Nuestro Mundo (Our World), thecountry’s first gay rights organization. “By 1971 six divergent Argentine groups
had come together to form the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de Argentina(Homosexual Liberation Front of Argentina).”
That year, the Frente de Liberación Homosexual formed in Mexico. And in 1974,“lesbians” and “gays” in Puerto Rico had founded Comunidad de Orgullo Gay(Gay Pride Community) and published the newspaper “Pa’ Fuera.”
Next: 1960s in U.S.—police brutality meets resistance from coast to coast.
lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-61/[2/3/2011 4:04:20 PM]

Calif. resistance predated 1969 Stonewall Rebellion

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1969 Stonewall Rebellion

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 5, 2006 8:45 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

The 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village in Manhattan
was not the first time in history that gay and lesbian (and mostcertainly some bisexual), transgender and transsexual people
physically fought back against brutal treatment at the hands ofpolice and other reactionary forces.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Wherever same-sex love was criminalized under capitalism, trysting spots which
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

offered relative anonymity developed in secluded public places in urban areas.
Such meeting places often drew those who were not easily “read” as being gay
socially, who may not have necessarily thought of themselves as “gay” or who
feared being seen going in or out of a gay/trans bar. Signals—from a glance to acolor-coded handkerchief—acted as a semaphore to indicate sexual interest. But
men looking for other men in those locations faced the danger of “sting”
operations—entrapment by “vice” cops.

The bars, on the other hand, tended to draw into social networks those who wereconsidered “too obvious,” as well as those who were, or wanted to be, their lovers.
Since sexuality is only obvious when desire is communicated, being considered“obviously gay” referred to gender expression—lesbian and gay-cross-dressers,
and those considered “inappropriately” gendered because of the way they spoke
or gestured or walked.
Historically, police raids on these gathering places were systematic, relentless andbrutal. So why did individuals go to places where they would be in such danger?
Because danger also followed them wherever they went alone. In the bars andother gathering places, they could form networks—social and personal. They
forged communities.
The composition of bar crowds varied based on region, economic classes,
nationalities, ethnicities and sexes.
Many bars catered to those from the working class who were economically andsocially marginalized.
In some cities in which Jim Crow segregation enforced apartheid conditions, thelesbian and gay bars were some of the only integrated social gathering places.
Historians Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk wrote in their book “Gay by theBay” that “racial segregation of many public places made bar culture more
important for white lesbians and gays than it did for African Americans andother people of color.”“Wilma Johnson” described a network of private house parties in San Francisco
in the early 1960s: “When we got there they had all these women that were
dressed up in men’s clothes. ... This group that I acquainted with really didn’t go
to gay bars. ... In San Francisco I don’t ever recall a bar that had a majority ofwomen that were Black. ... The majority of the women were always white. ... But
in the bars there was (mostly) one color and not the other. We all got along, but

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-62/[2/3/2011 4:04:43 PM]

Respond

Calif. resistance predated 1969 Stonewall Rebellion

the house parties were mainly Black. There were a few Caucasians, but not a lot,
just a few.” (Nan Alamilla Boyd, Oral History Project of the Gay & Lesbian
Historical Society)In blue-collar Buffalo, N.Y., historians Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy
wrote, “By the mid-1950s groups of Black lesbians began to patronize Bingo’s andthe street bars in the downtown section, and soon after, whites went to the bars
which opened in the Black section of town, thereby ending the racial
homogeneity of the lesbian bar community.” (Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold)
Fighting back, hand-to-handThere were many police raids on house parties and bars, and there were many
acts of resistance—courageous, whether large or small—which have goneunrecorded in written history. Some episodes passed on as oral history only lived
as long as those who retold them.
However there is one early historical example, from almost three centuries ago,
which proves the truth that sustained acts of repression inevitably lead tooutbreaks of open struggle: In 1707 and 1730 in England, the repressive“Societies for the Reformation of Manners” waged a campaign against“effeminate sodomites among the London poor.” After more than 20 raids on
clubs that drew what would today be referred to as feminine gay males—“mollies”
in the vernacular of that time and place—some patrons were hanged or publicly
pilloried as a result. But when a Covent Garden molly house was raided in 1725,
the crowd, “many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent
resistance.”
And two-and-a-half centuries later, in Cali f ornia, people gathered in gay/transbars and other establishments met police attacks with resis tance —the social
temperature was heating up.
In 1961, police in San Francisco carried out the largest vice raid in the city’s
history, arresting 89 men and 14 women at an after-hours club called the TayBush Inn. Stryker and Van Buskirk note, “After first allowing ‘respectablelooking’ and politically well-connected customers to depart without incident, thepolice booked the largely queer, working-class, and dark-skinned remainder.
Charges were dropped against all but two of the defendants, and the blatantprejudice manifested by the arrests helped shift pubic sympathies toward greater
civil rights protection for homosexuals.”
In 1966, “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot” erupted in the streets of San Francisco’s
Tenderloin district, when a group described as transgender women and gay street
hustlers fought back against police harassment. Rebellion broke out after a transcustomer in the all-night cafe reportedly threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of a
cop who was roughing her up. Transgenders and transsexuals threw sugar
shakers through windows, overturned tables and torched a police cruiser. (SanFrancisco Bay Times, March 23, 2006)
On the 40th anniversary of the rebellion this year, community-organized events
in San Francisco will commemorate this important milestone uprising. The 1966
events are brought to new generations in the recent film documentary“Screaming Queens”—written, directed and produced by Victor Silverman, an
associate professor of history at Pomona College, and Susan Stryker, former
executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
In another response to a police raid on two Los Angeles’ bars in 1967, politicalorganizers took their struggle to the streets. That year, as the stroke of midnightushered in the New Year at The Black Cat bar in Los Angeles’s Silverlake
neighborhood, the “The Rhythm Queens” were singing Auld Lang Syne.
Plainclothes cops who had infiltrated the festivities began viciously beating andarresting patrons. Several people tried to escape to the New Faces bar acrossstreet, where a drag contest was taking place. Cops followed and raided that clubalso, assaulting one of the workers so violently that his spleen ruptured. (The Gay

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-62/[2/3/2011 4:04:43 PM]

Calif. resistance predated 1969 Stonewall Rebellion& Lesbian Review, March-April 2006)
In response, more than 200 gay acti vists and human rights supporters from allwalks of life rallied on Feb. 11 at San born and Sunset to protest police brutality
and arbitrary arrests, and to demand homosexual rights. The rally swelled themember ship ranks of a newly and quickly formed, more militant gay groupcalled “PRIDE.” (Stephen O. Murray, lgbtq. com)
And within two short years, the collective anger that was bubbling up would
break into a furious boil: Stonewall!
Next: Stonewall means fight back!
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Cops raid the Stonewall Inn

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JUNE 29, 1969

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Cops raid the Stonewall Inn

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Lavender & red, part 63

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By Leslie Feinberg

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Published May 25, 2006 11:25 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

After midnight on June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall
Inn in Greenwich Village. Undercover cops, male and female,
were already inside. At 1:20 a.m., Deputy Inspector Seymour
Pine led an assault group of four cops from the First Division“morals squad” in three-piece suits and ties, two patrol cops anddetective Charles Smythe. The patrol cop with the radiotelephone remained
outside the bar, as the rest of the cops entered the club shouting: “Police! We’retaking the place!”
Ironically, the cops would soon find themselves holed up in the bar, barricaded
against an enraged crowd.
While details of the rebellion that broke out later that night outside the bar arefamiliar to many, historian David Carter offers the following detailed accounts
from bar patrons about the struggle that began to build up inside the bar thatnight during the raid in his book “Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay
revolution” (St. Martin’s Press).
The Stonewall Inn attracted a mixed crowd, described by bar-goer Philip Eagles:“There were some lesbians, hustlers, married people, single people, sometransvestites, but not too many. It was the heart and soul of the Village because
it had every kind of person there.” The bar drew some people of color, as well as
whites.
That time of night, a peak Saturday night crowd of some 200 filled the club.
David Carter noted, “Almost immediately after entering the Stonewall Inn, thepolice encountered resistance.”
The cops ordered grouped people in different rooms, then lined them up,
demanding to see their identification papers, then letting some go.
Philip Eagles said he witnessed some customers “giving the cops lip,” shouting,“I’m not showing you my ID,” and, “We’re not taking this.” Eagles said he andsome others also balked at producing ID, and finally did so only with “a lot of
attitude.” Another customer refused the police order to leave the club.
Those who had extra forms of identifica tion without photographs reportedlyshared them with those who did not have ID.
Carter added, “Whatever grumbling there may have been from the gay men, thepolice soon ran into more significant resistance from other patrons in each of thetwo rooms.”
Transgender and transsexual patrons who were considered “cross-dressed” weregrouped near the bathroom, where female cops threatened to do strip searches todetermine their birth sex.
According to Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, “We had a couple of thetransvestites who gave us a lot of flak.” Pine said: “We separated the few
transvestites that we had, and they were very noisy that night. Usually they would

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-63/[2/3/2011 4:05:45 PM]

RespondCops raid the Stonewall Inn

just sit there and not say a word, but now they’re acting up: ‘Get your hands off
me!’ ‘Don’t touch me!’ They wouldn’t go in, so it was a question of pushing themin, fighting them.”
Philip Eagles also described that some lesbians in the front room confronted
police, arguing, “We have a right to be here” and, “What are you doing?”
Eagles recalled that cops were “feeling some of them up inappropriately or
frisking them.” He said the lesbians “were being pushed around and bullied” andthis, combined with the cops body-searching the women, made “everybody
generally very uncomfortable.”
Patrol cars from the Sixth Precinct pulled up and parked in front of the Stonewall
Inn as backup for the raid.
Inside the Stonewall, those held by police were angry and restive.
Raymond “Ray” Castro, a 27-year-old Puerto Rican bakery worker, recalled thatthe cops “kept us there for so long, it was almost like a hostage situation.”
Next: Temperature rises.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Raid draws crowd and temperature rises

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Stonewall, June 28, 1969:

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Raid draws crowd andtemperature rises

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Lavender & red, part 64
By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 31, 2006 10:20 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe cops who raided the Stonewall bar on June 28, 1969, beganletting some of the customers leave one at a time, a slow ordeal.
Historian Martin Duberman reports that transgender Stonewall
combatant Sylvia Rivera later told him that patrons were“released after their IDs had been checked and their attire
deemed ‘appropriate’ to their gender—a process accompanied, as in Sylvia’s case,by derisive, ugly police banter.” (Stonewall)
The police cruisers parked outside the Stonewall Inn in the heart of Greenwich
Village on that hot, muggy night began drawing a crowd. Many of those the police
had released from the bar also chose to stay outside. As each person emerged
from the Stonewall, the crowd outside cheered them. Some 200 had been insidethat night.
Danny Garvin, who arrived at the Stonewall that night as the raid was alreadyunder way, estimated the early crowd on the pavement outside at 100-150.
Village Voice reporters Lucian Truscott and Howard Smith, who said they were
working late-night hours at the newspaper’s Seventh Avenue office, saw thepolice activity from the windows and hurried to the scene.
Their coverage of the crowd was not sympathetic, but it does reveal the gender
expression, displays of defiance and sharp-edged in-your-face attitude of those
who had been trapped inside the bar that night, and those who chose to remain
and mass outside.
Truscott wrote; “Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to theapplause were classic. ‘I gave them the gay power bit, and they loved it, girls.’”
Smith described the crowd outside as “prancing high and jubilant.”
Duberman and historian David Carter add more detail.
Carter wrote, “As one young man swished by the detective posted at the door, hetossed the classic come-on line at him: ‘Hello there, fella!’” (“Stonewall: The riotsthat sparked the gay revolution”)“Some of the campier patrons,” Duberman noted, “emerging one by one from theStonewall to find an unexpected crowd, took the opportunity to strike theirinstant poses, starlet style, while the onlookers whistled and shouted theirapplause-meter ratings.”
These were acts of courage in front of the police by those who knew that samesex love was illegal in New York state—and every other state in the United States
except Illinois. They knew that anyone not wearing three pieces of “genderappropriate” clothing was subject to arrest. And they knew that police beatings,
rape and sexual humiliation—acts of torture—invariably followed arrest.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-64/[2/3/2011 4:06:02 PM]

RespondRaid draws crowd and temperature rises

In 1969 these laws on the books were not abstract and long forgotten. They wereactively prosecuted—and the crowd knew it. Police raids constantly threatened alllesbian/gay/trans social meeting places—from bars to cruising areas in the parks
and along the piers.
In the last three weeks of June 1969 alone, the New York Police Department
raided five popular gay bars. Cops shut down three of them for good: theCheckerboard, the Tele-Star and the Sewer. (Carter)‘This night was different’
Voice reporter Smith noticed, according to Carter, “that the police handled theexiting patrons roughly, now hurrying one out quicker than he could comfortably
move, now giving another a parting kick.”
Onlooker Danny Garvin recalled the angry reaction: “It started getting ugly. You
had attitude: ‘Don’t touch me!,’ which then would ignite the crowd: ‘Go get ‘em!’(Carter)
The crowd continued to swell. More and more people were being released fromthe Stonewall and staying. Word of the raid spread on the streets of the Village.
Some onlookers called their friends from pay phones and told them what was
happening. People who had plan ned to spend their evening at the Stonewall werestill showing up.
Those massed outside the bar reportedly grew quiet as a police wagon pulled up
and parked on the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall.
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine ordered his police squad to load up the prisoners
and take them to the Sixth Precinct Station. Pine later said: “This presumably
should have been the end of the situation, because the raid was already over.
Now, all we had to do was put them in the patrol wagon.”But, he added: “The crowd had grown to 10 times the size: it was reallyfrightening.
“So many showed up immediately, it was as if a signal were given. And that was
the unusual thing because usually, when we went to work, everybody
disappeared. They were glad to get away. But this night was different. Instead of
the homosexuals slinking off, they remained there, and their friends came, and it
was a real meeting of homosexuals.” (Carter)
Next: All hell breaks loose.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-64/[2/3/2011 4:06:02 PM]

Stonewall 1969: ‘Turning point of rage’

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point of rage’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 8, 2006 8:47 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,No footage or photographs exist of what happened outside theStonewall bar in the early hours of June 28, 1969. The following
descriptions rely on first-person witnesses, whose accounts havebeen compiled in books, and coverage from the not-so-friendly
reporting in the Village Voice by Howard Smith and Lucian
Truscott, an army lieutenant on leave who occasionally wrote for the Voice.
The police raid on the Stonewall bar continued to draw more and more people
from the surrounding streets in Green wich Village. Others hurried to the scene
after getting a phone call about what was happening. Smith, who was on thescene, described the crowd as “growing very quickly. Every time I’d blink, there
were more people.”

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The mood grew tense and angry as the police wagon arrived. The cops brought
out several known members of organized crime, and then the Stonewall
employees —including John, the African Amer ican men’s room attendant;
Blonde Frankie, the doorman; and other workers. Many in the crowd reportedly
booed the Mafia and cheered the Stonewall employees.
Truscott wrote that the crowd then shouted and booed at police when the cops
loaded transgender and transsexual prisoners into the police wagon.
According to reports compiled by David Carter, one of the police shoved one of
the trans prisoners, “who turned and smacked the officer over the head with her
purse. The cop clubbed her and a wave of anger passed through the crowd, which
immediately showered the police with boos and catcalls, followed by a cry to turnthe [police] wagon over.”He added, “Gay men began to go to the many pay phones around the Sheridan
Square area and call up friends, telling them to rush down to the Stonewall.
Others ran throughout the neighborhood shouting that the Stonewall was being
busted, and word of the raid passed through the night like a fever.”Numerous eyewitnesses recall in detail what happened when police dragged out aprisoner described as a masculine lesbian wearing “fancy, go-to-bar drag for abutch dyke.”
Stonewall employee Harry Beard said that the lesbian had struggled with police
inside the bar. She was handcuffed behind her back and arrested for violation ofa New York edict that required each person to be wearing three pieces of “genderappropriate” clothing. Beard related that when she protested the roughtreatment, a cop hit her in the head with a nightstick.
Those outside described the butch lesbian as kicking, shouting and struggling
with police all the way to the police cruiser.
When cops put her inside, she immediately got out and fought police all the way
back to the entrance of the bar. “But after she reached the Stonewall the police

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-65/[2/3/2011 4:06:23 PM]

RespondStonewall 1969: ‘Turning point of rage’

pulled her back to the police car and again placed her inside it. She got out again
and tried to walk away. This time an officer picked her up and heaved her
inside.” The struggle lasted five to 10 minutes.
An anonymous woman witness later wrote in a letter that the fight “set the whole
crowd wild—berserk!”
One person there that night, Tom, remembers “Pennies ricocheted off the [police]
van, a beer can hit the door.” Many in the crowd, who reportedly feared that
others still in police custody inside were being beaten, began shouting theirnames, demanding that the cops release them.
Truscott wrote, “It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.”
Smith concluded that when the police forced this butch lesbian into the police carfor the third time, “the turning point came.”
Next: Sylvia Rivera: ‘Street gay people out front, drag queens behind them,everybody behind us.’
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Stonewall Rebellion: Crowd rage ignites

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Stonewall Rebellion: Crowdrage ignites

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 15, 2006 8:55 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Acts of resistance, some of them virtually simultaneous, presaged
rebellion as prisoners were being loaded into the police wagon
and precinct cars outside the Stonewall bar the night of June 28,
1969. Many of the following precious first-hand accounts by
Stonewall combatants are compiled in books about the rebellion
by David Carter and Martin Duberman.
A number of accounts of the confrontation between cops and the crowd outside
the Stonewall bar mark the prolonged struggle between police and a crossdressed butch lesbian as a qualitative turning point. According to Village Voicejournalist Howard Smith, “It was at that moment that the scene became
explosive.”

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Smith wrote that the crowd roared: “Police brutality! Pigs!”
Gino, a Puerto Rican construction worker, joining in the shouts of “Let her go!
Leave her alone!” reportedly dislodged a loose cobblestone and heaved it acrossChristopher Street. Eyewitness Steve Yates remembered, “It landed on the trunkof a police car with a terrible screech, ‘scaring the shit’ out of a policeman who
was standing next to the car.”According to Stonewall employee Harry Beard, one or more people in the crowd
were able to slash all four tires on the police cruiser with the butch lesbianprisoner inside.
Raymond “Ray” Castro, a Puerto Rican baker, recalled how he fought his own
arrest. “At that point I started pushing back and wound up with two plainclothes
police pushing me. The next thing I know, there’s two plainclothes cops and two
uniformed police in the melee. I was knocked to the ground by one of their billy
clubs, [which,] put between my legs, tripped me. At that point the handcuffs got
put on me, and they had a [police] wagon right in front of the entrance to theStonewall. When I got shoved up to the door of the [police] wagon, I had two
policemen on each side of me. I didn’t quite go willingly into the [police] wagon. I
didn’t want to be arrested. Even thought I was handcuffed, I jumped up and[put] one foot on the right side of the door and one foot on the left of the door. I
sprung up like a jumping jack and pushed backwards, knocking the police down
to the ground, almost against the wall of the Stonewall. Well, they finally dragged
me into the [police] wagon.”Tom, a participant, remembered Ray battling against arrest. “A couple more werethrown into the van. We joined in with some who wanted to storm the van, free
those inside, then turn over the van. But nobody was yet prepared for that kindof action. Then a scuffle at the door. One guy refused to be put into the van. Fiveor six cops guarding the van tried to subdue him with little success. Several guys
tried to help free him. Unguarded, three or four of those in the van appearedthen quickly disappeared into the crowd. This was all anyone needed.”

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RespondStonewall Rebellion: Crowd rage ignites

As police hurriedly tried to load other prisoners into the police wagon, one 18year-old participant saw “a leg in nylons and sporting a high heel shoot out of theback of the [police] wagon into the chest of a cop, throwing him backward.
Another queen then opened the door on the side of the wagon and jumped out.
The cops chased and caught her, but Blond Frankie [who worked the door at theStonewall] quickly managed to engineer another escape from the car; several
queens successfully made their way out with him and were swallowed up in thecrowd.” (“Stonewall,” Duberman)
Michael Fader reported seeing the cops “leave the van unattended—the doors
were open, so they left. That raised the emotional level, the excitement of themgetting away.”
The multinational crowd of hundreds massed around the police was made up of
those brave enough and angry enough at oppression to be drawn to aconfrontation with the police. Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera stressed a very
important point about the rebellion that ensued. Rivera was a Venezuelan andPuerto Rican transgender youth who had lived homeless on the streets of
Manhattan since she was 10 years old. Before her death, she stressed the role in
the rebellion of the homeless gay/trans street youth—Black, Latin@ and white,and gender-defiant—who could not afford the Stonewall door admission chargeor the overpriced, watered down drinks. The vest-pocket park across the street
from the bar was their home. (Personal interview, 1997)
Rivera emphasized that at the moment of ignition of the rebellion, “It was street
gay people from the Village out front—homeless people who lived in the park in
Sheridan Square outside the bar—and then drag queens behind them andeverybody behind us.” (Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue,” Feinberg)
Danny Garvin described how police tried to push back those gathered aroundthem. This allowed the crowd to make an important discovery: a big stack of new
bricks at a Seventh Avenue South construction site. Garvin explained, “Theywould come at us with nightsticks, and we would have to disperse onto Seventh
Avenue, where the people were able to see the bricks.”
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who led the raid, ordered police to drive off
quickly with prisoners in the police wagon and three cop cruisers and “just dropthem off at the Sixth Precinct and hurry back.”
People in the crowd around the police wagon began beating on its sides,
demanding to know the names of those imprisoned inside. According to Voicereporter Lucian Truscott, “A cry went up to push the [police] wagon over, but it
drove away before anything could happen.”
The slashed tires of one or more of the vehicles slowed down the police exit.
According to accounts compiled by David Carter: “The crowd, however, wasbeyond being intimidated by mere sirens and the caravan had to push slowly
through the furious protesters, who, enraged, pounded on the police vehicles.
Danny Garvin recalls the noise as ‘people would run over, grab the [police]
wagon, and start shaking—ba-boom! ba-boom!!”
Martin Duberman reported, “One queen mashed an officer with her heel,knocked him down, grabbed his handcuff keys, freed herself, and passed the keys
to another queen behind her.”Inspector Pine was left with eight plainclothed detectives and one uniformed cop,all surrounded by an enraged crowd. Those among the hundreds who surroundedpolice threw their precious pocket change in a hard hail, shouting, “Dirty
copper!” and “Here’s your payoff!”
They hurled bottles, cans, bricks, a dam aged fire hydrant, and dog excrement at
police. A youth named Timmy reportedly heaved a wire-mesh garbage can, whichshattered the Stonewall’s plate-glass window, which was reinforced withplywood.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-66/[2/3/2011 5:05:51 PM]

Stonewall Rebellion: Crowd rage ignites

Cries of “Gay power!” and “Let’s get ‘em” articulated the detonation of mass rage.
There was nowhere for the police to retreat except back into the Stonewall—thevery bar they had raided.
Next: Police barricade themselves inside Stonewall bar; crowd lays siege.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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‘All hell broke loose!’

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1969 Stonewall uprising against police repression

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Lavender & red, part 67

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RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Published Jun 26, 2006 10:26 PM

No recording device captured the roar or ferocity of the crowd
outside the Stonewall bar, enraged by the police raid and thephysical brutality and sexual and gender humiliation that wasinterwoven into the state repression. However, the militancy anddetermination of those who fought back that night—June 28,
1969—is recalled in the words of the top cop who led the raid, Deputy Inspector
Seymour Pine: “I had been in combat situations, [but] there was never any timethat I felt more scared than then.” Pine had written the U.S. Army’s manual forhand-to-hand combat in World War II and was in a mine explosion at the Battleof the Bulge.
By many accounts, the Black, Latin@ and white youth, many of them homeless
and/or gender-defiant—including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Zazu Nova
and Jackie Hormona—fought fiercely that night. And small wonder. These were
the bodies and lives most often scarred by police terror and torture. While
everyone fought bravely, historian David Carter wrote “the preponderance of
witnesses who are both the most credible and who witnessed significant amountsof the action agree that the most marginal groups of the gay community fought
the hardest—and therefore risked the most—on this and the following nights.”
Many in the multi-national, multi-generational crowd of hundreds amassed
outside the bar began to hurl their pocket change, shouting “Here’s yourpayoff!”—referring to the common practice of payoffs between bar owners, manytimes tied to organized crime, and the police.
The police showed signs of panic as they were hit with a hail of flying projectiles.
They retreated towards the Stonewall Inn, the club they had just emptied out inthe raid. One cop near the doorway was reportedly hit in the eye with a thrownobject, and was visibly bloodied. The police, wrote Village Voice journalist
Howard Smith, who was at the scene, “are all suddenly furious.” Three of thecops rushed the crowd to try to back them away.
But the crowd would not be pushed back. The streets outside the club belonged
to the people, and they could feel it. They could see the cops were scared, too.
One participant, Tom, observed, “A few plainclothesmen were surveying thecrowd, obviously panicked.” Ronnie Di Brienza stressed in an article in the East
Village Other that, “During the height of the action, you could see the fear anddisbelief on the faces of the pigs.”
A beer can struck Deputy Inspector Charles Smythe in the head. Smythe, who
had also been in World War II combat, later said, “I was still shaking an hourlater. Believe me, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Pine reached out from the doorway of the bar and reportedly grabbed the first
person he could lay his hands on, folk singer Dave Van Ronk, and pulled him
inside the bar. Van Ronk later explained that the cops accused him of throwing
the beer can. They held him down, punched him hard and kicked him. They left
him handcuffed on the floor of the bar.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-67/[2/3/2011 5:06:10 PM]

Respond‘All hell broke loose!’

Pine came outside to evaluate the relationship of forces. He told the other cops:“Let’s get inside. Lock ourselves inside; it’s safer.” Voice reporter Howard Smith
went inside the Stonewall with the 10 members of the police raiding squad. Theybarricaded the doors with overturned tables.
And then, Pine remembered, “All hell broke loose.”
Smith reported, “The exit left no cops on the street, and almost by signal thecrowd erupted into cobblestone and bottle heaving.”
Voice journalist Lucian Truscott said he had climbed atop a garbage can to watch
the action and he almost toppled when two men yanked it out from under him
and heaved it at the bar’s west window.
Participant Morty Manford emphasized: “And it escalated. A few more rocks
went and then somebody from inside the bar opened the door and stuck a gunout. Their arm was reaching out with a gun telling people to stay back. And thenwithdrew the gun, closed the door and went back inside.”
Yet even the threat of being shot did not stop the crowd. Historian David Cartersummed up descriptions by participants of what happened next. “A general
assault now began on the Stonewall Inn using anything and everything the crowd
inside could get its hands on: garbage, garbage cans, pieces of glass, fire, bricks,
cobblestones, and an improvised battering ram were all used to attack the police
holed up inside the Stonewall Inn.”
Someone, or more than one person, reportedly cut the electric and phone lines,
so the police were inside without the ability to call for backup.
According to accounts compiled by historian Martin Duberman: “The cops thenfound a fire hose, wedged it into a crack in the door, and directed the spray out
at the crowd, thinking that would certainly scatter it. But the stream was weak
and the crowd howled derisively, while inside the cops starting slipping on thewet floor.”
In his later Voice coverage, stinking of bigotry, Smith later wrote that from theinside of the Stonewall, “The sound filtering in [didn’t] suggest dancing f——-s
any more; it sound[ed] like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.”
Smith said he heard “the shattering of windows, followed by what we imagine tobe bricks pounding on the door, voices yelling. The floor shudders at each blow.”
The crowd outside roared “Gay power!” and “We want freedom!”
Pine described: “Now they really in earnest started to come after us. We covered
everything [but] whatever we could find to put up against the windows and thedoors didn’t last very long. They began to batter this down and made someholes.” The window—which the owners had reinforced with plywood and two-byfours—was smashed and the barricaded door was swung open.
Smith peeked out a hole in the splintered plywood, and he thought it seemed thatthose massed outside were thousands-strong.
In anticipation of the angry crowd rushing in, the cops drew their weapons; one
cop picked up a nearby baseball bat. One cop reportedly vowed, “We’ll shoot thefirst m——-f——r that comes through the door.”
But it was an arm that came through the shards of the plywood covering thewindow. Then the scent of lighter fluid, the fiery tip of a lit match, and flames
ignited inside the bar.
Next: Police reinforcements arrive; battle shifts to the streets.
Email lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty

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‘All hell broke loose!’

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Stonewall 1969: Fighting in the streets

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Stonewall 1969: Fighting inthe streets

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 6, 2006 9:59 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Stonewall participant Martin Boyce recalled, “All of a sudden thewhole street now had had it, and windows started cracking andpeople attacked cars and moved cars back and forth, but let thestraight people out, who were in terror, really, but nobody hurt
them, ever. It’s amazing how controlled the rage was, eventhough it was so hard.”
The police trapped inside the Stonewall Inn couldn’t call for backup. Top cop Seymour Pine, who led the raid on the Stonewall, later said: “Every time we tried touse the [police portable] radio to call for assistance, a message came back, ‘Dis
regard that call.’ Somebody else apparently had our frequency in the crowd, andso we couldn’t get a message through. The phone lines apparently were cut,because we couldn’t use the phone.”
Bob Kohler saw people carefully pouring liquid, apparently gasoline, into empty
soda pop bottles.
Pine later described how anxious he and the other cops were as these homemade
firebombs started landing in the bar. “There were bottles that came in exploded
with some kind of flame, and we were able to put those out with the fire hosethat we had. We were very worried because we didn’t know how long we could
put these Molotov cocktails out, because they were gasoline and all we had waswater. They didn’t have the kind of fire extinguishers that would put out a fuelfire.” (David Carter, “Stonewall”)
The fire extinguisher quickly emptied.
“Liberate the bar!” the crowd roared as youth battered open the barricaded door
to the Stonewall Inn with an uprooted parking meter.
Edmund White wrote: “The door is broken down, and the kids, as thoughworking to a prior plan, systematically dump refuse from waste cans onto thewall, squirt it with lighter fluid, and ignite it. Huge flashes of flame and billows ofsmoke.”
Morty Manford witnessed: “People took a garbage can, one of those wire meshcans, and set it on fire and threw the burning garbage into the premises. The areathat was set afire is where the coat room was. That night the closet was set on
fire both symbolically and literally.”
Cop Pine said: “We’re inside and the fires are coming in and we’re putting themout—all the time we’re dodging the bricks that they were throwing in—and thenthey crashed with this parking meter.” Pine actually said he debated shooting at
people in the crowd, but wasn’t sure it would stop them.
When a hand came through the splintered plywood that was covering one of thewindows and sprayed lighter fluid and ignited it with a match, Pine later said, heaimed his gun and was ready to shoot.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-68/[2/3/2011 5:06:29 PM]

RespondStonewall 1969: Fighting in the streets

At that moment, however, fire truck sirens screamed down Christopher Street.
Police cars from more than one precinct began screeching up from all directions.
Crowd wouldn’t disperse
Dave Van Ronk, who had been taken as a hostage-prisoner by police holed up in
the Stonewall, explained that as cops took him outside in handcuffs, “From what
I saw, that mob was not cowed. It would have taken something to get them todisperse. They were loaded for bear.”
Pine said: “Fights erupted with the trans vestites who wouldn’t go into the patrolwagon. Some [transgenders] who hadn’t even been in the Stonewall came overand started a fight with our guys.”
Eyewitness Marle Becker concurred. “All I could see about who was fighting wasthat it was the transvestites and they were fighting furiously.”
Two bus loads of Tactical Patrol Force riot squads, trained to brutally break up
anti-Vietnam War protests, arrived on the scene.
Participant John O’Brien observed that “when they tried to clear the streets iswhen people resented it, ‘cause it came down to: ‘Whose streets are these? They
are our streets.’” He described an additional layer of resistance: Many people—
gay and nongaythat they just couldn’t move out of the way of police because it
was too crowded. “A lot of them knew that they were interfering with the cops,”
he said.
Efforts to block the narrow, one-way street to impede police included
overturning a car in front of the Stonewall.
Based on eyewitness accounts that night, historian Martin Dubermansummarized the TPF assault. “Wearing helmets with visors, carrying assorted
wea pons, including billy clubs and tear gas, its two dozen members all seemed
massively proportioned. They were a formidable sight as, linked arm in arm, theycame up Chris topher Street in a wedge formation that resembled (by design) a
Roman legion. In their path, the rioters slowly retreated, but—contrary to police
expectations—did not break and run.” (“Stonewall”)
The crowd slowly backed up to avoid being clubbed, and then suddenly dissolved
as individuals raced around the block, regrouped behind the TPF squad andthrew debris at the troopers. Again and again the TPF broke up the crowd only tofind people defiantly appearing behind them, taunting them and hurling bricks
and bottles. The angry crowd set fire to trash cans and broke windows.
Bob Kohler recalled that the street youths “were constantly getting over on the
TPF. The TPF would chase somebody this way, then the kids would startsomething behind them so that attention would be taken, and then the TPF
would come [the other] way, and then more kids would start something behindthem. So the TPF were constantly off guard. It was keeping them on the runconstantly.”
Others, who did not directly take part in the fighting, kept pace alongside theaction. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt explained: “I myself was more part of like a
mob that was waving in and out like the ocean. I was part of a mob that had akind of deep identity and was acting as one force.”
The police took a terrible toll on anyone they could get their hands on—particularly those who were male-bodied and feminine. Many were badly bashedand bloodied. One person required 10 stitches in the knee after being clubbed.
Another teen ager lost two fingers. Four cops reportedly beat up a young transperson until she bled from her ears, nose and mouth. Sylvia Rivera, though not
injured, said she had so much of other people’s blood splashed on her during thefray that she later went to the piers to change into fresh clothing.
Yet the crowd still resisted, any way they could, even faced with such organized

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Stonewall 1969: Fighting in the streets

police violence.
When the TPF grabbed and began severely beating up one youth, described as afeminine male, angry members of the crowd rushed forward and rescued theperson.
Someone smashed a concrete block on a parked police car—with cops inside of it.
Another person hit a member of the police brass sitting inside his vehicle with abag of soggy garbage.
As two cops chased about 100 people down Waverly Place, the crowd suddenly
realized they outnumbered the police 50 to one—and lit off after the two officers,
who panicked and fled.
That night, police arrested and booked 13 people, seven of them workers fromthe Stonewall Inn. They faced charges ranging from harassment to resistingarrest to disorderly conduct.
Near dawn, the streets seemed quiet. Kohler remembered: “We were sitting
across the street [from the Stonewall] at the park, and you would see smoldering[garbage] baskets and the street was broken glass. The Stonewall window wassmashed, and there were cops all standing around like storm troopers. You’d looka block away and you could see trash cans still smoldering.”
It wasn’t just the trash cans that were still smoldering. The rebellion was notover. Not by a long shot.
Next: ‘Liberate Christopher Street!’
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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STONEWALL 1969—SECOND NIGHT:

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Lavender & red, part 69

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By Leslie Feinberg

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Published Jul 24, 2006 11:19 PM

Thousands of gay men and lesbians—many of whom identified asqueens and butches—returned to the West Village on Saturday
evening, the night after battles with the police and tactical forcesat the Stonewall Inn. It was the hottest June 28 on record in
New York’s history, in more ways than one.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Stonewall bar owners tried to lure many back inside the club. But the crowd
outside shouted, “Gay power,” “Equality for homosexuals” and “We want freedom
now!” Demon strators squared off with police outside the bar. Their chants,“Christopher Street belongs to the queens!” and “Liber ate Christopher Street,”made it clear that this was an offensive stage of the struggle—in the streets.
The night of protest drew street youth and some heterosexual activists fromvarious left-wing political currents. Gay author Edmund White described how
straight Black youth “put their arms around me and [said] we’re comrades.”One middle-aged white woman, in the West Village with her husband, reportedly
reprimanded a cop, shouting at him that he should be ashamed: “Don’t you knowthat these people have no place to go, and need places like that bar?” She and herhusband were later that night part of a crowd being chased by club wielding riot
police.
Participant Craig Rodwell described how the thousands who were drawn to theVillage filled the sidewalks from Chris topher to 10th St. and all around the Sher
idan Square park and Seventh Avenue. When the crowd overflowed the sidewalks
and poured into the streets, the call went out to block traffic on Chris topher at
Greenwich Avenue.
When drivers disrespected the crowd, their cars got rocked back and forth anddemonstrators laid siege to a bus whose driver angrily honked his horn at them.
Activists formed a human chain across the busy street.
One cab driver turned into the crowd, apparently unintentionally, but thosegathered did not realize at first that it was accidental. As they rocked the cab, thepassengers looked so frightened and the driver seemed to be having a heart
attack, so some activists joined arms to protect the taxi and helped it back out of
the street. The driver later died—the only fatal casualty of the Stonewall
Rebellion.
On Gay St., demonstrators briefly stop ped a procession of cars with a wedding
party. “We have the right to marry, too!” activists shouted. Members of thewedding party angrily threatened to call the cops on protesters. “The police are
already here!” activists laughed bitterly, before letting the wedding groupproceed.
Led by those with least to lose
Who led the battles? Who made up much of the ranks? The nationality, gender
expression and economic class of combatants at that stage of the uprising were

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-69/[2/3/2011 5:07:08 PM]

Respond‘Liberate Christopher Street!’well described in an otherwise offensive description by Dr. Howard Brown. As
chief health officer of New York City during the Lindsay administration, Brown—a rather closeted gay man—had described his horror when he had toured the
Tombs, a city prison. “Almost all the men in the crowded cells were
demonstrably effeminate. I could not identify with them.” He doesn’t say it, butof course many of the prisoners were Latin@ and Black, impoverished whites,and street youth.
Drawn to the June 28 protest by the roar he could hear from his apartment, hesaid he found that the Stonewall protesters “were like the homosexuals I had seenin the Tombs—most of them obviously poor, most of them the sort of limpwristed, shabby or gaudy gays that send a shiver of dread down the spines ofhomosexuals who hope to pass as straight. I could not have felt more remotefrom them.” He added that the composition of the crowd brought to mind “every
civil rights struggle I had ever witnessed or participated in.”
The women caged in the nearby House of Detention sure identified with thoserebelling below. The women’s “House of D” was, at that time, situated at theheart of Christopher St. and Greenwich Ave. When Stonewall ignited, prisoners—
many of them Black and Latina, and many, many of them lesbian andtransgender—set toilet paper on fire and dropped it from the turrets to support
the uprising on the streets below.
Eyewitness Chris Babick described, “That whole week the women werescreaming, cheering us on. … The whole jail, it seemed like, was alive withpeople, with activity, because the streets were alive with activity. Everything
vibrated.”
Fighting back!
On the streets, as police grew increasingly aggressive towards activists, one youth
hurled garbage can lids like Frisbees at cops. Fires burned from trash containers
up and down the blocks.
Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, a Black transgender gay street survivor wholater co-founded STAR—Street Transves tite Action Revolutionaries—reportedly
climbed a lamppost in order to drop a heavy object that shattered a police car
windshield.
At Waverly and Christopher, a crowd surrounded cops in a car and smashed its
hood with a concrete block, pounded the car with their fists and climbed up on it.
A sack of garbage with coffee grounds thrown through the window of yet anotherpolice vehicle smacked an official in the face. The crowd knocked the red light off
the roof of the car and rocked the vehicle, trying to overturn it.
The Sixth Precinct couldn’t subdue the crowd, even with help from the Fourth,
Fifth and Ninth. So for the second night, the feared Tactical Police Force (TPF)
sent about 150 of its crack riot troops into the West Village at about 2:15 a.m. The
crowd tossed beer cans at the TPF and cops in defiance.
Police rushed at demonstrators, vic iously beating people at random. How ever,when two cops used their nightsticks on one youth’s face, genitals and stomach, ahigh-pitched voice from the crowd shouted, “Save our sister!”Then, Stonewall participant Dick Leitsch recalled, “Fifty or more homosexuals
who would have to be described as ‘nelly,’ rushed the cops and took the boy backinto the crowd.” And, he added, they “formed a solid front and refused to let thecops into the crowd to regain their prisoner, letting the cops hit them with theirsticks, rather than let them through.”
For the second night in a row, TPF troops formed solid phalanxes and moved
slowly down the streets to break up the demonstration. At Christopher and Waverly, a group of gay men described as very, very feminine formed a defiant chorus
line and mocked the riot cops with bawdy choruses of “We are the Stonewall

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-69/[2/3/2011 5:07:08 PM]‘Liberate Christopher Street!’Girls, we wear our hair in curls.” As the TPF moved slowly towards them, theyouth waited until the last possible moment to stop singing and disappear.
Minutes later they appeared behind the TPF troops, taunting them with a new
chorus line.
Leitsch remarked, in the language of the day, about the leadership, participation,and bravery of the feminine, male-bodied combatants. “It was an interesting
sidelight on the demonstrations that those usually put down as ‘sissies’ or‘swishes’ showed the most courage and sense during the action. … The moststriking feature of the rioting was that it was led, and featured as participants,‘queens.’”“It was the ‘queens’ who scored the points and proved that they were not going
to tolerate any more harassment or abuse. … Their bravery and daring saved
many people from being hurt,” he noted.
Police continued to brutally battle to retake small areas of the West Village. But
the crowd would not be subdued, sometimes turning the tables by chasing thecops down the block.
At 3 a.m., when all the gay bars emptied out, the protest swelled with fresh
forces. Demonstrators were able to take over the IND subway station at Sixth
Ave. and Waverly for about half an hour before cops retook the location.
By about 4 a.m., cops withdrew and the streets appeared quiet. But the uprising
was still not over.
Eyewitness quotes from sources compiled by David Carter (“Stonewall: The
Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution,” St. Martin’s Press) and Martin
Duberman (“Stonewall,” Dutton).
Next: Pride!
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-69/[2/3/2011 5:07:08 PM]

Stonewall, night 3: ‘The battle was on’

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Stonewall, night 3: ‘The
battle was on’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 14, 2006 9:26 PM

Sunday, June 29, saw a lull between battles, although many cops
were patrolling the streets of the Village, hurling slurs at thosemilling on the corners and sidewalks, reportedly trying to egg onskirmishes.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAAs thousands of gays and lesbians—drawing to their leadership and ranks peopleof color, trans people, street youths—had waged pitched battles with the cops on
Friday and Sat urday during the early nights of the Stonewall Uprising, a fault
line of political difference opened visibly wide between those who had the least to
lose and the most to gain from fighting back, and those who fav ored not rocking
the boat.
The tony crowd soaking up a little sun in the Hamptons and Fire Island Pines
either ignored news of the rebellion or, as historian Martin Duberman noted,
tended to condemn it as “regrettable.”
The Mattachine Society had posted a sign on the Stonewall Inn reading, “Wehomosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet
conduct on the streets of the Village.” Matta chine-New York, according tohistorian David Carter, “after talking to the mayor’s office and the police, joined
police efforts to stop the protests. … Mattachine officials came to the Stonewall
Inn and talked to people who showed up in an attempt to discourage them fromprotesting.”
This was a far cry from the early days of the first Matta chine in California at theheight of the Cold War 1950s, when communists and other revolutionaries led
grassroots organizing to confront widespread police entrapment and brutality
against gay men and the Chican@/ Mexican@ communities.
However, a bodacious group of gay youths descended on the Sixth Precinct andplastered the police cruisers, a police arrest van, and the personal cars of police
officers with luminescent fuchsia and blue bumper stickers demanding “Equality
for Homosexuals.”Throughout the Village, teams made up of one male and one female passed out
leaflets issued by the Homophile Youth Movement that demanded, “Get the
Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars.”
Assessments of the changed mood of the LGBT population on Christopher Street
were voiced from two antithetical directions.
Deputy Inspector Pine, who led the initial raid on the Stonewall Inn, made aremark insulting those who showed individual courage, defiance and resistancein the face of police arrest and imprisonment, beatings and torture. Nevertheless,his words documented a dramatic overall shift in mass mood in the LGBT
population: “For those of us in public morals [sic], things were completelychanged … suddenly they were not submissive any more.”

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-70/[2/3/2011 5:07:26 PM]

RespondStonewall, night 3: ‘The battle was on’

Gay male poet Allen Ginsberg visited the Stonewall Inn on Sunday night with
Village Voice reporter Lucian Truscott. His later observation to Truscott contains
a word that inflicts wounds when used by an anti-gay bigot. Yet speaking about
his own community with tender pride, he wrote about the sea change hewitnessed. “You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost thatwounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.”
Rage still smoldering
David Carter assembled the following firsthand accounts of incidents on Mon day
through Wednesday from participants.
Monday and Tuesday nights were mostly quiet in the Village, as rain soaked thestreets.
Police who tried to pick fights, however, were met with bold responses.
When one arrogant cop at Christopher Street and Waverly twirled his nightstickand hurled insults in the direction of passersby, an individual described as a“wildly ‘fem’ queen” lit the fuse of a firecracker and detonated it under his feet.
The cop landed on his ass on the sidewalk.
The cop shouted and flailed with his club. When the same militant individual
tossed another firecracker at him, the crowd fought with the cop and was able tosnatch his badge off his uniform.
On Wednesday night, widespread street fighting resumed.
That was the night the Village Voice coverage of the early events in the Stone
wall rebellion hit newsstands. Some community members were so enraged by theanti-gay tone of the journalists that they debated torching the Voice’s offices thatevening.
Carter states, “The second reason that rioting resumed in full force on Wednes
day is because various radical Left groups came to protest.”
Participant Bob Kohler recalled: “There were more people rioting that could not
be easily categorized, and a lot of that had to do with people that came over fromother areas. The straight movement moved in heavily that night as a support.”
Reports of those of all sexualities who came in support included members of theBlack Panther Party, Workers World Party, the Yippies, a group that called itself
the Crazies, and other self-identified leftists.
In reality, these were parties and organizations with memberships of diverse
sexualities. And many of the LGBT people who fought the cops at Stonewall also
self-identified as leftists and revolutionaries.
Struggle erupted around 10 p.m. A chanting crowd, estimated at 500 strong, met
a motorcade of police with a shower of bottles.
Police used their nightsticks to beat back the crowd. Eyewitness Ronnie De
Brienza described seeing a friend pummeled by police and dragged off to a patrol
car under arrest. “This was it,” he said. “From nowhere the crowd swelled to an
estimated thousand, and the battle was on.”Those who were there that night describe the battle between police and protesters
as ferocious. Once again, eyewitnesses explain, it was the most oppres sed who
led the struggle. Unarmed protesters fought hard and bravely against police—
who were well-protected by equip ment and armed to the teeth.
Dick Leitsch, Mattachine-New York leader, observed that night that bodies ofStonewall combatants wounded in battle lay on the streets and sidewalks on
Seventh Avenue South between Christo pher and West 10th streets.
He concluded: “Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk,bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-70/[2/3/2011 5:07:26 PM]

Stonewall, night 3: ‘The battle was on’bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs and necks.”
Within roughly an hour, the fighting ended. But the battles fought by the most
oppressed and most militant layers of the LGBT population paved a new roadtoward revolutionary struggle.
Next: Left wing of “gay liberation” at every barricade.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
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Many histories converged at Stonewall

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Greenwich Village, 1969:

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Lavender & red, part 71
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 24, 2006 10:04 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Gay and lesbian historians who view history from a materialist
vantage point have emphasized that while same-sex affection andsexuality appear to have existed in all epochs of human society,the conditions of capitalism were required for the developmentof a distinct political and social minority identity: gay andlesbian.
Therefore these historians describe the Stonewall Rebellion as a qualitative
development that is a social product of capitalism.
They point out that the ascendancy of capitalist production in the United Statescreated a vast class of “wage slaves”—workers who owned nothing but theirability to labor. The organizing of a large-scale workforce also centralizedlaborers, creating large-scale industry and dense urban living with same-sex
living situations and relative anonymity.
They trace the devastating economic dislocation of the 1929 capitalist Depres sionthat shook the working class and oppressed, creating a widespread exodus fromrural areas and small towns to these cities in search of wage work.
World War II drew massive segments of the population into same-sex working
and living situations, and left large same-sex-loving populations in cities where
soldiers were discharged and dumped from the ranks of the military. And 1950s
Cold War repression inevi tably generated resistance.
These overall conditions under capitalism, heated to critical mass by oppression,
led to the development of LGBT communities and to a fight-back consciousness.
But Stonewall was not just a product of capitalism, but of national oppression as
well. And it is no accident that the rebellion, which drew its leadership from themost oppressed, ignited in an era of national liberation struggles in the UnitedStates, Asia and Africa.
The Vietnamese people inspired youth of all nationalities, here and all over theworld, by demonstrating that the determination of a people to fight for theirsovereignty and right to self-determination was an unconquerable force, even in
the face of Pentagon might.
The rising strength of national liberation struggles in the U.S.—Black Power, theAmerican Indian Movement, the Young Lords, the Chican@/Mexican@
movement and organizations of militant Asian youth—stirred great pride in the
oppressed here and around the planet. The waves of these movements createdmore room in their wake for women and LGBT people of all nationalities tostruggle to fight oppression based on sex, sexuality and gender expression.
The youth of color in leadership in the sustained battles against the police inGreenwich Village on three hot summer nights in June 1969—many of them

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-71/[2/3/2011 5:07:48 PM]

RespondMany histories converged at Stonewall

homeless youth who struggled to survive on the streets—fought for their right todefine and defend their own bodies, sexualities and gender expressions. Theirstruggle was rooted in a long history of battles against capitalist colonization andimperialism for the right of self-determination and national liberation.
In that sense, the Stonewall insurrection was not the culmination of one history,
but of many.
Roots of same-sex oppression
Historically, the development of class divisions is at the root of same-sex
oppression. And specifically, as lesbian and gay historians have explained, theascendancy of capitalism over agricultural production in the U.S. was the overall
class trajectory that laid the basis for the formation of distinct modern identities
of gay and lesbian, vocalized as “Gay Power!” at Stonewall.
But agricultural production in the United States, and its defeat by industrial
capitalism, was a class war with many battlefields between oppressor and oppres
sed peoples.
Gay American Indians (GAI) made a dynamic contribution to this understanding
in its ground-breaking 1988 book entitled “Living the Spirit.” In this compilation,
Indigenous peoples narrate their own histories of the diverse forms oforganization on this continent—many of them still pre-class, based oncooperative labor and matrilineal bloodlines—before the colonial military assault
which seized the land later used for white settler farming, as well as railroads andother industry.
In an essay in the book entitled “Sex/ Gender Systems in Native North Amer ica,”
Midnight Sun (Anishnabe) emphasized that the 400-year history of colonial
ethnographic research on Indigenous peoples on this continent omitted anddistorted reports about the sex and gender relations they observed, “especiallywhere these deviated from the bipolar European norm of the heterosexual ‘man’and ‘woman’ and contradicted the European patriarchal world view.”
GAI’s History Project lists 135 Indigenous peoples on this continent that maderoom for many more sex/gender roles than the European nations did.
Midnight Sun argued for a historical materialist view of sex/gender systems inthese diverse Native societies, explaining: “Social, and specifically sexual, life isembedded in the economic organization of society—an organization that gives
rise to a variety of cultural forms. The cultural construction of gender andsexuality must be seen in terms of the sexual division of labor, subsistence
patterns, social relations, and male-female relations. Within this context,
ideology is not an arbitrary, discrete force—rather, it serves to reproduce andperpetuate social forms, behaviors, and individuals suitable to a particular modeof production.”
Colonization, Midnight Sun concluded, attempted to systematically destroy thediverse economic, ideological—and sex/ gender systems—of Indigenous societieson this continent.
The cataclysmic impact of slavery
The history of African American youth who fought hand-to-hand combat with
police at Stonewall is rooted in the historic struggle in this hemisphere against
enslave ment and for national liberation. To overlook the earth-shattering impact
of slavery on social relations in this country—then or now—would be tantamountto ignoring the cataclysmic impact of a meteor strike in shaping the history of theplanet.
The tens of millions of African peoples who were taken prisoner, endured thehorrors of the Middle Passage and were enslaved as laborers on this continent,came from diverse cultures with their own systems of economic organization,
kinship, sex/gender and sexual and affectional expression.

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Many histories converged at Stonewall

The landed aristocracy of slave-owners was hell-bent on re-forging these social
relations, like shackles, to meet its own inhuman economic greed. HistorianAngela Davis reveals the contradictions in relations between the sexes/genders in
the family lives of those battling the horrific conditions of slavery in her germinal
book, “Women, Race & Class” (Random House, New York: 1983).
Davis pointed out that in the pre-Civil War era, “As the ideology of femininity—aby-product of industrialization—was popularized and disseminated through the
new ladies’ magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as
inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work. The
cleavage between the home and the public economy, brought on by industrial
capitalism, established female inferiority more firmly than ever before.”
However, she explained, “The economic arrangement of slavery contradicted thehierarchical sexual roles incorporated in the new ideology. Male-female relations
within the slave community could not, therefore, conform to the dominant
ideological pattern.”
By mid-19th century, she noted, seven out of eight enslaved Black people—female
and male—were field workers.
Davis stressed: “Because husbands and wives, fathers and daughters were equallysubjected to the slave masters’ absolute authority, the promotion of male supremacy among the slaves might have prompted a dangerous rupture in the chain ofcommand. Moreover, since Black women as workers could not be treated as the‘weaker sex’ or the ‘housewife,’ Black men could not be candidates for the figureof ‘family head’ and certainly not for ‘family provider.’ After all, men, women andchildren alike were all ‘providers’ for the slaveholding class.”
In terms of the division of labor within the home life of enslaved families, she
added, “Moreover, from all indications, the division of labor between the sexes
was not always so rigorous, for men would sometimes work in the cabin andwomen might tend the garden and perhaps even join the hunt.”
Davis concluded, “This bears repeating: Black women were equal to their men in
the oppression they suffered; they were their men’s social equals within the slavecommunity; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men’s.”
And centuries later, the descendants of those who resisted slavery were battling
the police in the streets at Stonewall for the right to define their own sexuality,
gender and sex.
Many histories; many identities
While colonialism and imperialism have used bullets and bibles to reshape thesocial relations—including organization of the sexes and genders and expressionof sexuality—and destroy the economies of oppressed peoples, the struggles of
the nationally oppressed have also had a deep overall cultural impact on the
oppressor nation.
For example, the Harlem Renaissance —which included such a powerful andlyrical articulation of defiant same-sex and gender non-conforming expressions—is also a defining period in the histories that converged in Greenwich Village
decades later.
The Stonewall Uprising, therefore, was not an articulation—as though from one
throat—of one sexual minority that has existed in all places, in all historicalepochs, without previous voice. Nor did it represent the emergence of a central
identity that represents sexual liberation in a form so universal that its visibility
can be used as a global marker for who is, or is not, “out of the closet” andproud.
The role of Latin@ leadership in the Stonewall insurrection demonstrates that
global roads of history led to the rebellion. Their parents and grandparents wereforced by the super-exploitation of U.S. capital and the dictatorships that

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Many histories converged at Stonewall

enforced it to leave their own countries—with their own systems of sex, genderand sexuality—to travel to this country to work and live.
Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera was a transgender teenager who had lived
homeless on the streets of New York City since she was ten years old. She wasVene zuelan and Puerto Rican—and was one of many Latin@s who fought in
hand-to-hand battles with police at Stonewall.
For some of the Stonewall combatants, numerous oppressions overlapped in theirown lives—racism, misogyny, transphobia—like multiple burdens that create
great strength.
When I asked Sylvia Rivera in an interview before her death, “What do you say
when people ask you if you fought the police at Stonewall because you were gay
or trans? Because of police brutality or racism? Because of being oppressed as ayouth or because you were homeless?”
She answered with succinct eloquence: “We were fighting for our lives!”
The Stonewall Rebellion was living proof that as many histories converged in thestreets of an imperialist metropolis—the capital of capital—people who did notshare a common oppression wrote a new chapter of history together when theyrose up to fight back against a common enemy.
Next: Early left-wing gay liberation: anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Post-Stonewall gay liberation: ‘Power to the People!’

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Lavender & red, part 72
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 12, 2006 10:42 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Stonewall is often recalled as a critical turning point in the
United States because it marked the qualitative development of amass movement in this country. That is both evident andimportant.
The Stonewall Rebellion was certainly not the first time in history that people
who today would be referred to as gay, lesbian, bi and trans fought back against
police repression. Stonewall, however, was only defensive in its very earliest
hours. It quickly turned into an insurrectionary offensive. The street leadership ofyouth of all sexes—particularly those who were homeless and trying to cobble
together a living on the streets, and those who faced oppression based on theirnationality and/or gender expression—forced the police and riot troop
reinforcements to retreat, again and again, in running battles.
Stonewall was not just a response to oppression. For at least the third time inhistory, revolutionary leadership sparked a mass struggle for the liberation ofsame-sex love, oppressed genders and sexes.
But unlike the early 20th century German Homosexual Emancipation Movement
and the early 1950s Mattachine movement, the left-wing of gay liberation
unleashed by the Stonewall insurrection was more thoroughly multinational andincluded many more women and trans people. The revolutionary leadership ofearly gay liberation was both of the oppressed and with the oppressed.
Some 25 militant organizations coalesced across the country in 1969, including
the Committee for Homosexual Freedom of San Francisco, which fought job
discrimination, and chapters of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in cities that
included New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
Many of these youth of all nationalities and sexes and genders identified asradicals and revolutionaries. They drew inspiration from the Chinese Revolution,
the indefatigable resistance of the Vietnamese people and the liberation struggles
sweeping the African continent. Many of the youth of color were actively a part of
struggles for their own national liberation, and many of the white youth saw theneed to unite against racism and its white supremacist ideology.
Within a week after the Stonewall Rebellion, the Gay Liberation Front formed. It
named itself to honor the National Liberation Fronts—the national resistancemovements—in Algeria and Vietnam and demanded, in solidarity with the Blackliberation movement, “Power to the People!”
The Los Angeles GLF statement of purpose, adopted in December 1969, read in
part: “We are in total opposition to America’s white racism, to poverty, hunger,
the systematic destruction of our patrimony; we oppose the rich getting richer,the poor getting poorer, and are in total opposition to wars of aggression andimperialism, whoever pursues them. We support the demands of Blacks,

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RespondPost-Stonewall gay liberation: ‘Power to the People!’

Chicanos, [Asians], Women, Youth, Senior Citizens, and others demanding theirfull rights as human beings. We join in their struggle, and shall actively seek
coalition to pursue these goals.”
GLF women initiated their own caucus in the spring of 1970; some of these
women later started the “Lavender Menace.” In November 1969 and May 1970,
lesbians from the Lavender Menace demanded to be heard at the Congress toUnite Women, opening up the vocal and militant role of lesbian activism on thefront lines of the women’s liberation movement.
East Coast GLF delegates and other militants at the November 1969 Eastern
Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations—a more moderate coalition
from the pre-Stonewall era—formed a “radical caucus” that put forward
resolutions that included calls to support the Black Panther Party, which wasbattling police raids, state frame-ups and assassinations; the Chicano grape
pickers, who were trying to organize a United Farm Workers union in the field
factories; and the Chicago Eight, political activists charged with conspiracy tostart a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; and to takepart in demonstrations against the Pentagon’s war in Vietnam.
From San Francisco to Ann Arbor, anti-war lesbian and gay activists organized tostop the war against Vietnam. New York’s GLF organized its own contingent at
the Oct. 15, 1969, anti-war march in Manhattan, and an even larger one at theNovember moratorium weekend in Washington, D.C., in which half a million
people protested the Vietnam War. Gay radicals from Berkeley marched with
their banners at the November 1969 anti-war rally in San Francisco. And lesbians
and gays organized a large and visible presence at the 1971 May Day anti-war
protest in Washington.
People of color LGBT forces provided leadership in many of these struggles, andformed their own caucuses and organizations. The struggle against racism andnational oppression was an integral, yet highly under-reported, part of themultinational left-wing gay liberation movement.
Next: Nationally oppressed leadership and left-wing gay liberation.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

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1970: Youth of color form STAR—

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Lavender & red, part 73
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 24, 2006 11:53 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Stonewall combatants Sylvia Rivera and Marsha “Pay It No
Mind” Johnson—a Latin@ and an African American activist,
respectively—took part in the early development of the Gay
Liberation Front (GLF) in the weeks after the 1969 Stonewall
street battles. Both were self-identified drag queens.
While consciousness and attitudes toward transgender and transsexual activists
was not uniform in GLF, the lesbian and gay front did not turn away transpeople.
The Philadelphia GLF news letter COME OUT took the following written position
in its August 1970 newsletter: “Gay Liberation Front welcomes any gay person,
regardless of their sex, race, age or social behavior. Though some other gay
organizations may be embarrassed by drags or transvestites, GLF believes that weshould accept all of our brothers and sisters unconditionally.”
Rivera and Johnson were inspired by their experiences in the early militant gay
liberation organizing and protests.
“STAR came about after a sit-in at Weinstein Hall at New York University in
1970,” Rivera explained to me, in an interview in 1998, four years before her
death. The protest at NYU erupted after the administration cancelled planned
dances there, reportedly because a gay organization was sponsoring the events.
GLF, Radicalesbians and other activists held a sit-in at Weinstein Hall. They won
the right to use the venue.
Rivera and Johnson saw the need to organize homeless trans street youth. BothRivera and Johnson were themselves homeless and had to hustle on the streets
for sustenance and shelter. “Marsha and I just decided it was time to help eachother and help our other kids,” Rivera stated.
In 1970, the two formed Street Trans vestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).
“STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody
that needed help at that time,” Rivera said. Shelter was a big problem for transstreet youth. “Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms.
And you can sneak 50 people into two hotel rooms.”
The first STAR home was a parked trailer truck in an outdoor parking lot inGreenwich Village. Some two dozen STAR youth lived together in the trailer. One
day, at dawn, Rivera and Johnson arrived at the trailer with food for all anddiscovered to their horror that their “home” was moving. Some 20 youth werestill sleeping in the trailer as a trucker was driving it away. Most youth were able
to leap out in time. One awoke to find herself en route to California. (Martin
Duberman, “Stonewall”)
Rivera and Johnson decided that STAR needed a more permanent home.

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RespondStreet Transvestite Action Revolutionaries“Marsha and I decided to get a building,” Rivera told me. “We were trying to getaway from the Mafia’s control at the bars. We got a building at 213 Second
Avenue.”Together, they all figured out how to fix the electricity, plumbing and the boiler.
They envisioned the top floor as a school to teach the youth, many of whom had
been forced to leave home and live on the streets at a very early age, to read andwrite.
“We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out andhustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn’t want the kids out in the streets
hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the houseand everyone had fun. Later we had a chapter in New York, one in Chicago, one
in California and England. It lasted for two or three years.”
Rivera and STAR also became a part of the Young Lords Party—an organizationof revolutionary Puerto Rican youth. Rivera recalled, “[W]hen the Young Lords
came about in New York City, I was already in GLF. There was a massdemonstration that started in East Harlem in the fall of 1970. The protest wasagainst police repression and we decided to join the demonstration with ourSTAR banner. That was one of the first times the STAR banner was shown inpublic, where STAR was present as a group.
“I ended up meeting some of the Young Lords that day. I became one of them.
Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was
just the respect they gave us as human beings. They gave us a lot of respect. It
was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself—being part of the Young Lords as a
drag queen—and my organization [STAR] being part of the Young Lords.
“I met [Black Panther Party leader] Huey Newton at the Peoples’ Revolu tion ary
Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution—that we were revolutionary people.”
Rivera stressed, “I was a radical, a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. … I’m
glad I was in the Stonewall Riot. I remember when someone threw a Molotov
cocktail, I thought, ‘My god, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!’I always believed that we would have a fightback. I just knew that we would fightback. I just didn’t know it would be that night. I am proud of myself as being
there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kinda hurt because
that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people.
“Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.”
Next: Nationally oppressed activists form caucuses, organizations.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-73/[2/3/2011 5:08:30 PM]

People of color activists organize across the U.S.

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1970s gay liberation

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People of color activists
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Lavender & red, part 74
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 29, 2006 8:56 PM

Militant activists of color played a leading role in early
multinational gay liberation groups and formed their own
caucuses and organizations.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Black, Latin@ and Asian activists established Third World Gay
Liberation in the summer of 1970. Their first leaflet, issued in Spanish andEnglish, stated, â€œWe are oppressed as people because our humanity isroutinely devoured by the carnivorous system of Capitalism. We are oppressed as
Third World people by the economically inherent racism of white Amerikansociety.â€? The statement also included a commitment to deepen consciousness
within people of color communities.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe groupâ€™s 13-point demands in its â€œ3rd World Gay Revolution
Platformâ€? stated in part:â€œWe want the right of self-determination for all third world and gay
people.â€?
â€œThe right to be gay, anytime, anyplace. The right to freephysiological change and modification of sex on demand. The right offree dress and adornment.â€?
â€œFull protection of the law and social sanction for all modes ofhuman sexual self expression.â€?
â€œWe want liberation for women. We want free and safe birthcontrol information and devices on demand. We want free 24-hourchild care centers controlled by those who use them. We want accessfor women to fill all educational opportunities. We want truthfulteaching of womenâ€™s history. We want an end to preferential hiring
against women and oppressed national minorities.â€?
â€œWe want the abolition of the bourgeois nuclear family. We believethat it perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality andheterosexuality by creating sex roles and sex definitions. The nuclear
family propagates capitalism.â€?
â€œWe want a free educational system that teaches us our true
identity and history, and presents the entire range of human sexuality
without advocating any one form or style; that sex roles and sexdetermined skills not be fostered by the schools; that language be
modified so that no gender takes priority.â€?
The platform also demanded for people of color and gay people: full employment,
decent housing, trials by â€œa peopleâ€™s court with a jury of their peers fromtheir community,â€? an immediate end to policy brutality and killings,
exemption from military induction, and â€œan immediate end to military
oppression both at home and abroad.â€?

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RespondPeople of color activists organize across the U.S.

The platform concluded, â€œWe want a new societyâ€”a socialist society. We
want liberation, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health care, employment
and utilities for all.â€? (â€œThe Gay Militants,â€? Donn Teal)
Ortez Alderson: organized behind bars
Ortez Aldersonâ€”born in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised on
Chicagoâ€™s South Sideâ€”was chair of the Black caucus ofChicago Gay Liberation. Aldersonâ€”a young African
American man described as â€œflamboyantâ€?â€”became aleader of the Third World Gay Revolution.
He organized gay participation in the 1971 Revolutionary
Ortez Alderson
Peopleâ€™s Constitutional Convention convened by the Black
Panther Party.
Alderson, a militant opponent of the Pentagonâ€™s war against Vietnam and themilitary draft, was one of four defendants known as the Pontiac Four. They wereconvicted in 1970 of breaking into an Illinois draft board and destroying files. He
was convicted and spent a year behind bars in the same Kentucky prison where
Black gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, lead organizer of the 1963 March on
Washington, had been imprisoned for draft evasion a quarter century earlier.
While jailed, Alderson tried to organize a gay liberation chapter behind the walls.
In a 1972 interview, Alderson explained how, the year before, he and a Puerto
Rican gay prisoner, Craig, â€œsat down and talked about the gayâ€™s situationin jailâ€”you know, hassles and stuffâ€”and how we could stop it. The
confrontation came on Gay Pride Day, June 28th, because we wanted to have a
Gay Day celebration in prison. The prison officials said we could not have thiscelebration.
â€œAt this point, we got up a petition attacking the institutionâ€™sdiscrimination against homosexuals. Craig, Green, Davis and myself wereimmediately arrested by the goon squad and put in the hole. Craig was Puerto
Rican, Green was Black and Davis was a full-blooded Sioux Indian.â€? (Motive
magazine, 1972)â€˜Stephanieâ€™s storyâ€™
Black lesbian activist Vernita Gray helped launch Chicagoâ€™sgay liberation movement. In 1969 she started the first lesbian
and gay hotlineâ€”telephone number FBI-LISTâ€”out of her
South Side apartment. She organized lesbian and gay support
groups and events.
Shortly after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, Gray played a keyrole in the formation of the first Lesbian Caucus of Chicago Gay
Liberation (CGL) and the cityâ€™s first lesbian newspaper,
Vernita Gray
Lavender Woman. The lesbian and Black caucuses of CGL later
became their own organizationsâ€”Chicago Lesbian Liberation and Third WorldGay Revolution, respectively. (Encyclopedia of Chicago)
As an activist and organizer, Gray offered support to a Black butch lesbianstudent named Stephanie, who was fighting expulsion from her high school.
Stephanieâ€™s story is brought to light in a film by the same name, directed by
Yvonne Welbon, focusing on 1972 events.
Stephanie, a Black lesbian youth often taken for being male, lived on the SouthSide of Chicago. â€œShe came of age as a young butch with her â€œbrothersâ€?
â€”older Black butches who formed â€œThe Sons of Sappho.â€? Stephanieâ€™smother, Nadine, took her to Sears to buy her first suit.
When Stephanie and her friends were expelled from her Catholic high school bynuns who charged they were a â€œbad influence,â€? Nadine encouraged theyouth to fight back by taking their case to the Free Legal Clinic at DePaul

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People of color activists organize across the U.S.

University Law School to file a lawsuit against the school. The students won theircase, were re-enrolled and the principal was shipped off, reassigned to Peoria, Ill.
Ruth Ellis: The oldest â€˜outâ€™ lesbian
Ruth Ellis was renowned as the oldest â€˜outâ€™ lesbian
before her death at 101 years of age in 2000. She was born
July 23, 1899, in Springfield, Ill., and came out around 1915.
Ellisâ€™ life is honored in a 1999 documentary made by her
friend Yvonne Welbon titled, â€œLiving with Pride: Ruth C.
Ellis @ 100.â€?
From 1946 to 1971, Ruth and her partner Babeâ€™s homebecame the â€œGay Spotâ€? in Detroit at a time when local
bar owners discriminated against African Americans. Ellissaid, â€œThere wasnâ€™t very many places you could go Ruth Ellis
when I came to Detroit, unless itâ€™d be somebodyâ€™s home. In those days
everything was hush hush. â€¦ So after we bought our home, we opened it up to
the gay people. That is where everyone wanted to come on the weekend.â€?
Welbon explained, â€œHer home was a refuge of sorts to African Americans whocame â€˜outâ€™ before the civil rights movement and Stonewall. Ruth andBabe offered lodging to black gay men newly arrived from the South. They also
helped many of the young people through college.â€?
Welbon concluded that in making the documentary, â€œI learned of manystories of black womenâ€™s involvement in the gay and lesbian liberation
movement that are virtually unknown to the general public. The incredible
impact that Ruthâ€™s story has had on our community has shown me that if wedonâ€™t record these stories that we are in danger of depriving ourselves of thetreasures found within our own history. These stories provide an alternative
history, one we are proud to embrace.â€? (sistersinthelife.com)
Today, Detroitâ€™s Ruth Ellis Center is a home for lesbian, gay, bisexual andtransgender youth. Detroit residents celebrate Ruth Ellis Day in February, during
Black History Month.
1970s: Organizing sweeps the country
Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a pre-Stonewall activist who marched
for gay rights on July 4, 1965, at a demonstration in front of
Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He went on to be one of
the founders of the Gay Liberation Frontâ€”Philadelphia.
Like Ortez Alderson, he was an openly gay delegate to theBlack Panther Convention.
Kuromiya was born in 1943 during World War II in a U.S.
government-run internment camp for people of Japanese
Kiyoshi Kuromiya
descent in Nevada. As a civil rights activist in the 1960s, hebore a scar on his scalp from a beating by Alabama sheriffs who opposed his
voter-registration activism in Montgomery. A staunch opponent of the Pentagon,
he was also arrested for demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
â€œJody,â€? an Asian-American woman, founded the Lesbians of Color Caucus
in Seattle during the late 1970s.
In a brief summary of the excitement and conflict she experienced during thatera, she recalled: â€œOver time I started meeting more and more women ofcolor. I lived up on Capitol Hill and there was a lot of activity there. Iâ€™d meet
one woman of color, and then she would introduce me to more, so then I started
feeling a bit better. Also, by that time, there were some white women that I finallydeveloped friendships with, which was good.â€? (HistoryLink.org Essay 4266)
Other groups that formed in the 1970s included the Native American Gay Rap

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People of color activists organize across the U.S.

Group (1972), Gay American Indians (1975), Gay Latin@ Alliance/GALA (1975),
Third World Lesbian Caucus (1977), Black Gay Caucus (1977), Asian-American
Alliance (1979) and Gay Asian Support Group (1978).
On the eve of the first national march on Washington in October 1979, hundredsof lesbians and gays of color convened a Third World conference there.
Black activist Keith Boykin wrote in the Encarta Africana Encyclopedia, â€œBlack writers, intellectuals, and activists have left a profound impression on
the gay rights movement. Linda Villarosa served as executive editor of Essence
magazine and introduced hundreds of thousands of black women to black
lesbians when she co-authored a â€˜coming outâ€™ piece with her mother.
Barbara Smithâ€™s groundbreaking anthology Home Girls presented dozens ofperspectives of black feminism that integrated black lesbian viewpoints. Otherssuch as Cheryl Clarke, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and June Jordan have shared
their experiences about bisexuality and lesbianism in their writings and publiccomments. Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde spoke at the 20th
anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and activist Phill Wilson
addressed the 30th anniversary march in 1993.â€?
Hidden by history
The history of those nationally oppressed organizations, and leaders who selfidentified as lesbian, gay or drag queens, is grossly under-reported in official
histories of early gay liberation.
Black lesbian feminist and socialist Barbara Smith emphasizes, â€œDespite thebuilding of a Black lesbian and gay political movement since the 1970s and thesimultaneous flowering of Black lesbian and gay art, Black lesbians and gays arestill largely missing from the historical record.â€? (â€œThe Truth that Never
Hurts,â€? Smith)
Itâ€™s important to remember that unlike white activists, the struggle fornational liberation meant that the terms â€œlesbianâ€? or â€œgayâ€? were not
the primary identification for many people of color activists.
Smith writes, â€œMy own experience as a Black lesbian during the past two
decades indicates that Black lesbians and gay men are linked by our shared racial
identities and political status in ways that white lesbians and gays are not. These
links between us are sociological, cultural, historical and emotional and I think it
is crucial to explore this new terrain together.â€?
The activist identity of many people of color leaders in their own national
liberation movements was not based on their sexuality necessarily or exclusively.
For example, in April 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Blackfeminists of all sexualities, issued a historic statement against the â€œinterlockingâ€? system of â€œracial, sexual, heterosexual, and class
oppression.â€?
Smith, a member of the Combahee River Collective, concludes, â€œI do not want
to dissuade white scholars from investigating and including material about
people of color. Indeed current queer studies needs to be much more racially andethnically inclusive, but at the same time it also needs to demonstrate a thoroughconsciousness of the racial and class contexts in which lesbians and gays of color
actually function.â€?
Such an understanding will be enriched when more of these histories areunearthed, analyzed and narrated by African American, Lakota, Puerto Rican,
Filipino, Mexican@/Chican@, Salvadoran, Chinese, Arab and many othernationally-oppressed activists.
Widening the focus of the historical lens is crucial and imperative. It will remedy
a distortion of the activist past. It is essential to strengthening anti-racist unity. It
is necessary to understanding that the left wing of early gay liberation was

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-74/[2/3/2011 5:08:48 PM]

People of color activists organize across the U.S.

defined by its anti-racist, anti-imperialist stance. It makes clearer why thispolitical emphasis won significant demonstrations of solidarity from the left wingof national liberation organizations.
And it will reveal more sharply why this political position within the overall gay
liberation movement in the United States led to a significant split.
Next: Panthers, Young Lords: Solidarity with gay liberation
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Support independent news DONATE

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Early left-wing liberation: ‘Unity with all the oppressed’

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Oct 5, 2006 8:03 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The multinational left wing of early gay liberation was defined byits struggle against racist state repression and in defense ofnational liberation here and abroad. Even white activists wholacked a thoroughgoing anti-racist consciousness or were unevenin their understanding saw unity in the struggle against all formsof oppression as key to gay liberation.
For example, the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front’s statement of purpose readin part, “We are in total opposition to America’s white racism.” The Los Angeles
chapter also started a Gay Action Patrol to monitor the police.
In cities from Houston to Chicago, gay liberationists protested local bar owners’
segregationist policies that only admitted white gay men and lesbians.
In London, too, the Gay Liberation Front allied itself with Black liberation,
defending Black activists like the Mangrove Nine, who were framed by police inthe early 1970s.
The very first resolution from the floor of the North American Conference of
Homophile Organizations conference in August 1970 was a call from the Radical
Caucus to support the Black Panther Party—which was under state siege acrossthe United States. The motion passed. A later attempt to overturn the motion
was decisively defeated.
The Radical Caucus had also won passage of a resolution that called for supportof Chicano grape pickers, who were trying to organize a United Farm Workers
union in the field factories.
The Radical Caucus program read in part: “We see the persecution ofhomosexuality as part of a general attempt to oppress all minorities and keepthem powerless. ... A common struggle, however, will bring common triumph.
Therefore we declare our support as homosexuals and bisexuals for the strugglesof the black, the feminist, the Spanish-American, the Indian, the Hippie, theYoung, the Student, and other victims of oppression and prejudice.”
The left wing of gay liberation won demonstrations of solidarity from the left
wing of the militant nationally oppressed movements, as well.
The Black Panther Party invited the Gay Liberation Front to take part in the
September 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. Nine
members of Third World Gay Liberation and one lesbian member of GLF
attended a planning meeting for the convention that summer. At that time,
Panther David Hilliard reportedly told the lesbian participant that BPP leader
Huey Newton was about to issue a statement in support of the gay and women’sliberation movements.
Newton issued his message in “The Black Panther” newsletter on Aug. 21, 1970. It
was titled “A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-75/[2/3/2011 5:09:09 PM]

RespondEarly left-wing liberation: ‘Unity with all the oppressed’

about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements.” (Full version canbe found at www.workers.org.)
Newton wrote, “When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, anddemonstrations there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement
and the women’s liberation movement.” He urged revolutionaries to excise any
historically anti-gay references to “men who are enemies of the people, such as
Nixon.” Newton concluded, “Homosexuals are not enemies of the people.”
This message from the Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party sent
shock waves of solidarity that reverberated throughout the progressive andrevolutionary movements.

Rivera: ‘A great moving moment’Lesbian and gay delegates—Black, Latin@, Asian and white—traveled by car, bus,
train and plane to take part in the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional
Convention on the weekend of Sept. 5, 1970. At a time when the Panthers werebeing rounded up, assassinated and framed by the state, some 10,000 to 15,000
people answered the Panther call to take part in the convention.
The aim of the revolutionary gathering was to draw up a revolutionary people’s
constitution. Each delegated group was asked to convene its own workshop to
draw up its own demands for rights to be included in the constitution.
At least 60 self-identified gay men and some two dozen lesbians formed adelegation. They traveled from Ann Arbor, Mich., Los Angeles and Berkeley,
Calif., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia,
Tallahassee, Fla., and Yellow Springs, Ohio.
There were problems at a gathering that size, to be sure. But here are some
important recollections and impressions.
The publication Gay Flames wrote in its issue No. 2: “When we got there, thewomen and men each got a place where they could stay together and be with gay
people from other cities. Some of the men dressed in drag the first night andrapped to some Panthers who came over.”The next morning “Panther Michael Tabor, a N.Y. 21 defendant, spoke about‘how we’re all in the same boat’ when it comes to facing the power of the pigs.
He talked about the oppression of gays and women.”
Transgender Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera said it was “a great moving
moment to be there.”Rivera told me that when she saw Huey Newton at the convention, he alreadyknew of her: “Yeah, you’re the queen from New York!”
On Sunday morning, the multinational gay men’s caucus met. Issue No. 8 of Gay
Flames explained, “Long meetings dedicated to the adoption of [the] gay platform
for the constitution were interrupted for vital discussions of racism and sexism.”
Gay Flames No. 2 elaborated: “The most important discussion centered aroundthe Third World/Gay Male statement. They confronted the gay whites on our
racism, specifically on our willingness to criticize the sexism of black men but notthat of white men. They asked us to recognize Huey Newton’s recently statedposition in favor of Gay Liberation as being a tremendous advance in therevolution and that the Black Panther Party holds the most out-front position interms of the struggle to give power to the people.”
Panther 21 defendant Afeni Shakur spoke to the gay men’s gathering. “She helped
to explain a lot about the Black Panthers to all of us. She said that all she wanted
was a farm with lots of trees and grass and a place to grow cabbage, but that to
get this for herself and her people, it would be necessary to fight. Most of us wereconvinced by what she had to say. We therefore decided to include in ourstatement that gay men at the Session recognized the BPP as being presently the

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-75/[2/3/2011 5:09:09 PM]

Early left-wing liberation: ‘Unity with all the oppressed’vanguard of the people’s revolution.”
Many of the white lesbians left the convention with resentments. The most often
expressed grievance—that the Panther women related to them as Black and as
Panthers rather than bonding as women—showed a low level of understanding of
national oppression by the white women.
In the gay men’s caucus, a revised version of the Third World Gay Revolution
platform “was adopted by the group as the basis of a national gay liberation
program. ... Gay people formed a 15-member delegation under the leadership ofThird World people and women, which attempted to present the 16-point
program to the Panthers. This delegation gave gay people the experience of
women and men, Blacks, Latins and Asians and Whites, working collectively in apractically revolutionary context, though the chaos and crowd kept the delegationfrom completing its task.”
The gay men’s statement, read by the delegation at the convention, concluded:“We recognize as a vanguard revolutionary action the Huey P. Newton statement
on gay liberation. We recognize the Black Panther Party as being the vanguard of
the people’s revolution in Amerikkka.”
Next: More solidarity: D.C. 21, Panthers, Young Lords, Cesar Chavez.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-75/[2/3/2011 5:09:09 PM]

Demonstrations of anti-racist solidarity

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Lavender & red, part 76
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Oct 17, 2006 11:03 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

One particularly militant action by a multinational group of gay
men took place during the fall 1970 Revolutionary People’s
Constitutional Convention, convened by the Black Panther Party.
It included a demonstration of anti-racist unity.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, During the convention, a group of four gay men—two Puerto Rican, one African
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

American and one white—at least one of whom was reportedly wearing “a bit of
makeup,” went out to eat at an area restaurant.

Management at the restaurant, which reportedly catered to a white clientele,refused to serve the group. The four left, and returned with 30 or more gay men.
The restaurant boss ordered them out.
According to a report in the Advocate, “A fight erupted when management,
security guards and several patrons attacked one Puerto Rican and two black
Gays. Glasses were thrown, windows broken and other damage done in the freefor-all which developed.” (“The Gay Militants,” Donn Teal)
The other gay men of various nationalities came to their aid and fought alongsidethem.
After the group left the restaurant, police stopped 12 of the gay men as theydrove away and charged them with assault, illegal entry and destruction ofproperty. The defendants later won an important legal precedent—the right tovet prospective jurors about their prejudices against same-sex love. Ultimately
the charges were dropped.
More solidarity
As early as November 1969, left-wing gay liberationists actively organized insupport of Chican@/Mexican@ grape pickers who were trying to organize aunion—the United Farm Workers (UFW)—in the fields of California. The “Radical
Caucus” at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations won a
resolution in support of the farm workers, even though the convention had drawn
more moderate forces.
Renowned labor leader César Chávez continuously extended his hand ofsolidarity to gay liberation, as well.
Last summer, when the National Executive Board of the United Farm Workers—apredominantly Latin@ union—announced its principled stance in support of theright of same-sex marriage, UFW Southern California Political Director Christine
Chávez restated her grandfather’s support of gay rights.
She recalled, “Beginning in the 1970s, before there was widespread public
acceptance of gays, especially among Latinos, my grandfather, César Chávez,spoke out strongly for gay rights. He attended gay rights rallies and marches. He
brought with him the UFW’s black-eagle flags and farm workers who wished tohttp://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-76/[2/3/2011 5:09:30 PM]

RespondDemonstrations of anti-racist solidarity

participate.” (www.ufw.org)
Chávez helped carry the lead banner in the 1979 march on Washington for
lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.
Early gay liberation won support from Puerto Rican revolutionary youth as well,particularly from the Young Lords Party.
When Gay Liberation Front (GLF) activists went to a Puerto Rican street festival
on Aug. 8, 1970, sponsored by the Young Lords Party, members of the Puerto
Rican revolutionary youth party helped hand out leaflets advertising an upcoming
GLF dance. (Philadelphia Gay Liberation Front-Newsletter, Aug. 9, 1970)
Shortly after Huey Newton issued his powerful statement of support for the gay
and women’s liberation movements in The Black Panther newspaper on Aug. 21,
1970, the Young Lords Party formed an internal gay caucus. One of its firstmembers was Latin@ trans Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera.
Rivera described joining in autumn 1970: “It was just the respect they gave us ashuman beings. They gave us a lot of respect. It was a fabulous feeling for me tobe myself—being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen—and my organization[STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries] being part of the Young
Lords.”The Young Lords Party held its own inquiry into the death of a Black gay
prisoner—Raymond Lavon Moore—after he was found dead in November 1970
on the fourth floor of the Tombs prison in lower Manhattan. That was the floor
where gay and trans prisoners were locked up.
Prison officials claimed Moore took his own life. But gay prisoner Richard Harris
courageously came forward with his eyewitness account of the beatings Moore
sustained from guards preceding his death.
The Young Lords charged that the administration had killed Moore. Gay
liberation activists formed the Gay Community Prisoner Defense Committee after
Moore’s death.
On at least one occasion, Gay Liberation Front in New York provided bail money
for two jailed Young Lords members.
Support for Panthers
Not all Black Panther Party leaders supported gay rights and not all gay activists
supported the Panthers. But many left-wing gay liberationists—Black, Latin@,
Asian, Native and white—worked hard to build and widen solidarity for thePanther Party.
The “Radical Caucus” at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile
Organizations also won a resolution in support of the Black Panther Party, andwhen the conference leadership tried to overturn the measure, a wider votesustained the resolution.
A Gay Liberation Front (GLF) representative spoke at the huge May 1970 rally in
New Haven organized to free Panther co-founder Bobby Seale.
The case of the Panther 21 drew demonstrative support from gay liberationists of
all nationalities. The 21 were arrested in New York on April 2, 1969, in a predawn police raid and charged with conspiracy to bomb the Botanical Gardens,
department stores and other sites. They were finally acquitted of all charges on
May 13, 1971, after 45 minutes of jury deliberation following what had been thelongest political trial in the city’s history.
During the long trial, gay activists, including members of the Gay Liberation
Front, had organized in support of the Panther defendants. The GLF Marxist
study group—Red Butterfly—organized a gay liberationist contingent at a massive
rally to “Free the Panther 21 and All Political Prisoners.”

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-76/[2/3/2011 5:09:30 PM]

Demonstrations of anti-racist solidarity

The New York GLF donated $500—quite a sum for activists in those days—to theCommittee to Defend the Black Panthers.
Support for the Panthers became the stated basis for an internal struggle within
the early gay liberation movement that eventually led to a significant political
split.
Next: Two-line struggle split gay movement
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-76/[2/3/2011 5:09:30 PM]

Early 1970s: Political split in gay movement

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Lavender & red, part 77
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Nov 11, 2006 9:13 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZANational liberation movements fighting for sovereignty and selfdetermination in Asia, Africa and the Middle East inspired theleft wing of early gay liberation. In addition, oppressed nations
held as virtual domestic colonies within the borders of the U.S.
were rebelling from Watts to Wounded Knee. Struggles of Black,
Chican@/Mexican@, Native and Asian peoples were roiling, with militantleadership.
As Vietnam veterans returned wounded or in body bags, anger against the war
built. Women’s liberation was taking on social momentum.
Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera later recalled, “All of us were working for somany movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women’s
movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement. We were all radicals.
I believe that’s what brought it [Stonewall] around. You get tired of being justpushed around. We are people. We are gay people.”
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people brought valuable experience to gay
liberation that they had acquired as activists and leaders in the union movement,
tenant and unemployed organizing, defense of political prisoners and the civilrights movement.
Left-wing gay liberation sought solidarity with all who were oppressed. The gay
movement itself was made up of many nationalities, countries of origin, sexes,
genders and ages.
The Gay Liberation Front, named to honor the national liberation fronts in
Vietnam and Algeria, issued a founding statement of purpose in 1969 after the
Stonewall Rebellion that articulated the anti-capitalist consciousness of early gay
liberation, as well.
The language in the statement is dated—particularly regarding Asian peoples—but the solidarity from that period still rings clear: “We are in total opposition to
America’s white racism, to poverty, hunger, the systematic destruction of ourpatrimony; we oppose the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and are in
total opposition to wars of aggression and imperialism, whoever pursues them.
We support the demands of Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals, Women, Youth, Senior
Citizens, and others demanding their full rights as human beings. We join in
their struggle, and shall actively seek coalition to pursue these goals.”
Third World Gay Liberation, established by Black, Latin@ and Asian activists inthe summer of 1970, stated in its first leaflet—issued in Spanish and English—“We are oppressed as people because our humanity is routinely devoured by
the carnivorous system of Capitalism. We are oppressed as Third World people
by the economically inherent racism of white Amerikan society.”
U.S. finance capitalism—the ascendant capitalist and imperialist power after

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-77/[2/3/2011 5:09:50 PM]

RespondEarly 1970s: Political split in gay movement

World War II—faced resistance domestically and internationally. The great
struggles of the 1960s forced Democrat Lyndon Johnson to make someconcessions on the home front while still waging war against Vietnam—newsocial programs like the “War on Poverty.” This “guns and butter” policy, which
aimed to buy some social peace domestically, plus the strong war economy,
helped isolate the national liberation struggles and the growing activism of
middle-class youth, and to keep rebellion from igniting the entire working class.
At the same time, the FBI worked hammer and tong to bust up unity among
oppressed groups. That covert “dirty war” was COINTELPRO: the CounterIntelligence Program.
J. Edgar Hoover, who is widely reported to have had a male lover, led the FBI atthat time. That certainly demonstrates that same-sex attraction doesn’t
automatically make a person politically progressive. As the union song asks:“Which side are you on?” Hoover certainly knew which side of the classbarricades he served.
The FBI used the weapons of spying, lying, infiltrating, disrupting and spreading
smear campaigns on the oppressed. They assassinated and framed up progressive
leaders in order to “neutralize” them. And they tried to drive a wedge between
gay liberation and Black liberation.
Under this pressure, gay liberation developed an ideological fissure.
Reminiscent of Cold War split
The Gay Liberation Front was originally conceived not as an organization but asa political front—a left-wing umbrella group. In early November 1969, at a GLF
meeting, a vote to support the Black Panther Party was defeated. A week later, a
GLF member called for a recount. This time, the majority—including reportedly
all the women—voted to support the Panthers, who were the target of vicious
state repression.
Angered by the vote, GLF members Marty Robinson and Jim Owles resigned,
walked out and became founders of the Gay Activist Alliance.
The split and the formation of GAA had national implications. Ostensibly, thedivide was over “priorities.” Those who created GAA claimed that Gay Liberation
Front was not focused enough on gay issues.
But beneath that argument was an ideological fault line reminiscent of the Cold
War anti-communist divide in the Mattachine gay mass organizing during the
McCarthyite witch hunt. Harry Hay, a communist who founded the early
Mattachine organization and was later driven out by red-baiters, helped draft theLos Angeles GLF founding statement in 1969.
Anti-communism reared its ugly head again in the GLF split.
In the summer of 1969, Marcus Overseth penned an article in the “San FranciscoFree Press” about the growing chasm between what he termed “leftists” and“social revolutionaries”—in reality, between revolutionaries and social democrats.
“These people—whose emphasis is on left rather than Gay—might be called Gay
leftists,” he wrote. “The primary orientation of left Gay social revolutionaries isGay. Gay leftists, however, look upon the Gay liberation movement as a means offurthering their peculiar notions about political revolution. They look at Gay
liberation through leftist lenses—from a framework of Marxist-Leninist thought.
To such persons the most important reason for their involvement is not freedom
for Gay brothers and sisters but blood-in-the-streets revolution.”
Overseth concluded that from New York to San Francisco, “Here lies the realreason for the current disruption within the Gay Liberation Movement. It has
been co-opted by politicos who are still hung up on political revolution.”
In an interview with a New York Times Magazine editor in June 1970, Jim Owles

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-77/[2/3/2011 5:09:50 PM]

Early 1970s: Political split in gay movement—GAA’s first president—stated, “In its beginnings, GLF, aside from being
revolutionary, was doing things that were related to the homosexual cause. ...
[But] the majority ... considered themselves revolutionaries, and they wanted thegroup to identify and align itself with the other like groups. There was the
beginning of a split, very early.”
Anti-communism was rife in the 1960s and early 1970s—as it still is today. The
communist leadership that had won so many gains during the class struggles of
the 1930s was driven out of the unions, tenant organizations and campuses
during the Cold War. The class lessons of those struggles were lost with them.
The legacy of McCarthyism hung heavy on the “New Left.” The reactionary
political positions and internal membership policies regarding same-sex love inparties that called themselves communists helped fan the flames of anticommunism, too. Each of those parties and organizations is responsible for
explaining its own political history.
But in one communist organization in the United States, the demand to end
oppression based on sexuality, gender and sex became a genuine and dynamic
part of its revolutionary program: Workers World Party.
Next: Theory and practice: Workers World walked its talk.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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LGBT members welcomed from day one

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Lavender & red, part 78
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Nov 17, 2006 11:22 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

During the Cold War, the early Mattachine movement was
founded by revolutionaries, many of whom had to leave theircommunist and radical parties in order to openly organize
against gay oppression. Even after Stonewall, some socialist orcommunist organizations maintained policies banning gay andlesbian membership, which led members to quit, some of whom then helped
develop left currents in gay liberation.
Radical and revolutionary groups in the gay liberation movement after Stonewall
included Third World Gay Liberation, Gay Liberation Front and its Marxist study
group Red Butterfly, the Lavender Left, Committee of Lesbian and Gay MaleSocialists, the Lavender & Red Union, and Gay Revolution and Gay Flames.
But in one communist party—Workers World Party—the struggle against gay
oppression was taken up in earnest by the entire organization, not just thelesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) members.
Workers World Party had emerged as a distinct party in 1959, after having been aprincipled, ideological grouping within the Socialist Workers Party for 10 years
that differed with the SWP leadership on crucial international and domestic
issues.
The founder of WWP, Sam Marcy, had characterized U.S. imperialism’s war
against Korea as part of a global class war. In his 1950 analysis of this globalclass war, written as an internal document, Marcy described that era as
characterized by a profound struggle between two class combatants.
On one side was a bloc of workers’ states, headed by the Soviet Union and the
newly formed People’s Republic of China, that was attempting to build socialism
and at the same time was forming alliances with oppressed nations trying to
break the shackles of colonialism and imperialism. On the other side was theimperialist camp, headed by U.S. finance capital, which sought to dismantle theworkers’ states and keep oppressed peoples in servitude.
Marcy argued that workers and oppressed peoples around the world had everyclass reason to defend the anti-imperialist bloc.
Marcy’s principled defense of the socialist camp set him apart as a politicalleader. At that time, many individuals and groups that called themselves socialist
or communist either refused to actively defend the USSR—which was underconstant siege, covertly and overtly, from imperialism—or outright politicallyattacked it.
Sam Marcy built a political tendency that was steeped in Lenin’s understandingthat class unity is impossible without resolute defense of all struggles for national
liberation from imperialism. And this former labor organizer—whose co-workers
referred to him as “Solidarity Sam”—knew in his political bones that the same

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-78/[2/3/2011 5:10:15 PM]

RespondLGBT members welcomed from day one

capitalist class in the U.S. used its police, courts, prisons and troops as a militaryboot heel to oppress Black, Latin@, Asian, Native and other oppressed peoples
who constitute nations within the borders of this country. In other words, theU.S. is definitely not “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”This deep understanding of the need to battle oppression in order to build thekind of solidarity that can truly achieve class unity was a defining characteristic ofMarcy’s ideological grouping.
For over a decade Marcy and his co-thinkers argued out their political
disagreements within the Socialist Workers Party, taking their vigorous defense of
the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese revolutions and the need to support thesocialist bloc to the SWP National Committee. But these differences eventually
led the Marcy ideological grouping to leave the SWP in 1959 and form Workers
World Party (WWP).
One of the first branches of WWP was in the working-class, industrial city of
Buffalo, N.Y. From day one, Workers World Party did not, and never had, aninternal policy barring membership to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals or transpeople. The founding members included individuals who today would put
themselves somewhere under the umbrella of LGBT identities.
During the McCarthyite witch hunt, however, same-sex love and cross-dressing
were illegal, hunted by state repression and hounded and harassed by the“Lavender Scare” that was a central crusade of the domestic Cold War. So, while
founding members and individuals who joined Workers World before theStonewall era did not necessarily self-identify based on their sexuality, it was not
because of any internal membership policy that kept them “in the closet.”
What made Workers World Party open in this period to members who today
would be referred to as LGBT? And what prepared the leadership of thiscommunist party to make political breakthroughs about lesbian and gay
oppression shortly after Stonewall?
‘An injury to one is an injury to all’Bob McCubbin, a gay man who met Workers World Party back in autumn 1960—
and later worked with other leaders in the organization to write a germinal
Marxist analysis of the roots of sexual oppression in class society—recently
addressed those questions from his own first-hand experience.
Asked about those days, he wrote back, “The small group of political organizers
who came together to form Workers World Party in 1959 carried forward, in
addition to the communist spirit of struggle and profound class consciousness, anundiluted and uncompromised political tradition and ideology harking back at
least a century, that made the newly dawning struggles for sexual and genderequality in the mid-century U.S. relatively easy for them to identify with andembrace as legitimate and important for the working class.”
McCubbin continued, “Under Sam Marcy’s leadership, the party’s guiding ideas
included, from the very beginning, the concept of the great diversity of theworld’s working class and the need to address all of the different issues that thisdiversity manifested from a class-conscious and revolutionary perspective. Thiswas in the interests of uniting the whole class for the inevitable struggles for
power.
“But Marcy’s lifelong experience as a working class organizer and theoretician
also taught him that many of the most dedicated and class-conscious fighters
were from the ranks of the most exploited and oppressed people. Those with theleast to lose and the most to gain consistently show themselves to be the mosthighly enthusiastic about change, the most highly motivated to struggle forchange, the most capable of sacrifice in the interests of furthering the struggle.
“Further, those who best understand the systems of exploitation and oppression
are those with the most experience as the objects of that exploitation andhttp://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-78/[2/3/2011 5:10:15 PM]

LGBT members welcomed from day one

oppression.”
Therefore, McCubbin stressed, “Having such a comprehensive, inclusive andintimate view of the working class, and promoting such a positive attitude toward
the most oppressed, it was a natural development that the party was able toattract lesbian and gay members even at its earliest stages of development.”
McCubbin concluded, “Of course, the recruitment of lesbian and gay people tothe party in those early days was on the basis of this strongly positive andinclusive view of our class and a strong emphasis on sensitivity to oppression in
general, and not, at least not in the early days, on the basis of a deep
understanding of the oppression faced by lesbian and gay people.”
Next: “Solidarity Sam” vs. gay oppression
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Workers World fought gay oppression before Stonewall

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Lavender & red, part 79
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Nov 26, 2006 8:59 AM

Years before the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, the leadership ofWorkers World Party understood the need to fight oppression asa many-headed hydra.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

I joined Workers World Party (WWP) in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1973,
drawn to its ranks by my rage at the Israeli occupation of Palestine and thebloody CIA-orchestrated counter-revolution in Chile. The first person in the
branch leadership that I “came out” to as transgender in late 1973—Jeanette
Merrill—listened to me very intently. She responded, “I don’t know much about
your oppression, but I know oppression when I hear it.”
My comrades in the Buffalo branch quickly made discussion and understanding
about my oppression an important part of branch work. They demonstrated tome that comradeship is different than friendship or family. It is a powerfulrelationship among people who unite on a solid platform of political principles
and who fight against each other’s oppression as though it were their own.
In reaching out to me, some of the older members told me anecdotes about how
Sam Marcy—who had founded our political and ideological tendency—haddeveloped their understanding and sensitivity to all forms of oppression,
including sexuality and gender expression. While no one could recall the exact
dates, these examples ranged from the mid-1950s to the very early 1960s, long
before Stonewall.
In one example, Marcy, at that time living in Buffalo as branch organizer, called
an immediate halt when a young man sashayed around the office, mocking afeminine male to elicit laughter—something that was and is still quite common in
the U.S. generally.
Marcy said firmly, “Stop!”
Marcy, as a former labor organizer, certainly understood on a deep level that “Aninjury to one is an injury to all.” However, another incident shows the depth ofpolitical and historical understanding that Sam Marcy brought to every aspect ofsocial life.
When someone who attended a Party forum made a disparaging remark aboutdrag shows held at a nearby bar, Marcy interrupted him, arguing that this form of
expression was a carryover from pre-class society. Before his death, I asked
Marcy how he knew that. He replied that he had come across what is today
referred to as transgender in his readings about ancient cooperative societies.
Jeanette Merrill recalls that when Sam Marcy first heard that meetings at the
Mattachine Society in Buffalo were being menaced by reactionaries, he sent Party
members to the society’s office at Main and Utica, telling them, “It’s very
important for you to go in solidarity.” Merrill says she and her comrade and life
partner, Ed Merrill, a steel union shop steward, attended.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-79/[2/3/2011 5:10:35 PM]

Respond

Workers World fought gay oppression before Stonewall“We walked up there on a Sunday evening—we didn’t have a car. I can’t
remember all the details, but I can remember how everyone there greeted us andthanked us for coming. We stayed very late.”
Whole Party fought gay oppression
Bob McCubbin, a gay man who met WWP in the fall of 1960 and is today a Party
leader on the West Coast, remembers hearing the news about the opening salvoof the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. “I later heard that a comrade in New York hadcommented, upon hearing this news item, that ‘A new front against U.S.
imperialism has opened.’”Members of Workers World took part in the following nights of the Stonewall
Rebellion in Greenwich Village.
As a militant gay liberation movement emerged after the uprising, Workers
World Party and its youth group—Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF)—
demonstrated solidarity on every front in the struggle against sexual oppression.
And it wasn’t just the lesbian and gay, bi and trans members who took part inthese struggles. Party members of all sexualities took part in the struggle to“Smash gay oppression!”
Workers World newspaper carried articles about lesbian and gay resistance.
YAWF took part in a 1970 demonstration at the Tombs prison in Manhattan insupport of Richard Harris—a gay member of the Inmates Liberation Front of theYoung Lords Party.
McCubbin says that, while organizing in San Francisco a year after Stonewall, “I
combined my gay liberation activities with Party work in the anti-war movement
and the struggle for Black liberation.”
He recalls, “The banner we opened at a big rally for Angela Davis—where we also
raised the need to support her co-defendant, Ruchell Magee—was signed Gay
Liberation Front, but it looked suspiciously like a Youth Against War & Fascism
banner. And it was greeted with some consternation on the part of the rally’sorganizers.”
McCubbin describes the spring 1971 anti-war march in San Francisco as “thebiggest of the semi-annual West Coast mobilizations during those years.”“My friends and I carried banners in the march and managed to get out close to
5,000 copies of Workers World newspaper during the rally.”
The large Chican@ contingent had been insensitively placed at the end of themarch. The political high point of the event, McCubbin explained, “was when the
Chican@s marched into the stadium where the rally was being held and surged
through the huge crowd right up to and onto the rally platform, where they stoodtriumphantly waving Chican@ banners and flags.
“One of the leaders of this action was my gay friend Arturo Rodríguez, who
subsequently wrote an article for Workers World explaining the reason for theaction.”Next: Internal development of WWP’s organizational, political and historicalcontribution to the struggle for sexual liberation.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-79/[2/3/2011 5:10:35 PM]

Workers World fought gay oppression before Stonewall

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Internal education on gay liberation

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Workers World Party 1971-1972

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Internal education on gay
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Lavender & red, part 80
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 3, 2006 8:02 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Workers World Party’s youth group, Youth Against War &Fascism (YAWF), formed an internal Gay Caucus in 1971—whichsoon after became the Lesbian and Gay Caucus. Bob McCubbin,
who played a key role in its political and organizational
formation and development, recalls what led up to and followed
the establishment of the caucus.
McCubbin writes that he had been doing gay liberation work and Workers World
Party (WWP) organizing on the West Coast. He had told leading members of the
Buffalo branch he was gay when he moved to San Francisco, where there was nobranch, six months after the Stonewall Rebellion.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

And he remembered that one of the founders of the party, Vince Copeland, “hadactually used the presence in New York of a large gay community as one of his
incentives to get me to move to New York City” to work in the party center.
However, not until 1971 did McCubbin ever take the floor at a party meeting to
speak from the political perspective of a gay man. “In the late summer of 1971, I
left San Francisco for New York City and a few weeks later, at a party meeting, I
took the floor to defend the party during a minor factional struggle. One of thecharges being leveled was that the party had no position on the gay liberation
movement.”
McCubbin stood up and said, “Well, I’m gay, and I’ve always understood that the
party supports the struggles of all oppressed people.” There were a few seconds ofabsolute silence and then strong applause, recalls McCubbin.
McCubbin explains, “What followed the branch meeting where I came out wereseveral months of preliminary discussions with leading comrades in New York, inparticular with Vince and Dottie [Dorothy Ballan, a founder of WWP], and with a
few lesbian and gay comrades in party branches.
“At the end of 1971 or the beginning of 1972, the party held a winter conference,and I asked Deirdre [Griswold] if an announcement could be read at theSaturday plenum to the effect that a meeting of lesbian and gay comrades andfriends would be held in the evening. Deirdre assured me that would be no
problem.
“Well, about 50 people showed up!” Not all of them were LGBT, McCubbin
recalls. “It was a wonderful expression of solidarity on the part of many
heterosexually oriented comrades, but the 12 or 15 of us who were lesbian andgay had to schedule a further meeting the following morning to get some work
done after the evening meeting full of praise for us and solidarity statements.
“This conference,” McCubbin concludes, “marked the beginning of a party-wide
effort to educate ourselves and our class on this issue.”

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-80/[2/3/2011 5:10:56 PM]

RespondInternal education on gay liberation

Sam Marcy vs. gay oppression
Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy made a tremendous contribution to thedevelopment of the party as a revolutionary communist organization, and to thehistoric struggle for sexual liberation, when he oriented the party about the gay
struggle politically, theoretically and historically in a significant part of a 1972
internal document he wrote as orientation for the party conference.
Marcy said of the oppression of nationalities, women, youth and gay people: “Thedegeneration of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism carries to an
extreme all the forms of oppression which the capitalist system, in the previous
epoch, had engendered and developed. As the crisis of the social system becomes
more and more apparent, the need of the ruling class to unload its burden on themost oppressed sections of society becomes more evident. Only by dividing, only
by fragmenting and continually pitting different elements of the oppressed
masses against each other, can the capitalist establishment maintain its swayover all society, and hope to survive.”
This same sharpening of the persecution and oppression, however, creates theimpetus for a genuinely progressive militancy and resurgence of Black and
Latin@ peoples, women, youth and gay people.
Marcy characterized the lack of widespread support for the gay struggle in the
progressive movement at that time as a legacy of the deep-seated prejudice thatemanated from the religious bigotry of the Middle Ages and its reinforcement
throughout the entire course of capitalist development.
“It is particularly significant,” he wrote, “that the public change in attitude—suchas it is—comes on the heels of a very formidable wave of struggle by gay people, averitable ‘coming out’ in a most demonstrative way. Gay Pride took a cue fromBlack Pride. ...
“Without the struggle launched by gay people,” Marcy stressed, “the prejudiceswhich have been ground into the consciousness of the masses by indoctrination
would not even have been challenged, let alone shaken to their foundations.
“All this shows how intimate is the connection between the ideas of a particulartime—even progressive ideas—and the conditions of the time, in this case, thestate of the struggle.”‘Influence of October Revolution’Marcy continued, “An important influence in the progressive movement insofar
as the gay struggle is concerned, dates back to the victory of the October
Revolution in Russia. In early 1917, the Soviet government annulled all laws
which restricted the rights of homosexuals. It also, of course, annulled all thereactionary laws pertaining to divorce as well as the feudal-bourgeois family
relations.
“What is important about this,” he emphasized, “is that for the first time inhistory, a workers’ government established equality in law—and to a measurable
degree also in fact—between men and women, for heterosexuals andhomosexuals.”
Marcy noted that, “Unfortunately this period of very progressive development
was short-lived, and was succeeded by a period of reaction with the rise of Stalin
to power.” The 1934 move by the bureaucratic grouping at the helm of theworkers’ state to reinstate laws against homosexuality, Marcy explained, had aprofoundly negative ideological impact on communist parties around the worldthat looked to the Soviet Union for political leadership.
“Our party,” Marcy stated, “which bases itself on Marxism-Leninism, looks to theearly model of the Soviet Union as the embodiment of what our own political
position should be in relation to the struggle of gay people.

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-80/[2/3/2011 5:10:56 PM]

Internal education on gay liberation“Our first, most elementary and fundamental duty as well as objective on thisquestion is to completely eliminate and abolish all forms of persecution andoppression of gay people. It must also fight against all ideological, political andsocial manifestations of gay oppression which may be reflected in our own
ranks.”
Marcy wrote that the demand to end all sexual oppression and persecution “isreally an elementary democratic demand which a bourgeois democracy should be
able to grant along with all other democratic demands. But imperialist democracy
tends to restrict the elementary rights of all people—not only gay, women, youth,
Brown and Black. It is only the struggle that can wrest concessions. In the longrun, only the abolition of the capitalist system can produce a lasting, free andequal treatment of all peoples.”Marcy concluded that although regression in the Soviet Union had bequeathed abackward ideological legacy on the question of homosexuality, “The socialist
revolution is a permanent revolution, one of continuous change. Along with manyother changes that need to be made in the socialist countries, the gay question issurely one of them.
“In the meantime, we ought to concentrate on preparing our own revolution, of
which the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people, including gay
people, is an indispensable condition for victory of the revolution.”
Next: Historic WWP contribution: Publication of “The Gay Question” by Bob
McCubbinE-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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Party-wide education campaign in 1972

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WWP’s support for early gay liberation

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Lavender & red, part 81
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 10, 2006 9:29 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn the months after Workers World Party’s August 1972
conference at which founder Sam Marcy motivated the historic
importance of supporting the gay liberation struggle, “Comrades
hammered out some important goals for our work,” writes Bob
McCubbin.
McCubbin—who had founded the Gay Caucus of WWP’s youth group Youth
Against War & Fascism (YAWF) a year earlier—stresses that, “First and foremost,
we wanted to show our support for the gay liberation movement in every way we
could.”He recalls, “If we step back for aminute and consider all the struggles
in which Workers World Party and its
youth group were involved at this time—building anti-imperialist opposition
to the U.S. war against Vietnam in thestreets; supporting and defending theBlack Panther Party and otherrevolutionary organizations of
New York City: Way back in 1972,
oppressed peoples in the U.S.;
Workers World's youth group,
exposing the prison-industrial
Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF),
complex, publicizing the cases of the
had already been part of the struggle
many political prisoners, andin the streets for gay liberation.
defending the political organizing
going on in the prisons through the Prisoners’ Solidarity Committee; actively
aiding anti-war and anti-racist organizing within the U.S. military, mostimportantly, by providing strong organizational and political support for theAmerican Servicemen’s Union; supporting workers’ struggles and union
organizing and establishing the Center for United Labor Action; providing active
leadership, encouragement and ideological support to the growing women’s
movement; and educating those we could reach on the many other struggles
erupting throughout the world, including our principled defense of Cuba, theSoviet Union and People’s China—the ability of the party to take up the issue of
lesbian and gay liberation in the sustained, serious and fully committed way it
was done is truly remarkable.”
YAWF organized its own contingent in the 1972 Pride march in New York City,and party members of all sexualities, genders and sexes have marched together
under the YAWF/WWP banners every year since.
Nowadays, McCubbin states, many glad-handing capitalist politicians, religious
groups and businesses—large and small—want to be seen at the huge yearly Pridemarches. “But back then it was largely the politically conscious members of theLGBT communities, mostly the youth, who made up the ranks of these grassroots

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-81/[2/3/2011 5:11:24 PM]

RespondParty-wide education campaign in 1972

marches.”

Being principled wasn’t easy
In the decades since, the LGBT struggle has gained strength and wrested many
victories, attracting broader support. But at that time WWP’s stand in the
movement was unique among the left parties and was not based on any shortterm organizational or political advantages. It took principles to be a communist
in the gay liberation movement and simultaneously to be for gay liberation in theradical and communist movement—including the self-described “New Left.”
When McCubbin left San Francisco to work in the WWP national office inManhattan in 1971, he explains, “The gay movement in New York had a very
different character from the movement that I left in San Francisco. It was easy
for me as an openly communist activist to participate fully in the San Francisco
movement. The whole climate, at least among the youth, was very open, very
radical, and there was no single dominant organization.”He explains that as the movement developed, party activists in some cities werecaught between the anti-communism of more politically moderate andconservative lesbian and gay groups and the anti-gay prejudices that many otherleft organizations had not yet examined.
As a result, McCubbin states, as the gay liberation movement grew, “All leftorganizations were viewed, to one extent or another, with suspicion or open
hostility. We were very much at pains to always act in a principled andsupportive way, and with our very limited human and material resources, we
couldn’t always do much more than simply show support for the lesbian and gay
struggles with our physical presence at protests.”
However, he emphasizes, “There was a group that was much easier for us torelate to when I first arrived in New York: the Third World Gay Liberation Front,composed of revolutionary Cuban, Argentinean, Puerto Rican and Mexican transpeople, lesbians and gay men. Unfortunately, they were only in active existence
for a short period.”
McCubbin stressed that WWP’s 1972 national conference “marked the beginningof a party-wide effort to educate ourselves and our class on this issue. As
Marxists we know that it is the struggle that is the great educator, and the new
movement of lesbians and gays and transgender people was providing lessons inabundance about the situation of people historically oppressed because of theirsexual orientation and their gender variance. But it is important to note that at
this time the main focus of the gay liberation movement was on sexual, notgender, expression. Although trans people were involved in the movement, andoften stood out as the most dedicated and militant, the issue of gender variation
was often, unfortunately, sidelined and/or misunderstood.”
As the struggle was educating and raising consciousness, Workers World Party
was on the eve of making a historic contribution to gay liberation.
Next: 1972: Marxism is as Marxism does—WWP begins analysis of lesbian/gay
oppression.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Party-wide education campaign in 1972

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WWP searched for roots of lesbian/gay oppression

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Applying Marxist method in early 1970s

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WWP searched for roots oflesbian/gay oppression

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Lavender & red, part 82
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 12, 2006 8:23 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn educating the party as a whole on the importance of
supporting gay liberation, Workers World Party (WWP) founder
Sam Marcy noted in 1972 that, when it came to the origins anddevelopment of this oppression, “No special Marxist study ortheory has been advanced as far as we know.”
Marcy stressed, “Marxists, of course, should reject any variety of bourgeois
psychological theories. Most of these psychological approaches are in reality
extensions of the general bourgeois ideology.
“Marxists on the other hand are historical and dialectical materialists who seek
the basic causes of all social phenomena from material conditions, of which
psychology is a mere reflection. Marxists deal with social phenomena and thestruggle of classes.”
He referred to the contributions that the revolutionary Marxist movement had
made to the “national question.” He was referring to the Marxist examination
and articulation of the origins of racism, white supremacist ideology, oppressor
nation jingoism and xenophobia, the oppression of whole nations in the capitalistera, the super-oppression of peoples around the world in the colonial andimperialist epochs, and therefore the right to national self-determination.
Marcy also mentioned Marxist contributions to a materialist understanding of
women’s oppression—the “woman question.” Karl Marx’s lifelong collaborator,
Frederick Engels, wrote a foundational historical and theoretical contribution in
1884, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” Revolutionary
Marxists since then have continued to develop historical, theoretical andideological clarity as a contribution to the struggle of women for liberation fromthe additional burdens imposed on them in patriarchal, class-divided society.
It may jar some readers today to hear their oppression or other struggles referred
to as a “question”: the national question, the woman question, the gay question.
For more than a century, however, this formulation has been used to emphasize
the theoretical importance that revolutionary Marxists place on bringing battles
against oppression to the left-wing political agenda. Locating the earliest tendrilsof oppression in the development of class-divided societies is a profoundcontribution to eventually uprooting it.
Therefore, Marxists study when oppression arose and who profits from it in orderto deepen solidarity and support for liberation struggles and strengthen therevolutionary movement to overturn capitalism. Such an analysis also lays thebasis for understanding how a socialist economic system can create the material
basis for ultimately winning economic and social liberation from exploitation andoppression, and the extrication of humanity from millennia of divide-and-rule
ideology justifying these conditions.
Marcy noted, “We know of no theory which explains the gay question from the

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RespondWWP searched for roots of lesbian/gay oppression

point of view of the historical class struggle.”
He concluded, “If such a theory is developed, we will study it. For the time being,
however, we are not advancing any special theory regarding the gay question.”
Sam Marcy was not ending the subject, he was opening it.
‘Months of discussion followed’
Months of party dialogue followed. Bob McCubbin—a WWP leader who a year
earlier had founded the lesbian and gay caucus of the party youth organization,
Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF)—recalls that the continuing party
discussion focused on four goals.
The first was how to concretely demonstrate support for, and solidarity with, theautonomous gay liberation movement, of which WWP lesbian, gay and transmembers were also a part.
“Second,” McCubbin writes, “we wanted to deepen the party’s understanding of
the issues being raised by the gay liberation movement and, if possible, provide a
Marxist analysis of lesbian and gay oppression.
“Third, we felt a serious responsibility to bring the issues that this movement was
raising to the general progressive movement, which often amounted tochallenging homophobia within the movement.
“Fourth, we wanted to make the issue of gay liberation a working-class issue.
This was a formidable challenge in a period of relative labor quiescence.”
Many heterosexual party leaders took up these tasks together with their lesbian,gay, bi and trans comrades—no one with more vigor than WWP founding leader
Dorothy Ballan, affectionately addressed as “Dottie” by her comrades. Ballan left
her own communist imprint on the struggle for women’s liberation with theparty’s publication in January 1971 of her pamphlet “Feminism & Marxism.”
McCubbin remembers, “I had felt the need for a theoretical analysis of lesbian
and gay oppression from the time I read Engels’ ‘Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State.’ I remember very clearly reading [it] at this time, being
very excited by this historically based explanation of the oppression of women,
and feeling that there must be a parallel, historically based explanation for the
oppression of homosexuals.”
After the 1972 conference, McCubbin states, many of his heterosexual comrades
offered help. Dorothy Ballan in particular, he notes, assigned herself the task ofhelping to lay the basis for such an analysis.
“As I mentioned above,” McCubbin writes, “one of the goals the party set foritself was the education of the party membership and of our class on this issue.
So, in addition to informal discussions, Dottie produced a series of educational
programs based on Engels’ work, but also on our general view of oppressedpeople and their struggles as part of the overall struggle of our class. These
educationals were made available party-wide and were extremely helpful to me in
my effort to grapple theoretically with the issue.”In those educationals, Ballan developed the view that there was a connection
between women’s and lesbian/gay oppression.
McCubbin reminds today’s readers, “When I enter LGBT bookstores these days,
the wealth of material now available makes me dizzy. In those days, even though
I worked in one of the great academic libraries of the U.S. and spent many hours—when I was supposed to be working—instead searching for material relevant toa historical analysis of homosexual oppression, there was heartbreakingly little tobe found.
“I spent several years collecting material that might be relevant to a more
complete analysis. Many comrades knew I was working on such an analysis andhttp://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-82/[2/3/2011 5:11:45 PM]

WWP searched for roots of lesbian/gay oppression

brought relevant material to my attention.”
Together—lesbian and gay, bisexual and heterosexual, transgender andtranssexual—members of Workers World Party worked to dig for the ancienteconomic, social and political roots of modern lesbian and gay oppression.
What resulted made a historic contribution to the struggle for liberation fromsexual oppression, strengthened the communist left politically, and demonstrated
the power of Marxist tools in the hands of workers who know how to use them.
Next: Impact of “The Gay Question,” published in 1976.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Marxist analysis rocked U.S. left

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Lavender & red, part 83
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 19, 2006 9:45 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Workers World Party—a revolutionary communist party in the
United States made up of people of diverse nationalities andcountries of origin, ages and sexes, genders and sexualities—
published in 1976 the first known, fully developed Marxist
analysis of how, when and why state repression, social
oppression and widespread prejudice against same-sex love arose and developedin human society.
The pamphlet, written by gay WWP leader Bob McCubbin, was originallyentitled, “The Gay Question: A Marxist Appraisal.”
The title did not mean that fighting lesbian/gay oppression was a question for theauthor, who was himself an activist in the movement against the oppression, orfor Workers World Party as a whole.
The term “gay question” in the title honors more than a century of Marxist
analysis that has brought important social issues—including the battle against
forms of oppression above and beyond the overall economic exploitation of theworking class—to the fore of the political movement: the national question, thewoman question, the housing question. Those who have been introduced to avulgarization of Marxism offering merely a mechanistic and simplistic view of therelationship between economic and social life—economic determinism—will bepleased to know that.
“The Gay Question” established a foundation and a framework for understanding
why repression and oppression of people who love and/or desire people of thesame sex rose and developed in human history.
It was not the first time a sexually oppressed Marxist attempted to look backover the vista of history to find clues.
A century earlier homosexual British socialist Edward Carpenter began to dig
into history, sifting for answers.
The leaders of the late 19th and early 20th century German Homosexual
Emancipation movement did, too. Many of its leaders identified as socialists. At
the height of the movement—the eve of fascism in Germany—the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee had compiled more than 12,000 books that included
cross-cultural and cross-historical references about same-sex love and gendervariance. How many analyses were researched and penned in that precious
archive before German fascist forces—on their march to power to save and serve
big capital—burned it to the ground?
Gay communist Harry Hay founded the first-known widespread grassroots gay
movement in California at the height of the Cold War witch-hunt in the UnitedStates. He also brought his Marxist tools to history and unearthed a wealth of
information. But Hay, who had to leave the Communist Party USA in order tohttp://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-83/[2/3/2011 5:12:07 PM]

RespondMarxist analysis rocked U.S. left

openly do gay mass organizing, was later driven out of that activist role by gay
anti-communists. Many of Hay’s public historical presentations appear to be lostto the record.
Marxist analyses about the violent colonial and imperialist suppression ofindigenous sexualities and genders may have been developed. But if so, attempts
at cultural genocide by the occupier nation prevented international publicationand circulation.
Part of what was so significant about the 1975-1976 Marxist analysis in the
United States written by McCubbin was that he was a leading member ofWorkers World Party and he didn’t have to leave the party to publicly formulate a
Marxist analysis of lesbian/gay oppression. He had the whole party behind him
and behind the politics of the book.
While one member of the organization authored the pamphlet, it represented thecontributions of the entire party.
Looking back, McCubbin states, “In the fall of 1975, I finally felt I had, at least
minimally, what I needed and sat down to write.” He recalls finishing the firstedition of the manuscript in early winter.
McCubbin gave copies of the analysis, which so many comrades of all sexualities
had contributed to in ways small and large, to WWP founders Sam Marcy andDorothy Ballan, and to Fred Goldstein, today a contributing editor to Workers
World newspaper. McCubbin said the feedback from these comrades—”whose
profound grounding in the science of Marxism and whose analytical abilities I
have always admired”—was extremely positive.
The impact of this Marxist analysis on the left-wing movement, and lesbian andgay self-identified radicals and revolutionaries within it, was first politically felt
just one month later, in a pre-publication edition of the pamphlet.
A delegation of lesbian/gay/transgender and heterosexual members of Workers
World Party traveled by bus from New York City to Chicago through a blizzard to
take part in the January 1976 “Hard Times” conference. As part of their politicalwork at the conference, they sold all 300 xeroxed copies of the pamphlet they’dbrought with them.
What made the defense of the lesbian and gay liberation struggle at that event
particularly important, McCubbin emphasizes, “was that this conference was agathering of most of what remained of what was called ‘the New Left’—the radical
youth movement of the late sixties and early seventies.”
It was not an easy task to politically intervene in the conference with a strong
Marxist call to defend lesbian and gay liberation as a dynamically integral andnecessary part of battling capitalism—economically and socially, politically andideologically.
Many white activists there, even those who were lesbian or gay themselves, tried
to argue that this oppression was of “secondary” or “tertiary” importance in theoverall struggle for liberation.
“It’s hard to understand,” McCubbin notes, “but even at this late date—1976—
there was still strong resistance within the progressive movement toacknowledging the legitimacy of the struggles of lesbians and gay men for fullequality.”
Workers World Party’s principled position as part ofand in solidarity with the lesbian/gay liberation move-ment of the early and mid1970s strongly influenced both the left wing of the communist movement and theleft wing of the autonomous movement for sexual liberation.
Next: ‘The Gay Question’: Blazing history’s trails

http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-83/[2/3/2011 5:12:07 PM]

Marxist analysis rocked U.S. left

E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Marxist analysis blazed history’s trails

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Lavender & red, part 84
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 5, 2007 9:10 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

For more than 30 years I have looked for an opportunity to
publicly thank Bob McCubbin—a white gay brother; intrepid
activist/organizer against repression and oppression; workingclass intellectual; grassroots historian; dialectical and historicalmaterialist; a revolutionary; a communist; my comrade—for
writing “The Gay Question: A Marxist Appraisal” in the autumn and winter of1975.
I can close my eyes and remember, in visceral detail, the moment I began readinga xeroxed, pre-publication copy on a bitter wintry night in late January 1976.
I was curled up in a bus seat on an 18-hour ride from New York to Chicago. We
revolutionary activists were slowly making our way to the “Hard Times”
conference in a blizzard, without heat. The glass window near my cheek was slickwith ice.
In a small cone of light, I read these words, and my eyes filled with tears: “Antihomosexual prejudices have not always existed and need not continue to exist in
the future.”
I cried as I read the rest of the xeroxed manuscript, all night long, moved byemotional release and ideological exhilaration.
As a young blue-collar lesbian butch, I had survived growing up in the 1950s
Cold War ideological and state witch hunt against communists and militants,
against same-sex love and against any body or gender expression that sketchedoutside the lines of 1950s’ Dick-and-Jane gender education.
If I had been taught anything at all about Marxism in my high school classes, it
was that that worldview was dogma, moldering and hoary with irrelevance, andthat factory workers like me wouldn’t be able to understand a word of it.
But in these pages, I found my life, my love, my class, a genuine basis forsolidarity with everyone battling oppression—here and around the planet—and amaterialist compass that pointed the direction toward liberation.
Marxist vantage point of history“Even before the formation of the Gay Caucus of Youth Against War & Fascism in
1971,” McCubbin wrote, “our gay and straight comrades were actively supporting
the struggle against gay oppression. We didn’t need a formal position paper tohave it made clear to us that gay people were oppressed and that their struggle
should be supported.
“Nevertheless, it is important to bring communist understanding to every social
phenomenon and class consciousness to every struggle. These are the objectivesof the present book.”

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-84/[2/3/2011 5:12:29 PM]

RespondMarxist analysis blazed history’s trails“To understand how homosexuality has come to be viewed the way it is today,”he wrote, “it is important to examine the changing historical periods and theirimpact on sexual attitudes in general as well as on homosexuality.”
Every phenomenon has a history, McCubbin stressed.
“[D]evelopment and transformation are characteristic of everything that exists.
We believe that the uncovering of the history of homosexual oppression will be
helpful in bringing that oppression to an end.”
The pamphlet focused on societies in what is termed the Western world. “Thereason for this,” McCubbin explained in the 1976 publication, “is that the
information available to us concerning homosexuality in non-Western societies issparse and often subject to disparate interpretations. It does seem clear,
however, that nowhere else have attitudes towards homosexuality been as
profoundly negative as they are in Western society.”
The Marxist vantage point in this pamphlet lifted me up to a mountaintop
overlooking the rolling development of hundreds of thousands of years of humanhistory: pre-class cooperative societies, chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism.
From there I could see for the first time that during the major portion of that
long, long history, human beings worked in group cooperation on every
continent. That simple but profound fact created social relations very different
than those in capitalist societies today.
Thinking back, that was the most startling realization of all for me in thispamphlet. It meant that human beings were not hard-wired as a species forcompetition and greed, cruelty and violence. Society had not always been divided
by classes, driven by avarice. Social life had changed many times based on theoverall economic organization of society.
No wonder my high school facts-by-rote history education concealed thisparticularly earthshaking fact like a dense fog. The understanding it awakens is
downright “subversive.” If things have not always been the way they are now,then they can, and will, profoundly change again.
Next: Surplus produced bosses, lords and masters
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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1976 WWP pamphlet found answers in Marxism

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Lavender & red, part 85
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 10, 2007 11:15 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

The profound and meaningful contribution of Workers World
Party’s 1976 publication “The Gay Question: A Marxist
Appraisal” was that it examined the roots of modern lesbian andgay oppression from a historical materialist standpoint.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Marxists are often accused of having a worldview that ignores oppression,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

focusing solely on the economic battle between the owning classes and thelaboring classes.
However, “The Gay Question” drew on more than a century of revolutionary
Marxist scientific approach to understand how oppression arose and what it willtake to eradicate it in all its forms. In doing so, the analysis widened anddeepened the application and contributions of Marxism as a science of humaneconomic development and the social relations it has produced.
McCubbin did not have to break fresh soil, he tilled it. Just as Charles Darwin’s
analysis of evolution created a new scientific understanding of species
development, Engels and his life-long collaborator Karl Marx laid thegroundwork for a scientific basis to understand social development.
Engels’ groundbreaking 1884 work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State” used anthropological evidence from North America, Africa, Asia
and Australia to conclude that women have not always been oppressed.
Engels deduced that social interaction was not governed by repression,
domination or exploitation of one group of people by another during the long
history of cooperative societies that preceded economic divisions between havesand have-nots.
The necessity of early humans to band together for group survival also createdvery different “family” relations than today. Kinship and group living
arrangements were based on female descent, not male. The overall role offemales in social organization resulted in respect for their contributions.
As labor efficiency, tools and technique developed, however, human societies
accumulated a surplus—more than was required for immediate consumption.
The struggle that led to private ownership of this surplus, which had been
produced by collective human labor, transformed social life.
“The overthrow of mother-right”—matrilineal cooperative society—Engels
summed up, “was the world historic defeat of the female sex.”
In the more than 120 years since he wrote this, Marxism has been a powerful toolin the hands of Black, Latin@, Native, Asian and white activists for women’sliberation in this country—communists, socialist feminists, materialist feminists
and other revolutionaries.
And it has been a powerful ideological and theoretical weapon worldwide.

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-85/[2/3/2011 5:12:57 PM]

Respond

1976 WWP pamphlet found answers in Marxism

African-Caribbean Marxist revolutionary activist, theoretician andinternationalist Walter Rodney stressed in 1975 that those who try to relegate
Marxism to an outdated European ideology do not take the following into
account:“That it is already the ideology of 800 million Chinese people; that it is alreadythe ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and to
the defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North
Korea to transform itself from a backward, quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain
into an independent industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has
been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis fordevelopment in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which wasused by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the African
continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a
new society.” (“Yes to Marxism” pamphlet, February 1986, People’s Progressive
Party of Guyana)
Roots of sexual oppression
McCubbin presented evidence of acceptance of homosexuality in pre-classsocieties on far-flung continents. The development of private ownership of the
new storehouse of surplus “not only brought forth economic inequalities that set
the stage for class society but also had the effect of replacing the matriarchal
order with one dominated by men.”“The new property relations were,” he emphasized, “insupportable andunworkable without consequent changes in kinship relations, sexual relations,and religious attitudes and practices.”
McCubbin traced the historic rise of state repression of sexuality and antihomosexual patriarchal religious bigotry to the cleavage of society into economic
classes.
He laid a historical materialist foundation for understanding how chattel slavery
came into being, why the feudal Church unleashed the bloody Inquisition andhow these phases in human economic development increasingly repressed andoppressed sexuality.
Contributions to trans theory and activism
Of course the 1976 pamphlet—and even its reprint 17 years later as “The Roots ofLesbian and Gay Oppression: A Marxist View”—is now dated in some of its
language and peripheral concepts—true of all scientific discoveries which help
pave the road forward.
McCubbin’s analysis was ahead of its time in including focus on the honored
status in cooperative societies of gender-variance and in its defense of the rights
of modern transsexual women and men to live in the sex that is “home.”
The analysis was weakened, however, by two realities. First, the moderntransgender and transsexual movement in the U.S. had not yet developed. And
sex-reassignment programs only accepted transsexual individuals whose sexuality
would be heterosexual in post-transition. This skewed an understanding of thefact that sexual diversity is as much a fact among transsexual men and women as
everywhere else in society.
Workers World Party continued to struggle to actively defend transsexual andtransgender people against oppression, through banners at demonstrations,articles, leaflets and pamphlets that culminated in the 1992 publication of “Trans
Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come.”
The entire text of that pamphlet has been reprinted in two anthologies:“Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women’s Lives,” editedby Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (Routledge, 1997) and “TheTransgender Studies Reader,” edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-85/[2/3/2011 5:12:57 PM]

1976 WWP pamphlet found answers in Marxism(Routledge, 2006).
The later anthology described the 1992 pamphlet as “small but influential,”
adding that, “It is an important foundational text of contemporary transgendertheory and activism.”
The pamphlet, and the larger book it inspired—”Transgender Warriors: Making
History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman” (Beacon 1996)—made their own
contribution to Marxism. The historical materialist analysis offered compellingand consistent evidence that although there was an overall division of labor
between females and males in pre-class societies, sex reassignment, intersexuality
and gender diversity played an important social role on every continent.
Like evolutionary science, when Marxist understanding of human economic
development and the social organization that arises from it is updated, this only
strengthens its analysis, despite “creationist” attacks of every ideological stripe.
Workers World Party has continued to stress that battles against oppression are
not “secondary” to the class struggle, they are a form of class struggle,
particularly when they target the capitalist class.
Feinberg is author of “Transgender Liberation” and “Transgender Warriors.”
Next: Defending the Cuban Revolution!
E-mail: lfeinberg @workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-85/[2/3/2011 5:12:57 PM]

1970s Cold War gay-bashers condemn Cuba

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Lavender & red, part 86

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 20, 2007 7:20 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Bob McCubbin, a young gay male leader in Workers World Party
during the rise of the early gay liberation movement, recalls, “Byhaving regular articles in Workers World, attending gay protests,
producing and distributing flyers addressing lesbian and gay
issues, giving extra visibility to gay comrades, organizing branchmeetings on related issues, and doing outreach to the lesbian and gay
communities, we were successful in attracting many lesbian and gay youth to ourranks in the early and middle 1970s.
“But this work was not without difficulties,” McCubbin says. He remembers, inparticular, how a stream of articles in the big-business media opened up a
campaign against Cuba. Many of the articles focused on the imperialist chargethat gay and lesbian Cubans were being mistreated on the island after the 1959
revolution.
The reality is that the Cuban Revolution—which seized state power on an islandin which class society, colonialism and imperialism had woven prejudices andrepression against same-sex love tightly into the fabric of life—has madetremendous advances for men who love men and women who love women, as
well as the struggle against racism and sexism.
The U.S.-led blockade is designed not only to economically strangle the Cuban
population, but to keep an understanding of what a revolution can achieve interms of social progress from lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people living in
the imperialist citadel.
The imperialist propaganda machine doesn’t care a whit about the lives of gay
and lesbian Cubans. They want to crush the revolution and re-enslave the entire
population.
But first, it is impossible to skip over the staggering hypocrisy of U.S. imperialism
and its media propaganda machinery. They don’t care a whit about lesbian andgay, bisexual and trans lives. They want to crush the revolution and re-enslave
the entire population.
Their political duplicity was obvious on the domestic front. In the 1950s, theseCold War capitalists had escalated a state witch hunt against every expression ofhomosexuality and transgender under the guise of a “Lavender Scare.”Same-sex love was still illegal across the United States. Gay men, lesbians and all
gender-variant people faced police raids and entrapment, prison, torture, forced
institutionalization, rape and lynchings, loss of jobs, homes and loved ones. (SeeLavender & Red series, parts 26-28, www.workers.org.)
But by the 1970s—while cops were still raiding bars after Stonewall and same-sex
love was still illegal—the imperialists suddenly became champions of gay rights,
anywhere except on their own soil.

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-86/[2/3/2011 5:13:17 PM]

Respond1970s Cold War gay-bashers condemn Cuba

The big-business spin made it seem as though the Cuban Revolution was awellspring of anti-gay prejudice.
“Absent the persistent and pervasive climate of anti-communism,” McCubbin
stresses, “such attacks would have been laughable, emanating as they did from acountry where gay-baiting was an indispensable political tool and where scarcely
a week went by without the murder, somewhere within the country, of atransgender person.
“But since the anti-Cuba propaganda campaign was relentless and did have anegative effect on many people, including many lesbian and gay youth, we felt aserious responsibility to answer and challenge these articles, and we did, just as
we conscientiously defended the other socialist countries, and in particular theSoviet Union, from the steady stream of anti-communist attacks.
“So we were often challenged by progressive youth, gay and straight, ‘You
support Cuba?’ The more serious listened carefully to what we had to say inCuba’s defense, but we were also badmouthed frequently by anti-communist
elements in the gay movement.”
An understanding of the Cuban Revolution, and the hand it was dealt by
imperialism, is as important today as it was then. It demonstrates what arevolution can achieve, even when surrounded and under siege by imperialism.
The truth to begin with is this: Communists did not bring anti-homosexual
prejudice to the Americas. The development of class societies and colonialism
did.
Next: Arrival of colonialism in the Americas—the real “Apocalypto.”
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-86/[2/3/2011 5:13:17 PM]

Colonialism: the real ‘Apocalypto’

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Anti-gay, anti-trans Inquisition in the Americas

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‘Apocalypto’00

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Lavender & red, part 87
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 26, 2007 6:11 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

From Indigenous oral histories, passed down through millennia,
to the hostile accounts kept by colonial record keepers, a great
deal of evidence exists to show that sex/gender variance andhomosexuality were part of the fabric of early cooperative
societies in the Americas—from pole to pole.
What is significant about the abundant European colonial records—whether
military, missionary or anthropological—is not their perception, objectivity or
accuracy in describing life among the diverse Native societies in this hemisphere.
It’s that these observations by the Europeans and their reactions tohomosexuality and gender/sex variance in Native cultures—reflected in terms
like “devilish,” “sinful,” “perverted,” “abominable,” “unnatural,” “heinous,”“disgusting,” “lewd”—reveal how different were the societies they came from.
The “observed” were peoples who lived in societies that were either communal orwere in the early stages of class division.
The “observers” came as military,commercial or intellectual servantsof entrenched European rulingclasses that were expanding beyond
their own hemisphere to steal thegolden fruits of the Native peoples’labor.
In Europe, where most communal
lands had been seized by slaveowners and then feudal landlords,
state laws and repression against
same-sex love and sex/gendervariance had been part of thiscenturies-old class warfare.

From south to northColonial observations about
Indigenous societies in thishemisphere are copious. Thosewith imperial aspirations studied
the peoples they sought tomilitarily conquer and enslave.

A 1594 engraving of Balboa’s Inquisition
terror in Panama against homosexuality
and gender/sex variance—in this case,being torn apart by dogs.
Engraving : New York Public Library

When a European colonial expedition in 1576 reached the lands of the
Tupinamba people in what is now northeastern Brazil, they found female-bodied
hunters and warriors who were accepted by the other Native men. Recalling the
Greek Amazon warriors, the Europeans dubbed the river that flowed throughhttp://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-87/[2/3/2011 5:13:42 PM]

RespondColonialism: the real ‘Apocalypto’that area the “River of the Amazons.”
Narrating his first trip down another river, now called the Mississippi, Jesuit
Jacques Marquette described in the 17th century how, among the Illinois andNadouessi, he found people who today would be referred to as Two-Spirit.
Marquette wrote that they were “summoned to the Councils, and nothing can bedecided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of Leading an
Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous—That is to say, for Spirits—or personsof Consequence.”
French missionary Joseph François Lafitau condemned the Two-Spirit people hefound in societies along the western Great Lakes, Louisiana and Florida, butthese Native peoples did not share his prejudice. He wrote in 1724 that “theyparticipate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life
causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order.”But in areas where ruling classes had emerged and consolidated their territory,
sometimes after the violent overturn of neighboring communal societies, these
attitudes had changed.
Historian Max Mejía wrote, “In the Aztec culture of pre-Hispanic Mexico, thedominant culture at the time the Spanish arrived, the treatment of sodomy was
not exactly favorable. On the contrary, the Aztecs had very harsh laws against it,punishing the practice severely with public execution for those who were caught.
Punishment affected mainly males, but women were not exempt.” (“Mexican
Pink,” Different Rainbows, Gay Men’s Press)
Friar Bartolomé de las Casas noted that among the Aztecs, “The man who dressed
as a woman, or the woman found dressed with men’s clothes, died because ofthis.”“However,” Mejía explained, “there were exceptions to the Aztecs’ rules against
homosexuality. Most historians agree that the practice was tolerated when it took
place in religious rituals.”Mejía added, “[T]he Aztecs ruled over a vast array of peoples, who had different
cultural histories. Several of these did not necessarily share the Aztecs’ vision ofhomosexuality and its practice. Some even showed signs of singular tolerance
towards it in their communities. One of these was the Zapotec culture, derived
from the Mayans and located in what is now the state of Oaxaca.”
He emphasized, “[W]hat I am trying to show is that in pre-Hispanic Mexico,alongside the rigid Aztecs, there existed—and there exist still today—other, more
flexible cultures more tolerant of homosexuality.”

The real “Apocalypto”
When it came to sexuality, Mejía stated: “[T]he Mayans had a more favorable
view of diversity within the community, which suggests greater tolerance ofhomosexuality, above all when it concerned religious rituals and artistic
practices.”
Recently, director Mel Gibson made a movie called “Apocalypto” about the
Mayan empire, as experienced by a family from a nearby hunting-gatheringsociety being chased by its warriors.
Gibson’s movie ideologically serves those in the U.S. who yearn for a Fourth
Reich, much as Leni Riefenstahl’s films did for imperialist Nazi capital.
“Apocalypto,” which depicts the Mayans as inherently blood-thirsty, is being
screened in the citadel of the most blood-thirsty imperialist power in history. It
arrives in chain theaters in the U.S. at a time when Lou Dobbs and other whitesupremacist propagandists are pitching classical fascist appeals to the middleclass in this country to view Mexican@ immigrants as “the enemy within.”
It also airs as U.S. finance capital has unleashed its war machine to recolonize

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/lavender-red-87/[2/3/2011 5:13:42 PM]

Colonialism: the real ‘Apocalypto’

Iraq and Afghanistan under the banner of a “war on terror.”“Apocalypto” is pro-imperialist propaganda, making colonialism synonymouswith salvation. The film ends with the Spanish fleet appearing on the horizon tosave the day.
But when the lights come up, it is colonialism and imperialism that are the real
historical “Apocalyptos.”

Colonialism brings Inquisition
The patriarchs of colonial power violently restructured the Indigenous societies
they militarily conquered—in economic organization, kinship, family/community
organization, sexualities, gender and sex roles—in order to best facilitate theirenslavement, exploitation and oppression.
Mejía stated that with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, “An absolutist
discourse enveloped homosexuality in the concepts of ‘infamous sin,’ ‘sin against
nature,’ corruption of the soul and alliance with the devil. They punished thepractice without distinctions, among both lay people and clerics.”
This religious ideology and the ethos of male supremacy, he said, corresponded
to the war-driven European social order.
“Furthermore,” Mejía concludes, “the conquerors treated ‘sodomy’ as a special
Indian sin and hunted it down and punished it as such on a grand scale. They
orchestrated crusades like the Holy Inquisition, which began burning sodomites
at the stake as a special occasion, as in the memorable auto-da-fé of San Lázaro
in Mexico City.”This bloody crusade of terror is confirmed in the colonizers’ own words.
Antonio de la Calancha, a Spanish official in Lima, wrote that during Vasco
Núñez de Balboa’s incursion across Panama, he “saw men dressed like women;
Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the king and forty others to beeaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard.”
When the Spanish invaded the Antilles and Louisiana, “[T]hey found men
dressed as women who were respected by their societies. Thinking they werehermaphrodites, or homosexuals, they slew them.”
Native peoples throughout this hemisphere fought back.
Conquistador Nuño de Guzmán noted in 1530 after a battle that the last
Indigenous person taken prisoner, who had “fought most courageously, was aman in the habit of a woman.”Next: Colonialism, imperialism shackle Cuba.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

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Bodies shackled and repressed

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Colonial period in Cuba

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Lavender & red, part 88
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 4, 2007 9:25 PM

Colonialism, and later imperialism, brought anti-homosexual andanti-trans laws and state repression to Cuba. The deep bite of
the knotted lash of oppressor ideology backed it up.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAFor over 300 years, Spanish colonialism shackled the laboring
population of Cuba, literally claiming ownership of the lives, labor and bodies of
millions.
The enslaved toilers were from the Indigenous peoples of the island, decimatedby the colonialist forces that washed up on their shores, and also African peoples—survivors of mass kidnappings from their homelands and of the Middle Passage
holocaust.
Using Bibles as well as bullets, those who bled the labor of the enslaved classliterally “laid down the law”—reshaping and regulating every aspect of life for theenslaved class, including economic structure, kinship recognition, marriage,organization of the sexes, sexuality and gender expression.
Colonial terror, under the banner of religious law, enforced the brutal remodelingof economic and social life among peoples from diverse societies that thecolonialists, and later imperialists, sought to conquer and exploit.
The following historical footnote underscores the importance the colonial
occupiers placed on eradicating the “pecado nefando”—the “nefarious sin” ofsame-sex love and/or gender/sex variance.
In order to petition Havana’s town council in 1597 for his freedom, an enslaved
man argued that he had “rendered a valuable service by discovering anddenouncing those who had committed the ‘pecado nefando.’” (Alejandro de laFuente, Law and History Review)Santería was one form of resistance to colonial cultural imperialism. It used thetrappings of Roman Catholicism to shelter African religious beliefs and rituals—
which make room for very different sex/gender expression.
Havana: cross-dressing labor leader arrested
In the mid-1600s, the Spanish Captain General who ruled over the rural andurban enslaved population sentenced 20 “effeminate sodomites” to be burned todeath.
Others were exiled to Cayo Cruz, a small island in Havana Bay, which wasthereafter referred to in Spanish by an anti-gay slur.
Historian Amara Das Wilhelm added, “Similar disparaging attitudes towardhomosexuals were expressed in a 1791 Havana newspaper article entitled ‘A
Critical Letter About the Man-Woman,’ which condemned the effeminate
sodomites that apparently thrived in eighteenth-century Havana.” (The Gay andhttp://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-88/[2/3/2011 5:14:23 PM]

RespondBodies shackled and repressed

Lesbian Vaishnava Association online)
U.S. imperialism militarily occupied Cuba for four years, beginning in 1898.
From 1902 until the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Wall Street ruled by establishingdictatorships to squeeze the island’s economy in its fist, restructuring Cuba for
exploitation as a giant sugar plantation.
Laws against same-sex love and gender variance and state repression continued
to be used as a cudgel for economic, social and political control.
Cross-dressing Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo
was arrested in Havana in July 1915 for wearing men’s
clothing.
Capetillo was a single mother, a revolutionary, and a muchloved and respected labor organizer.
After supporting the 1905 farm workers’ strike in the northern
region of Puerto Rico, she became a reader in a tobacco plant,
an industry whose workers were among the most politically
conscious. She also spoke in public about the needs of working
women, including the right to sex education. She strongly
believed that sexuality was not the business of the church or
the state.
Luisa Capetillo
As a full-time labor organizer after 1912, Capetillo traveled extensively,
particularly to Havana, Tampa and New York because they were hubs of thetobacco workers’ movement.
In Cuba, Capetillo actively supported a sugar cane workers’ strike organized by
the Anarchist Federation of Cuba.
The Cuban government tried unsuccessfully to deport her as an agitator.
Then it focused on her wearing of a “man’s” suit, tie and fedora in public tocharge her with “causing a scandal.”Capetillo fought the charge, arguing in court that no law prevented her fromwearing men’s garb, and that such clothing was appropriate for the changing roleof women in society, and that she had worn similar clothing in the streets ofPuerto Rico and Mexico without state intervention.
Capetillo won her court battle—the judge ordered the charges dropped. News ofher victory spread in articles in all the major newspapers in Cuba and Puerto
Rico.
Historian Aurora Levins Morales concluded, “The incident received massive press
coverage, and Capetillo used it as an opportunity to attack conventional morality,with its rigid sex roles, and women’s imprisonment within it.”
In 1938, the Cuban Penal Code—the “Public Ostentation Law”—was enacted. Thislaw mandated state penalties for “habitual homosexual acts,” public displays ofsame-sex affection and/or gender-variant dress and self-expression.
Next: Gambling, narcotics, prostitution industries in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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Bodies shackled and repressed

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1950s Havana: Imperialist sexploitation

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 11, 2007 7:34 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

For 400 years of Cuba’s history, the social organization and state
regulation of the sexes, gender expression and sexualities was—as among all occupied and colonized peoples—in thrall to thebrutal systems of exploitation by semi-feudal landlords, capitalist
bosses and imperialist finance capitalists.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, By the mid-20th century, the impoverishment sweeping the island was the
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

outgrowth of imperialism’s conversion of the economy into sugar and citrus
plantations and nickel mines that shackled the rural laboring population to thesoil and the earth below it.
Havana exerted a gravitational pull on those who cut cane from sunup to
sundown. By the 1950s, the promise of jobs attracted hundreds of thousands of
impoverished peasants of all sexualities, genders and sexes to the urban capital,
the largest city on the island.
Many tens of thousands whose sexuality or gender expression had made thempublicly vulnerable and without privacy in rural towns and villages foundemployment in Havana. Capitalist organized crime bosses ran an interlocking
directorate of large-scale prostitution, tourism, gambling and drug distribution in
the capital city.
In the 1950s, McCarthyite repression in the U.S.—including the Puritanicalpurges and state repression carried out under the banner of fighting a “LavenderMenace”— spurred the expansion of this lucrative offshore capitalist sex-drugsgambling industry in Havana for the rich and powerful to escape the Cold War
climate.
“Not surprisingly, then,” researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich
stressed, “Cuban homosexuals had preferential hiring treatment in the Havana
tourist sector in order to meet the demands” of U.S. businessmen and brass.
Arguelles and Rich published their extensively researched report, entitled“Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes Toward an Understandingof the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience,” in the summer of 1984.
The two researchers added that the illegal prostitution industry was also created
for the patriarchs and scions of the Cuban elite, who sought feminine malebodied youth and adults.
In the towns and villages, sexuality, gender and the organization of the sexes
were in the servitude of patriarchal feudal social relations. In the urban capital,
sex was reduced to the nexus of patriarchal capitalist relations.
Arguelles and Rich explained: “Even in the Havana of the 1950s, everyday life
was not easy for the working-class or petty-bourgeois homosexual.
Unemployment was high and had been steadily increasing throughout the
decade. The scarcity of productive occupations demanded a strictly closeted

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Respond1950s Havana: Imperialist sexploitation

occupational life. For all women, and especially for lesbians, employment almost
invariably entailed continual sexual harassment.”
Men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women were caught up
in the dragnet of the illegal economy.
Arguelles and Rich noted: “Apart from employment realities, social pressures
made thousands of pre-revolutionary homosexuals part of this underworld. Evenhomosexuals such as students (who were differently placed) were integrated into
this subculture through the bars that they frequented: the St. Michel, the Dirty
Dick, El Gato Tuerto.” Most of these bars were owned by crime bosses.
The researchers emphasized, “The commodification of homosexual desire in the
Havana underworld and in the bourgeois homosexual underground during the
pre-revolutionary era, however, did not produce a significant toleration ofhomosexual life-styles in the larger social arena.
Homosexual and gender/sex variant Cubans met with violence and harassmentin the above-ground industries and within the patriarchal family structure. “Iflegal sanctions and official harassment were rare,” Arguelles and Rich explained,“this tolerance was due less to social acceptance than to overriding considerationsof profit and the economic interests of the underworld that dominated the Cuban
political apparatus.”“The consumer structure of the Havana underworld never spawned a ‘gay culture’or ‘gay sensibility’ even in strictly commercial terms, due to its isolation from themainstream of social life and the degree of guilt and self-hatred afflicting its
members.”
Arguelles and Rich concluded that Santería—African-Cuban religious beliefs andpractices that challenge the colonialist and imperialist sex/gender and sexuality
systems—has been a “favored form of gender transcendence for many Cuban
homosexual men and lesbians.”
Next: Cuban Revolution defeats imperialist mega-giant.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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Why many Cuban gay men and lesbians left after 1959

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Unweaving the lies

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Why many Cuban gay men
and lesbians left after 1959

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Lavender & red, part 90
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 17, 2007 7:47 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Significant numbers of Cuban homosexual males and females,
including many who were transgender, began leaving the island
immediately after the July 26 Movement overthrew the hated
U.S.-backed Batista regime in 1959. The U.S. big-business media
pointed their microphones at counter-revolutionary claims thatanti-gay terror drove them to flee.
This reactionary political propaganda was a cover for a dirty war by imperialism
to carry out “regime change” in Cuba. It also was aimed at demoralizing themultinational, revolutionary wing of the young gay liberation movement in the
U.S.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThis political and ideological campaign to paint Cuba as a cruel and oppressive
dictatorship was crafted by Cold War capitalists who were themselves carryingout a ruthless domestic war against same-sex love and gender variance.
Before the Cuban Revolution, U.S. finance capital had installed two iron-fisted
dictatorships in order to grease the gears of exploitation: Gerardo Machado in
the late 1920s and Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. For a cut of the profits, thesebrutal regimes served the rule of U.S. sugar, nickel and citrus companies andmade it possible for the imperialists to own the banks, telephone and electric
systems and big retail stores.
U.S. crime bosses ran the lucrative large-scale sex industry and interconnectedcasinos and drug distribution. Tens of thousands of Cuban women, men andchildren of all sexualities served the desires of wealthy and powerful tourists
from the U.S. and on the island.
Cold War anti-gay and anti-trans purges and persecution in the U.S. created thedemand for an offshore prostitution network in Havana that exploited large
numbers of men and boys, the majority of them feminine, for profit.
The revolution that took state power on Jan. 1, 1959, shut down the sex industry
and casinos. The workers and peasants of Cuba faced a massive task—
restructuring their economy to meet the needs of all, which meant creating jobs,
land reform, food, clothing, housing, medical care, basic literacy and higher
education.
This work had to be done while imperialism tried to take away every tool througheconomic strangulation, military encirclement and siege.
Seeking scientific understanding
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich made an important analyticalcontribution in the mid-1980s to understanding why many Cuban homosexuals
left after the revolution—and why many stayed.
The two researchers took a scientific approach, accruing data through historical

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RespondWhy many Cuban gay men and lesbians left after 1959

analysis, survey, field and experiential methods. They interpreted the results“within a theoretical framework drawn from lesbian-feminist and critical gay
scholarship and the politico-economic and phenomenological study of Cuban
social life.”
Between 1979 and 1984 Arguelles and Rich interviewed Cubans on the island andémigrés in the United States, Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico. The report on the
research, titled “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes Toward an
Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience,” was firstpublished in the summer of 1984 in “Signs, A Journal of Women in Culture andSociety.”
The two researchers said their goals were to reveal the nature and dynamics of
the Cuban homosexual experience in order to put the questions of same-sex lovein Cuba, migration and resettlement in context.
They also sought to develop greater understanding of same-sex love in what wereat that time referred to as Third World countries and communities, and tofurther develop theory “on the nature of the relationships between the structuresof sexuality and the corresponding structures of socialist organization.”
This is what they found.
Attempt to discredit the revolution
The role of economic incentive and individual ambition—powerful stimulants for
all migration from poorer to wealthier countries—was seldom considered when it
came to Cuban homosexual émigrés.
Arguelles and Rich wrote, “The more structuralist explanations for international
population movements, which stress the role of capital and of capitalist states inorganizing migratory flows from less developed to more developed economies,
have yet to be invoked in the interpretation of gay migration from Cuba.”
Washington had passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1952, which
specifically mandated blocking entry or expelling “sexually deviant” immigrants.
But when it came to Cuban homosexuals, Arguelles and Rich noted, “Then, as
now, anticommunism won out.”
Wealthy homosexual male Cubans, who before the revolution had spent extensive
periods abroad, left the island for good. “Emigration began immediately. The
promoters and overlords of the Havana underworld along with large numbers of
their displaced workers (many of them homosexuals) headed for Miami. Many
lesbians who had liaisons with members of the bourgeoisie followed their maleprotectorate to Miami, as did gay men who had worked for U.S. firms or had
done domestic work for the native bourgeoisie.”
The two researchers point out that Cuban “refugee” testimony became “the main
source for evaluation of Cuban gay life, despite knowledge of the pressures onémigrés to testify to political persecution in their country of origin in order toattain the legal and economic advantages of refugee status in their new country.”
These narratives were then amplified as part of an imperialist propaganda
campaign calculated to neutralize “badly needed support for the Cuban
revolution among its natural allies,” Arguelles and Rich wrote. In addition, thepropaganda campaign “legitimated the presence in traditionally liberation circles
of some of the more reactionary elements within the Cuban émigré population.”
They added that it obscured changing realities of gay life in Cuba as part of theongoing revolutionary process, made the historical inheritance of the prerevolutionary political economy and homophobia seem irrelevant, and helped to
disguise the oppression and exploitation of gay and lesbian Cubans living inémigré enclaves.
The campaign also distanced “gay activists in capitalist mainstream culture fromhttp://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-90/[2/3/2011 5:15:03 PM]

Why many Cuban gay men and lesbians left after 1959

minority gays involved in the liberation movements of their respective countries
and national communities.”
And lastly, this scapegoating of Cuba “has made the growing number ofprogressive gay émigrés who criticize but also support the revolution into living
contradictions: invisible to gay liberation forces but easy targets for thehomophobic anti-Castro army in exile.”
While many left the island, many others stayed.
Arguelles and Rich concluded, “Other homosexuals, especially those fromworking-class backgrounds or students from petty-bourgeois families, worked tointegrate themselves into the revolution.”
They stressed, “For these homosexuals, class and class interests were perceived as
more elemental aspects of their identity than homosexual behavior. And therevolution spoke to these interests and this identity.”
There was work for all, free health care, free education, affordable housing andtremendous cultural growth.
Cuban lesbians, some of whom had played an important role in the prerevolutionary urban struggle, also benefited from the great gains being made by
and for women.
Next: Homosexuality, revolution and counter-revolution.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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Early Cuban Revolution paved road to sexual liberation

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Lavender & red, part 91
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 21, 2007 10:49 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The first revolutionary step toward the liberation of sexuality,
gender expression and oppressed sexes in Cuba was thedismantling of the sex-for-profit industry and interconnectedgambling dens and drug-distribution networks. This concrete,material first act by the Cuban Revolution unshackled humanbodies, desire and gender expression from capitalist commodification,commercialization and exploitation.
For almost half a millennium the island had been manacled by colonialism,
capitalism and imperialism. The holds of their ships brought enslaved peoples
from Africa. Their advanced weaponry was cocked and trained on the enslaved
laborers. The ideological lash of the Roman Catholic Church sliced to the bone.
White supremacist, racist ideology, patriarchal oppression of women and stateenforced repression against same-sex love ruled the economic and social order.
Just as colonialism and imperialism left the island’s fertile soil cultivated as asingle-crop plantation, class enslavement tilled the fields of culture.
When the revolutionary process began, it had to start from there.
Before the 1959 Revolution, the burgeoning sector of the Cuban economy was
Havana’s prostitution industry, booming with Cold War consumption—thelargest in the Caribbean—and the gambling, drugs and tourism connected to it.
U.S. crime syndicate bosses and wealthy Cubans with connections to Batista’s
regime owned the profitable operations.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich note that this illegal economy“employed more than two hundred thousand workers as petty traders, casino
operators, entertainers, servants and prostitutes.” (“Hidden From History”)
Many were homosexual—male and female—and many male homosexuals werefeminine. Crime bosses also exploited tens of thousands of heterosexual womenand men in the prostitution industry. All performed to the sexual whims of thefathers and scions of the U.S. and Cuban ruling classes.
Cuban citizen, translator and interpreter Leonardo Hechavarría, and Cuban
defender, typographer and gay rights activist Marcel Hatch, sum up that era:
“Before the 1959 Revolution, life for lesbians and gays was one of extreme
isolation and repression, enforced by civil law, augmented by Catholic dogma.
Patriarchal attitudes made lesbians invisible. If discovered, they’d often suffer
sexual abuse, disgrace in the community, and job loss.
“Havana’s gay male underground—some 200,000—was a purgatory of
prostitution to American tourists, domestic servitude, and constant threats ofviolence and blackmail.” (“Gays in Cuba, from the Hollywood School of
Falsification,” walterlippmann.com)

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RespondEarly Cuban Revolution paved road to sexual liberation

Arguelles and Rich explained: “It was just a profitable commodification of sexual
fantasy. For the vast majority, homosexuality made life a shameful and guiltridden experience. Such was gay Havana in the fabled ‘avant la guerre’ period.”

Reactionaries prey on dislocation
For male homosexuals in Havana, particularly those who were feminine and/or
cross-dressing, social outlets for congregating were limited once this large-scale
illegal economy was shut down.
As a result, Arguelles and Rich explained, this “prolonged the relationshipbetween the declining underworld and more progressive homosexuals, locking
the two groups together for sheer companionship and sexual pleasure.”That was truer for Cuban males than females.
The two researchers noted, “Homosexual perspectives on the revolution could
shift according to class interests.”
Middle-class homosexuals whose privileges were threatened by agrarian andurban reforms banded, they said, with “the remaining veterans of theunderworld” to oppose the revolution.
“Some veterans of the old underworld enclave joined counter-revolutionary
activities or were pushed into them by the CIA,” Arguelles and Rich reported.
“Not a few of the progressive homosexuals became implicated by default incounter-revolutionary activities and were even jailed.
“Young homosexuals seeking contact with ‘the community’ in the bars andfamous cruising areas of La Rampa were thus introduced to counterrevolutionary ideology and practice. One example of such a dynamic is the case of
Rolando Cubela, a homosexual student leader who fought in the revolutionary
army but was later enlisted by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.”
The two researchers concluded, “Homosexual bars and La Rampa cruising areas
were perceived, in some cases correctly, as centers of counter-revolutionary
activities and began to be systematically treated as such.”

Cuban women organize for gains
The overall situation for Cuban women who loved women had its own
characteristics.
Under the triple weight of the patriarchies of colonialism, capitalism andimperialism, a dynamic women’s movement emerged in Cuba as early as the
1920s and Cuban women won the right to vote and be elected to public office in1934. (thegully.com)
After the 1959 seizure of state power, it was Cuban women as a whole who
became the driving force to break the chokehold of centuries-old patriarchal
economic and social organization, and the attitudes about women and femininity
it engendered.
The Cuban Women’s Federation formed quickly after the Revolution in 1960. It
exerted immeasurably more power because it was a part of the Revolution, notapart from it.
At a 1966 leadership meeting of the Federation of Cuban Women, President Fidel
Castro observed, “Women’s participation in the Revolution was a revolution in
the revolution, and if we were asked what the most revolutionary thing that therevolution is doing, we would answer that it is precisely this—the revolution thatis occurring among the women of our country.”
Hechavarría and Hatch stressed, “Following the Revolution, women won near fullequality under the law, including pay equity, the right to child care, abortion, andmilitary service, among other historic gains, laying the basis for their higher

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Early Cuban Revolution paved road to sexual liberationsocial and political status.
“This foundation, a first in the Americas, played an important role in women’s
greater independence and sexual freedom, a prerequisite for homosexualliberation. The Revolution also destroyed the Mafia-controlled U.S. tourist driven
prostitution trade that held many Cuban women and gay men in bondage.”
Hechavarría and Hatch added, “The Revolution undertook to provide ample
education and employment opportunities for female prostitutes.
“Advances for women in general were naturally extended to lesbians, and many
became among the most ardent defenders of the Revolution.”

Revolutionizing the sexes
Cuban men, as well as women, had been treated as the property of other men—the patriarchs of property.
Revolutionary Cuban men have carried out their own work to consciously build
the consciousness of a “new man” on the basis of new social principles.
Ché Guevara, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution as a whole challenged all
Cuban men to examine male consciousness, attitudes and behaviors.
This revolutionary effort, which continues today, aimed to change old ways thatmen were taught to interact with women. Like the Revolution itself, this work ismost profoundly meaningful because it is a process, not a single act.
The Revolution challenged the biology-is-destiny “natural order” ideologies ofcolonialism, capitalism and imperialism that elevated patriarchs to rule.
The Revolution challenged the reactionary biological determinist concept that
men are innately superior and women are naturally submissive.
But genuine economic and social equality for women, and profound change of theattitudes of men, could only be generated by economic and social reorganizationthat could lift the standard of living for all. Imperialism was determined tothwart and sabotage that work at every moment. U.S. finance capital cinched theisland in an economic noose, and the Pentagon cordoned the island, attacking
overtly and covertly.
As Washington and the Pentagon ratcheted up the pressure on Cuba, and the
CIA having spearheaded the commando invasion at Playa Girón, the entire
island’s population had to be organized and mobilized to meet two huge tasks in
1965—military defense of the Revolution and harvest of the crop that sustained
economic life.
Everyone—of all sexes, genders and sexualities, from children to elders—wascalled up for these two life-and-death tasks.
Inside Cuba, trying to fit many thousands of urban homosexual and/ortransgender males into agricultural work sharpened a social contradiction.
Outside Cuba, propagandistic exploitation of this contradiction led to the single
greatest slander against the Cuban Revolution in the history of the workers’ state.
Next: Vilification of the Cuban Revolution.
Parts 1-90 can be read at workers.org. Look for the lavender and red logo.
Parts 86-90 also explore sexuality, gender and sex on the island before andafter the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-91/[2/3/2011 5:15:23 PM]

Early Cuban Revolution paved road to sexual liberation

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1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not

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Lavender & red, part 92
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 4, 2007 9:15 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAOne of the worst slanders against the Cuban Revolution is thatthe workers’ state was a “penal colony,” interning gay men in“concentration camps” in 1965. That charge, which refers to the1965 mobilization of Units to Aid Military Production (UMAP),
still circulates today as good coin.
Therefore the formation and ending of the UMAP work brigades in the history of
the Cuban workers’ state is vitally important for today’s activists to study very
carefully and thoroughly. Those who are working the hardest to make arevolution in the heartland of imperialism will pay the most careful attention,and bring the most genuine solidarity and humility—teachability—to thisimportant analysis.
For those worldwide who struggle against oppression based on sexuality, genderand sex, the sharpening of this sexual/gender/sex contradiction in Cuba in 1965
offers this critical lesson: The way sexuality and the sexes are socially organized,
and gender is socially assigned and allowed to be expressed, always has a history.
Since the overturning of matrilineal, cooperative societies, strict organization
based on race, sex, gender expression and sexuality has served the dictates ofruling-class economic organization, and has been under the knuckles of state
regulation and repression.
Pre-revolutionary Cuba was no exception.
Spain exports Inquisition
Without understanding Cuba’s historical process, it’s impossible to understandits revolutionary process.
Researcher Ian Lumsden noted in his study on Cuba and homosexuality, “Thereis much speculation about the incidence of homosexual activity between Cuba’s[I]ndigenous people, as there is with respect to other parts of the New World.
Whatever its true extent, it was used as a pretext for Spain to enslave [N]atives
on the grounds that they were not fully human.”
He explained that, “Condemnation of sodomy and subsequently of homosexuality,
along with repressive mystification of women’s sexuality, have long been at thecore of Spanish Catholic dogmas regarding sexuality.” Only crimes against theking and heresy ranked higher as crimes than “sodomy” in the Middle Ages.
Lumsden added, “There was competition between the Inquisition and the secular
courts about who should have authority to exorcise it from the body politic.”
Sentences ranged from castration to being burned alive.

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Respond1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not

The domestic Spanish crusade against “sodomy,” he explained, was driven by theruling class’ “desire to expunge Moorish cultural influence from Spain, which
they associated, among other things, with homosexual and cross-dressing
behavior.”
Pivotal impact of slavery
Lumsden paraphrased, “As Julio Le Riverend, Cuba’s leading economic historian,reminds us, the development of Cuba, particularly since the 18th century, cannot
be understood without recognizing the pivotal impact of slavery as a mode of
production on all social relations, including domestic ones. Homosexuality
among slaves occurred in a context—that is, a country whose dominant culture
was both racist and homophobic.”
The system of plantation slavery—both chattel and latifundia—created rural
enslavement in which the masters on the island, and the masters across the
Florida Straits, claimed to own the bodies and lives and labor of enslaved
workers.
The patriarchal slave-masters, landowners and their overseers dictated theclothing enslaved workers could wear; where they could live and in whatarrangements; when the sexes could meet; where, when and how they could havesex; if they could marry and, if so, who they could marry.
Of the more than 40,000 Asian laborers counted in the 1871 Cuban census, forexample, only 66 were women and the law forbade Chinese males from marrying
African-Cubans.
Enslaved African males outnumbered females by a ratio of almost two to one.
Males were often housed together in isolated regions in single-sex barracones—
plantation barracks—in which no women were allowed.
In his oral narrative, former enslaved African laborer Esteban Montejo told
Miguel Barnet about men coupling with other men in everyday life in thebarracones. And he offered a glimpse at how they were gendered in relation toeach other. Montejo only refers to the partner who looks after a marido(husband) as what the Spanish would term “sodomite.”
Montejo said it was only “after slavery that that word afeminado appeared.”
Centralization and commodification
Capitalism and imperialism did not invent homosexuality or gender variance in
Cuba; these market forces centralized, commodified and commercialized them.
Rural poverty made capitalist relations—the often empty promise of jobs—amagnet that drew hundreds of thousands of campesin@s from the impoverishedcountryside to the cities, in particular the capital Havana, in search of wage work.
“During this period of severe sexual repression in advanced capitalist nations,”
researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich explained, “homosexual desire
was often channeled into illegal and lucrative offshore markets like the Havana
underworld.” (“Hidden From History”)
The crime syndicates and wealthy Cubans with ties to the Batista dictatorshipgave “preferential hiring” to Cuban homosexuals, many of them feminine and/or
cross-dressing males, to serve the demand of the dollar, and those whose wallets
were filled with them.
“Other buyers of homosexual desire,” Arguelles and Rich elaborated, “were thefathers and sons of the Cuban bourgeoisie, who felt free to partake of homoerotic
practices without being considered homosexual as long as they did not take thepassive, so-called female role in sexual relations. Yet another common practicefor Cuban heterosexual men was the procurement of a lesbian prostitute’s favors
for a night.”

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1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not

Poverty drew many heterosexual Cuban men “into this underworld oralternatively into a homosexual underground dominated by the Cuban
homosexual bourgeoisie,” the two researchers added. The bourgeois Cuban malehomosexual of this era sought out masculine men from the laboring class.
“Thus,” Arguelles and Rich observed, “in many ways, pre-revolutionary
homosexual liaisons in themselves fostered sexual colonialism and exploitation.”
Overall, the pre-revolutionary state regulated this sex-for-profit industry, rather
than repress it.
Fidel: ‘We were forced to mobilize’
Shutting down the exploitative, unproductive economic industries in Havana
after seizure of state power was just one task. Building a planned, productive
economy that could meet the needs of 9 million urban and rural workers was awhole other job—and a difficult one, at that.
“Let me tell you about the problems we had,” Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel
Castro recalled. “In those first years we were forced to mobilize the whole nation
because of the risks we were facing, which included that of an attack by theUnited States: the dirty war, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Missile Crisis.”
Fidel Castro—referred to as “Fidel” by supporters of the Revolution and “Castro”
by enemies—talked extensively about the UMAP in two interviews. The first wasin a published conversation with Tomás Borge, published in “Face to Face with
Fidel Castro” (Ocean Press: 1992). The second was in conversations between
2003 and 2005 with Ignacio Ramonet, published by the Cuban Council of Statein April 2006.
Recalling the period of 1965, Fidel outlined three obstacles in organizing thisisland-wide emergency mobilization to defend the Revolution and to build theeconomy.
The first two: The CIA was beaming messages to entice skilled workers andtechnicians to emigrate. And members of Catholic, Jehovah’s Witnesses andSeventh-Day Adventist religious organizations would not take up arms in defenseof the island.
“[A]t the triumph of the Revolution,” Fidel explained, “the stage we are speakingof, the male chauvinist element was very much present, together with widespread
opposition to having homosexuals in military units.”
Fidel said that as a result, “Homosexuals were not drafted at first, but then allthat became a sort of irritation factor, an argument some people used to lash out
at homosexuals even more.
“Taking those three categories into account we founded the so-called Military
Units to Support Production (UMAP) where we sent people from the said three
categories: those whose educational level was insufficient; those who refused toserve out of religious convictions; or homosexuals who were physically fit. Those
were the facts; that’s what happened.
“Those units were set up all throughout the country for purposes of work, mainly
to assist agriculture. That is, homosexuals were not the only ones affected, thoughmany of them certainly were, not all of them, just those who were called to do
mandatory service in the ranks, since it was an obligation and everyone wasparticipating.”
Sexual, gender contradictions sharpened
Revolutionary re-organization in Cuba in 1965, staring down the barrel ofimperialism’s cannons, had to reintegrate a numerically large
homosexual/transgender population from the cities back into the rural
agricultural production.

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1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not

This returning workforce from the capitalist urban center had to go back to therural agricultural production that many had left earlier in their lives.
When large numbers of feminine homosexuals returned to the countryside from
Havana, it was not just a conflict of differently socialized sexual expression, but acollision between historically differently gendered workforces.
Capitalist relations had consolidated and commercialized the industry which had
given mass expression to this sexuality and gender expression in males, andshaped these as commodities on the auction block of the market.
The urban homosexuality/transgender culture, dress, mores and social
semaphores seemed to many Cubans—even men who had sex with men andwomen who had sex with women—to have washed up on the island’s shores on
the waves of oppressive and exploitative capitalist and imperialist cultures.
Arguelles and Rich stressed that at the time of the revolution, “Erotic loyalty(and, in the case of women, subservience) to the opposite sex was assumed as
normal even by homosexuals. Hence, for many Cubans of this era, homosexuality
was a mere addendum to customary marital roles. Among others, it was just a
profitable commodification of sexual fantasy. For the vast majority,homosexuality made life a shameful and guilt-ridden experience.”
Fidel stresses that the UMAP “were not internment units, nor were theypunishment units; on the contrary, it was about morale, to give them a chance towork and help the country in those difficult circumstances. Besides, there weremany who for religious reasons had the chance to help their homeland in anotherway by serving not in combat units but in work units.”
Fidel cut cane; children worked in the fields. Renowned Cubans such as musician
and poet Pablo Milanés and Baptist pastor and MP Raúl Suárez worked in the
UMAP.
The whole island was at hard at work building an independent existence, in
economic soil deeply furrowed by the combines of colonialism and imperialism.
Fidel shut down the UMAP
Fidel Castro stated categorically about the UMAP, “I can tell you for sure that
there was prejudice against homosexuals.”
On the island, the Cuban National Union of Artists and Writers (UNEAC)
reportedly protested treatment of homosexuals working in UMAP, prompting
Fidel to check it out for himself.
A Cuban who worked in a UMAP, interviewed by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto
Cardenal in 1970-1971, related that Fidel slipped into a UMAP brigade one night
and lay down in one of the hammocks. The interviewee said: the UMAP guards
would sometimes cut the hammock cords with their sabers. “When one guard
raised his saber he found himself staring at Fidel; he almost dropped dead. Fidel
is the man of the unexpected visits.” (“In Cuba”)
A youth described as a “young Marxist revolutionary” told Cardenal that 100
young males from the Communist Youth were sent to the UMAP to report backabout how they were treated. “It was a highly secret operation. Not even theirfamilies knew of this plan. Afterward the boys told what had happened. And they
put an end to the UMAP.”
Closing the UMAP required further large-scale reorganization of agriculturalwork, the lifeblood of the economy.
One youth concluded to Cardenal, “[W]e who were in the UMAP discovered that
the Revolution and the UMAP were separable. And we said to ourselves: We
won’t leave Cuba, we’ll stay and make what is bad not bad.” (Jon Hillson,
blythe.org)

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1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not

Fidel: ‘Overcoming legacy of chauvinism’
Fidel explained that during this periodof early revolutionary history,“Concerning women, there was a strong
prejudice, as strong as in the case ofhomosexuals. I’m not going to come up
with excuses now, for I assume myshare of the responsibility. I truly had
other concepts regarding that issue.
“I am not going to deny that, at one
point, male chauvinism also influenced
our attitude toward homosexuality,” he ‘I am absolutely opposed to any formof repression, contempt, scorn or
said.

discrimination with regard tohomosexuals. It is a natural tendency
and human that must simply berespected.’ —Fidel Castro, 1992

“We inherited male chauvinism andmany other bad habits from theconquistadors. I would say that itcorresponded to a given stage and is largely associated with that legacy ofchauvinism.”

Fidel stressed, “Homosexuals were certainly discriminated against—more so inother countries—but it happened here too, and fortunately our people, who are
far more cultured and learned now, have gradually left that prejudice behind.
“We have made a real advance—we can see it, especially in the young people, but
we can’t say that sexual discrimination has been completely wiped out and wemustn’t lower our guard.”
Fidel said, “I must also tell you that there were—and there are—extremely
outstanding personalities in the fields of culture and literature, famous names
this country takes pride in, who were and still are homosexual.
“Today the people have acquired a general, rounded culture. I’m not going to say
there is no male chauvinism, but now it’s not anywhere near the way it was backthen, when that culture was so strong. With the passage of years and the growthof consciousness about all of this, we have gradually overcome problems and suchprejudices have declined. But believe me, it was not easy.”
Fidel Castro concluded in 1992: “I am absolutely opposed to any form ofrepression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard to homosexuals. It is anatural tendency and human that must simply be respected.”
Next: Charge of “concentration camps” fascist-baited Cuban workers’ state.
Lavender & Red parts 1-91 can be read at workers.org. Look for the lavenderand red logo. Parts 86-91 also explore sexuality, gender and sex in Cuba before
and after the 1959 Revolution.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-92/[2/3/2011 5:15:43 PM]

Hollywood projected Cuba as 'police state' for gays

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Lavender & red, part 93
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 18, 2007 10:08 PM

Hollywood turned up the volume on charges that Cuba was a“penal colony” for homosexual males with its release of “Before
Night Falls” in August 2000.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,The movie was based on a memoir by the late anti-communist
Cuban homosexual writer Reinaldo Arenas, who emigrated to the United Statesin 1980. A decade later Arenas committed suicide in a dilapidated Hells Kitchenapartment in Manhattan, the capital of capital. Impoverished and dying as aresult of AIDS, he had no health insurance and could not afford high medical
costs of care—rights enjoyed by every Cuban under the Revolution in his
homeland.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Since the early days of the 1959 Revolution, the CIA had trolled for grievances
about the Revolution—real, manufactured or exaggerated.
“Before Night Falls” is the pinnacle of this propaganda campaign, by virtue of
having the most capital invested in its production, its cast and distribution
network; the publicity generated for its release; and the accolades and awards
that gave it the imprimatur of “truth.” Interspersed snippets of actual archival
footage from the early days of the Revolution and snippets of newsreel of Fidel
Castro’s speeches aim to lend the film the appearance of historical authenticity.
As the movie begins, the cameras pan across what is actually rural Mexico, thebackdrop for Arenas’ childhood in Cuba. The reality of agricultural plantation
enslavement is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the voiceover narrates that theauthor’s childhood was “splendor,” adding that “it was absolute poverty but also
absolute freedom ... .”Projected onto movie screens, “Before Night Falls” becomes an imperialist-era
sequel to “Gone with the Wind.”
In both reactionary propaganda films, bygone epochs of white-supremacist
plantation slavery—which shackled African and Indigenous peoples—are
nostalgically revived, revised and romanticized. In both films, the armies thatbreak the manacles of slavery for profit are cast as the bad guys.

Pre-Revolution:
exploitation, not freedom
Viewers of “Before Night Falls” are left with the overall impression that the U.S.backed Batista regime actually offered greater “freedom.”
In an October 2001 movie review about “Before Night Falls,” entitled “Gays in
Cuba, from the Hollywood School of Falsification,” Leonardo Hechavarría andMarcel Hatch took on this fiction. (www.walterlippman.com)
Hechavarría’s biography describes him as a Cuban citizen, a translator andhttp://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-93/[2/3/2011 5:16:09 PM]

RespondHollywood projected Cuba as 'police state' for gays

interpreter, and states that “he is a passionate advocate of the Revolution andworks for increased acceptance of lesbians and gays in his homeland.” Marcel
Hatch is identified as a typographer, “a veteran gay rights activist and Cuba
defender.”In their review, Hechavarría and Hatch wrote: “Before the 1959 Revolution, life
for lesbians and gays was one of extreme isolation and repression, enforced bycivil law, augmented by Catholic dogma. Patriarchal attitudes made lesbians
invisible. If discovered, they’d often suffer sexual abuse, disgrace in thecommunity and job loss.
“Havana’s gay male underground—some 200,000—was a purgatory of
prostitution to American tourists, domestic servitude and constant threats ofviolence and blackmail. The closet was the operative image. Survival often meantengaging in fake heterosexual marriage, or banishment to the gay slum.”
For more analysis of “Before Night Falls,” also see “The Sexual Politics ofReinaldo Arenas: Fact, Fiction and the Real Record of the Cuban Revolution,” by
Jon Hillson, at www.blythe.org.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich concluded about life for thehomosexual/transgender urban work force in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, “If legal
sanctions and official harassment were rare, this tolerance was due less to social
acceptance than to overriding considerations of profit and the economic interestsof the underworld that dominated the Cuban political apparatus.”
But the misery of urban sexual enslavement in brothels, casinos, domestic workand drug networking is nowhere to be seen in “Before Night Falls.” Neither is theapparatus of the Batista dictatorship’s police, secret agents and army.

Workers’ state, not bosses’ state“Before Night Falls” is the blockbuster of the propagandistic charges that the
Cuban Revolution ushered in a “police state,” similar to fascist Nazi Germany
and the bloody 1973 counter-revolution in Chile.
These vilifications purposely confused the difference between a workers’ state
and a bosses’ state. Understanding the class character of the Cuban workers’ stateis very important for those who seek their own liberation today.
Cuba was a newly developing workers’ state—which had to literally battle overt
and covert military onslaught and economic strangulation by U.S. imperialism. At
the same time the Revolution had to fight the legacy of racist, sexist and antihomosexual/transgender indoctrination by patriarchal colonialism, capitalism
and imperialism.
In contrast, the state machineries of the exploiting classes—and the church
hierarchies that serve them—have always relied on repressive terror, anddeepening and strengthening homophobia and transphobia, in order to conquer
and rule.
For example, the Spanish colonial state in Cuba enslaved the Indigenous
population on the island, castrated those it considered “sodomites,” and forced
them to eat their own testicles coated with dirt. (“Los Negros Curros,” 1986)
In order to save German capitalism, a wing of industrialists and bankers
bankrolled the fascists who forced tens of thousands of gays and lesbians to wear
the pink triangle in slave labor and extermination camps.
Víctor Hugo Robles wrote of Chile—where the mass of workers and peasantswere not armed against the 1973 CIA-backed counter-revolutionary—that,“Perhaps the most forgotten are the many transvestites who were executedduring the days immediately following the coup.” (“History in the Making: The
Homosexual Liberation Movement in Chile”)
In the imperialist United States, homosexuality and sex/gender variance were so

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Hollywood projected Cuba as 'police state' for gays

viciously criminalized and punished by state repression that a mass politicalmovement arose to resist it. Despite widespread struggle, same-sex loveremained illegal in the United States until 2003. Currently, at least 65 percent oftranswomen and 29 percent of transmen are estimated to have been imprisoned
at some point in their life in the United States. (Critical Resistance)
And today it is U.S. imperialism that has set up concentration camps—from Abu
Ghraib to Guantánamo—where anti-gay and anti-trans rape and humiliation areincorporated into the science of torture.

The state of former slaves
The Cuban workers’ state, like the armies of Bolívar and Toussaint L’Overture, isan armed liberation struggle of the oppressed up against the Goliath force of the
oppressor state.
An estimated 20,000 Cubans died in two years of battling the U.S.-backed
Batista dictatorship—up against bombs, aircraft and artillery. The Revolution
disarmed the Batista regime’s army and secret police networks.
However, simply dismantling the bosses’ apparatus of dictatorship did not create
a new mechanism to defend the island from counter-revolution and invasion.
Imperialism soon cinched an economic noose around the island, its Pentagon aconstant threat.
A new state had to be built, from the ground up. It took a mass mobilization of
the population to defend the gains of the Revolution. The National Revolutionary
Militia and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution organized theentire population into a network against CIA-organized subterfuge and sabotage.
This block-by-block watchfulness, combined with old, deep prejudice against
same-sex liaisons, made life uncomfortable for some Cuban male homosexuals.
While they had experienced extreme isolation and alienation in the sexual
exploitation industry, they had also found refuge in urban anonymity andprivately-owned casinos, bars and other meeting places.
However, unlike its portrayal in “Before Night Falls,” the Cuban workers’ state
was not a repressive apparatus. Rather, it had the task of defending 11 million
Cubans from re-enslavement by U.S. finance capital. The Cuban Revolution could
not have survived a day, let alone a half century, without organizing andmobilizing the population to defend its independence from imperialism.
The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the Cuban popular
militias—which armed millions of women as well as men—are the protective
might of a formerly enslaved population against enraged former plantation
owners, bankers, industrialists and syndicate bosses.
Arming the Cuban population of workers—rural and urban—made it possible todefeat the invasion at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs). At the same time, thisdefense allowed the Revolution to boot out the U.S. sugar plantation owners andgave the land back to those who tilled it. It allowed the Revolution to oust U.S.
industrialists and bankers, and crime syndicate bosses who ran the lucrative
brothel, gambling and drug networks. The Revolution could begin deconstructing
the white supremacist and patriarchal systems that hadn’t allowed Cubans ofAfrican descent to set foot on the beaches, and had kept women in servitude.
This was a workers’ state.

‘Dispute this fable with facts’
Calling for an end to Hollywood’s blockade of Cuba, Hechavarría and Hatch
stress about “Before Night Falls”: “[I]n a queer cinemagraphic twist, it erases theachievements of Cuban toilers, women, people of color, and indeed gays, who’ve
made stupendous advances since 1959.

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Hollywood projected Cuba as 'police state' for gays

“The end of hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, high infant mortality, and foreign
domination of the island are of course undeniable—all fruits of the Revolution.”
After the Revolution, “advances for women in general were naturally extended tolesbians, and many became among the most ardent defenders of the Revolution.
On the other hand, a significant minority of gay men left Cuba. Some joined thecounter-revolutionary expatriates in Miami or were blackmailed into doing so.
Ironically, the U.S., which was busy flushing out and jailing its homosexuals
during the McCarthy period, welcomed Cuban gays as part of its overall
campaign to destabilize the island.” (walterlippmann.com)
Hechavarría and Hatch added: “It was Clinton/Bush-inspired destiny that a hot
button pushing, gay-themed anti-Cuba melodrama would be released. The
persistent myth, promulgated chiefly by right-wing Cuban-Americans (most ofwhom are hyper-homophobes), that homosexuality is illegal in Cuba, that gays
and lesbians are banned from the Communist Party, and that they are savaged
and tossed in the slammer, is pure bunk.”
Hechavarría and Hatch stated categorically: “We know of no Cuban, for oragainst their government, who finds the movie credible. Nor do smart gay
activists.
“This political falsity,” they concluded, “has widespread currency among liberalskeptics and within the queer community. It is to this audience the film wastargeted. It is necessary for friends of Cuba to dispute this fable with facts.”
Next: Cuban Revolution: trajectory of progress for homosexual/transgender
population.
For more on homosexuality/transgender and the Cuban Revolution, see
Lavender & Red parts 86-92, at www.workers.org. Look for the lavender andred logo.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-93/[2/3/2011 5:16:09 PM]

1970s: Decade of cultural progress

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1970s: Decade of cultural
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Lavender & red, part 94
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 22, 2007 11:05 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Those who today are working to seize state power and defend
and build a workers’ state in their own countries may be sobered
as well as heartened by the enormous cultural labor that the
Cuban Revolution had to accomplish in the 1970s, particularly
regarding liberation of women, sexuality and gendered social
roles.
Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich concluded in their 1984 study of Cuba thatthree events “marked the gradual but continual improvement of life conditions ofgay men and lesbians in Cuba during the seventies: the First National Congress
on Education and Culture, the promulgation of the Family Code, and the creationof a national group on sexual education.”Arguelles and Rich explain that at the 1971 congress on education and culture,“On the one hand, homosexuality was not referred to as a product of decadence
and homosexuality was no longer seen by the revolutionary leadership as afundamental problem in Cuban society, but, rather, viewed as a form of sexual
behavior requiring study.
“On the other hand, declarations from the same congress called for the removalof homosexuals from the field of education, thus continuing the view ofhomosexuality as a contamination of the body politic.”
The 1971 congress declaration demoralized some activists worldwide who had
hoped that the seizure of state power in Cuba would usher in an immediate andthorough-going theoretical, social and economic transformation.
Some activists succumbed to fear that prejudice is a hard-wired human trait that
can’t ever be eradicated from any human society, even a socialist one.
Anti-communists have also tried to use the 1971 congress document in attempts
to discredit the revolutionary process altogether.
Both are ample reason to look more closely.
Roots of prejudice
Studying Cuba’s specific historical economic and social conditions opens up
greater understanding about what generates prejudice against same-sex love andgender variance, and of racism, and opens up clarity about what kind of materialchanges are necessary to eventually uproot all forms of bigotry.
Prejudice—ideology that pits groups within the vast laboring and oppressed classworldwide against each other—is not the same as superstition. Superstitions are
explanations concerning the material world that the scientific process later proves
are untrue. Attempts to supplant that new, scientific understanding with oldsuperstitions are consciously reactionary.

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Respond1970s: Decade of cultural progress

Prejudices, however, are rooted in the historical development of class-divided
societies. They are a conscious ideological campaign to frustrate mass unity
among the laboring masses of millennia. These lies, minted like gold, only
profited emperors and kings, landowners and barons.
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” observed KarlMarx, “i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the sametime its ruling intellectual force.”
Colonialism and imperialism didn’t just bring reactionary ideas. The patriarchal
ruling-class ideologies they enforced served to buttress their structures ofenslavement of Cuba, as elsewhere.
Spanish colonialism brought Inquisition terror to its edicts against same-sex lovein Cuba, and its church imbued this sexuality with shame and guilt.
Imperialism swiftly centralized and shaped what became a numerically huge newurban homosexual/transgender subculture, mostly male, within the larger
culture(s) in Cuba for the sole purpose of sexual exploitation for profit. Tens of
thousands of Cuban women and girls, including many enslaved in “domestic”
jobs, were ruthlessly sexually exploited, as well.
So it is not difficult to understand why homosexuality, coupled with gendervariance, would seem to be a product of “bourgeois decadence” in Cuba. And it’s
not hard to understand why many Cubans believed that homosexuality andgender varience would go away with the shutting down of these non-productive,
exploitative industries.
But the 1971 Cultural Congress marked the moving away from that assumption.
Changing ideas
Revolution is not a single act, it’s a process. The revolution created the basis forsocial and economic transformation that has been profound and is ongoing, aparticularly remarkable achievement carried out under almost half a century ofimperialist siege.
The first tasks of the revolution in Cuba were to organize to provide jobs, food,shelter, health care and education for the entire population and to defend the
new revolutionary state against imperialist attack.
At the same time, the 1959 Cuban Revolution faced the odious task of cleaningout the Augean stables filled with 450 years of rotting, stinking oppressor culture
excreted by Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism. And the U.S. tried to takeaway every shovel that the Cubans needed to do that work.
While deep divisions based on bigotry help facilitate and maintain colonial andimperialist economic rule, every form of ideological prejudice—white supremacy,
male supremacy and anti-homosexual bigotry—break up the unity required tocollectively build a socialist economy.
The 1971 congress declaration pointed out that, “For the bourgeoisie, theelimination of the cultural elements of its class and system represents theelimination of culture as such.
“For the working class and people in general, the culture born of therevolutionary struggle is the conquest and development of the most valuable ofhumanity’s cultural heritage which the exploiters kept from them for centuries.”
The 1971 congress declaration stressed that “[T]he changes in the field of sexual
relations stem from society itself as it progresses in the social, cultural andeconomic fields and continues to acquire an ideology that is more consistently
revolutionary.”
Fidel: ‘tangible and practical successes’

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1970s: Decade of cultural progress

Looking back from the vantage point of 1992, Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel
Castro told Tomás Borge, a priest and founder of the Sandinista National
Liberation Front, “We inherited male chauvinism and many other bad habitsfrom the conquistadors. That was an historical inheritance. In some countries
more than in others, but in none was there more struggle than in ours and I
believe that in none have there been more tangible and practical successes.” (“AGrain of Corn,” Ocean Press)
Fidel Castro recalled, in a series of interviews between 2003 and 2005, “[W]ehad to work very hard to do away with racial prejudice here. Concerning women,
there was strong prejudice, as strong as in the case of homosexuals. (“OneHundred Hours with Fidel,” by Ignacio Ramonet)
Castro had told Borge, “There was, for example, one standard for judging thepersonal conduct of a man and another for a woman. We had this situation foryears in the party and I led fights and argued a lot about this. If there wasinfidelity in a marriage on behalf of the man, there was no problem, no worry, on
the other hand it was a subject of discussion in the party units when there wasinfidelity on the part of the woman. There was one way of judging sexual
relations of men and another of women. I had to fight hard, against deeply rooted
tendencies that were not the product of any sermon or doctrine, or education,
but the male chauvinist concepts and prejudices that exist in the heart of oursociety.”
Castro added, “I am not going to deny that, at one point, male chauvinism also
influenced our attitudes towards homosexuality.”
He explained to Ramonet, “There was less prejudice against homosexuals in themost cultured and educated sectors, but that prejudice was very strong in sectorsof low educational level—the illiteracy rate was around 30 percent those years—
and among the nearly-illiterate, and even among many professionals. That was areal fact in our society.” (“One Hundred Hours with Fidel”)
One of the first actions of the revolution in 1960—the Year of Education—was toorganize volunteers to teach 700,000 adults to read. Cuba rapidly reached thehighest literacy rate in Latin America.
Fidel Castro, who is an atheist, metaphorically answered the idealist concept ofchange with a scientific materialist view in an interview with a Galician television
station in Spain in 1988. He talked about how the cultural mass process of the
Revolution deepened understanding about same-sex love.
“God needed seven days to make the world,” he said, “you must understand thatto remake this world, to destroy a world like that which we had here and to makea new one, there wasn’t much light, and at first there was a lot of darkness, and a
lot of confusion about a series of problems. Our society, our party, ourgovernment now have ideas that are clearer, wiser and more intelligent about
many of these problems. Given that we can make mistakes, we obsessively follow
the idea that what is just, right and best for the people, and what is the mosthumane for our people and our society. However, the task is not easy. I thinkthat each time we get closer to the right criteria for making the world we want.”
Revolution: ‘school of unfettered thought’Fidel Castro said in a now-famous 1962 talk that the “Revolution must be aschool of unfettered thought.”
The intellectual and cultural dynamism of the Cuban Revolution, which combined
communist leadership with mass participation, is evident in the trajectory of
progress in the 1970s made concerning women and same-sex love.
The Cuban leaders continued to organize mass forums for discussion and debatethat empowered changes concerning sexuality, sex and gendered social roles.
Two years after the 1971 congress declaration that no homosexual should officially

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-94/[2/3/2011 5:16:33 PM]

1970s: Decade of cultural progress

represent the country, it was overruled by a Cuban court. (Leonardo Hechavarría
and Marcel Hatch)
In 1975, the limits on employment of homosexuals in the arts and education were
overturned by the Cuban Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of gay artists who
were petitioning for compensation and reinstatement in their workplace. (cubasolidarity.org.uk)
That same year, a revolutionary Family Code was adopted that called for equal
participation by men in child-raising and household work.
Also in 1975, a new Ministry of Culture was established, as well as a commission
to study homosexuality.
That commission helped pave the road for the formal decriminalization of samesex love.
But U.S. imperialism, which had economically exploited thehomosexual/transgender population of Cuba before the revolution, continued to
exploit them politically.
Next: Imperialism, homosexuals and the 1979 Mariel boatlift.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-94/[2/3/2011 5:16:33 PM]Behind the 1980 'Mariel boatlift'

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Lavender & red, part 95
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 26, 2007 9:35 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Several thousand self-identified homosexual Cubans were among
the some 120,000 who left the island over a two-month period
in 1980 from the port of Mariel and sailed to the U.S. The media
in the imperialist countries, whose capitalist classes are hell-bent
on re-colonizing Cuba, broadcast an anti-communist
interpretation of what produced that migration at Mariel.
Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy wrote, “The 1970s were the high pointin Cuba’s revolutionary influence, not only in Latin America but in Africa, Asiaand even Europe. Cuba was part of a worldwide surge in the working-class
movement and particularly among oppressed countries. U.S. imperialism was on
the defensive, especially after its historic defeat in Vietnam and its inability toeither crush or tame the Cuban Revolution.” (Workers World newspaper, Sept.
22, 1994)
Cuban women and men were fighting bravely alongside their African comrades todefend the people of Angola, Namibia and Ethiopia from colonialism andimperialism.
U.S. finance capital tried to isolate and destroy the Cuban Revolution.
U.S. banks and corporations commanded Washington not to recognize Cuba’s
right to diplomatic recognition. Captains of the military-industrial complex
ordered their generals and admirals to attack the island using various weapons—covert and overt—including enforcement of the economic blockade of the island,
which is an illegal act of war. The Pentagon refused to retreat from the militarybase it built at Guantánamo—now a site where the interrogators incorporate antigay and anti-trans humiliation, rape and attempted dehumanization as part oftheir sadistic torture of Muslim men and boys.
And 1980 was the year that Ronald Reagan won the White House administration.
Marcy concluded, “A period began when the most intense economic, political anddiplomatic pressure was exerted on Cuba. In the background was always thethreat of U.S. military intervention, causing the Cuban government to spend agreat deal of its resources on military defense.”

CIA targeted homosexual Cubans
Between 1979 and 1984—before and after Mariel—scholars Lourdes Arguelles
and B. Ruby Rich interviewed Cuban émigrés in the U.S., Spain, Mexico andPuerto Rico. The two researchers also interviewed Cubans who chose to stay on
the island and be a part of building a socialist society.
The two summed up their scientific research in a report titled “Homosexuality,
Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes Toward an Understanding of the Cuban
Lesbian and Gay Male Experience.” It was first published in the summer of 1984

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-95/[2/3/2011 5:17:14 PM]

RespondBehind the 1980 'Mariel boatlift'

in Signs, A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. (For more on immigrationfrom Cuba after 1959, see Lavender & Red, part 90, workers.org.)
Arguelles and Rich reveal how U.S. finance capital used its secret police agency topolitically target the same Cuban homosexual/transgender population it had once
exploited for profit.
“The year 1979 was an unsettled one,” Arguelles and Rich wrote. “Even thoughliving conditions were better than in any previous period and compared favorablywith those in the rest of the Caribbean, there were serious problems.” They
pointed out that the economy suffered under the heavy weight of the U.S.
blockade and suspicious outbreaks of biological epidemics destroyed harvests ofcash crops. This forced Cubans to work harder and faster and for longer hours inorder to raise overall productivity.
The U.S. allowed Cubans who had emigrated in the early years of the revolution
to travel back to the island. Arguelles and Rich noted, “The visits of ‘theAmerican cousins’ increased consumer envy and added to the effectiveness ofcounter-revolutionary propaganda.
“Lesbians and gay men were particularly vulnerable,” they explained. “The CIA
targeted the homosexual intelligentsia and worked to persuade its members to
defect, promising generous academic grants and publishing contracts.”
Arguelles and Rich continued, “The more cost-effective ploy of blackmail was
also used, especially against those gays less willing to leave, in the hope thatpolitical anxiety would force victims into exile. Carlos Alberto Montaner, aMadrid-based anti-Castro writer, for example, published two full pages listing
names of homosexuals inside Cuba in an attempt to discredit them and toencourage them to migrate. Such cynical ‘assistance’ in coming out continues tobe a favored weapon against lesbians and gay men who are well integrated into
the revolution.”
The two researchers added, “The visits also provided a context in which Cuban
lesbians and gay men could hear of the more open and affluent gay lifestyles
available in the United States as a benefit of consumer capitalism. Other common
reasons for wanting to emigrate included the lack of career mobility in a still
under-developed economy and, for men, a traditional desire for the adventure oftravel that had to focus on emigration since the United States and other capitalist
nations deny tourist visas to Cubans. For some Cuban gays (especially for themen), emigration also provided wider sexual parameters than they felt could ever
be possible in Cuba.”

Exception to a rotten rule
U.S. imperialism demonstrated how its laws either kneel to its overall capitalistclass objectives, or are forced to bend.
After the Cuban Revolution shut down U.S. finance capital’s burgeoning sex andcasino industries that had exploited mass numbers of homosexuals, U.S.
immigration authorities unofficially lifted the part of the Immigration andNaturalization Act of 1952 that had been used to bar and deport those it labeled“sexually deviant”—but only for homosexual Cubans.
The Cold War Florida Legislative Investigation Committee made no mention of
the influx of homosexual male Cubans into the state in its report on its own antigay witch hunt in 1964. The McCarthy-style state witch hunt tried to break up
unity in the struggle against white-supremacist apartheid in the U.S. Deep South.
(Lavender & Red, part 55, workers.org)
Washington lured Cubans to risk their lives at sea by creating an exception to
immigration rules and quotas that barred legal migration to the U.S. Any Cuban
who arrived on U.S. soil was promised admission, with perks.
Cuban President Fidel Castro challenged Washington’s immigration

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-95/[2/3/2011 5:17:14 PM]Behind the 1980 'Mariel boatlift'

manipulation and hypocrisy by opening the port at Mariel from April 21 to Sept.
28 in 1980, allowing any Cubans who wanted to leave to go to the U.S. Some
120,000 Cubans left, out of the country’s total population of 11 million.
Even the estimates of how many homosexual Cubans left from Mariel in 1980
demonstrate political manipulation by the U.S. government.
Reporting for the publication Paris Match, Nina Sutton cited a “nonofficial State
Department source” as saying at least 10,000 Cuban homosexuals had emigrated
at Mariel. However, Julia Preston stated in the New York Village Voice dated
Dec. 10-16, 1980, that “As many as 3,000 gay Cubans passed through refugee
camps this summer. Now about 350 are left, almost all men, the others having
been sponsored out mainly to gay communities throughout the country.”
Gay Cubans were not welcomed into the homosexual-hating, right-wingdominated Cuban émigré enclaves and anti-communist organizations.

Under state duress
At U.S. borders, all individual immigrants face tremendous pressure underinterrogation from border police, immigration judges and officials and in
detention centers.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich explained in 1984 that “Cuban‘refugee’ testimony and subsequent conversations with the newly arrived Cubans,for example, becomes the main source for evaluation of Cuban gay life, despiteknowledge of the pressures on émigrés to testify to political persecution in theircountry of origin in order to attain the legal and economic advantages of refugee
status in their new country.”Arguelles and Rich stated, “The success of this interpretation has served antiCuban interests, most notably the American state, rather well. First, credibility ofthe story has neutralized badly needed support for the Cuban revolution amongits natural allies (North American progressive lobbies) and legitimated thepresence in traditionally liberal circles of some of the more reactionary elements
within the Cuban émigré population.”
Reinaldo Arenas left Mariel for the U.S. in 1980. Imperialist movie and banking
capital—without which no star-studded, big budget movie is filmed or distributed—brought Arenas’ memoir depicting life in Cuba as a “police state” forhomosexuals to the screen. Leonardo Hechavarría and Marcel Hatch, in theirOctober 2001 article “Gays in Cuba, from the Hollywood School of Falsification,”categorically concluded, “We know of no Cuban, for or against their government,
who finds the movie credible. Neither do smart gay activists.” (For more about
the movie, also see Lavender & Red, part 93.)
Next: ‘Many more chose to stay.’
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-95/[2/3/2011 5:17:14 PM]

'A visible feature of Cuban society'

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1980: Homosexuality

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Lavender & red, part 96
By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 5, 2007 12:25 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The thunderous, monopolized voice of the U.S. media machine
dwelled on homosexuals who left Cuba from the port of Mariel in
1980, omitting the role of the CIA in instigating migration. At
the same time, the U.S.-led political blockade of Cuba silenced
the voices of Cubans who chose to stay, working together toactively defend their workers’ state against the most powerful imperialist empire
in history.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich stated, with the clarity of
courage, “For all the gay men and the few lesbians who left, there were many
more who chose to stay. Their lives had been constantly improving. The
revolution might not yet speak to the homosexual in them, but it continued toaddress other vital aspects of their being.” These Cubans, they reported,“steadfastly refused to fulfill their gay identity at the cost of their national andpolitical identities.”
Few lesbians left from Mariel, Arguelles and Rich found. “Their small number bycomparison with that of gay men points, again, to the fuller integration of women
into Cuban society and the increased status and freedom enjoyed by lesbians, as
women, under the revolution.”
Ada, a lesbian Cuban rural nurse, said that everything in Cuba wasn’t “perfect.”But, she said, “I remember how it was before [the revolution] and for the firsttime, I feel I’m a human being.’”
Arguelles and Rich reported that in this period of their research—1979 to 1984—
the homosexual population was “a visible feature of the Cuban social
landscape”—part of every sphere of economic, social and governmentalorganization, as well as at the point of production of art and other forms ofculture.
Arguelles and Rich observed, “They are no longer confined to an underworld
economy or alienated from the mainstream of social life as they were in the prerevolutionary era. Particular individuals are well known and pointed to with prideas evidence of revolutionary non-discrimination.”Arguelles and Rich reported finding “a flourishing homosexual social scene
centered around private parties and particular homes.” They described this social
networking at parties and beaches as “a feature of Havana life in general.”Arguelles and Rich added, “While their sexuality may be an open secret inside
Cuba, many lesbians and gay males who participate in cultural and academic
exchanges with the United States become more guarded when abroad, fearful of
how homosexual issues are utilized in the war against the Cuban revolution.
“But many still take the opportunity to visit lesbian and gay bars and bath houses
in New York or San Francisco,” Arguelles and Rich pointed out in the mid-1980s.

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-96/[2/3/2011 5:17:34 PM]

Respond'A visible feature of Cuban society'“Ironically, their own adjustment to a greater social integration in Cuba causes
them increasingly to feel out of place in these sites, viewing their sexual
consumerism as bizarre.”
Jorge, a Cuban artist, concluded that “there is more true sexuality for gays in
Cuba.” (Arguelles and Rich)
Arguelles and Rich returned to the island after their research had been publishedin Spanish in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. The response they got fromlesbian and gay Cubans was that “Overwhelmingly, they felt that progress wasmore marked than we suggested and that conditions of daily life had significantly
improved during this decade.”
A gay Cuban named Roberto who said he had left from Mariel “for theadventure” went back to Cuba to visit. Roberto’s subsequent experiences in the
U.S. drew him to the Antonio Maceo Brigade—pro-revolutionary Cubans in
Miami and New Jersey. (Jon Hillson, “The Sexual Politics of Reinaldo Arenas”)
When Roberto returned to the island, he visited the factory in which he used towork. His co-workers had known he was homosexual. As Roberto got up to speak
to an assembly of 700 of his former factory co-workers, they all rose to give him
a standing ovation.

Lift the blockade!
Cubans who are homosexual, transgender and transsexual did not needimperialism to “liberate” them from their own people, their own revolution. They
needed and deserved support from the revolutionary and progressive movementsin the U.S.—the citadel of anti-Cuban finance capital—and around the world tohelp defeat imperialism.
Cubans of all sexualities, genders and sexes were suffering, and are still suffering,under the economic warfare of the U.S. blockade.
In addition, the blockade impacted on sexual and gender expression on theisland. For example, it put enormous strain on housing, which in turn determines
literally how much room and privacy people have to explore their sexual curiosityand desire.
The constant state of military alert demanded a mass mobilization of Cuban
women, as well as men, in a collective effort for national defense. Revolutionary
military preparedness values courage and strength, dignity and discipline. For
half a millennium, colonialism and imperialism had extolled these virtues as birthtraits of masculine males.
Colonial ideology, backed up by the ruling church and state, enforced masculine
gender expression in males. The Spanish military and church brought antihomosexual epithets that seared like branding irons, as its state cruelly punishedsame-sex love and gender variance.
The most common slur hurled at male homosexuals, which has endured from themedieval Inquisition in Europe, translates into English as “stick of wood.” It
refers to the feudal European punishment of burning alive at the stake males who
had sex with other males, or those deemed inappropriately gendered. Colonialism
brought the fire of the Inquisition with its armadas. In the mid-1600s, forexample, the Spanish captain general who ruled over the rural and urban
enslaved population of Cuba sentenced 20 “effeminate sodomites” to be burned
alive.
The anti-gay epithet—hurled at those not considered “manly” enough—has
another meaning: coward. It’s an accusation that those who fled Cuba in theMariel boatlift faced.
All women, together with the overlapping populations of those battling
oppression based on their sexuality, gender expression and sex, have a common

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-96/[2/3/2011 5:17:34 PM]

'A visible feature of Cuban society'interest in debunking the gender prejudice that femininity is innately “cowardly”
or “weak,” as well as confronting prejudice against same-sex love.
Cuban community defense and military ranks, however, were organizing andmobilizing the entire population as a popular army to defend the collective gainsof the Cuban Revolution, not inculcating the kind of Rambo-masculinity
indoctrination that the Pentagon drills into its ranks of the foot soldiers of animperialist empire. Cuba’s foreign policy, by contrast, was the export ofrevolutionary solidarity.
Next: Sex education created basis for scientific approach to AIDS.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-96/[2/3/2011 5:17:34 PM]

Sex education campaign battled old prejudices

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1970s Cuba:

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Lavender & red, part 97
By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 11, 2007 8:49 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Eva Bjorklund wrote in Swedish-Cuba magazine in 2000: “In
1977, the Center for Sexual Education (CNES) was founded on
the initiative of the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC) and theirseminars and publications encouraged a more enlightened
outlook on homosexuality and started to undermine traditional
prejudices and taboos. The work done by this center has contributed to changes
in attitudes and laws, and the credit for the fact that the AIDS problem has notbeen handled with a homophobic outlook is largely attributed to this endeavor.”(Quarterly publication of the Swedish-Cuban Association)
Bjorklund noted: “Before the Center for Sexual Education (CNES) started its
work, sexual education was a practically unknown phenomenon in Cuba, as in
the rest of Latin America, where the stand and the attitude of the Catholic
Church has continued to curb any attempted change. In this light, Cuba’s sexual
education is groundbreaking.”
Cuban women led the way forward.
Dr. Celestino Álvarez Lajonchere, then-director of the National Institute of Sex
Education in Havana, recalled in a December 1986 interview: “In 1974, theFederation of Cuban Women has already insisted that sex education had to be
done. They had been working on this since the early 1960s.” (International
Journal of Health Services, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1988)
The interview with Álvarez—known on the island as “Tino”—was conducted with
Elizabeth Fee, Joan Furman-Seaborg and Ross Conner. Margaret Gilpin arranged
the interview and did the translation.
In the interview, Álvarez stressed: “The First Party Congress reviewed all of thethings that the Federation has asked for and converted them into a politicaldirective. This is the only country in the world where the people who havesuffered from the consequences of ignorance, principally women and young
people, did not have to spend one minute to convince the highest levels of
leadership of the country that something had to be done. On the contrary, thepolitical leadership was always worried that they weren’t doing enough of what
the women expected them to do. I am convinced that that doesn’t happen in any
other country in the world. I think that’s important—very important.”Álvarez continued: “The First Party Congress of 1975 agreed on the declaration of
the complete and absolute equality of women. The elaboration of that declaration
included the need to organize a system of sex education. They needed a plan tocreate, for example, illustrated texts, and educational materials for the
population. The National Assembly of People’s Power then created a permanentcommission. Within that commission they created a working group, the National
Institute of Sex Education. The structure is very important. I don’t think that inany country in the world, including the socialist world, does this kind of structure

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RespondSex education campaign battled old prejudicesexist, except here.”He added, “With this kind of task, to create a national plan, you can’t leave it in
the hands of one person or a group of people or to one organization; it has to bedone throughout the entire society.”
One of the first suggestions the Ministry of Education made was to begin
elementary sex education from the earliest years. But Cuba was still trying tobuild enough schools and train enough teachers to meet the educational needs ofthe population. Alvarez said his youngest child’s teachers at that time insecondary school in the countryside were just two or three years older than theirstudents.
“It was difficult for the Ministry of Education under these circumstances,” hestated, “to assume responsibility for a national program in sex education.
“The first task was to prepare some texts on the subject, because there weren’tany.”

Ground-breaking first publicationÁlvarez explained, “We decided to make a selection from the most highly
developed socialist country in this area, East Germany, and we selected thebooks that we thought would best cover our needs.”
The first ground-breaking publication in Cuba was Sigfried Schnabl’s “TheIntimate Life of Males and Females” (El hombre y la mujer en la intimidad). The
book had been published first in the German Democratic Republic—the East
German workers’ state—in 1978.
Bjorklund wrote that Sigfried Schnabl’s book, which was “translated and edited in
Cuba in 1979, clearly states that ‘homosexuals should be granted equal rights,
respect and recognition, and that any kind of social discrimination isreprehensible.’ This book served as guidance for the work of CNES and at
pedagogical colleges.”
In their article in the Summer 1980 Gay Insurgent, Stephen J. Risch andRandolph E. Wills noted, “In fact it was the Women’s Federation which saw thebook as so important that it successfully lobbied for its publication considerably
ahead of schedule (since there are limited resources for publishing books in
Cuba, finished manuscripts must wait in line to be published).”Álvarez remembers that the subject was so popular: “We sold it in a special way
to try and guarantee that it would get into the hands of doctors, other healthpersonnel and teachers. We sold it at about 5 pesos, but in addition, the buyer
had to have a paper signed by me saying that he or she had the right to buy the
book. Otherwise, the books would have disappeared from the bookstores within
two hours.”
The law against same-sex love was removed the same year that the book was
published in Cuba—almost a quarter century before the U.S. government
followed suit under pressure from a mass lesbian, gay, bisexual and transmovement.
A subsequent publication, “Are You Beginning to Think about Love?” translated
and edited in Cuba in 1981, “was more ambivalent,” wrote Bjorklund. “It was
intended for a broad audience and argued that homosexuals have the sameability to function in society as other people, but that they can never be as happy
as married people. Mónika Krause, a leading expert at CNES, admitted that thiswas a response to criticism against the first edition of Schnabl’s book, for being
too positive towards homosexuality. A second edition of Schnabl’s book, intended
to be printed in 250,000 copies, although delayed because of the economic crisis,
however, persisted, stressing that sexual violation of minors has no causal
relationship to sexual orientation, dismissing the theories of seduction into
homosexuality, and emphasizing that since nobody is responsible for his or her

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Sex education campaign battled old prejudicessexual orientation, homosexuals must be just as respected as heterosexuals.”Álvarez said the next step was a paperback entitled “When your child asks you”
(Cuando tu hijo te pregunta), first printed in 1980. It was offered for public salewith a book aimed at sex education for children aged 9 to 12. “We did simple
illustrations showing the process of reproduction. This was the best way to start
trying to break the prejudices of the population,” he stated. “We were trying totell parents that they didn’t have any alternative, they had to tell children about
these things, because their kids were going to deal with them for better or forworse. It was up to the parents to answer their kids’ questions and they needed
to know how to do that.”
A fourth publication, “Thinking about love?” (¿Piensas ya en el amor?), wasdesigned for teenagers. Álvarez explained: “This book covers sexually transmitted
diseases and discusses some of the emotional aspects of how children become
adults and what adult relations are all about. It deals with some of the problems
that have to do with being in love, and also talks about contraception.”
Yet another book was written for children from 3 to 7 years old, entitled “Mama,
papa and me” (Mamá, papá, y yo). Álvarez said, “It was the only one that didn’t
sell out immediately, the way all the rest of them did, and we think that’s a signof some resistance to our work in the population.”
In 1981, the Cuban Ministry of Culture produced a publication titled “In Defenseof Love” that stated homosexuality was a variant of human sexuality. Cubasolidarity.org.uk concluded that the book “argued that homophobic bigotry wasan unacceptable attitude inherited by the Revolution and that all sanctions
against gays should be opposed.”This ground-breaking work on sex education, in which Cuban women playedsuch a leadership role, helped pave the road for a scientific and humane
approach to the AIDS epidemic that put the imperialist countries to shame.
Next: Cuba prepared AIDS health care plan before the first diagnosis.
To read more about Cuba, read parts 86-96 of Lavender & Red at workers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-97/[2/3/2011 5:17:54 PM]

Cuba mobilized before first diagnosis

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Lavender & red, part 98
By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 21, 2007 9:06 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHThe Reagan administration tried to whip up world anger at
Cuba’s handling of the AIDS epidemic. In reality, Cuba took an
immediate, scientific and humane approach to people withAIDS.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, In the U.S., AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981. By May 1983, simultaneous gay
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

and lesbian protests of tens of thousands had to take to the streets in New York
City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Milwaukee
under banners reading “Fighting for our lives!” to demand federal funds to battle
AIDS, and for research, services and Social Security benefits.
A day later, activists organized a telephone blitz of the White House to protest
government inaction and to demand funds. It was to date the largest number ofcalls to the Oval Office in a single day in its history. The president had still not
publicly said the word AIDS, while theo-cons demonized the emerging healthcrisis as a “gay plague.”
By contrast, Cuba’s health care workers began preparations to defend the whole
population from the AIDS epidemic two years before the first case was diagnosed
on the island in 1985. Cuba spared no expense despite the chokehold of the U.S.led blockade.
Cuba—unlike the U.S.—mobilized against AIDS, not against people with AIDS.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich observed in the autumn of 1987
that, “Cuba is unusual in publicizing the disease, not as a gay disease, but rather
as a sexually transmitted disease regardless of specific sexual practice.”Planning to protect population
After members of the Cuban Health Ministry took part in a workshop organizedby the Pan-American Health Organization in August 1983, they immediately set
up a national commission to research and create a plan of action to prevent AIDSinCuba. (Karen Wald, Guardian, Oct. 28, 1987)
The National Commission to Face AIDS Syndrome formed in 1983. (Denver Post,
Feb. 10, 2003)
The commission immediately blocked the import of all blood products fromcountries in which the epidemic was already documented.
The commission recommended discarding more than 20,000 vials of imported
blood, worth millions of dollars.
Getting rid of all imported blood products greatly burdened the Cuban healthsystem and forced the country to ratchet up local production. However, thisurgent action resulted in avoiding HIV transmission to almost all hemophiliacs

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RespondCuba mobilized before first diagnosis

and others who needed blood transfusions. (Financial Times, Feb. 16, 2003)
A multi-disciplinary team of doctors and researchers was assigned to work fulltime on AIDS. Political journalist Wald wrote, “Their first move was to prepare adiagnostic screening program based on concrete symptoms that could be seen in
hospitals, such as repeated cases of pneumonia or Kaposi’s sarcoma type ofcancer, which indicated possible AIDS. Hospitals were asked to give weekly
reports on findings of these symptoms.”
Doctors tested more than 135,000 Cubans for HIV in 1983.

Science, not stigma
In 1985, a Cuban who had returned from abroad was the first in the country to
be diagnosed with AIDS. The Cuban was one of 300,000 heroes of the revolution
who helped defend the people of Mozambique—an African country impoverishedby colonialism and battling the forces of imperialism.
In the U.S., Africa and Haiti were being scapegoated as the source of theepidemic, without any scientific proof. In Cuba, however, where many are of
African descent because of the history of slavery, health officials did not
stigmatize the African continent.
In an interview in Cuba International, circa 1987, Dr. Rodolfo Rodríguez, then
the national director of epidemiology for the Cuban Ministry of Health, said thatwhile some of the mass media at that time might have been trying to blame theAfrican continent for AIDS, “It is known worldwide that it is the developed
Western countries—Europe and the U.S.—that have the largest number of AIDS
cases and the largest number of asymptomatic carriers.”
In the U.S., homosexuality was still against the law and viciously repressed. The
right wing labeled AIDS a “gay disease.” This only drove the epidemic deeper into
the population. So too did the criminalization of drug addiction and prostitution,
both highly profitable industries in the U.S.
There was no known intravenous drug addiction in Cuba, and same-sex love was
not against the law.
Cuban health workers tested all pregnant women, people with sexuallytransmitted diseases, and anyone who might have had sexual contact withsomeone who was HIV positive. Testing equipment was installed in blood bankcenters. (Denver Post)
By the end of 1985, Wald wrote, the Cuban government had purchased, despite
great expense, all the technical means to screen the island’s entire blood supply.
“Cuba spent more than $3 million to buy the reactive agents and equipment, andto set up labs in blood banks and hygiene and epidemiology centers around thecountry.”
That year, the Cuban public health system allocated $2 million for the National
HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Program, which focused on providing the first
750,000 diagnostic kits and centers. (MEDICC Review, Vol. II, No. 1, 2—2001)

Capitalism and contraception
The years of sex education that preceded the outbreak of the epidemic helped tocreate the basis for a more scientific and compassionate approach to people withAIDS.
However, when faced with a sexually transmissible epidemic like AIDS, Cuba had
to overcome a particular capitalist legacy regarding safer-sex education andpractices.
Dr. Celestino Álvarez Lajonchere, a gynecologist and ground-breaking sex
educator in Cuba, reminded interviewers in 1988, “You know this country
inherited a system in which the rural areas and small towns had little or no

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Cuba mobilized before first diagnosis

medical care before the revolution.”
He added that before the revolution, illegal abortions were common. They weremost often performed by doctors, without anesthesia, in unsanitary conditions.
Álvarez Lajonchere explained: “At the triumph of the revolution, the majority ofthese abortion doctors left the country. There was no habit in the country ofusing contraceptives, and contraception did not even appear in the medical
school curriculum. ... The private physicians at the time didn’t give contraceptive
services to their patients because they could charge much more doing abortions.”
As a result, he said, “Since people didn’t have contraceptive habits, we
encountered serious difficulties in the first years after the triumph of therevolution.”
While half of all Cuban doctors left the island and went to capitalist countries, 97
percent of the physicians in obstetrics and gynecology emigrated. As a result,Álvarez Lajonchere noted, overnight he became the oldest
gynecologist/obstetrician in the country.
Álvarez Lajonchere said that, in addition, within months after the workers andpeasants took state power, “[A]ll of the professors at the medical school quit
voluntarily, thinking mistakenly that the government could not replace them. The
government accepted their resignations. It was a policy in the country, and stillis, that if you really don’t want to live in this country under socialism you should
leave. You can’t create a socialist society with people who are disaffected.
“So the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health got together acourse for new professors,” he continued, “people who could never have been
professors before the revolution because of their low social class origins—they
didn’t come from the upper middle classes.”
The medical school faculty was replaced with new professors. “We all left private
practice and went to teach. It was an extraordinary advantage that we knew theconditions of medical practice in the country. I became chief of the department ofobstetrics and gynecology at the one and only medical school. The first thing I
did was to put contraception into the medical school curriculum. There were
never any restrictions about who could have access to contraceptives in thiscountry: not by age, not by race, not by anything.”Álvarez Lajonchere added, “Medical services from the very beginning have been
free.” And the new medical teachers received a higher salary than the president.
(International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 18, Number 2, 1988)“The habit of using contraceptives,” Álvarez Lajonchere explained, “is a habit thattakes time to build. For a population that was accustomed to having abortions, it
was easier for them to go to the hospital and have an abortion.”
After the revolution, underground abortions in unsanitary conditions increased
until 1965. “When we started to do all of them in hospitals, obviously deaths as aresult of abortion disappeared.”He added that the number of abortions began to decrease in 1974 as a result ofmass education about sex and contraception.
Álvarez Lajonchere concluded: “Our current policy on population is the same
policy that we’ve had from the first day of the revolution. It’s a policy of principle.
A woman has the right to have the number of children she wants, and to havethem when she wants. The government is obligated to assure that her rightbecomes a reality. So we educate people about all of the contraceptive methods.
We include abortion, even though we don’t view it as a contraceptive method, sothat people will know about it. We have never said that having a small family isgood; we have never pressured people to reduce the birth rate.”
Next: Cuba directed war against AIDS, not people with AIDS.

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-98/[2/3/2011 5:18:13 PM]

Cuba mobilized before first diagnosis

To read more about Cuba, read parts 86-97 of Lavender & Red at workers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-98/[2/3/2011 5:18:13 PM]

Care & prevention, not repression

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Care & prevention, notrepression

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Lavender & red, part 99
By Leslie Feinberg
Published May 26, 2007 7:49 AM

From both a scientific and human standpoint, the AIDS
sanatoria health care facilities in Cuba bore no relation to thethreat of state quarantine in the U.S.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn the U.S., there was no scientific merit to public proposals to
empower the state for surveillance and quarantine of people believed to have
AIDS. There was no way to identify how many people out of the vast population
had already been exposed. The epidemic was already entrenched. AIDS was not
spread through casual contact. And anti-gay and racist scapegoating, laws against
same-sex love, immigrant bashing, and laws against IV drug use and prostitution
had generated fear of the state, as well as of coming forward for testing or
treatment.
So threats of state investigation and forced isolation only drove the epidemic
deeper underground. The prohibitive costs of medical care, particularly for those
without health insurance, also barred many from seeking health care.
Yet on March 2, 1984, USA Today revealed that California officials were legally
pursuing the ability to forcibly quarantine people believed to have AIDS. The
same month, the Democratic co-chair of the Connecticut General Assembly’s
Judiciary Committee introduced broad quarantine legislation after a racist media
campaign demonized a Black woman, accused of prostitution and drug addiction,
who was reported to have AIDS.
Even as politicians were refusing to allocate the funds necessary to meet thispublic health emergency, the big-business media were unjustly accusing Haitian
immigrants in the U.S. of spreading AIDS.
The late Michael Callen told Workers World at that time that the press forquarantine powers was “not really to protect people but to further certain
political goals, to further isolate already disenfranchised people.” Callen said thatthe singling out of a Black woman in Connecticut and allegations without
scientific basis that Haiti and Africa were the sources of the epidemic wereattempts “to blame all calamity on the Third World.” (Workers World, April 5,
1984)
Gay men and bisexuals were blamed for the epidemic for much the same reason
that the church hierarchy in the Middle Ages accused Jewish people of creating
bubonic plague by “poisoning the wells.”
Media in the South and Jerry Falwell’s right-wing fundamentalist publication“Moral Majority Inc.” editorialized that AIDS was God’s “deserved punishments”
against homosexuals. (aidssurvivalproject.org)
Far-right columnist Patrick Buchanan titled his commentary: “AIDS Disease: It’s
Nature Striking Back.” (New York Post, May 24, 1983)

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RespondCare & prevention, not repression

That’s why the late Bobby Campbell, a San Francisco registered nurse with AIDS,
told Workers World on March 25, 1984, how concerned he was about the politicalabuses of broad quarantine measures in the U.S. He warned, “We would see gay
men locked up en masse and it is possible in more backward localities thatlesbians could be included in that.”
The U.S. government declared war on people with AIDS rather than marshal
funds and forces to deal with the epidemic.

Science, not scapegoating
By contrast, Cuba—an island nation of 11 million that was blockaded by U.S.
imperialism—had prepared its health care system for the epidemic two years
before its first diagnosis of an AIDS case. So when AIDS first emerged in the
population, it could be easily identified and isolated before being spread to therest of the people.
In 1986, Cuba opened up 13 sanatoria that provided care for 99 people, only 20
percent of whom were believed to have contracted AIDS through same-sex
contact. (Denver Post, Feb. 10, 2003)
Joseph Mutti wrote from Havana in June 1999, “Once a person has tested HIVpositive, attempts are made to trace everyone who had sexual contact with theperson. Given Cubans’ general openness about their sexuality, and Cuba’s cradleto-grave health care system, it’s usually possible to ascertain how and when aperson was infected.
“The basic principle of the Cuban public health-care system, widely recognized as
the Third World’s best,” Mutti explained, “is to prioritize the health of the
population as a whole instead of focusing exclusively on individual care. This isimportant for understanding HIV/AIDS policies, including the sanatorium
system that earned Cuba an unfair reputation for employing repression tocounter the virus.” (“Love and Honesty: The Dawn of Gay Rights,” Resource
Center of the Americas.org)
The newspaper Granma explained Cuba’s reasons for using quarantine: “Themain usefulness of this measure is to slow down as much as possible theepidemic progression of the disease to allow time for other measures of disease
control to have a medium- or long-term effect, such as education (encouraging
changes in sexual habits and behavior), until such time as a vaccine andtreatment exist, auguring a definitive solution to the problem.” (“Cuban Strategy
in the Struggle Against AIDS,” Granma, Sept. 18, 1988)
When asked about the Cuban approach to AIDS, then-Cuban Deputy Public
Health Minister Hector Terry explained in October 1987, “The quarantine center
is a sanatorium. We have a very small number of people carrying the virus, andwe believe that because of that, we are in a unique situation. We have an
opportunity, in epidemiological terms, of controlling the spread of AIDS andpreventing it from becoming a major epidemic as it has in other countries, where
they don’t know how to confront, reduce or eliminate it.
“We are in a situation that permits us to make this kind of decision, and to wait awhile because we are not talking about something permanent, for a whole
lifetime. We’re talking about a dialectical situation.”
Terry added, “This aspect [quarantine] is controversial, some groups of scientists
disagree with it.” He said that the objections were “more from a political than ascientific standpoint. But we believe our country has this epidemiologicalopportunity and we shouldn’t lose it. We are trying to prevent the spread of thevirus throughout the country by means of sexual relations that our patients could
have with other people who at this point have not been infected with the virus.”“Our country has its own philosophy and the first principle of this philosophy isrespect for human dignity. I think that human dignity requires care of theindividual. You know that we spare no resources here to make sure that our

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-99/[2/3/2011 5:18:33 PM]

Care & prevention, not repression

people have the best health care possible anywhere in the world. And that’s partof what we’re trying to maintain in our battle against AIDS.” (Interview with
Karen Wald, Guardian, Oct. 28, 1987)

The best care—for free
Cuba provided free health care to its population despite economic obstruction by
the U.S. and later the devastating loss of its main trading partner, the Soviet
Union. Cuba organized its scarce resources—not just to stem transmission of theepidemic, but to provide humane care.
“Organized like small communities,” MEDICC Review wrote, “the sanatoriums
are made up of apartment complexes and small houses, plus infirmary, offices
and other patient facilities.” (Vol. II, No. 1, 2; 2001)
People with AIDS received healthy food, medications and other treatment, airconditioned housing, exercise and sports, movies, television, videos, rest, andpsychological and social services; everything was free except cigarettes.
Cubans with AIDS continued to receive their full paychecks, even if they weren’t
able to work. Their jobs were held open indefinitely. Terry stressed, “This is very
important, so that they have no concern regarding the support of their families.
“What other country in the world would be capable of paying full salary to people
with AIDS? Terry asked. “I think that’s very linked to the whole question ofhuman rights and the controversies around this. We know there are countries
that shout about human rights, such as the U.S. where a person who gets AIDS
may die of hunger, lose his job, it’s hard to get into a hospital. Treatment there
costs an average of $700 a day.”
Terry added that the Cubans’ families also received special attention. A working
group of psychologists, sociologists and social workers helped the families ofpeople with AIDS deal with their problems, as well. Terry concluded that people
with AIDS had greater peace of mind knowing their families were being cared for.
Next: Cuba declared war on AIDS, not on people with AIDSTo read more about Cuba, read parts 86-98 of Lavender & Red at workers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-99/[2/3/2011 5:18:33 PM]

Cuba brought science, not scapegoating, to AIDS care

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Cuba brought science, notscapegoating, to AIDS care

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 1, 2007 11:38 PM

Cuba tried to isolate the spread of AIDS as soon as the epidemic
appeared in the island population, explained then Cuban Deputy
Public Health Minister Héctor Terry in 1987. But Cuba did not
try to socially isolate people with AIDS.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,

Terry stressed of Cubans living in the sanatoria: “They visit their families athome, go out on pass; their families visit them, every day. Their friends can visit
them.” (Interview with Karen Wald, Guardian, Oct. 28, 1987)
Cuba attempted to quarantine the spread of the epidemic based on a scientificapproach to a medical emergency, without using scapegoating to isolate people
with AIDS.
In the U.S., AIDS activists had to fight a protracted battle to replace the bigotedlabel of “high-risk groups” with a rational understanding of “high-risk behaviors.”
Cuban medical workers and educators approached transmission scientifically.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich observed in the autumn of 1987
that, “Cuba is unusual in publicizing the disease, not as a gay disease, but rather
as a sexually transmitted disease regardless of specific sexual practice.”

WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA
The primary route of AIDS transmission in Cuba was via international contact,
including Cubans who had worked or studied abroad.
Of the first 99 people quarantined in 1986, only about 20 percent were believed
to have contracted AIDS through same-sex contact.
Terry articulated this clearly: “We are carrying out our program by giving the
public a lot of scientific information, speaking to them clearly about the modes oftransmission and not generating phenomena such as homophobia or sexual
repression.
“In some countries the mass media, for commercial reasons, generate thosephenomena to sell more magazines or newspapers. But we don’t need to sellmore magazines or newspapers. We don’t need to use AIDS to get people towatch more TV or to get some corporation to finance AIDS research. We don’t
need any of that here.”
Terry summed up, “We start from the ideas that AIDS is transmitted not becauseof what you are but because of what you do, and therefore there’s no reason to
generate any kind of persecution or phobia against any patient.”
Interviewer Karen Wald added: “Members of the gay community interviewed
here said there has been no increase in homophobia or attacks on gays as a resultof AIDS. They attribute this in part to the fact that the government has not
singled out gays as carriers of the disease.”
And unlike in the U.S., same-sex love was not against the law in Cuba.

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RespondCuba brought science, not scapegoating, to AIDS care

Eyewitness to Cuban care
Cleo Manago was part of a delegation of 200 people from the U.S. whochallenged Washington’s travel ban to visit Cuba in August 1994. Manago wrote
about his visit to an AIDS sanatorium in an article entitled “Cuba, from a Black,Male, Same-Gender-Loving Perspective.”“The widely reported rumors and articles on AIDS concentration camps in Cuba
are out of context and pure anti-Cuba propaganda,” Manago stated. “I visited
Cuba’s largest AIDS sanatorium and was taken aback by the humane,considerate, intuitive and life affirming approach to care taken by this center.
“The sanatorium was similar to a large housing complex where all who chose tolive there had 24-hour health care, the option of having family members, even a
dog or a cat stay with them. Same-gender-loving and heterosexual couples living
together at the complex is a common occurrence.
“I asked people living there about the conditions in which they live. None were
happy about having HIV or AIDS but all were very appreciative of the care theyreceived. Many who could go home if they wanted chose to stay where they wereguaranteed prepared food, a comfortable home and prompt medical attention.
This particular center offered ambulatory care for those with jobs or who wanted
to continue with school. To my knowledge there is nothing similar in the USA.”Manago concluded, “The main problem people with AIDS faced was the difficultyin getting the medicines and treatments (pentamidine, bactrim, condoms, etc.)
needed from other countries, due to the U.S. blockade of Cuba.”(www.sonomacountyfreepress.com)‘Information without sensationalism’Dr. Héctor Terry emphasized: “We are treating the patients medically tomaintain their present state of good health. Every time some new information
comes up in the scientific community, some new kind of drug or medicine, we try
to find out if it could be useful in preventing the virus from becoming activatedinto a full-blown disease.”
Terry added: “Information is reaching the public without any sensationalism,
without creating any hysteria or panic. We haven’t yet been using the mass media
as much as we should; we think that’s a deficiency in the program. We’ve beenusing state agencies and all the ministries a lot, organizing conferences for all theworkers in certain ministries, especially those in the high-risk areas. We alsoutilize the health education program and the popular video centers throughout
the country. We run videos and have doctors there to answer questions. We’ve
used that a lot and many young people attend these.
“We’re now preparing other activities with the mass organizations, theCommittees to Defend the Revolution, student and women’s organizations,” hecontinued. “We are working with other scientific institutions in the country,
which are providing invaluable assistance and we are looking at all possibilities
anywhere in the world. We try to synthesize what is being done internationally.
“Here we have the SUMA group, which is developing Cuban technology to do
mass-scale diagnostic testing. With an infinitesimal blood sample we candiagnose for AIDS. We’ll be trying to get this equipment into all the country’s
blood banks next year, and in all the hygiene and epidemiology centers. And
we’ll be preparing ourselves for carrying out at least annual blood tests of thewhole population, in every blood bank and epidemiology center, in every
hospital. We’re preparing a very wide-range program.”
Terry concluded: “I repeat that the method of quarantine in a sanatorium isn’t
permanent. It will be treated dialectically. We are studying the situation andwhen we see that it is not the correct solution, or that other possibilities offer
themselves, we will act accordingly—always basing ourselves on scientific data.

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Cuba brought science, not scapegoating, to AIDS care

Otherwise we wouldn’t be scientists.”
Clearly quarantine in Cuba was a tactic at the moment the epidemic emerged, nota scientific principle.
Joseph Mutti wrote from Havana in June 1999: “The government undertook
extensive efforts to learn more about transmission of the virus and to discover acure. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that officials felt enough was known to end
the quarantine and focus on public information, education and prevention.”(“Love and Honesty: The Dawn of Gay Rights,” Resource Center of theAmericas.org)
Cuba began an out-patient pilot reintegration project in 1993 that proved
successful. (Denver Post)Those who left the sanatoria received ambulatory care that included regular
doctor’s care, visits to specialists and dietary supplements—all free. (medicc.org)
However, the Denver Post concluded in February 2003, “Today, 48 percent of
those who are HIV-positive or have AIDS choose to live in the 16 sanatoriums
around Cuba.”
Next: “Cuba has much to teachthe world about AIDS.”
To find out more about Cuba,
read parts 86-99 of Lavender & Red
at workers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-100/[2/3/2011 5:18:52 PM]

U.S. imperialist blockade obstructed Cuban AIDS treatment

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Lavender & red, part 101
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 13, 2007 9:07 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe Cuban approach to AIDS saved lives, Joseph Mutti
concluded in June 1999. “Cuba now has one of the world’s lowest
rates of infection, with only one of every 1,500 persons testing
HIV-positive (the U.S. rate is 1 of every 550). That statistic is
especially remarkable given Cuba’s sexually active youth andeasygoing attitudes about sex.” (“Love and Honesty: The Dawn of Gay Rights,”
Resource Center of the Americas.org)
MEDICC Review explained that, “By the end of 2001, Cuba will have approved its
most ambitious offensive yet against HIV/AIDS: setting up a National Task Force
Against AIDS (GOPELS),” to be headed by the minister of public health and thesecretary of the council of ministers.
“Their job will be to integrate prevention strategies among the various national
players, including the Public Health and Education Ministries, the Federation of
Cuban Women, and other government agencies and NGOs. They will be guided
by the ‘Strategic Plan for Controlling HIV/AIDS,’ outlining national strategies
against the virus for the next five years.” (Vol. II, No. 1, 2—2001)
The biggest problem in dealing with AIDS on the island continued to be access to
medicine for free distribution to the population because of the U.S. blockade.
MEDICC Review noted in 2001 that, “Early treatment of AIDS consisted of AZT,interferons and other drugs commonly used in international protocols—but often
more difficult for Cuba to purchase because many were patented by U.S.
pharmaceutical companies and therefore not freely available to Cuban importers
under the restrictions imposed by the U.S. embargo.
“Earlier this year, Cuba began to manufacture its own anti-retrovirals and makethem available to AIDS patients free of charge. Cuba has maintained a strong
research component in the fight against AIDS, primarily through studies of theapplication of interferons to AIDS patients and the continued research to develop
an HIV/AIDS vaccine.”
In February 2003, it was reported that treatment of Cubans with AIDS had
greatly improved over the preceding two years because Cuba’s pharmaceuticalindustry was producing its own generic copies of anti-HIV medicines. Dr. Byron
Barksdale, director of a U.S. medical group, said, “Cuba now produces enoughanti-viral medicines for its own patients and it has offered to supply othernations in the Caribbean region.” (Financial Times, Feb. 16, 2003)
The Financial Times—no friend to socialist construction—reported, “Cuba hasmuch to teach the world about tackling AIDS, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science heard on [Feb. 16]. A wide-ranging prevention andtreatment program, backed by strong political action, has given the Caribbean
country the lowest prevalence of AIDS disease and HIV infection in the western

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-101/[2/3/2011 5:19:24 PM]

RespondU.S. imperialist blockade obstructed Cuban AIDS treatment

hemisphere—and one of the lowest rates in the world.”
Cuba addresses world impact
In its issue coinciding with International AIDS Day 2001, MEDICC Review
noted, “Today, some 36 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, over 25
million of them in Africa, where most have no way to pay for the drugs thatmight extend their lives. They die with no treatment in sight.” (Vol. II, No. 1, 2)
MEDICC Review reprinted the full text of a speech by Cuban Vice President
Carlos Lage Dávila, delivered earlier that year at the United Nations General
Assembly on AIDS. Lage Dávila had offered his socialist government’s offer of
Cuban solidarity for people with AIDS, “especially those in the developing
countries most affected.”
In his speech on June 25, 2001, Lage Dávila said, “No country is free of AIDS.
Some—the privileged and rich—have managed to reduce the mortality rate withmedicines sold at high, unreasonable prices. Others—unfortunate and poor—are
experiencing a terrifying reduction in their population’s life expectancy and ademographic decline that could lead them to extinction.”He stressed that, “In many African nations, the number of teachers who die fromAIDS each year is greater than the number of new teachers graduating. The
deaths in sub-Saharan Africa to date are equivalent to those that would haveresulted from dropping on the region 70 bombs like the ones on Hiroshima andNagasaki. It is a dramatic paradox that, in this new millennium, the same
continent that witnessed the appearance of humankind’s first ancestors six
million years ago begins to witness the disappearance of humankind.
“Cuba also suffers from this disease; there have been 2,565 people living with
HIV/AIDS in our country, 388 of whom currently have the full-blown disease,and 896 of whom have died over the last 14 years.
“Our program to fight AIDS,” Lage Dávila explained, “guarantees comprehensive
care for people with HIV and AIDS, free anti-retroviral treatment for all,specialized medical centers for those who require them and a constant struggle
for patients to achieve the fullest social integration, with all their rights andwithout discrimination.
“It also guarantees access to safe blood, certifying that 100 percent of blood
donations are free of AIDS, hepatitis and other illnesses; voluntary testing of all
pregnant women, resulting in zero mother-child transmission since 1997; and an
education and prevention strategy aimed at vulnerable groups, young people andthe entire population. We have the lowest AIDS rate in the Americas and one of
the lowest in the world, with 0.3 percent of the population between 15 and 49
years affected.
“Even in the face of the [U.S.] blockade, which prevents our access to 50 percentof the world’s new medicines because they are produced in the United States,”
Lage Dávila stressed, “we have controlled the epidemic, and what is more,achieved a life expectancy of 76 years and an infant mortality rate of less thanseven. Cuba participates in this Assembly as a responsible member of theinternational community, showing solidarity and modesty and freely offering our
experience and collaboration.”
Solidarity proposal
Lage Dávila stated, “The U.N. Secretary General has proposed—and is making aworthy and just effort to obtain—$7 to $10 billion for the fight against AIDS. The
amount is not enough and money alone cannot solve the problem, but it is anecessary start. It is incomprehensible to think that this life-saving money cannot
be found in a world that spends 40 times more on illegal drugs, 80 times moreon military budgets and 100 times more on advertising.
“It is incomprehensible to think that this life-saving money cannot be found in a

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U.S. imperialist blockade obstructed Cuban AIDS treatment

world where 20 percent of the population is responsible for 86 percent of private
consumption, and where the personal fortunes of 22 people each exceed theamount the Secretary General is requesting, fortunes that in total represent 43
times his request.”
Lage Dávila pointed to the U.S.: “The richest and most powerful nation in history—that claims it is a human rights champion, does not make its payments to the
U.N. and is trying to reduce its contribution to the WHO [World HealthOrganization]—dedicates barely 0.2 percent of its gross domestic product todevelopment. It is the only country that voted against the resolution giving every
individual the right to have access to AIDS medicines, while at the same time, it
has unleashed an insane arms race upon the world, with the sale of the mostsophisticated instruments of war to allies and followers, and its global missile
shield initiative.
“There is no need to elaborate further to understand that the international
economic order is criminally unjust, that when the words ‘democracy,’ ‘humanrights,’ ‘individual liberty,’ ‘equal opportunities’ and others come from themouths of the powerful, they ring hollow and demagogic.”
Lage Dávila delivered Cuba’s urging that the special session of the U.N. General
Assembly proclaim that:“AIDS drugs and other vital medicines required on a large scale should not beprotected by patents. People cannot be allowed to make money off the lives ofhuman beings.
“The foreign debt of the poorest countries should be cancelled immediately andunconditionally. They have already paid more than once.
“The next Group of Seven meeting, instead of adopting a new economic
liberalization to impose on the world’s poor and less fortunate, should agree toreduce their military budgets to raise at least U.S. $10 billion requested by the
U.N. And they should turn these funds over today, not sit by while 25 million
more people die. This is merely a small part of their social debt to the Third
World.”
Cuban government offer
Lage Dávila concluded with an offer from the Cuban government to the poorest
countries and those with the highest prevalence of the illness:• Four thousand doctors and health personnel to create the necessary
infrastructure to supply the population with the prescription drugs and necessary
follow-up and to train a large number of specialists in their own fields, including
nurses and allied health technicians.
• Sufficient professors to establish 20 medical schools, many of whom could bechosen out of the 2,359 Cuban doctors who were then serving in 17 countries aspart of Cuba’s Integral Health Program. These schools could train 1,000 doctors
annually in countries that need the most assistance.
• Doctors, teachers, psychologists and other specialists needed to assess andcollaborate with campaigns to prevent AIDS and other illnesses.
• Diagnostic equipment and kits necessary for basic prevention programs.
• Anti-retroviral treatment for 30,000 patients.
Lage Dávila concluded, “All it would take is for the international community toprovide the raw materials for the medicines, the equipment and material
resources for these products and services. Cuba would not obtain any profits, andwould pay salaries in its national currency, thus taking on the most expensive
part for international health agencies, as well as the most difficult part, which is
to ensure that the professionals are prepared and ready to begin their work.”

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U.S. imperialist blockade obstructed Cuban AIDS treatment

The U.S.-led political and economic blockade of Cuba kept this offer of socialist
solidarity from reaching those around the world who most needed it.
Next: Arc of progress on same-sex love and gender variance visible in Cuban
films.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-100 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-101/[2/3/2011 5:19:24 PM]

Change apparent in still photos and motion pictures

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Lavender & red, part 102
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 24, 2007 10:17 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Two years into the AIDS epidemic and on the eve of theoverturning of the Soviet Union—Cuba’s primary trading partner—and the East European bloc of workers’ states, the Cuban
Revolution continued to make great gains in the battle against
old, obstinate prejudice against same-sex love.
Qualitative developments of great import took place in Cuba in the late 1980s.
Leonardo Hechavarría and Marcel Hatch wrote that in 1987, the police were
“forbidden to harass people because of appearance or clothing, largely benefiting
gays.”
A year later, another important change in Cuban law occurred. Pre-revolutionary
legislation against “flaunting homosexuality” in public was rescinded. That edict
had threatened feminine males and masculine females of all sexualities since its
imposition under U.S. neo-colonial rule in the 1930s.
Punishment for homosexual acts had already been formally removed from Cuban
law back in 1979—almost a quarter of a century before the U.S. decriminalizedsame-sex love.
Research scholars Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich noted, though, that the
1979 legal code “failed to legalize manifestations of homosexual behavior in the
public sphere and left intact anti-gay laws dating to the Cuban Social Defense
Code of 1939.”
Arguelles and Rich, summarizing their research in Cuba in the mid-1980s, madea very important point about the difference between private and public spheresin a society building socialism that might not be readily apparent to anyone
living in a capitalist system.
They explained, “As delineated in a Latin American socialist setting, private space
is far wider than in the United States, encompassing virtually all behavior outside
the purview of official sanction or attention, while approved policy, publishedtexts, and official stances compose the public sphere.”
They added that “within the private sphere, there are a clear latitude and range ofpossibilities for lesbians and gay men that surprise the critical observer.”Canadian activist Ian Lumsden quoted a gay émigré living in Toronto, who statedwith regard to gay men that “homosexuals in Cuba find it much easier to be open
and free about conveying sexual desire in the street than they would in Canada.”(“Cuba and Homosexuality”)
However, in 1988 Cuba took another major step by striking down the imperialistera “Public Ostentation Law” against “public scandal” or “extravagance.”
Revolutionary leadership, mass participation

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RespondChange apparent in still photos and motion pictures

Cuban society was not changing in some automatic, unconscious way. Thesedevelopments—which are both a reflection of the growth of consciousness and aneffort to raise wider, deeper consciousness—are the result of revolutionary
leadership, with widespread popular discussion and debate.
Two years before the old law was rescinded, in 1986, Fidel Castro and the Cuban
Communist Party had initiated a popular campaign, “not simply to rectify errors
committed in the last 10 years,” the Cuban president emphasized, “or errors
committed throughout the history of the revolution. Rectification is finding theway to resolve errors that are hundreds of years old.” (“Alert on Before Night
Falls,” Jon Hillson)
That same year, Cuba’s National Commission on Sex Education stated thathomosexuality is a sexual orientation and announced the goal of countering
homophobia with education. (From the film “Gay Cuba”)
In 1988, Fidel Castro spoke out publicly about the need to change negative
attitudes in society and in the party about homosexuality.
At the 1992 congress of the Union of Young Communists, Cuban revolutionary
leader Vilma Espín, president of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC),
challenged prejudicial ideas presented by a psychologist. Sonia de Vries, directorof the film “Gay Cuba,” reported that Espín stated that what needed changing
was prejudice, not gay and lesbian sexuality. (Cuba Update)That same year, Fidel Castro stated in an interview: “I am absolutely opposed toany form of repression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard tohomosexuals. [It is] a natural human tendency that must simply be respected.”
These qualitative changes in Cuba, like still photographs, capture the peaks ofprogress.
The release of three films in the 1990s—”Strawberry and Chocolate,” “Gay Cuba”
and “Butterflies on the Scaffold”—offered a panoramic moving picture of thesweep of progress resulting from decades of the process of building socialism
despite the imperialist military, economic and political blockade.
From the balcony to the screen
When Havana was ruled by U.S. crime bosses and bankers, capitalism maderoom in the market for homosexual acts, forced to serve the fantasies of those
who could afford the cost in dollars and pesos. Often the patricians who paid forsex despised those whom they exploited—hating them for their class, their race,
their sex and/or their gender expression and for witnessing the cruelty, selfhatred, guilt and shame in the customers’ desires.
So there were lots of homosexual acts taking place in Havana—the biggest U.S.
brothel industry in the Caribbean. But off the clock there was not much social
room for two men or two women of any gender expression to meet and get toknow each other, to freely follow same-sex attraction and exploration, or to fallin love and/or live together as couples or in other formations.
Many men found each other in the darkened theaters of old Cuban cinemas likethe Campoamor, Rialto and Verdún. One older Cuban homosexual recalled,“[Y]ou could go and immediately pick up a young guy. Many had their firstexperience there. There was a lot of sex in those cinemas.” (Lumsden)
The culture of Cuba changed with social ownership of the means of production on
the island—the land, mines, factories and other major arteries of economic life.
The Cuban Revolution did not, and could not, wave a magic wand and instantly
transform the social content of culture. But it quickly transformed the economic
underpinnings of culture. Like everything else that is collectively produced on theisland, culture began to be produced to meet the social needs of the many, notjust packaged for individual consumption for the few.

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Change apparent in still photos and motion pictures

Lumsden, who published his views on Cuba in 1996, reported the ways in which
he saw culture being made available to everyone in Cuba. “This is evident in the
low prices and range of theater, dance and music that are available on stage or inopen spaces like the Parque Central in Old Havana. It is evident in the quantityand quality of translated foreign and domestic books that have been published at
low prices in huge editions. Finally it is evident in events such as the annual film
festival (New Latin American Cinema), which has an impact as great as Toronto’s
Festival.” (Temple University Press)
Lumsden observed: “When you attend a cultural event in Havana you come away
as impressed by the informed and critical engagement of the audience as you areby the innovative quality of the performance itself. This involvement is far
removed from the commodified nature of so many mainstream cultural events inNorth America.”
This is the Cuban audience that flocked to the state-sponsored release of the 1993
blockbuster movie “Strawberry and Chocolate.” The film, about an attempt atfriendship and understanding between a young heterosexual communist and ahomosexual, brought same-sex love out of the cinema balconies, where shameand guilt lurked in the shadows, and onto the silver screen of Cuban culture.
Over the next two years, two important documentaries followed—“Gay Cuba” in1994 and “Butterflies on the Scaffold” in 1995.
All told, these movies offer a view of the influence of revolutionary process on
popular culture, as well as the influence of popular culture on revolutionary
development. The films are themselves part of that dialectical struggle, whichitself takes place within the battle against the roar of ruling imperialist ideology,
broadcast at every turn by its entertainment, media and education industries.
Next: “Strawberry and Chocolate,” sweet taste of change.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-101 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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The sweet taste of change in Cuba

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Lavender & red, part 103
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 28, 2007 9:20 PM

In 1993, the Cuban state sponsored a ground-breaking movie,“Strawberry and Chocolate” (“Fresa y Chocolate”).

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The movie tells the story of two young Cuban men—aheterosexual communist and a homosexual. In his 1995 Cineaste
article, Dennis West described the movie about two young men getting to knoweach other in Havana in 1979. David is the young communist. Diego, thehomosexual, West writes, “leaves in spite of his pro-Revolution sympathies andhis friend’s claim that there is a place for gays in the Cuban Revolution.” (vol. 21,
no. 1-2, Winter-Spring 1995)
The release of “Strawberry and Chocolate” in Cuba broke national box officerecords and opened up an island-wide discussion about same-sex love andprejudice.
The movie’s script is an adaptation by author Senel Paz of his own very popular
short story, “The Wolf, the Woods and the New Man.”
Dennis West interviewed acclaimed Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea—
affectionately known to friends as “Titón” but also referred to as Alea—in August
1994. Gutiérrez died, at age 68, in April 1996. West conducted the interview inJuárez, Mexico, during the Second Festival of Latinamerican Cinema Paso delNorte; Dennis West and Joan M. West translated the interview into English,edited it and published it in the Winter-Spring 1995 edition of Cineaste.
The movie, which played simultaneously at 10 to 12 Havana theaters, drew linesof Cubans that stretched for blocks. (Larry R. Oberg, “The Status of Gays in Cuba:
Myth and Reality”)
When West asked Gutiérrez why he thought his movie “Strawberry and
Chocolate” so resonated in Cuba, the filmmaker answered that as soon as themovie opened after the annual film festival, “There were very long lines to see it,
and it ran for something like three months in Havana. I think it had that
response because it was a well-told story with a theme that many people wanted
to discuss in public. A theme that up until this time had remained rather
marginalized. I’m not referring just to the theme of homosexuality, but rather tothe theme of intolerance in general. I think that people really felt a great need toreflect on this, and to reflect on it openly. For these reasons, the film became asociological phenomenon.”
When asked about the number of Cuban viewers who attended screenings,
Gutiérrez said, “‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ may hold the record for the greatest
number of Cuban viewers. I don’t know. But at any rate, it is the film which has
attracted the greatest number of viewers in the shortest period of time.”
Gutiérrez contrasted 1979, the year in which “Strawberry and Chocolate” is set,with life on the island in 1995: “Now there is greater flexibility in job

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Respond

The sweet taste of change in Cuba

opportunities for homosexuals. In the case of representing Cuba abroad, forexample, the appointment of representatives used to be handled with kid gloves
when homosexuals were involved. Many people were against appointing thembecause they were considered more vulnerable to scandal and blackmail—and
that’s true, we’ve seen it in countries such as England and the United States—butthings are very different nowadays for homosexuals.”Gutiérrez summed up, “Many Cuban homosexuals are now open about theirsexual orientation. Others are not open about it—just like anywhere else—butthere is a new level of awareness concerning homosexuality.”
Gutiérrez recalled the experience of his friend Aramis, who told him in Havana in
1994 about an argument with his father. Aramis said when he returned home fora visit with shoulder-length hair, his father used an anti-gay slur and ordered his
son to get a haircut or leave.
Gutiérrez said Aramis argued with his father, saying, “You’re supposed to be acommunist, for freedom, for human beings. I’m your son, you should love me,whether or not I’m a homosexual. What kind of communist are you?”
Gutiérrez said by the time Aramis had stormed to the door, his father stopped
him with these words: “Wait. You’re right. You can stay. You don’t have to cut
your hair. I’ve got to think about these things.” Aramis added, “So we hugged,
and I stayed.”‘The trajectory of Cuban cinema’
Julia Levin, a Latvian freelance film critic who lives in the U.S., described
Gutiérrez Alea as the most famous director in Cuba. She noted that thefilmmaker was born to a bourgeois family in 1928. After getting a law degreefrom the University of Havana, he studied film at “the Centro Sperimentale dellaCinematographia in Rome (which had spawned, amongst others, Michelangelo
Antonioni), where he fell in love with cinema and where he directed his firstneorealist film, El Mégano (1954), with Julio García Espinosa, another filmmaker
he met at Centro Sperimentale.”
Levin continued, “It has been noted that this film marked the very beginning of
the New Latin American Cinema, the ‘new wave’ in cinema that grew out of thedesire by many Latin American filmmakers to unveil the conflicting realities of
their own countries and to do this by exploring the political potential of the filmic
medium.
“Alea was one of the founders of the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria
Cinematográficos (ICAIC),” Levin wrote, “which was created in 1959 in order tovigorously produce and promote cinema as the most progressive vehicle forcommunicating the ideas of the revolutionary through, for the most part,documentaries, although some fiction films were made there as well.
“The ICAIC recognized film as the most powerful and important art form inmodern life, a voice of the state, and, unquestionably, the most accessible form of
distributing revolutionary ideas to the masses. In its first 24 years, ICAIC
produced nearly 900 documentaries and over 112 feature films.”
Levin pointed out, “Artistically and intellectually, the trajectory of Cuban cinema—from cinéma vérité to experimentalism, and from neorealist drama to social
comedy—has paralleled the trajectory of Alea’s directorial career. Similarly, Alea’s
films are a primary source of cultural politics in revolutionary Cuba, a fact thatallows one to study his films directly against the political climate in which helived and worked.”
Daniel West added that “Tomás Gutiérrez Alea has been the most prominent of
the filmmakers working in Cuba’s government-supported film institute. ...
Gutiérrez Alea is a committed revolutionary, and his best features explore thesocial, political and historical dimensions of the revolutionary progress.”(www.sensesofcinema.com)

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The sweet taste of change in Cuba

Solidarity served up
with a cherry on top
After Cuba lost the socialist solidarity and trade it had had with the Soviet Union,
the illegal U.S. blockade tightened its grip on the island’s economy.
West pointed out in 1995, “Given the profound economic crisis currently grippingCuba, it is astonishing that a feature such as ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ could be
produced. The situation in ICAIC is desperate. Top directors such as Gutiérrez
Alea earn the approximate equivalent of $5.00 per month, and the once
relatively well-funded ICAIC filmmakers can now undertake a feature only if coproduction money is available. The low-budget ‘Strawberry and Chocolate,’ forinstance, could not have been produced without Mexican and Spanish support.”
Gutiérrez Alea, battling cancer, also had to undergo surgery during the
production of the film. Juan Carlos Tabío, a collaborator, stepped up to co-direct
the film.
“Strawberry and Chocolate” was the first Cuban movie to be nominated for an
Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category. (Levin)Daniel West concluded in early 1995: “The commercial release of ‘Strawberry and
Chocolate’ in the U.S. is a welcome event because U.S. authorities have at times
hounded Gutiérrez Alea—by, for example, denying his visa requests or blocking
exhibitions of his works. This interviewer’s videotape copy of [Gutiérrez’s 1968
film] ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ was confiscated by U.S. Customs in Los
Angeles when he entered the country on Dec. 11, 1993, after having legallyattended the annual International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in
Havana.”By the closing ceremony of that festival in Havana on Dec. 10, 1993, “Strawberry
and Chocolate” had won most of the top awards.
“Afterwards”—West, who was a guest, described—“in the Palace of the
Revolution, Fidel Castro held a reception for festival guests featuring strawberry
and chocolate ice cream served together for dessert.”
Next: “Gay Cuba”
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-102 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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'Gay Cuba'

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'Gay Cuba'

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By Leslie Feinberg
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Published Jul 8, 2007 7:56 PM

Two Cuban-backed documentaries about changing attitudes on
the island towards same-sex love and gender variance—which inturn deepened that change—opened in theaters on the island in
the mid-1990s.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

“Gay Cuba” (1996) was a project of Cuba’s Félix Varela Center (CFV). Activist
Sonia de Vries—raised in Amsterdam and now living and organizing in Kentucky—wrote and directed the documentary, which objectively struck a blow against
the political blockade of Cuba by U.S. imperialism.
“Gay Cuba” is a series of interviews—a radio host and a singer/poet, an artist anda gay male elected union general secretary, a transgender factory worker and ajournalist, an HIV-positive doctor and an interpreter, soldiers and teenaged law
students—who offer personal anecdotes and individual observations about
attitudes towards same-sex love in Cuba.
The interviews are interspersed with archival footage of the revolutionary seizureof power. The sound track incorporates the music of world renowned Cuban
musicians Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez.
The Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC) hosted the pre-release screening of the
documentary in Havana in 1994. The same year, the FMC invited a group named“U.S. Queers for Cuba” to visit the island. (Leonardo Hechavarría and Marcel
Hatch)“‘Gay Cuba’ was shown at the Havana International Festival of Latin American
Cinema to public and critical acclaim,” wrote Larry R. Oberg.
The documentary turned its cameras onto the audiences of “Strawberry and
Chocolate” (“Fresa y Chocolate”), another film made with the help of the Cuban
state. “Gay Cuba” captured some of the enthusiastic responses of Cubans who had
just seen “Strawberry and Chocolate”—a 1993 film about a heterosexual
communist and a homosexual Cuban—at the Yara cinema.
“Fantastic!” a filmgoer who described himself as a heterosexual, masculine male
exclaimed. “If I could have a friend like that I would!”
Jorge Perugorría, a lead actor in “Strawberry and Chocolate,” said in thisdocumentary, “‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ is the story of an encounter ... between
a communist militant and a homosexual, and how their friendship develops outof this encounter. What happened with the film is that it surpassed thecinematographic phenomena, and became a social phenomenon. People had
never before discussed homosexuality so much.”
Cuban journalist Gisela Arandia stressed in “Gay Cuba,” “For people in otherparts of the world, ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ might be just another movie. For
Cuba, it was an essential moment in our society’s development, because neverbefore had these topics been dealt with in public.”

Measure of change

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4

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Respond'Gay Cuba'“Gay Cuba” was a weathervane that pointed in the direction of prevailing windsof change in the revolutionary battle against the legacy of centuries of colonialist
and imperialist cultural domination.
The interviews offered a cross-section of consciousness.
“They’re people. One should treat them normally, but keep them away,” one
youth with her friends told the interviewer.
“They are part of our Cuban-ness, part of our people. We have to accept them assuch,” said an older man.
One young woman recalled going to a judgmental therapist about her attraction
to other women. “I stood up, but first told him that he was mediocre and a bad
psychologist and that I regretted being there. Then I stood up and left.”
Another young woman remembered going to see a psychologist to try to change
her same-sex attraction. “At the end of the week, she told me, ‘Look, love, I see
that you are happy as you are. Don’t try to change. It’s nothing out of this world.
Nothing bad.’”A cross-dressing factory worker explained, “Besides working here I am an artist. I
imitate Sarita Montiel. I’m a drag queen. Everyone calls me ‘Sarita.’ Myrelationship with the workers here in the factory is wonderful. I’ve been here 12
years.”One young Cuban said when she was in high school, she thought that she was
not accepted into the communist youth (UJC) group because there wasdiscussion about whether she was or was not a lesbian.
Another Cuban emphasized, “I’ve read the statutes of the UJC, and I don’t
remember reading any article that said that being homosexual is an obstacle tobeing a member of the UJC. There are thousands of homosexuals in the UJC,
from the roots to the leadership.”
Lourdes Flores, from Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, stated in her
interview, “As a center we see homosexuality as a sexual orientation, just likeheterosexuality or bisexuality.” She added, “We have led workshops on the topic
of homosexuality; sexuality in general, homosexuality in particular. The
workshops are very interesting. For example, we have workshops with teachers,
doctors, the general population, community activists and youth.”“Gay Cuba” showed viewers a transgender performance organized by aneighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR).

‘Break the blockade!’
The political views towards the Revolution of those who spoke on camera in “GayCuba” largely could only be gleaned through their anecdotes. The individual
experiences narrated in this documentary were positive and negative, in varying
degrees.
Progress in Cuba is the measurable difference between the two.
It is painful to hear Llane Alexis Domínguez say onscreen that when his father
found out he was homosexual, “He actually said he’d like to beat me to death!” In
Cuba, however, men who have sex with men and women who have sex withwomen are not being tortured and lashed to fences to die, beaten to death,stabbed or shot or strangled, decapitated and dismembered—all too frequent
occurrences in the U.S.
A gay male Cuban worker sums up that in Cuba in 1994 what was largely left todeal with were individual attitudes. “I don’t think that Cuba’s situation is as
critical for gay people as it is in other countries,” he explained. “I have theopportunity to study and to work here and no one can stop me. They might try
to, but it’s that individual, not the system itself.”

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'Gay Cuba'

He called on the gay community in the U.S. to help break the blockade, which, deVries pointed out in her 1994 documentary commentary, “has cost the Cuban
economy over $40 billion since 1960; the resulting fuel shortages and scarcity offood and medicine have impacted all Cubans.”

Precious footage
The documentary also provides historic footage of Cuban nova trova singer Pablo
Milanés singing his song “Original sin” at a 1994 public concert in Havana. (“ElPecado Original” is available on Milanés’s CD “Orígines.”)Milanés—a Cuban who harvested in the UMAP brigades in the mid-1960s, and
who is beloved in Cuba—told the concert audience, “I dedicate this song tohomosexuals, to gay people, and to all those who are marginalized and are
suffering in the world.”
Milanés sang: “Two souls, two bodies, two men who love each other, are being
expelled from the paradise they live in. Neither of them is a warrior with victories
to boast of. Neither of them has riches, to calm the ire of their judges. Neither isa president, neither is a censor of his own desires. We are not god. Let’s not makethe same mistakes again.”
Larry Olberg noted, “Introduced at his annual holiday concert held in the vast
Karl Marx Theater in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, ‘El Pecado Original’
took the audience and the country by storm and did much to advance the causeof gay acceptance.” (cubasolidarity.com)“Gay Cuba” includes footage documenting the position of gay transgender Cubans
at the head of the annual, massive May Day march in 1995, which was joined by
two lesbian and gay delegations invited from the U.S. There’s also footage of alesbian and gay Cuban contingent in the José Martί procession.
At the close of “Gay Cuba,” radio host Anna Marίa Ramos concluded, “We havebeen in 35 years of revolution, a revolution that by no means has been static; thathas made changes constantly. In every sense, we are prepared for change. The
roots of homophobia have not been driven so deep into the soil of Cuban earth.
They can be pulled out.”
Next: “Butterflies on the Scaffold”—creating room for more genders.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-103 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-104/[2/3/2011 5:20:26 PM]

How La Güinera made room for more gender

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How La Güinera made room
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Lavende & red, part 105
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 16, 2007 1:32 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

“Butterflies on the Scaffold” (“Mariposas en el andamio”), a 1996
documentary, offered a profoundly thoughtful and moving
account of how Cuban women construction workers literally
made room for cross-dressing performance art in the workers’
cafeterias in their neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana,called La Güinera. The film was directed by Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe
Bernaza.
Gilpin reported that the preliminary cut had to be shown 11 times at the Havana
Film Festival in December 1995 to accommodate the crowds. In April 1996, thefilm won the best documentary and the popularity award at the lesbian and gay
film festival at Turin.
The word “butterfly” (“mariposa”) refers to male-bodied Cubans whose
femininity is either a part or the whole of their gender expression.
“Butterflies on the Scaffold” came out at the same time that a contingent of gay
transgender Cubans were asked to lead the massive May Day march in Havanathat year. Two U.S. queer-focused activist delegations were invited to join themin the procession—one from Bay Area Queers for Cuba, the other from New
York’s Center for Cuban Studies.
Cuban women—”the revolution within the revolution”—built La Güinera from theground up.
For 10 to 15 years after the 1959 revolution, La Güinera remained undeveloped.
The land was in the shadow of a meat factory, surrounded by bushes and insects.
Documentary footage explained, “Squatters came from the provinces and formed
an association. They said, we’ll build your house today and mine tomorrow.”
Women made up 70 percent of the construction brigades.
A local family doctor said to the interviewer, with pride, that by the time of this1995 documentary, the local infant mortality rate was so low that only two babies
had died in the neighborhood clinic.
‘We saw the show and we liked it’Marisela, a young woman of African descent on the construction staff, recalledthat cross-dressing performance artists “had a show in a private house. They
invited the girls from the [workers’] dining room. We went, we saw the group,
the show, and we liked it.”One drag artist spoke from his home, the site of performances. “We used sheets
for fabric, no sequins, nothing. The dressing room was in the bedroom and we
acted here. When the show moved to the backyard we used this as our dressing
room. We had more room and air for us and for the public. The public brought

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RespondHow La Güinera made room for more gendertheir own chairs. Marisela even brought a sofa! In the short time we worked in
my backyard this was the headquarters, the cradle of cross-dressing in Havana.
Hundreds of drag queens came through here who never thought they would dothis work.”
The local security chief, on camera with his young daughter, expressed abackward view: “Personally, I don’t think these things should increase. On thecontrary, I think they should diminish. Children go there and see a person who isa man in normal life or who goes around as a man and later they see him dressed
as a woman. That child will want to experiment and that’s not what I want to see.
“Also, they charged admission for the parties they gave at home.” In fact, noted
one party participant, the funds at one event were collected for the troops of theterritorial militia—for the defense of Cuba.
The security police chief called off the drag shows. But in a workers’ state, that’s
not the end of the story.
Marisela explained, “After the police stopped the parties there was no place forthem to perform. In solidarity I began to collect protest letters and petitions. The
only option was Fifi. To bring them here so everyone could see them. I wasconvinced they were good.”
Marisela was referring to the lead organizer of La Güinera’s construction brigade
effort—Josefina Bocourt Díaz, affectionately known as “Fifi.”‘Fifi should be honored by us’
The woman whose co-workers and neighbors call her “Fifi” is a Cuban of African
descent. As a child, before the revolution, she had to start work at the age of 9.
She explained, “I was one of the 70,000 maids that Cuba had before 1959. I
couldn’t enjoy much of my childhood. Now I’ve had the opportunity to work on
the development of La Güinera and I feel like a new woman.”
She narrated how her consciousness about transgender/homosexuality changed
qualitatively while in a position of social leadership.
Fifi remembered, “Marisela and the others came to see me. ‘We want them in the
cabaret. If you haven’t seen them you can’t object.’“At first I rebelled,” Fifi said, recalling her arguments: “I’m an older woman. I
wasn’t accustomed to running around with this ‘class of people.’ I said, ‘No, keepthem away. I don’t want to hear about people who run around with a double
façade.’ ... I said, ‘No, please, I can’t be around you guys. I wouldn’t be doing myduty to society. I’m too old for this stuff. I’ve never been involved in thesethings.’”But Marisela persisted. She said, “Fifi, I saw a show. Fifi, they should start atonce here in the workers’ cafeteria.”
One drag performer said of Fifi, “She opened a cabaret in the workers’ cafeteria
and brought us into it. She made us face the ‘herds’ of public we were afraid toface. She reassured us. She said, ‘Do it, face them, you’ll see. Nothing will
happen.’”Another performer added, “Fifi should be honored by us. She’ll always be close to
our hearts for the wonderful way she treated us.”
‘A right to live as they wish’
This documentary was made during the “special period” in which Cuba had lost
virtually all its trade when the USSR was overturned.
The U.S.-led economic blockade of Cuba also impacts on every aspect of life on
the island: Performers use acetate because eyelash glue is not available. They
create eyelashes out of horse hair or cut from carbon paper. Their nails are glued

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How La Güinera made room for more genderon with a shoe adhesive.
“Butterflies on the Scaffold” is packed with footage of indoor and outdoor dragperformances in front of an audience of virtually all their co-workers andneighbors, family and friends. People of all ages attend the drag performances,arriving early for a good seat, or climbing onto a tree limb for a last-minute seat.
The performers take their bows to cheers and ovations.
A local congressional representative says, “[T]hey’re giving the people somethingthat others who aren’t like them don’t give.”
A construction worker agreed. “They’re the people who are giving thisneighborhood a new level, a new character. Sometimes there’s nothing to do andno place to go.”
The performers play many other important roles in their community. They
include a cook in a cafeteria for mechanics, a dentist, a baker, a dressmaker, asoldier just returned from an internationalist mission in Angola, a carpenter, anurse, a horse trainer, a professor of Spanish literature and a professor ofmilitary topography.
These worker-sponsored drag shows in turn have been a fulcrum to lift
consciousness about cross-dressing and male-bodied femininity and same-sex
love. The process of change is apparent.
One young girl child of a cross-dressing performer, unequivocal and eloquent,
told the interviewer: “I love my father with my life. I don’t want anyone to be
disrespectful to him. He’s what he is. He wants to be that way, and he’s a person,and people have the right to live as they wish.”
A parent said, “I never deceived my kids. I tried to help them adapt to how things
were, to how I felt—I never disguised myself as a ‘man’—to know me as I am, toaccept my friends. They need their own lives. My world is my world. But I don’t
want them to be estranged from who their father is and the work he does.”
The pain in some families was palpable. One mother said when she found out
her son was gay, “I felt real bad. Like all mothers, one wants the best for yourchildren. We know he chose a difficult path ... but in reality, it’s not out of thisworld. ... [H]e’s my son and I would give my life for him.”
A young man who says he is gay but not ready to do cross-dress performancesaid, “I have a fabulous family. They know all about me. They’ve known about me
for 10 years and I’m not 27. My family is exquisite. Up to now I haven’t had
problems. At first it was rough but once they realized it was my path, they
accepted it and my friends, with their virtues and defects.”
His father, working in the background, is asked, “What do you think of your son?
”
The father answers, “No one’s better. I couldn’t ask for a better son. I’m gratefuland proud he’s my son. He’s a good kid. He hasn’t got any problems. He’s A-1.
Better than me and I’m his father.”After those words tumble out, the father and son hug each other.
The local doctor summed up, “The transvestite phenomenon marks a new era
with perspectives for the union of humanity in love and mutual respect between
human beings.”
Fifi stressed, “I think this type of work should go on all over the country, becauseof the respect, pride and responsibility with which they work. If the nation
accepts these cultural workers, these workers for the society, as we did here in La
Güinera, we’ll be successful as a nation.”
Fifi concluded, “I think that our kids will grow up according to what we teach

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-105/[2/3/2011 5:20:46 PM]

How La Güinera made room for more genderthem. We have to explain the variety of life-styles in the world. They have tochoose among them. If our kids get used to seeing men in drag, they’ll see it as
normal. We’ll explain what a transvestite is and that child will choose a path towhich their education leads and we’ll create ‘the new man.’ Besides the new man
will be brought up completely without any taboos!”
Next: 1990s: More and more progress in Cuba
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-104 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-105/[2/3/2011 5:20:46 PM]

1990s: Cuba education about same-sex love reached every home

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1990s: Cuba education
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Lavender & red, part 106
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 19, 2007 8:19 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

The revolutionary Cuban government, since the 1990s, has
waged a struggle against deep-rooted old prejudice about samesex love in virtually every cultural venue.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, In 1998 a national television program opened a mass discussion
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

about lesbians and gays to immense audience interest. The topic was discussed incommunities for weeks afterwards. (Leonardo Hechavarría and Marcel Hatch)
Librarian Larry R. Oberg wrote on his observations of homosexuality and culture
in Cuba. “Between March 2000 and April 2002, I spent more than four months
in Cuba on four separate occasions, working as a librarian on a range of research
projects with my Cuban colleagues. Most of that time was spent in Havana, butalso in numerous other cities, including Matanzas, Trinidad and Santiago de
Cuba. As a gay man, I was motivated to find out as much as I could about thestatus of Cuba’s gay and lesbian population.”
Oberg referred to the cross-dressing, cross-gender performances in theneighborhood of La Güinera, on the outskirts of the capital. “Many of these dragshows are sponsored by the local CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the
Revolution),” Olberg reported, “and play to large and wildly enthusiastic
audiences. (If you’re wondering, the performers were great!)”Oberg stressed, “One of the most striking things about Cuba is the vitality of its
cultural and intellectual life throughout the island, particularly in Havana. Gay
themes are prevalent in the theatre, in lectures, and in concerts.
“In December, 2000, I attended a play entitled ‘Muerte en el Bosque’ (A Death in
the Woods), produced by the Teatro Sótano in Havana ‘s Vedado neighborhood.
Based upon the acclaimed novel ‘Máscaras’ (Masks), by Leonardo Padura
Fuentes, the play follows a police investigation into the murder of a Havana dragqueen, a plot device that allows for an examination of Cuban attitudes andprejudices towards gays at every level of society.”(www.cubanlibrariessolidaritygroup.org.uk)
Oberg concluded, “A striking contradiction in Cuban society today is the contrast
between the rich cultural and intellectual life that is widely available and easily
affordable, and salaries that make the purchase of a pair of shoes an event for
which one must plan.”
He noted that Cubans could buy theater tickets for the equivalent of about anickel, first-run movies for about a dime, theatrical plays for less than 50 cents,and musical extravaganzas and ballet festival performances for half a buck.
The U.S. blockade of Cuba, aimed at strangling the economy, makes it harder tobuy a pair of shoes, let alone build socialism, which requires material abundance
and often imported materials.

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Respond1990s: Cuba education about same-sex love reached every home

Wall Street hopes that economic deprivation will turn up the pressure cooker oninternal relations, making it easier to wear down and overturn the revolution thattook the Cuban economy, labor, land and resources off its list of neocolonial“assets.”
But the revolutionary government has continued to move forward on every front
possible to generate consciousness, including about same-sex love.
“While in Cuba, I spoke with scores of gays, mostly men, and encountered none
who said that their government was persecuting them,” Oberg stated. Hereiterated that no one with whom he spoke “reported active or systematic
repression by the state.” (“The Status of Gays in Cuba: Myth and Reality,” March
20, 2006)
Art and consciousness
AIDS prevention is only possible with widespread safer-sex information and athoroughgoing struggle against sexual prejudices that allow the disease to spreadin the silence of shame, guilt and fear. Revolutionary Cuban leadership brought
the battle against AIDS and sexual prejudices—including bigoted attitudes aboutbisexuality—to the small screen of popular television, as well as the big screens ofculture.
Last year the 115-chapter television series “La Cara Oculta de la Luna” (The
Hidden Face of the Moon), had virtually all of Cuba buzzing with debate.
“La Cara” deals with AIDS, youth sexuality, bisexuality and other social issues.
The series began with the story of a 14-year-old girl who contracted AIDS during
her first sexual experience.
As of November 2005, 5,422 Cubans were HIV-positive or had full-blown AIDS.
“La Cara,” wrote author Freddy Domínguez Díaz, was “a series on humanbehavior, on people’s attitude of life, on everyone’s responsibility for themselves
and everybody else.” (Interview, Juventud Rebelde, Oct. 9, 2006;
walterlippmann.com)
The series borrows from the popular style of television novellas—soap operas.
Marlon Brito López, a screenwriter and director, critiqued the television novella“as a member of the audience and media expert.” He wrote, “The main goals
were well defined: a warning of the dangers of this pandemic disease, present
also in our territory, which can infect people in any group, race or creed; and areflection on the elimination of prejudice linked to HIV-AIDS and sex in oursociety, particularly within the family.”
Brito López stated, “I believe art is so ambiguous and abstract it has a latenteffect on our consciousness, mainly when it reflects with honesty and talent thesociety one lives in. This is precisely what ‘The Hidden Face of the Moon’ isachieving.”
He continued, “AIDS statistics in the world increased alarmingly and in ourcountry; despite the excellent professional project and public health plan toprevent infectious diseases, media campaigns on the HIV-AIDS subject had
shown little efficacy. It is here where we artists must step in. Concerts and songsby Buena Fe [Cuban musical group], or documentaries by my colleague Belkys
Vega and others, were not enough to reach our homes at prime time with anartistically effective language, with affection and respect.”
Bringing education to every home
“La Cara” series director Rafael “Cheíto” González explained, “When we deal withpresent-day stories, we try to be as close to reality as possible. Everywhere in theworld there are soaps for entertainment. We try to discuss the social problems wehave and therefore we deal with topics such as these. I believe it is valid to face

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1990s: Cuba education about same-sex love reached every homethem with all seriousness. In this soap there are some parallel stories aimed only
at entertaining the audience, but we cannot overlook the problems we have, andthese must be tackled with courage.
“What better way to do it than through a TV soap watched by the whole country?
Information on HIV is offered in TV spots, there is also a specific TV program on
AIDS, but these are not seen by everybody. The soap, on the other hand, iswatched in every home.” (La Jiribilla #260, April 28, 2006)
Cheíto noted, “We did a lot of research to pull out all the stops, as popular
speech has it, in approaching AIDS as a topic, that is, seriously and with all due
respect, since we can’t beat about the bush if we want to send an effective
message.” (Interview, Juventud Rebelde, Oct. 9, 2006; walterlippmann.com)
Magda González, a television director who now directs the Dramatizations
Division for Cuban TV, also stressed, “When we decided to take on this theme inthis slot, we were convinced that it would provoke all sorts of reactions. They’re
not themes that we usually deal with in a dramatized form, even though over the
past three years they have been dealt with in a direct and open way by otherprograms like ‘Let’s Talk about Health’ [a weekly program focusing on healthmatters] and ‘It’s Worthwhile’ [a weekly program in which a leading psychologist
discusses letter writers’ problems].”
But as the AIDS epidemic continued, “and because we consider we have a socially
responsible role to play to put television in the front line of the Battle of Ideas,
we decided that the dramatic format was an ideal way to disseminate messages
using the emotions and the viewer’s identification with the human dramas. When
writing the script and producing the tele-serial we called upon experts from theCenter for Sexual Education and the National HIV-AIDS Prevention Center asadvisers and we believe it mirrors realistically aspects of our society.
“The second theme incorporates a new element in teledramas,” she continued,“the treatment of sexual relations between men either as homosexuals orbisexuals. Public reaction is divided. Some are indignant that the theme is shownon screen, others applaud the initiative, and still others say that these themes
have to be aired but not in this way.
“That the first exists is only natural in people whose sexual attitudes were formed
by a Hispanic culture, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, where sex is a
sin and homosexuality a crime. Hopefully the telenovela will help themunderstand that to respect, recognize and tolerate different lifestyles doesn’t turnthem into accomplices of what they believe to be evil, but that it makes themfollowers of the concept given to us by our Comandante when he says that ‘The
Revolution is about equality and full liberty, it’s about being treated by everybody
else as human beings.’” (La Jiribilla #260, April 29-May 5, 2006)
This is revolutionary process
No one, of any sexuality, was of one mind in Cuba about “La Cara.” However,those who brought the series to television screens did not shy away from thedebate. On the contrary, widespread public debate with leadership was the whole
point, and it has been eminently successful.
The Cuban health care system Web site “Infomed” garnered viewpoints about the
television novella. So did Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).
E-zine La Jiribilla devoted an entire issue to the topic.
Journalist Ricardo Ronquillo concluded, “It would be worrying if we thought ofourselves as a wholly agreeing society with neither competing arguments nor
opposing positions in face of its most intimate conflicts; or even worse, thatsilence prevailed.”
La Jornada correspondent Gerardo Arreola wrote, “This discussion has become
the most relevant signs of public impact on the matter since the motion picture‘Fresa y Chocolate’ (‘Strawberry and Chocolate’) shook sectors of Cuban society in

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1990s: Cuba education about same-sex love reached every home

1993 with its statement against intolerance through the story of a homosexual
character.” (May 8, 2006, walterlippmann.com)
The Miami Herald, an unlikely source for any supportive news about Cuba,
reported in November 2006, “Now, as the show draws to an end, Cuban gays
and lesbians say the show is symbolic of the communist island’s government andpeople becoming more accepting towards them.” (Advocate.com, Nov. 8, 2006)
It is this process of popular education with leadership, in which consciousness israised through mass participation, discussion and debate, that is the revolution
and the “unfettered thought” it liberates—not overnight, but with ongoing labor,
without which nothing is produced.
CENESEX continues to be at the forefront of that important work, includingbacking the television novella that sparked such controversy.
Next: Mariela Espín Castro talks about work still to be done in Cuba.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-105 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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Cuba's CENESEX led the way on sexual rights

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jul 27, 2007 9:28 AM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (Centro Nacional de
Educación Sexual) carries out its important collective labor—
including combating what remains of pre-revolutionary prejudiceagainst same-sex love—in what was once a privately owned
Havana mansion.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, Mariela Castro Espín, director of CENESEX, stressed that sexologists have a
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

“scientific, social and political responsibility” to help raise understanding andconsciousness in the whole population. (havanajournal.com, April 1, 2003)
CENESEX’s goal, Castro Espín explained, is to contribute to “the development ofa culture of sexuality that is full, pleasurable and responsible, as well as topromote the full exercise of sexual rights.” (MEDICC Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1,
March-April 2006)
Since she and CENESEX are part of the revolution, they don’t have to do thiswork alone.
“Historically speaking,” Castro Espín stated, “changing mentality is one of themost difficult things to do, one of the slowest processes in society. Even though
we’ve made substantial political and legislative strides, we’re still bound by
aspects of roles defined long ago. This subjectivity begins early, in the way
children are raised, in how they’re taught to play.
“We have to learn to recognize which elements of the traditional masculinity or
femininity are actually doing us damage. What parts of the picture actually takeaway from our freedom, fulfillment and dignity. We have to take a hard look atthese things, or else we’ll keep passing them down from generation to
generation.” (MEDICC Review)
She offered a concrete example about AIDS safer-sex education. “We have toinclude a gender perspective—promotion of new constructs of masculinity andfemininity—and not just take an epidemiological approach.”
She said an epidemiological approach to prevent AIDS transmission might
simply suggest, “Use a condom.”
But the system of male chauvinism imposed on Cuba for centuries created amindset in which some males feel that condoms may be a sensation barrier tofull sexual enjoyment, to which they are entitled. Castro Espín emphasized, “Sofor him to use a condom, he has to begin to construct and define his masculinity
in a different way, that doesn’t put a premium only on his own pleasure. In theend, this stereotype is very dangerous to his own health as well as his partner’s—
and this can be true for homosexual as well as heterosexual couples, whenever a
relationship defines that one partner has hegemony over the other.
“So you need to combine both an epidemiological and a gender approach to thesevery intimate issues. This is why, for example, our posters and other materials

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RespondCuba's CENESEX led the way on sexual rights

emphasize that protection of your partner against HIV and STDs in general is asign of caring, and that means it’s a responsibility of both partners in a
relationship.”Castro Espín told MEDICC Review interviewer Gail A. Reed regarding
CENESEX: “We work with groups who promote safe sex among their peers: men
who have sex with men [MSM], transvestites and transsexuals, adolescents andyoung people in general and then more broadly with medical students. In each
medical school, there’s a department of Sexology and Education for Sexuality.”
All education in Cuba, it bears repeating—including medical school—is free.
Castro Espín observed in 2006: “Regarding attitudes towards MSM and bisexuals
as well, there have been positive changes—I say empirically, since we are still
studying this. But at our conferences and workshops that we hold with people
from the whole country, it’s clear that participants are more able now than 10
years ago to understand and respect another sexual orientation. I think the workthat’s been done over the decade in health and by the Cuban Women’sFederation has helped to bring about that change, and we’ve done it reaching out
to people’s sensitivity as human beings.
“In essence, our view is that any kind of prejudice or discrimination is damaging
to health.”‘Modifying the social imagination’As a revolutionary worker, Mariela Castro Espín demonstrates in every interview
that she has already rolled up her sleeves to do the next job that needs to bedone.
She talked about the revolutionary labor that is still required to make progress inovercoming old prejudices about same-sex love. “First,” she told MEDICC Review
in 2006, “I think we have to work more and better in the schools. We’ve worked
with the Ministry of Education, but I’m still not satisfied we’ve made enoughprogress, and so we need to deepen understanding among teachers and otherschool staff; we need to carry more on educational TV and so on.
“And this also has to do with a gender focus, of course. In the 70s and 80s, wefound a lot of fear and resistance to a national program for sex education withsuch a gender focus. The program was finally accepted in 1996, and now it’staught throughout the country; since then it has reduced school dropouts fromearly marriages and childbirth by one half.”
Castro Espín elaborated: “The country now has policies that legitimize sexual
orientations and also has brought laws in line with a gender perspective. But on
the legislative front, there is still a lot to be done.”
She has proposed that when the Cuban Constitution of the Republic is next
revised, the category of “sexual orientation” be added. Castro Espín said
homosexual Cubans are protected, but “when something like that is madeexplicit, it is official recognition that there is a need to avoid any type of
discrimination, like racism or sexism.”
Such a legal measure, she pressed, would make this protection even moreevident. And, she added, it’s important to protect against discrimination, not justin public institutions “but also in the space of the family, because it is often therethat a homosexual is first insulted or rejected.”
No Cuban of any sex has to marry in order to have economic support, a job, ahome, health care or other rights that are guaranteed to every person. Castro
Espín pointed out, though, that although homosexuals live within the law inconsensual relationships: “gay marriage is not recognized, so you have many
issues such as inheritance that aren’t fully resolved. We need changes in thefamily code itself related to these and other questions, including domestic
violence. CENESEX has now presented two bills in Parliament before the

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Cuba's CENESEX led the way on sexual rights

education and children’s commissions that have to do with gender,” she noted in
2006, “and these have been well received.”
Unofficial same-sex marriages have taken place on the island. For example, four
local young males ranging in ages from 17 to 22 held a double same-sex
ceremony outdoors, in front of loved ones and neighbors, in the working-classsuburb of San Miguel del Padrón, southeast of Havana, in 2001.
(workingforchange.com, July 13, 2001, based on a report from the French Press
Agency)Castro Espín summed up, “By the 1970s, reforms to the penal code excluded theclassification of homosexuals as criminals [because of their sexual orientation];
any word that discriminated against homosexuals was modified.
“However,” she stressed, “that is not enough because I think our laws should
better reflect the respect that homosexuals deserve. Greater and more
professional work is needed at the micro-social level, because what this is about
is trying to change perceptions, modifying the social imagination.” (Alma Mater,
journal of the University of Havana, CENESEX website: www.cenesex.sld.cu)
Next: CENESEX proposes groundbreaking transsexual rights.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-106 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Cuba's CENESEX proposes ground-breaking transsexual rights

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Fidel Castro backs effort

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Cuba's CENESEX proposes
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Lavender & red, part 108
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 6, 2007 8:48 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAMariela Castro Espín, director of Cuba’s National Center for Sex
Education (CENESEX), recalled that three decades ago a Cuban
from Matanzas who was born female-bodied but identified as
male came to Havana for help.
In response, Cuban revolutionary leader and president of the Federation of
Cuban Women (FMC), Vilma Espín, recommended in 1979 that a special
committee be established, coordinated by the National Work Group on Sex
Education—CENESEX’s predecessor. The FMC had formed the Work Group in
1972; CENESEX was established in 1989.
The first result, Castro Espín related, was an agreement with the Ministry of theInterior and the Ministry of Justice to issue new identity papers. Threetranssexual Cubans got new identity documents under that accord.
In 1988, the first sex-reassignment surgery—from male to female—was carriedout successfully in Cuba. The operation was successful and the person lives
without difficulty.
But the media coverage, Castro Espín remembered, was tinged with moresensationalism than science. Historically unchallenged prejudice welled up. As aresult, the CENESEX director explained, the operations were temporarily halted
until the need for them could be explained to the population. Clinical andpsychological care continued for transsexual Cubans, but with a lower profile.
Castro Espín stated in the January 2006 La Jornada interview, “We were unable
to convince people of the need to carry out these operations. This reluctance alsocame from the professionals in the Ministry of Public Health who were notexperts on the subject. This is where I feel the strongest resistance, even as we
speak.”
Journalist Gerardo Arreola added that in recent years, “A group of transsexuals
joined CENESEX and were trained as sex health promoters in the campaign forthe prevention of AIDS. In the center they have a permanent open debate forum
and receive specialized care. The health system provides them with free hormone
treatment.”

Sex change and social change“At the beginning of 2004,” Arreola wrote, “there was a new momentum when
CENESEX launched a national strategy: it increased and diversified its
professional staff, obtained support from President Fidel Castro and directly
contacted ministries and social organizations to discuss, based on entity profile,the subject of transsexuals.”

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RespondCuba's CENESEX proposes ground-breaking transsexual rights

Two years later, Mariela Castro Espín said, this move has accelerated change. “Itseems all this work is now bearing fruit. People are now more receptive. We havealso articulated a more persuasive discourse. I see great flexibility, even among
official leaders.”
Castro Espín, as director of CENESEX, took a plan about expanding rights fortranssexuals to two parliamentary committees on Dec. 20, 2005.
Granma reported the following day that CENESEX had “released results of asurvey on gender identity in today’s Cuban society to the committees on
Education, Culture, Science, Technology and the Environment, and Youth,Children and Women’s Rights.
“Mariela Castro said that for people with a non-traditional gender identity to
fully develop their potential as a member of society, it is first necessary to
identify them so as to assure that they receive adequate specialized assistance.
She also noted the need in Cuban society of a profound understanding of genderand sexuality.”
Correspondent Gerardo Arreola interviewed Castro Espín for the Jan. 9, 2006,
issue of La Jornada about the move to widen rights for transsexuals. Castro
Espín outlined that her proposal to parliament would make free sex
reassignment surgery and hormones available to all transsexual Cubans—all
forms of health care are provided cost-free on the island. New identity documents
would also be immediately issued.
Arreola reported, “This is part of a national policy to recognize the rights of thesepeople to live a full life in the gender they chose.”
Castro Espín stated, “The draft was very well received by the representatives inthe two commissions examining the project.” She added, “They not only accepted
the proposal, but asked many questions and made recommendations.”
By 2006, a transsexual Cuban woman traveled abroad on her new passport. Fourothers who had sex reassignment surgeries abroad got changed identity papers assoon as they returned home. “The Courts of Justice were finally convinced,”
Castro Espín concluded.
In early 2007, Cuba’s National Assembly of Popular Power agreed to discuss
making sex-reassignment surgery free of cost to all transsexuals on the island
who request it.
The newsletter Diversity (Diversidad) reported: “The measure would complement
the present Identity Law that already acknowledges the right of citizens to change
name and sexual identity. This places Cuba at the vanguard of the legislations
that acknowledge the rights of transvestites, transsexuals and transgender in
Latin America.”
In fact, by providing free health care, Cuba is leading the world on rights fortranssexual and gender variant people.

Revolution takes work
Mariel Castro Espín and CENESEX don’t rest on these laurels. She emphasized
the need for legislation and other actions to block discrimination and raise
popular consciousness.
A job is a right in Cuba. However, she said, “there may be transsexuals who havea job and are not rejected, because the law protects them, even if they go crossdressed. But the administrators always find a way to get rid of them.”
Addressing a conflict between revolutionary security police and trans Cubans two
years earlier, Castro Espín was very clear. She stated that neighbors hadcomplained about street solicitation. But when the security police arrested
transsexuals and transvestites, based on an assumption that they were
prostitutes, Castro Espín stressed that they were acting on backward ideas andhttp://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-108/[2/3/2011 5:22:02 PM]

Cuba's CENESEX proposes ground-breaking transsexual rights

prejudice.
“The police take measures—that’s what they are there for,” she explained, “butthey interpret things with their own way of thinking. They have learned over their
lifetimes that transsexuals and homosexuals are intrinsically bad.” (AssociatedPress, Sept. 5, 2004)“This attitude was not in keeping with the policy or the law, because these do not
penalize a person for cross-dressing.” (La Jornada, Jan. 9, 2006)
Castro Espín noted, “We have been given procedural guidelines so these people
know how to defend themselves in case of police transgression of theregulations.”
She explained that CENESEX intervened and set up a channel of communication
with the revolutionary security forces and the Ministry of the Interior. Together
they ordered police not to hassle transgender and transsexual Cubans. They also
agreed to provide education to Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police officers,
including a seminar on distinct expressions of gender and sexuality.
Castro Espín noted that the transsexual and transgender Cubans who had beenharassed came right to CENESEX to lodge complaints and demand redress. “Ofcourse, they came to demand their rights, because I don’t know if you havenoticed, we Cubans have a strong sense of justice and fight when we have to,” shesaid.
“They spoke of everything that bothered them. I asked if I could tape what they
had said to prepare a report. And that’s what I did; a short report so they could
read it over rapidly and then a longer one with many annexes.
“That is how a national strategy came about for attention to transsexuals with an
integral vision since 1979, which was created by my mother, Vilma Espín,president of the Cuban Women’s Federation. What we did was to broaden thiswork, to enrich it.” (BBC Mundo, Sept.18, 2006)“We are even carrying out a very important study on representations oftranssexuality,” she concluded, “to carry out educational campaigns to teachsociety to respect these people and respect their rights.”
Next: Revolution—’a battle of ideas’To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-107 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Cuba: 'Bringing revolution's humanity to all aspects of life'

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Lavender & red, part 109
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 18, 2007 10:45 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,“I want to bring the revolution’s humanity to those aspects of lifethat it hasn’t reached because of old prejudices,” Mariela Castro
Espín, who has worked hard to eradicate pre-revolutionary
prejudices about same-sex love, transsexuality and gendervariance in Cuba, said in summer 2006. (Reuters, June 29,
2006)
Castro Espín is director of Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX),
which has accomplished a great deal in a relatively short time to replace
prejudices about same-sex love and transsexuality with positive attitudes.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZACENESEX created its own Internet Web site—www.cenesex.sld.cu—shortly after
the 16th World Congress of Sexology met in Havana in March 2003.
CENESEX’s site incorporates a
section on sexual diversity,
which, in Spanish and English,
offers basic information andopportunities to consult withexperts and to voice personal
opinions.
The site gets right to the point
about its objective, which it
FIST and Workers World Party delegation
states is to “overcome thewith staff of CENESEX in their Havana office,taboos and prejudices that
July 24.
persist about same-sex love:
Photo: Namibia Donadio
Being homosexual or bisexual is
not a disease, it is not synonymous with perversity, nor does it constitute acrime.”
Homosexuality, the Web site makes clear, “is a sexual orientation that is notcaused by seduction at any age, it is not contagious, and is not acquired byeducational defects or negative examples in the family environment.”
This Internet site receives the most visits—150,000 “hits” a day—of any Cuban
World Wide Web portal. (IPS/GIN, July 3, 2004)
Castro Espín said in the summer of 2004 that these developments are “the resultof an effort of more than 30 years, and now we are seeing its fruits more clearly.”Work accomplished, work to do
When asked by a BBC reporter in September 2006 whether perceptions abouthomosexuality had changed in Cuban society, Mariela Castro Espín answered, “I
think so; it has changed very much.”

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RespondCuba: 'Bringing revolution's humanity to all aspects of life'

She told interviewer Eduardo García Jiménez: “I do believe that since the 1990s
there is greater acceptance of the presence of homosexuals by some portion of the
population and public institutions. That does not mean that the contradiction has
been resolved for all individuals at all levels of society. (“Alma Mater,” journal of
the University of Havana, reprinted in Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004)
Castro Espín added, “I think we are at a good moment to implement policies thatare more explicit about the defense of the human rights of homosexuals, so that
we are better prepared to confront any manifestation of discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation. I see this very humanistic attempt to achieve
greater respect for the rights of homosexuals as the waging of a battle of ideas inour society. I believe this notion has to be part of the cultural and political battle
because that would mean a cultural, social and political strengthening for the
Cuban Revolution.”
Castro Espín said she is advocating for an amendment to the Cuban Constitution
to add homosexuality to the groups against which discrimination is outlawed. “Itis a proposal I am making from my position of responsibility as the director of
the CENESEX. I assure you it has been heard by receptive listeners. My proposal
is in no way removed or distant from the spirit of the Revolution, or from theentire process that has brought about this call to a battle of ideas.
“It would be wonderful to be able to spark meaningful, inter-group discussion on
this subject,” Castro Espín emphasized, “so that Cuban society could develop ahealthier culture of sexuality, one that is fairer, that helps to erode old, erroneous
beliefs and prejudices that emphasize sexual orientation.
“Something like this would put the revolution even more in line with its
humanistic ethic; the Cuban Revolution has been possible because of theparticipation of all men and women, of all Cubans who have identified with theconquests and dreams of that social project. Among all those who haveparticipated there are also people of diverse sexual orientations.”

Don’t measure with imperial ruler
As earlier articles in this series documented, the CIA, Hollywood and corporate
media tried to deflect resistance to U.S. imperialism’s covert war against Cuba,
and the domestic discrimination, police brutality and bashing of same-sex-loving
and gender-variant people that are commonplace in the U.S., by focusing on the
onerous tasks Cuba’s revolution faced in uprooting centuries of prejudice aboutsame-sex love. Of course, each poisonous seed had been planted and cultivatedby U.S. capitalism and, earlier, Spanish colonialism.
Today, the Cuban Revolution has made enormous strides in raising popular
consciousness about sexual liberation, including same-sex love. Building ties ofunity between the lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) movement in the U.S. andthe Cuban Revolution require conscious leadership of the most resolutely antiimperialist activists in the liberation movement for LGBT and other sexually, sexand gender-oppressed peoples.
Yet some activists in the U.S. still argue that Cuba won’t have “passed the test”
until lesbians and gays are “out” in Cuba with their own autonomous
organizational formations.
Lesbians and gay men in the U.S. and other capitalist countries are “out” in orderto unite against shared and/or overlapping mechanisms of oppression.
Castro Espín stated categorically to journalist Mary Lamey via a translator,“There is no official repression of lesbians and gays in Cuba. What remains aresocial and cultural reactions that must be transformed, the same as in manyother countries.” (Canada.com, The Gazette, July 29, 2006)
She pointed to the bashings of transsexuals and homosexuals in England andother imperialist countries. “This doesn’t exist in Cuba. The Cuban population is

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Cuba: 'Bringing revolution's humanity to all aspects of life'

much more respectful of differences than in other places,” she emphasized.
“When I’m afraid I will find a very strong resistance, I find a high degree ofsensibility in the Cuban population.”

Cubans defining their ‘liberation’
In a capitalist country, being “out” is not only an assertion of individual identityand personhood. The movement to end the oppression has to be “out” andindependent, as well.
That is because of the LGBT movement’s relationship to its own ruling class incapitalist countries. In the class struggle, it is imperative for the movement tobreak free of its own capitalist bosses and their ideology. In that case, themovement is only as powerful as it is independent.
But what about a socialist country in which the laboring class rules and is trying
to build socialism in the liberated turf of a workers’ state? What would Cuban
men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and bisexuals,
transsexual and transgender Cubans gain by identifying “away” from their own
class?
Castro Espín addressed the question of organizing for change in Cuba in her
2003 interview with Eduardo Jiménez García. “I think the greatest difficulty isthat there is no unifying and convincing project, because male and female
homosexuals are as heterogeneous as heterosexuals,” she said. “Yet, I don’t see
this as an obstacle; I see it as a complicated reality.
“I believe that male and female homosexuals should participate more in different
loci of social and political discussion, despite the prejudices, so they can maketheir truth, their real need for equality, their beliefs known, in order to gain
support from the scientific community, and in that way bring to bear argumentsthat can effect the changes that are necessary in society—and see that they are
just.”
However, an international network of both LGBT social democrats and those far
to the right of them is developing in the imperialist countries, particularly the
U.S. and Britain. It makes an appeal to Cubans, and others in countries menaced
by imperial powers, to identify first and foremost based on what is presumed to
be an identical and shared sexuality. In turn, this network asserts its readiness to
defend gay and lesbian Cubans and others—but only against their own people,
culture and national liberation struggle.
When aligned with overall and sometimes specific imperialist interests, such a
position can offer a “left cover” for regime change—through covert and/or
military intervention.

Defend Cuba!
Cubans are defining their own liberation.
The Cuban Revolution merits the support of progressives and communists
around the world, without demands that it measure up as “perfect” using animperial ruler. A socialist revolution is a process, not a single act. Solving the
economic and social problems that the capitalists cannot and will not tackle isthe dynamic forward motion of revolution.
Regarding the revolution’s efforts to eliminate old prejudice against
homosexuality, Fidel Castro concluded during a 1988 interview with a Galician
television station: “Given that we can make mistakes, we obsessively follow theidea [of] what is just, right and best for the people, and what is most humane forour people and our society. However, the task is not easy—I think that each time
we get closer to the right criteria for making the world we want. Nonetheless, I
think that we still have many faults, and that future generations will have tocontinue to perfect this new world.”

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-109/[2/3/2011 5:22:22 PM]

Cuba: 'Bringing revolution's humanity to all aspects of life'

The whole population of Cuba—of all races, sexes, genders, sexualities, ages andabilities—does not need to be defended against its own culture or its own
revolution. It needs and deserves defense against the U.S. blockade of its islandand every other illegal act of imperialist war, overt and covert, which impedes
revolutionary progress.
International support for Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination willallow the island’s population to spend more time, energy and resources onsocialist construction, rather than on defense.
It is the LGBT movements in the imperialist citadels that have to break with theirown ruling classes in order to build bonds of genuine international solidarity. It’sa hard position to take. It requires ideological valor; the refusal to remain silent
about the emperors’ “new” clothing.
The Cuban Revolution has had to take up the tasks that history presented it,
including the eventual eradication of the legacies of racism, sexism and anti-gay
bigotry.
In order to move forward toward their own liberation, the LGBT and otherprogressive movements in the U.S. and other capitalist countries have to combat
anti-communism—which is, in the long run, a defense of capitalism—and develop
a powerful anti-imperialist current that can extend its solidarity to Cuba and all
countries fighting for their sovereignty and self-determination against financecapital.
Revolutionary Cuba—the “hope of the hemisphere”—has done a better job dealing
with its tasks.
Next: Rainbow Solidarity for the Cuban Five.
To find out more about Cuba, read parts 86-106 of Lavender & Red atworkers.org.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-109/[2/3/2011 5:22:22 PM]

Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe

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Lavender & red, part 110
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 27, 2007 8:27 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTH

A multinational, multilingual group of lesbian, gay, bisexual andtrans (LGBT) activists in the United States—the belly of the beast—issued a call in Spanish and English for Rainbow Solidarity for
the Cuban Five in mid-January 2007.

AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR, The five political prisoners—Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Labañino, Fernando González, and René González—are collectively serving fourlife sentences and 75 years in far-flung U.S. penitentiaries. The “crime” they wereconvicted of is having infiltrated CIA-backed fascist commando groups in orderto halt terror attacks against Cuba from U.S. soil.
The Rainbow Solidarity call demands a new trial and freedom for these politicalprisoners, defense of Cuban sovereignty and self-determination, and a halt to theillegal U.S. acts of war against Cuba—including the economic blockade and CIAtrained, funded and armed attacks by mercenary “contra” armies operating fromthis country.
This initiative was consciously issued by LGBT and other activists battling
oppression based on sexuality, gender expression and sex—one of the targeted
progressive movements at whom the imperialist campaign to vilify Cuba had been
aimed.
This was not the first act of solidarity with Cuba by left-wing LGBT activists in
the United States—not by a long shot. But the response to the Rainbow Solidarity
initiative—swift and dramatic—signals a new day for LGBT support worldwide
for Cuba.
Within hours and days after the call went out over the Internet, hundreds ofindividuals and organizations signed on to the call, posted on the
www.freethefiveny.org web site (look for the rainbow).
Most exciting was how many of the signers immediately began forwarding thecall to their lists.
Volunteers from around the world translated the introduction and call for
Rainbow Solidarity to free the Cuban Five into simplified and traditional
Chinese, Tagalog, Farsi, Turkish, Greek, Croatian, Portuguese, Italian, Danish,
Japanese, French and German. More translations in the works or planned
include Swahili, Urdu, Indonesian, Arabic, Korean, Bengali and a streaming video
in ASL (American Sign Language).
International endorsements flooded in from Argentina, Australia, Austria,
Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Denmark, England,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg,
Mexico, Montenegro, New Zealand, occupied Palestine, Philippines, Portugal,
Puerto Rico, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey,
United Arab Emirates, Wales and other countries, and from Hong Kong andhttp://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-110/[2/3/2011 5:22:42 PM]

Respond

Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe

Taiwan.
Individuals and groups from every state in the continental United States signed
on as well—from southern Florida to the Pacific Northwest, Southern California
to Maine.
All told, they form an extraordinary and broad arc of a united front. A frequently
updated list of signers is posted at www.freethefiveny.org.
Many names on the growing list will be recognizable as well-known LGBT
activists and others battling oppression based on sexuality, gender and sex,
including women’s liberationists.
This roster also reveals that many of these activists are also some of the hardestworking organizers in movements here and around the world against imperialistwar, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, national oppression, racism, police
brutality, prisons and the death penalty, sweatshops and capitalist globalization.
These are also leading activists in the struggle for immigrant rights; women’sliberation, including reproductive rights; jobs; labor union, tenant andcommunity organizing; education; health care and affordable housing; freedom
for all U.S. political prisoners and for prisoner rights; liberation of oppressednations; support for Cuba, and the revolutionary movement to overturn
capitalism and build an economy based on planning to meet peoples’ needs.

Expansive political spectrum
Early signers include Teresa Gutierrez, a longtime leader in the struggle to free
the Cuban Five; former political prisoner and leading prison abolitionist Angela
Y. Davis; Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice;
LeiLani Dowell, national coordinator of FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand
Together); Stephen Funk, the U.S. Marine who was the first imprisoned Iraq War
conscientious objector; Bev Tang, organizer for Anakbayan, the youth group of
Bayan; Gerry Scoppettuolo, co-founder of GALLAN (Pride At Work, Boston); Lani
Ka’ahumanu, BiNET USA; anti-imperialist activist Joo-hyun Kang; Atlanta
community activist Pat Hussain; Camille Hopkins, director of NYTRO (New YorkTransgender Rights Organization) of Western New York; transgender activist
Moonhawk River Stone; and Jesse Lokahi Heiwa, Queer People Of Color Action.
Rauda Morcos, general coordinator of Aswat-Palestinian Gay Women, signed on.
The Puerto Rican Alliance of Los Angeles and its coordinator Lawrence Reyes
have endorsed.
Activists Barbara Smith and Margo Okazawa-Rey signed on. The two wereamong the founders of the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feministsof all sexualities who issued a historic 1977 statement against the “interlocking”
system of “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression.”
Former political prisoners Laura Whitehorn and Linda Evans added their names.
Louisville, Ky., filmmaker and activist Sonja de Vries, director of the
documentary “Gay Cuba,” and Walter Lippmann, editor-in-chief of CubaNews,signed on. Other activists and organizations working in defense of Cuba added
their weight to the call, including Cuba Education Tours, Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada; Fairness Campaign, Louisville, Ky.; Simon McGuinness, secretary of theFree the Miami Five Campaign, Ireland; Brigitte Oftner, coordinator of theAustrian Free the Five committee; Viktor Dedaj, webmaster of the Cuba
Solidarity Project; the Cuba Edmonton Solidarity Committee in Alberta, Canada;
the Swiss Cuba Association; Deutsche Kommunistische Partei Cuba
Arbeitsgruppe, Germany; and No War on Cuba, Washington, D.C.
Also QueerToday.com and its founder, Mark Snyder; Gordene MacKenzie,
GenderTalk Radio and director of Women’s Studies, Merrimack College, Beverly,
Mass.

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Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe

Organizations include the national organization Pro-Gay Philippines; Audre
Lorde Project—a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People ofColor center for community organizing, focusing on the New York City area;
FIERCE!—a community organization for Transgender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Two Spirit, Queer, and Questioning (TLGBTSQQ) youth of color in New York
City; QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism); LAGAI-Queer Insurrection;
Stonewall Warriors, Boston; Greek Homosexual Community, Athens, Greece;
Queertoday.com, Boston, Mass.; and Queers Without Borders, Hartford, Conn.
The Queer Caucus of the National Lawyers Guild; Stephen Whittle, professor ofequalities law and the British organization Press for Change at the School of Law
at Manchester Metropolitan University, endorsed. So did Barbara Findlay, cochair of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Issues Section, BC Branch,
Canadian Bar Association, and the law office of Lenore Rae Shefman, San
Francisco, Calif.
Many transgender and transsexual organizations and individuals strengthened
the initiative, including Trans Action Canada; three national Italian trans groups:
Coordinamento Nazionale Trans FTM, Movimento Identità Transessuale andCrisalide Azione Trans; playwright and performer Imani Henry; Matt/ilda a.k.a.
Matt Bernstein Sycamore, editor “Nobody Passes,” San Francisco, Calif.; Cianán
Russell, chair of the Indiana Transgender Rights Advocacy Alliance; and theWinona Gender Mutiny Collective.
Endorsers include The National Lavender Green Caucus; Doug Barnes and theFreedom Socialist Party; Starlene Rankin, Green National Committee delegate of
the Lavender Caucus of the Green Party of the United States; Orange County
Peace & Freedom Party, Anaheim, Calif; and the LGBT Caucus of Workers World
Party.
Among the signers are individuals and organizations whose activist work includes
the struggle against women’s oppression: Brenda Stokely, a leader of the Million
Worker March Movement and NYCLAW; transnational feminist theorist Chandra
Talpade Mohanty; Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center;
Women’s Fightback Network, Boston, Mass.; Melinda Clark, local co-founder ofCode Pink in Willits, Calif.; Welfare Warriors, Milwaukee, Wis.; League of
Women Voters in Montenegro; and Women’s International League for Peace andFreedom (WILPF) chapters in Washington, D.C.; Rome, Italy; and the Canadian
Section in British Columbia.
Many labor activists have added their names and/or the endorsement of theirunions, including Pride at Work/GALLAN Boston, Mass., AFL-CIO; Bus Riders
Union/Labor Community Strategy Center, Los Angeles, Calif., and GuyaneseAmerican Workers United, New York, N.Y. From Canada, Canadian Union Of
Postal Workers, Calgary, Alberta; Canadian Union of Public Employees, Toronto,
Ont.; and Hospital Employees’ Union, Burnaby, B.C.
There’s no end in sight to this rainbow.

Grassroots diplomacy
The Rainbow Solidarity for the Cuban Five initiative is also giving voice toindividuals who, living in capitalist democracies, have little political input except
to be asked to pull a lever for a big-business candidate.
The Rainbow Solidarity call has become a poll that reveals a new grassroots
sentiment as signers eloquently register their outrage at the continued
imprisonment of the five Cubans and at Washington’s economic and political
blockade of Cuba and other illegal and covert acts of war.
Rebecca writes from San Diego, Calif., “Free the Cuban Five!! No more politicalprisoners!”
David from New York state stresses how biased the trial venue was for the Five:“Five Cubans who were trying to stop the ultra-right terrorist groups in Miami

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Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe

from carrying out violent actions against the people of Cuba. Miami is the one
city in the U.S. where the Five certainly could not receive a fair trial.”
Paul says: “As a gay man in South Florida who calls for freedom for our brothers,
the Five, I am delighted to see this initiative. THEY MUST BE FREE!”
Tighe supports the five as “those most important defenders of everyone’s right tolive without fear of terrorism. The patriotic Cuban Five [are] illegally heldpolitical prisoners in a country with the most of its own people behind bars.”
Barry, who grew up in Miami, adds the need to organize to close down the U.S.
prison at Guantanamo and free all those held there.
“T.” from California, comments: “These five men, fighting against terrorism, havebeen imprisoned by the U.S. government—‘MY’ government! Jailing heroes andsupporting terror, while pretending to do the opposite, is sadly all the public cancount on from ‘our’ hypocritical, double-speaking, global corporate-run excuse
for a ‘by and for the people’ government.”
Brian states from Newport, Ore.: “I am enraged by the hypocrisy of five innocent
men being held in prison under harsh circumstances while known terrorist Luis
Posada Carriles goes scot-free. While Bush and cronies spout off that no nationthat harbors terrorists will be tolerated with one face, they set a convicted
terrorist murderer of at least 73 innocents free with the other, while holding fiveinnocent men in prison.”
Adela, from the Zig Zag Young Women’s Resource Centre Inc. in Queensland,
Australia, states, “I want to express my solidarity with the Cuban Five and the
Cuban people and Fidel.”Richard, from Madera, Calif., says succinctly, “It’s way past time to change ourpolicy toward Cuba and the Cuban people.”
Jerry, from Athletes United for Peace, U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities, Nicaragua
Solidarity Committee, writes: “These people were trying to prevent an act ofterrorism. The country that claims to lead the ‘War On Terror’ is imprisoning
them.”
Marcos writes from Bielefeld, Germany, “Free the 5 Cubans now, stop the war on
Cuba and the rest of the world!”
Richard, in Jacksonville, Ill., says, “Close Guantánamo, human rights are forhumans everywhere.”
Ray from Farmington, Conn., suggests, “Put Cheney and Bush in jail instead of
the Cuban Five.”
Yancy, from the LGBTQI Desk of Bayan USA, affirms: “Mabuhi ang
panaghiusang international!!! Long live international solidarity!!”

Solidarity is not charity
Eric from Milwaukee reminds, “Ah, the things we gain from solidarity.”
By defending Cuba against imperialist warfare, LGBT activists and organizationsin the U.S. and other imperialist countries are breaking with their own rulingclasses and extending their own unilateral declaration of peace to a socialist
country.
By rejecting anti-communism, the movement against sexual, gender and sex
oppression is combating capitalist ideology—a giant step towards liberation.
Cuba has much to teach those who yearn for the right to live and love without
fear or censure about what it takes to begin the process of literally eradicating
white supremacy, patriarchy and prejudice against same-sex love and gender/sex
diversity; what it takes to create a new woman, a new man, a new human being,
and new forms of communist comradeship.

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Rainbow solidarity for Cuban Five circles the globe

The Cuban people fought back against enslavement for half a millennium. For
the last half century they have resisted the most powerful slave-master in history,
just 90 miles from their shores.
The famous labor union song poses the question sharply: Which side are you on?
Rainbow Solidarity answers: “Cuba, we are with you. Cuba, estamos contigo.”
This is the last segment of the Cuba mini-series within the ongoing Lavender &Red Workers World newspaper series, which can be read in its entirety online
at: www.workers.org.
Next: An anti-imperialist perspective on ending oppression based on sexuality,
gender and sex.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Anti-gay, anti-trans laws rooted in class rule

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Lavender & red, part 111

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 21, 2007 11:08 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

In today’s capitalist citadels, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transmass political movements have overturned many oppressive laws
against same-sexuality and cross-dressing. The imperialist rulingclasses would be relieved if these movements would now redirect
their collective ire against laws still on the books in today’s
former colonies and neocolonies.
What the official imperial histories have all but obscured, however, is that thesesame colonial and imperialist powers were the ones that imposed laws against
same-sexuality and narrowed gender/sex expression all over the world.
The policing of sexuality and gender expression—and the very existence of police
as a repressive force—are rooted in the development of class society.
Reactionary laws that narrowly defined the sexes, degraded the economic andsocial status of women, and justified state repression and harsh penalties forsame-sex love and gender diversity were instituted around the world wherever
patriarchal class rule overturned matrilineal pre-class societies.
In some societies the change was slow and gradual. Labor technique overcenturies became more productive, leading to the accumulation of surplus. The
struggle that ensued over control of this surplus resulted in the overturning ofcooperative economic and social relations.
In other cases, pre-class communal societies were conquered by the armies ofpatriarchal ruling classes. In those instances, matrilineal kinship lines weresevered abruptly.
In both instances, the new world order served the dictates of patriarchal private
ownership of the new social wealth.
Lex Scantia—one of the earliest known laws against same-sex love—was written
during the early Roman Empire in the third century B.C.E. East Roman Emperor
Justinian blamed homosexuality for floods and earthquakes—not unlike today’s
U.S. theo-cons who claim AIDS and Hurricane Katrina are the wrath of anavenging Jehovah against gay men and lesbians.
The East Roman Code of Theodosius in 390 C.E. is an example of the historicalintertwining of anti-homosexuality laws with gender/sex enforcement. The edict
stated that “All of those who are accustomed to condemn their own manly body,transformed into a womanly one, to undergo sexual practices reserved for theother sex, and who have nothing different from women, will pay for this crimeamong the avenging flames, in front of the people.”
The feudal ruling classes of Europe also developed harsh domestic laws as part oftheir conquest of communal peasants and consolidation of overall class rule.
Spain enforced its “Seven-Part Code” during the rule of Alfonso X of Castile from1252-1284 C.E. The code was one of the first on the continent to call for

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RespondAnti-gay, anti-trans laws rooted in class rule

castration and then stoning to death for “sins against nature,” which included“sodomy.”France instituted a legal code in 1260 that made same-sexual acts punishable byamputation of clitoris or testicles for the first “offense,” penis or breasts for thesecond conviction, and death by burning at the stake for the third. A decade
later, under Louis IX, anal intercourse was proclaimed a capital crime mandating
the sentence of burning at the stake.
In what is today Belgium, the first execution in Western Europe for a same-sex
act between two men was carried out in 1292.
In one example of how the charges of “sodomy” and “heresy” were used aspolitical weapons in an economic war, Philip IV of France called for the rounduparrests of all Knights Templar in 1308. The charges were a cover to appropriate
the considerable wealth of the knights.
Queer Heritage’s online timeline notes that in 1432: “Florence becomes the first
European city to set up a special authority to prosecute crimes of sodomy. Called
the Uffiziali di Notte (Officers of the Night), this special court prosecutes morethan 10,000 men and boys over the next 70 years. About 2,000 are believed tohave been convicted. Most avoid further punishment by paying fines.”
In 1451 Pope Nicholas V empowered the Inquisition to hunt down and punish
male sodomy. In 1476, Leonardo Da Vinci was twice anonymously reported to
Florentine authorities on the charge of “sodomy,” but was acquitted both times
because no witnesses came forward.
King Henry VIII’s government codified the “buggery” civil law in 1533 that called
for death by hanging as punishment for anal intercourse. The slur “buggery”
derived from the old French term “bougre” for heretic, and the Latin word
“bulgaris” for Bulgaria—a country rumored to be full of heretics. By the 13th
century the word “buggery” had become synonymous with sodomy in English.
Historian Douglas Sanders explains that the legislation “cannot be understoodapart from the break of the English church from Rome and the confiscation ofmonastic properties. It was a first step in justifying the dissolution of themonasteries and the seizure of their endowments.” (fridae.com)
While charges of “sodomy” were often political in nature, these and other laws
restructured sexuality and sex/gender to facilitate the new patriarchal classeconomic relations.

Laboring class resistance
Persecution of same-sex love sparked some forms of resistance. For example, inthe late 15th century, the campaign led by Florentine monk Savonarola against“sodomy” as an “abominable vice” was met with rebellious anger by theCompagnacci, a group of young men led by those who had been convicted of suchcharges.
Queer Heritage reports that in 1497: “The youths jeer and harass the preacher’s
followers in the streets and squares of [Florence].” In the same city 15 years later,“A large group of young men converge on the government palace to protest thecurrent crackdown on sodomy and to demand the release of men recently
arrested.”
Overall, state repression and the dominance of the patriarchal family andmarriage drove same-sex love underground.
However, from the Middle Ages to the 16th century, masking and cross-dressing
as another sex continued to be woven into urban carnivals. These festivals had
ancient pagan (pre-class rural) roots and were organized by all-male semisecretsocieties. Some of these enduring, defiant customs from pre-class societies in
Europe can still be seen today in Halloween, Mardi Gras and Mummer traditions.

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Anti-gay, anti-trans laws rooted in class rule

Sometimes the days of festival “misrule” authorized by the ruling feudal
institutions as a social safety valve exploded into actual rebellions. In thoseinstances, cross-gendered leaders of the festivals led the charge.
In France, for example, male-bodied “Mére Folle and her children” publicly
humiliated the King’s Grand Master of Streams and Forests in Burgundy in Dijon
in 1576 because the latter beat his wife and destroyed the local forests. In Lyon
in the 1580s, the “Lord of Misprint” used the cover of the festival license toprotest war and the high cost of bread. In 1630, another “Mére Folle” and her
infantry led an uprising against royal tax officers in Dijon.
Cross-dressed males who called themselves “Lady Skimmington” fought backagainst the king’s enclosure of their forests in Wiltshire, England, in 1631.
Also in England, “To cite but four examples, toll gates were demolished by bandsof armed men dressed in women’s clothing and wigs in Somerset in 1731 and
1749, in Gloucester in 1728 and in Herefordshire in 1735.”“General Ludd’s wives”—two male-bodied weavers dressed as women—led anenraged crowd of hundreds of workers to destroy the owner’s looms and burndown the factory in Stockton, England, in 1812.
And when in 1725 repressive campaigners raided a Covent Garden “molly house”
in an attack against “effeminate sodomites among the London poor,” thoseinside, “many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent
resistance.”
In other historical reports, cross-dressed female leaders described as “masculine”
were on the front line of rebellions.
An account from England in 1531 noted an unruly crowd of cross-dressed
females, together with cross-dressed males.
In Essex, England, female-bodied “Captain” Alice Clark led a group of womenand cross-dressed male weavers in an uprising over grain shortage in Essex in
1629.
A report from France stated, “The tax revolt at Montpellier in 1645 was started
by women and led down the streets by a virago [masculine woman] named La
Branlaire, who shouted for death for the tax collectors that were taking the breadfrom their children’s mouths.”
As the ruling classes of Europe expanded beyond their borders to colonize
peoples around the world, they brought these same laws against same-sex loveand gender variation with them, and enforced them even more viciously. And
then, as now, the colonialists and imperialists met with fierce resistance.
Next: European colonialism and U.S. imperialism impose laws against samesex love in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org
Unsourced accounts can be found in Feinberg’s “Transgender Warriors”(Beacon).

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-111/[2/3/2011 5:23:04 PM]

Western rulers imposed anti-gay laws throughout world

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Lavender & red, part 112
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 27, 2007 11:08 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,Wherever class-divided societies overturned matrilineal
communal groupings, laws began to punish sexualities, gender
expressions and bodies that did not fit the new patriarchal familymodels. The status of women, who had played a pivotal role inpre-class societies where the blood line was traced throughfemales, not males, was degraded with the ascendancy of patriarchal class rule.
The ruling class mandated adherence to a father-dominated family unit, rather
than the ancient mother-right gens, because it assured the transmission of
wealth to male heirs.

STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

As ruling classes grew stronger and expanded their territories by overthrowing
neighboring communal societies by force of arms, they violently enforced theirlegal codes and social order on militarily conquered peoples.
European ruling classes, however, exported and enforced laws against same-sex
love all over the world as they established their colonial empires. European
colonialism used Inquisition terror to enforce these laws against same-sex loveand sex/gender variance all over the world. This violent legal restructuring of
Indigenous societies—which affected economic organization, kinship,
family/community organization, sexualities, gender and sex roles—served
enslavement, exploitation and oppression.
These Indigenous societies under siege were diverse. For instance, the Gay
American Indians History Project, first published in the germinal 1988 book
“Living the Spirit,” lists 135 Indigenous peoples on the North American continent
who made room for many more sex/gender roles than the European nations did.
Midnight Sun (Anishnabe) provides a historical materialist view of sex/gendersystems in these varied Native societies in one of the book’s essays. Entitled“Sex/Gender Systems in Native North America,” it explains: “Social, andspecifically sexual, life is embedded in the economic organization of society—anorganization that gives rise to a variety of cultural forms. The cultural
construction of gender and sexuality must be seen in terms of the sexual divisionof labor, subsistence patterns, social relations, and male-female relations. Within
this context, ideology is not an arbitrary, discrete force—rather, it serves toreproduce and perpetuate social forms, behaviors, and individuals suitable to aparticular mode of production.”
The roots of Abu-Ghraib
European colonialism exported its domestic, counter-revolutionary Inquisition
around the world, starting with Portuguese expansionism around 1500 C.E. The
early epoch of direct colonial rule reached its zenith more than three centuries
later with British domination of India in 1857.

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Respond

Western rulers imposed anti-gay laws throughout world

Queer Heritage reports that in 1551, “Portuguese missionary Father Pero Correia,
writing from Brazil, asserts that same-sex eroticism among indigenous women isquite common, in fact as widespread as in Africa, where he was previously
stationed. Native Brazilian women, he observes, carry weapons and even formsame-sex marriages.”
In 1646, Portuguese colonial overlords expanded their laws against samesexuality to include females, as well as males. The sentence was being burned
alive at the stake.
Max Mejía states that with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in theWestern hemisphere, “An absolutist discourse enveloped homosexuality in theconcepts of ‘infamous sin,’ ‘sin against nature,’ corruption of the soul and alliancewith the devil. They punished the practice without distinctions, among both lay
people and clerics.
“Furthermore,” Mejía concludes, “the conquerors treated ‘sodomy’ as a special
Indian sin and hunted it down and punished it as such on a grand scale. They
orchestrated crusades like the Holy Inquisition, which began burning sodomites
at the stake as a special occasion, as in the memorable auto-da-fé of San Lázaro
in Mexico City.”
During Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s colonial expedition across Panama he “saw men
dressed like women; Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the kingand 40 others to be eaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic
Spaniard.”
The Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba castrated those they considered“sodomites,” and forced them to eat their own testicles coated with dirt.
When the Spaniards invaded the Antilles and Louisiana, “they found men
dressed as women who were respected by their societies. Thinking they werehermaphrodites, or homosexuals, they slew them.”
Wealthy Dutch merchants imposed pre-Napoleonic Roman-Dutch common law,which criminalized “sodomy” and “unnatural sex offenses,” from Indonesia to
South Africa.
The colonial legislation that the Dutch merchants brought with them to the Capeof Africa in the 17th century still forms the basis of laws in Namibia, Zimbabwe
and Lesotho.
Sun never set on British anti-sodomy laws
The British imposed on the people of Ireland a 1634 law that made same-sex
relations between males punishable by death. Later, the 1885 British Labouchère
Amendment was the law under which feminine homosexual writer Oscar Wilde
was sentenced to hard labor.
Laws criminalizing same-sex relations in India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei all have the same name—“Article377”—because the same colonial power wrote the law: Britain. The colonialdrafted legislation is misleadingly named the “Indian Penal Code.” Hindu law had
not punished consensual sexual relations.
Historian Douglas Sanders explains: “Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code of1860 made ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ an offence.”
The British imposed this legislation in the Straits Settlements of Singapore,
Penang and Malaca in 1872. By the late 19th century, Britain also enforced thelaw in Hong Kong, Fiji, the Malay Peninsula and Burma.
Korea Herald journalist Benjamin Jhoty quotes Utopia-asia.com, which offers
information about the same-sexuality scene in Asia: “Asia has rich and uniquehomosexual traditions almost everywhere you look. The true enemy ofhomosexuality in places like Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the

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Western rulers imposed anti-gay laws throughout world

Philippines are antique colonial laws and homophobic non-Asian religions thatbully citizens with skewed views of the natural world.”
Sanders notes, “This provision, or something very close to it, is presently in force
in all former British colonies in Asia with the exception of Hong Kong.” He adds:“Sri Lanka, Seychelles and Papua New Guinea have the key wording from 377,
but different article numbers. Parallel wording appears in the criminal laws ofmany of the former colonies in Africa.”
Historians Kevin Botha and Edwin Cameron write, “The systems of law thecolonial powers (both Dutch and later English) introduced significantly
influenced the customary law of the African communities they subjugated.”
The British “Queensland Penal Code” of 1899 was “adopted in Northern Nigeria
in the nineteenth century, later becoming the basis for a uniform federal code in
Nigeria in 1916. The Indian Penal Code had been used in Kenya, Uganda andTanzania, but those laws were later replaced by drafts based on the Nigerian
criminal code. Sudan used the Indian Penal Code. In 1960 Northern Nigeria
enacted a separate criminal code, based on the Sudan code.”
Similar laws were forced on “British” Honduras (today Belize), Jamaica, Anguilla,
the “British” Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Bahamas, Tobago,
Turks and Caicos, and St. Lucia.
The British also imposed anti-“sodomy” legislation on Canada in 1892, New
Zealand a year later, and Australia in 1788 and again in 1899.
Capital offense in colonized North America
Civil liberties historian Tom Head explained: “As Spanish, French, Dutch, andEnglish colonists began to settle North America during the 17th century, theybrought with them a catalog of highly specific laws proscribing various sexualacts. The purpose of all of these laws was to enforce monogamous, same-race,
heterosexual marriage as a mandatory institution, and to punish any and allsexual activity outside of that institution.”
The earliest anti-“sodomy” legislation was passed in the Virginia Colony on May
24, 1610, and soon spread to all the colonies, and later to all of the states.
Historian John D’Emilio wrote: “In every colony, sodomy was a capital offense—
at least five men were executed during this era—and other homosexual acts, from‘sodomitical practices’ to lewdness between women, were punished withwhippings and fines.
“After the American Revolution, although the states reformed their criminal
codes in the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, revision of the sodomy statutes
and the ‘crimes against nature’ laws came very slowly; North Carolina did not
eliminate capital punishment until 1869. Thomas Jefferson proposed that deathbe replaced by castration. Moreover, as time went on, legislatures and courts
broadened the statutes to include a wider range of acts, such as oral sex between
men and sexual activity between women,” D’Emilio concluded.
In the U.S., anti-homosexual and anti-miscegenation law was also a weapon ofstate repression against African and Native peoples, who became internalcolonies. In 1898, U.S. imperialists also brutally enforced these laws in countries
they subjugated militarily.
After seizing Puerto Rico as a colony in 1898, the U.S. imposed a law against
same-sex love on the island that was a carbon copy of the California state legal
language. And in 1938, under U.S. domination, the Cuban Penal Code—the“Public Ostentation Law”—was enacted.
Next: Resistance!
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-112/[2/3/2011 5:23:24 PM]

Western rulers imposed anti-gay laws throughout world

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provided this notice is preserved.
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Struggles for sexual, gender liberation rooted in national liberation movements

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Lavender & red, part 113
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Oct 21, 2007 11:30 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Resistance rose wherever European colonial and imperial powers
enforced the restructuring of indigenous sexualities, gender
expressions, organization of the sexes, and family and kinshipstructures. This “New World Order” facilitated the economic
exploitation of the labor, land and resources.
The struggles against colonial and imperialist outlawing of same-sex love andgender/sex variance among oppressed peoples, therefore, are also rooted indefense of sovereignty and the right of self-determination. This resistance hastaken many forms—as diverse as the indigenous forms of social organization thatexisted prior to colonial domination.
In innumerable instances, leadership in these struggles came from those who did
not conform to the colonial and imperial gender, sex and sexual dictates.
The self-identification or social organization oflesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals andtransgender people in the U.S. or Britain today
is not identical to the Brazilian travesti, Zulu
skesanas, South Asian hijra, Crow badé, Cocopa
warhameh, Chumash joya, Maricopa
kwiraxame, Turkish köçek, Moroccan hassas,
Chinese tongzhi, Filipino bakla or Lakota
koskalaka. Self-identification and group
identities are specific to material social andeconomic histories.
Every form of indigenous resistance byoppressed peoples against the sexual andgender mandates of the colonial and imperial Female-bodied Carmen Robles
enlisted as male and fought
powers is part of the fight against culturalfor independence from Spain.
imperialism. These battles on many fronts
expose racist ideological dogma, which tries to erase world history by claimingthat the way social and sexual organization is in the oppressor nations is the way
it’s always been.
Many battles
Conquistador Nuño de Guzmán
recorded in 1530 that the last person
his military took prisoner after a battle,
who had “fought most courageously,
was a man in the habit of a woman.”Historian Daniel Wilson recorded thatin Edinburgh in 1736, “The Porteous

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RespondStruggles for sexual, gender liberation rooted in national liberation movements

Riots, which were sparked by a hated
English officer and oppressive custom ‘Rebecca and her daughters’ lay siege
to British toll gates in South Wales.
laws and expressed resistance to the
From the Illustrated London News, 1843
union of Scotland with England, werecarried out by men disguised as women and with a leader known as Madge
Wildfire.”
In 1839, peasants in Wales rose up against the British demand for tolls on theroads to market. Male-bodied guerrilla fighters in diverse parts of Wales crossdressed, calling themselves “Rebecca and her daughters.”
On the North American continent in the late 1890s, the Crow nation defended a
Crow badé named Osh-Tisch, which translates into English as “Finds them andkills them.” In a 1982 oral history, Joe Medicine Crow related that one
government agent “tried to interfere with Osh-Tisch, who was the most respectedbadé. The agent incarcerated the badés, cut off their hair, made them wear men’s
clothing. He forced them to do manual labor, planting these trees that you see
here on the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] grounds. The people were so upset
with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow Agency, and told [the agent] toleave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them.”
A Lakota medicine man recounted tohistorian Walter Williams thepressures on the winktes in the
1920s and 1930s. “The missionaries
and the government agents said
winktes were no good, and tried to
get them to change their ways. Somedid, and put on men’s clothing. Butothers, rather than change, went out
and hanged themselves.”

Lakshmi Tripathi (left) from Dai

Welfare Society and Gauri Sawant
Female-bodied Mexican
revolutionaries enlisted as males and of Charchowgi at 2006 media
conference protesting Lucknow arrests.
fought for national independence
from Spain. A number of them rose to the rank of colonel, including Carmen
Robles, Carmen Amelia Flores and Limbania Fernández.
(suppressedhistories.net)

Cross-dressing Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo was arrested forwearing men’s clothing in Havana while organizing tobacco workers in July 1915.
Capetillo fought the charge in court and won.
Cuban lesbians reportedly played an important role in the pre-revolutionary
urban struggle that helped to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in
1959.
Max Mejía, a founding member of the Grupo Lambda de Liberación Homosexualin Mexico City in 1978, explained, “In the 1950s, gay and lesbian life in Mexico
was largely confined to big cities, in particular Mexico City.”
He described the massive student uprising in Mexico City during the 1968
Olympics, which resulted in the military slaughter of hundreds of activists. “Thedemands of the ‘68 student movement included those of an entire generation of
Mexican youth. Outstanding among the demands were political freedom and also
sexual and personal freedom. Gays and lesbians were among the movement’s

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Struggles for sexual, gender liberation rooted in national liberation movements

activists and main leaders.” Activists carried hand-made “Gay rights!” signs.
In 1971, La Frente Liberación Homosexual formed in Mexico City to protest thefiring of gay workers by Sears store bosses in the capital city.
James N. Green, a co-founder of the Brazilian gay and lesbian movement in São
Paulo in 1978, wrote: “In 1968 student mobilizations swept through Latin
America from Mexico to Rio de Janeiro, confronting authoritarian regimes anddemanding more political freedom.” A year later, he wrote, “a group of fourteen
Argentine men met in a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires to form Nuestro
Mundo (Our World), the country’s first gay rights organization.
“By 1971 six divergent Argentine groups had come together to form the Frente deLiberación Homosexual de Argentina (Homosexual Liberation Front ofArgentina).”“In 1974,” he added, “Puerto Rican lesbians and gays organized the Comunidad
de Orgullo Gay (Gay Pride Community) and began publishing the newspaper
Pa’Fuera on the island.”In Puerto Rico, activists struggled for years to overturn the 1902 U.S. colonial“anti-sodomy” edict which was a copy—word for word—of the California Penal
Code. After a long legal battle by Puerto Rican activists, the island’s Senate
abolished the “sodomy” law in June 2003, days before the U.S. Supreme Court
officially decriminalized same-sex love.
In Hawaii in 1991, two gay men and two lesbian couples filed a court suit for
their right to marry. They argued that the Hawaiian Constitution guaranteed theirright to equal protection. But the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled against them in
1999, arguing that a U.S. state constitutional amendment gave the “state”
legislature of Hawaii the right to bar same-sex marriage.
Many fronts
Black lesbians in Johannesburg and Cape Town townships helped build alesbian/gay movement and link it to the anti-apartheid struggle.
Gay African National Congress anti-apartheid warrior Simon Nkoli “came out”
during the notorious Delmas treason trial of the mid-1980s. “Upon his releasefrom prison in 1989,” wrote South African political journalist Mark Gevisser,“Nkoli founded GLOW, radically different from the gay organizations thatpreceded it in that it was a [B]lack organization.”
Historian Peter Drucker noted that the 1992 Lesbian/Gay Pride March in
Johannesburg was led not by white lesbians or gays, nor by Zulu transgender‘skesanas’ from the Black townships, “but by the skesanas’ butch ‘injonga’boyfriends—who were not considered gay.”
Nairobian writer John Mburu noted that Simon Nkoli organized an AIDS
conference in Kampala, Uganda in 1996—three years before he died as a result of
AIDS—that gathered lesbians and gays from about 20 African countries.
Drucker wrote, “Indonesian waria were also organized in the 1960s, before there
was any attempt to organize a gay movement as such, in fact before there wasmuch gay organizing in Europe or North America.” In 1965, the CIA led acounterrevolution there that drowned in blood the anti-colonial struggle, which
had communist leadership.
Drucker noted that Pakistani hijra “organized successfully in the early 1960s
against a ban on their activities by the Pakistani government.” Pakistan, like
India, is still burdened with Article 377—the British colonial-era law against“unnatural” sexuality.
In India, the Naz Foundation took its challenge to Article 377 all the way to theDelhi High Court in 2001. In 2006, the arrests of four male-bodied people inLucknow based on the colonial law ignited renewed struggle to repeal the

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Struggles for sexual, gender liberation rooted in national liberation movements

repressive statute. Namita Bhandare reported in The Hindustan Times on Sept.
15, 2006, “Indian citizens from all walks of life have come forward to sign a letter
written by author Vikram Seth asking for the overturning of Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code.”In 2005, Hong Kong removed the British colonial edict against same-sex lovefrom its lawbooks.
Next: Beware imperialist pretexts for war.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-113/[2/3/2011 5:23:45 PM]

‘Big lie’ and breakup of Yugoslavia

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‘Big lie’ and breakup of
Yugoslavia

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Nov 18, 2007 7:47 PM

The Pentagon is not a vehicle to liberate women or same-sex
love, and it is certainly not a rape-crisis intervention force. But
these truths get blurred when there is a war in progress.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

When U.S. imperialism is gearing up for war, ad agency spin
doctors are put on the payroll to sell the aggression as defensive orhumanitarian.
U.S. and German imperialists used a public relations psychological operation tocover up their violent covert and overt war to destabilize and dismantle theSocialist Federation of Yugoslavia from 1990 to 2000. That media agitation,broadcast by the imperialist monopoly news industry, helped to isolate thepeoples of Yugoslavia from the world solidarity they deserved.
After finally undermining and breaking up the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism nolonger needed to tolerate non-aligned Yugoslavia.
Some of the countries of Eastern Europe hadalready acceded to all the privatization andausterity measures drawn up by imperialist
bankers. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia
was the last of the Eastern European workers’
states trying to hold on to what was left of its
planned, socialized framework of production
and its collective ownership.
In a Jan. 2, 1996, New York Times opinion
piece headlined “The Third American Empire,”
Pat Chin, an opponent of theJacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, two
editors of the right-leaning magazine The New U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia,
traveled to Yugoslavia to
Republic that supported the Clinton
express her solidarity. Hereadministration’s war on Yugoslavia, wrote:
she speaks at an anti-war rally“Now, in the years after the cold war, thein Union Square, New York.
United States is again establishing suzerainty
over the empire of a former foe. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has
prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into Eastern
Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And—most of all—the end of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement in the
Middle East.”
Heilbrunn and Lind argued that Bosnia should become the western border of a
new U.S. imperialist empire in the Middle East “encompassing the regions once
ruled by the Ottoman Turks.” That’s a swath of territory from Iraq to the Balkans—a geo-strategic area that Britain, Germany and France ruled over before WorldWar I, the first world conflagration caused by inter-imperialist rivalry overeconomic “spheres of interest.”

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Respond‘Big lie’ and breakup of Yugoslavia

It would take a “Big Lie” propaganda campaign to cover up this imperialist
dismemberment of the multinational Yugoslavia federation.
Using charge of ‘mass rape’ to sell the war
The imperialist pro-war campaign—covert and overt—was based on two charges,
repeated often and loudly: “systematic mass rape” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The very suggestion that U.S. imperialism and its military are a rape-rescue
team, and that they bring equality and peace between nationalities, should give
immediate pause.
Rape has been a constant feature of class-divided societies—a weapon of mass
terror and reinforcement of patriarchal ownership and control. Rape, the violence
and the threat, has enforced enslavement, racist domination, oppression of
women and punishment for those who bridge or blur the partitioning of thesexes.
U.S. finance capital is bloody with the “ethnic cleansing” that facilitated stealing
the labor and land of African and Native peoples. “Defense of white Southern
womanhood” was the white-supremacist ideological cover for mass lynching ofBlack men. At the same time, the white slaveocracy and those in its hire werecarrying out mass rape of African peoples.
The U.S. military—from its early Cavalry to today’s high-tech Pentagon—hasbrought rape, prostitution and sexual enslavement in the wake of its invasions
and the establishment of its bases, from the Philippines to South Korea.
Women GIs are survivors of mass rape in the Pentagon’s own ranks.
The U.S. and German ruling classes, their politicians, and their embedded media
and public relations demonstrate cruel and callous contempt for the lives of all
women—particularly Muslim women—and for all rape survivors, when they use
the charge of “systematic mass rape” as a pretext for imperialist aggression.
Mass rape is a serious charge that warrants meticulous and thoughtful attention.
Between the fall of 1992 and spring of 1993, imperialist corporate news sources
carried coordinated reports that an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Muslim women
had been systematically raped by the Bosnian Serb Army.
The public accusation came first from Haris Silajdzic, then foreign minister of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, who stated that 30,000 women and girls had been raped.
A cover story in Ms. magazine charged that Bosnian Serb forces were raping
women in order to make pornographic films. No films were ever discovered. Andeven the findings of Helsinki Watch and Human Rights Watch—which are often
in accord with U.S. imperialist interests—did not support those charges.
The Warburton Report in January 1993, authorized by the European Community,
got big headlines when it released its estimate that 20,000 Muslim women had
been raped. But Simone Veil—a former French minister and president of theEuropean Parliament—got virtually no air time as a dissenting member of the
Warburton report group. Veil disclosed that the estimate was based on interviews
with only four individuals. The New York Times admitted on Oct. 19, 1993, that
the Croatian Ministry of Health in Zagreb was the source for the Warburton
Report figures.
Newsweek reported in its Jan. 4, 1993, issue that up to 50,000 Bosnian Muslim
women had been raped. This estimate, according to Tom Post, a contributor to
the article, was based on interviews with 28 individuals.
French television reporter Jerome Bony summed up his pursuit of the charge ofmass rape: “When I was 50 kilometers from Tuxla, I was told: ‘Go to the Tuxlahigh school grounds. There are 4,000 raped women.’ At 20 kilometers this figure
dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only

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‘Big lie’ and breakup of Yugoslavia

four women willing to testify.”
The point of these facts is not to diminish the impact of rape on a single life.
Rather, the pattern in these facts demonstrates how cynically, callously andcontemptuously the real “butchers of Belgrade”—in Washington and in Bonn—can create rumors of tens of thousands of rapes in order to re-shackle thepeoples of the former Yugoslav federation to exploitation and steal the richnatural resources and industries that were once the collective property of all.
Nadja Tesich—Serb writer, filmmaker and professor of film—went back to
Yugoslavia when the civil war started in 1991. In response to misreporting bycorporate news accounts, Tesich wrote that she contacted PBS, Nightline, Time,
Newsweek, Vanity Fair, the Times magazine section, women’s magazines, Mother
Jones, Harper’s, the New Yorker and other media. She concluded: “They wanted
to hear about rapes. (Got any rape stories, we want to hear about rapes.) But the
moment I mentioned Serb women raped, they were not interested.”
Next: U.S.-led NATO occupation brought mass rape in its wake.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org.
For more information read “NATO in the Balkans” (International Action Center,
New York: 1998). Available at Leftbooks.com

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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Wars, lies and 'mass rape' charges

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Print this pageWars, lies and 'mass rape'charges00

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Lavender & red, part 115

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 2, 2007 10:06 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

Unsubstantiated imperialist media accusations of systematic
mass rape became the “weapons of mass destruction” pretext forthe breakup of the former Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, orchestrated by the United States and Germany. But
it was NATO armies and their fascist hirelings that broughtsystematic sexual violence—including mass rape of women and girls.
Rape and sexual exploitation are a feature of imperial warfare.
The Pentagon and CIA have long trained torturers to use rape, genderdegradation and sexual humiliation as violent weaponry—from the School of theAssassins to Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo.
An unusually clear view of the imperialist troop indoctrination that rape is a
“spoil,” a “right” taken through the patriarchal conquest of empire, appeared in aseries of still pictures in the July 6, 1997, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
The photographs showed German soldiers in battle fatigues during a break fromtraining for their military mission against the former Yugoslavia. They werestaging simulated rape, torture and noose lynching of civilians.
U.S. and German imperialism bankrolled neofascist forces in Croatia and Bosnia
and in Serbia’s Kosovo province. Rape is a terror weapon in the arsenal of fascist
violence, which targets oppressed nationalities, ethnicities, religions, sexes,
gender expressions and sexualities.
The actions of private mercenary armies, like DynCorp commandos, are subject
to even less scrutiny than Pentagon troops. These privately owned “foreign
legions” have been assured of virtual immunity from prosecution.
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote in November 2005, “DynCorp
employees in Bosnia, where the company plays a major policing role, haveengaged in organized sex-slave trading with girls as young as 12, and DynCorp’s
Bosnia site supervisor was filmed raping a woman.”
A company whistleblower, whom DynCorp initially fired but eventually settled
with, filed a suit that described “coworkers and supervisors literally buying andselling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag
about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”(CommonDreams.org)

U.S.-NATO industrialize mass rape
In Kosovo, capitalist profiteers literally established large-scale mass rape as aprofit-generating industry.
“The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October—four months
after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province,” revealed a Washington Post
report on April 24, 2000.

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RespondWars, lies and 'mass rape' charges

Even the Post’s preservation of imperialist double speak—”peacekeepers”—cannot
obfuscate the consequences of capitalist reconquest: “Kosovo, which had somelocal prostitution but no trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived
after the Kosovo war ended last June, is just another new market.”
NATO troops, including from the U.S., were customers.
The Post article elaborated that in the prior decade, “Hundreds of thousands ofwomen from the former Soviet republics and satellites have been trafficked toWestern Europe, Asia and the United States.”
They were tricked into travel or kidnapped from Moldavia, Ukraine, Bulgaria andRomania. The Post reported that the women and girls were repeatedly raped andbeaten to break their resistance to enslavement.
While some people forced into prostitution industries are paid at least a smallsum, these women and girls were bought and sold like chattel.
The procurers, the Post article stated, “work under the protection of major crime
figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with links to the former antiSerbian rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation Army.”
The U.S. and Germany armed and equipped the so-called Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) against the Yugoslav government. The New York Times—which
supported the war to break up Yugoslavia—nevertheless reported on March 28,
2000, that many of the leaders of the KLA trace their roots to a fascist unit set upby the Italian occupiers during World War II.
Yet while the U.S. and Germany had spent a decade bankrolling fascist groupings
to destabilize the former socialist Yugoslavia, the imperialist propaganda
machinery slandered the Serbs as fascists.

How PR firm pulled off ‘Big Lie’
Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels built the German imperialist media blitzkriegon the “Big Lie”—the premise that any lie or distortion can be publicly accepted
as truth if it is broadcast loud enough and frequently enough.
James Harff, director of the Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs public relations
firm, adds, “Speed is vital. ... It is the first assertion that really counts. All denials
are entirely ineffective.”
Harff knows what he’s talking about. The Washington-based firm of Ruder Finn
was hired to handle public relations and win support for the breakaway Yugoslav
republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina and the opposition in Kosovo.
Harff did an interview in April 1993 with Jacques Merlino, associate director of
French TV 2. Harff boasted about how his firm had developed an ad campaign
designed to make the Serbs appear to be fascists.
Harff said his proudest achievement in this effort was, “to have managed to put
Jewish opinion on our side. ... Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatiancamps, so there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to behostile towards the Croats and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse thisattitude and we succeeded masterfully.”
Harff bragged: “We outwitted three big Jewish organizations—the B’nai B’rith
Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American
Jewish Congress. In August, we suggested that they publish an advertisement in
the New York Times and organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.
That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the gameon the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with
the Nazis in the public mind.”
Harff added, “By a single move we were able to present a simple story of goodguys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. ... Almost immediately there

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Wars, lies and 'mass rape' charges

was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with highemotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., whichevoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could
go against it without being accused of revisionism. We really batted a thousand in
full.”
Merlino asked, “But between 2 and 5 August 1992, when you did this, you had no
proof that what you said was true.”
Harff put it all out on the table when he concluded, “Our work is not to verify
information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate thecirculation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. ...
We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid tomoralize.”
For more information read part 114 of Lavender and Red at www.workers.org
and “NATO in the Balkans” (International Action Center, New York: 1998).
Next: Pentagon did not wage war on Afghanistan to “liberate” women andsame-sex love.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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The cynical abuse of 'women's rights'

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U.S. and Afghanistan

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The cynical abuse of'women's rights'

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Lavender & red, part 116
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 6, 2007 8:21 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe U.S. did not unleash war on Afghanistan in 2001 to“liberate” women. But pro-war spin doctors—embedded with thecorporate media—went into overdrive to create that impression
after 9/11. Public relations campaigns “sold” as liberation a hightech imperialist war against an impoverished country with no airforce.
This was designed to obscure the fact that imperialism had no right to violate
Afghanistan’s self-determination and sovereignty.
The New York Times offered a more candid geopolitical view as early as Jan. 18,
1996, in an article entitled “The New Great Game in Asia”—referring to the 19th
century struggle among capitalist powers to control the Eurasian landmass andthe warm-water ports of the Persian Gulf.
The Times explained, “While few have noticed, Central Asia has again emerged asa murky battleground among big powers engaged in an old and roughgeopolitical game. Western experts believe that the largely untapped oil andnatural gas riches of the Caspian Sea countries could make that region the
Persian Gulf of the next century. The object of the revived game is to befriend
leaders of the former Soviet republics controlling the oil, while neutralizing
Russian suspicions and devising secure alternative pipeline routes to world
markets.”
After overturning the bloc of workers’ states in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, U.S. finance capital schemed to secure ownership of trillions of dollars
worth of buried oil and gas treasure in the Caspian Sea region, which had for
decades been collectively owned by the workers and peoples of the region.
Transnational energy giants like Unocal and Enron saw Afghanistan as the best
path to pipe oil and gas from Central Asia to the world market.
The Bush neo-cons, Pentagon brass and the military-industrial complex worked
overtime to frame this as a campaign for women’s rights.
Laura Bush delivered the presidential radio address on Nov. 16, 2001—a monthafter the Pentagon assault began. Her speech focused on women’s rights in
Afghanistan: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignityof women.” It was a total lie.
Afghan Revolution advanced women’s rights
An article in Workers World on Oct. 10, 1996, by Deirdre Griswold showed how a
progressive revolution in Afghanistan in 1978 had taken measures to liberate
women and challenge centuries of landlordism. In response, the U.S. pulled
together an army of pro-feudal elements to crush that revolutionary government,
forcing it to call on the USSR for support.

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-116/[2/3/2011 5:24:46 PM]

Respond

The cynical abuse of 'women's rights'

The WW article quoted from a 1986 Department of Defense publication titled“Afghanistan—a Country Study.” Even this Pentagon book had to admit that the
1978 revolution brought many gains to Afghan women and girls.
Women were organized in the Democratic Women’s Organization of Afghanistan.
The national group had been founded in 1965 by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada. Her
companion Babrak Karmal, who founded the People’s Democratic Party ofAfghanistan the same year, later became the country’s president.
One of the first actions of the revolution was to end “bride-price” and allow
women to make marriage choices. Punishment of women who had sex outside ofmarriage was prohibited. Women could choose to wear or not to wear the veil,
travel in public, get an education and work at a job. Women of all classes—not
just the well-to-do—were trained as doctors, teachers and lawyers.
Brigades of women and other young Afghans brought medical care to rural
peasants.
The revolution impacted the life of one third of the rural population—landlesspeasants, sharecroppers and tenants held in virtual bondage to landlords andmoney lenders.
Before the revolution, 5 percent of the landlords claimed ownership of more than
45 percent of the country’s arable land. “When the PDPA took power,” thePentagon report noted, “it quickly moved to remove both landownershipinequalities and usury.” One of the revolutionary land reforms was thecancellation of mortgage debt for agricultural laborers, tenants and small
landowners.
On the eve of the revolution, 96.3 percent of the women of Afghanistan were
illiterate; rural illiteracy for all the sexes was 90.5 percent. The progressive
government created massive literacy programs and printed textbooks in Dari,
Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi.
The 1986 Pentagon report stated, “The government trained many more teachers,
built additional schools and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans.”
The Washington Post admitted that Afghan women were the strongest supportersof the 1978 revolution.
But this revolution was crushed by a well-funded, well-armed counterrevolutionin which U.S. imperialism made common cause with feudal patriarchs. Women
were then bought and sold as property once again.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert
M. Gates later publicly bragged that, beginning in early 1979, the CIA had
funneled money and arms to counter-revolutionary groups, many of themmembers of militias loyal to local landowners.
Democrats and Republicans had approved at least $8 billion for thiscounterrevolutionary effort that hired, armed and trained the Taliban, Osama bin
Laden and other forces.
CIA historian John Ranelagh recalls that then President Jimmy Carter OK’d“more secret operations than Reagan later did.” Carter later admitted in his
memoirs that his administration actually considered the use of tactical nuclear
weapons against the progressive developments in Afghanistan.
U.S. set women’s rights back centuries
By 1992 the Soviet Union was overturned and the progressive government in
Afghanistan was defeated by imperialism. After four years of internecine struggle
among different Afghan factions, the Taliban came to power.
Michael Meacher, a senior Labor Party member of Parliament who had been amember of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, observed in a Sept. 6,

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The cynical abuse of 'women's rights'

2003, article in the Guardian of London, “Until July 2001 the U.S. government
saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable
the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to theIndian Ocean.
“But confronted with the Taliban’s refusal to accept U.S. conditions, the U.S.
representatives told them ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or webury you under a carpet of bombs.’”
Washington took advantage of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to launch aninvasion of Afghanistan.
U.S. occupiers appointed former Unocal advisors to be both the titular presidentof Afghanistan and the U.S. ambassador to the country.
The continuing imperialist blitzkrieg has destroyed the infrastructure—including
potable water, sewage and electricity—worsening hunger and disease. Sovietbuilt public urban housing complexes and schools lie in ruins.
These conditions create suffering for all sexes, genders and sexualities in
Afghanistan, particularly for women. In 2004, some provinces reported 593
maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.
Pentagon Special Forces commandos can kick in the door of a home at any hourof the day or night, body search Afghan women and their loved ones, and dragthem all off in hoods to torture chambers.
That’s imperialist-style “liberation.”
Research by Minnie Bruce Prattcontributed to this article.
Next: U.S. warmakers gay-baitedand gay-bashed Afghanistan.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-116/[2/3/2011 5:24:46 PM]

U.S. war agitation targeted LGBT movements

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SEARCHAs prelude to Afghan invasion

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U.S. war agitation targetedLGBT movements

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 16, 2007 9:50 PM

U.S. and British military public relations, and their embedded
media, focused on Taliban laws and attitudes about same-sex
love to agitate for the October 2001 invasion and justify
occupation.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

The monopoly corporate media broadcast this newfound concern for the rights ofoppressed sexualities—like its crocodile tears for Afghan women—after 9/11, as
U.S. imperialism readied the Pentagon to plant its corporate flag in this geostrategic Central Asian country. Transnational energy behemoths like Unocal andEnron were hellbent on siphoning the vast fossil fuel wealth of the Caspian Sea
region from the former Soviet Union through Afghanistan.
More than a year before 9/11, the U.S. Department of State’s “Country Reports
on Human Rights Practices, 2000” had stated that during the Taliban rule, “Thepunishment for those found guilty of homosexual acts is to have walls toppled
over them. Although there were no known instances of such punishment during
the year, this punishment was carried out on at least one occasion in 1999, andseven times in 1998 (resulting in five deaths).”
Whether those facts are accurate or distorted, the Department of State wasn’t
ready to make war against Afghanistan in 2000, using same-sex rights as ashield. And of course, the U.S. did not declare war on any of its client states in
the region that punish homosexuality by prison terms or execution.
In the weeks between the Sept. 11 attacks and the first blast of the imperialist
blitzkrieg on Oct. 7, articles in the imperialist corporate media amplified accountsof the 1998 and 1999 executions. These reports also got picked up by media
aimed at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities.
But months later, after the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan was already inplace, more reports about the period in which the executions took place revealeda more complex reality.

Struggle against rape
Tim Reid reported in “Kandahar Comes Out of the Closet,” in the Jan. 12, 2002,
issue of The Times of London that stopping the abduction and rape of maleyouths by landlord militia commanders “was one of the key factors in Mullah
Omar mobilizing the Taliban.” Mohammed Omar is the leader of the Taliban
Reid reported that two non-Taliban militia commanders fought over a maleyouth in the summer of 1994, just a few months before the Taliban took controlof Kandahar. Civilians were killed in the artillery shelling. “Omar’s group freed
the boy and appeals began flooding in for Omar to help in other disputes. By
November, Omar and his Taliban were Kandahar’s new rulers.”
Reid quotes Torjan, a soldier loyal to the post-Taliban governor appointed underimperialist occupation. Torjan, 38 years old, recalled, “In the days of the
Mujahidin, there were men with their ‘ashna’ [beloved young man] everywhere, at

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RespondU.S. war agitation targeted LGBT movements

every corner, in shops, on the streets, in hotels: it was completely open, a part oflife. But in the later Mujahidin years, more and more soldiers would take boys byforce, and keep them for as long as they wished. But when the Taliban came,they were very strict about the ban.”
Other media presented similar accounts. The New York Times wrote on Feb. 21,
2002: “In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of theKoran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They
freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support.”
The Times article quoted Amin Ullah, a money changer, gesturing to his two
teenage sons hunched over wads of Afghani bank notes at Kandahar’s currency
bazaar. “At that time boys couldn’t come to the market because the commanders
would come and take away any that they liked,” Ullah said.
One of the Afghan men that the U.S. Department of state claimed was sentenced
to death in 1998 for being “found guilty of homosexual acts” survived. By law, he
was later set free. The Feb. 21, 2002, New York Times admitted that the man—
Mullah Peer Muhammad—was a former Taliban fighter arrested for sexual abuseof young male prisoners while he was in charge of the central prison in
Kandahar. The Times stated, “The man had been convicted of raping and killing aboy.”
Clearly a more complex reality existed than the one the New York Post used topress for war: “Men accused of being gay were executed by having a wall toppled
on them.”
These accounts aim to divert attention from the real issue: The Pentagon—that
armed institution of gay-bashing violence—had no right to invade and occupy
Afghanistan.
Next: Embedded anthropology
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-117/[2/3/2011 5:25:06 PM]

U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan

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In the months after the autumn 2001 imperialist militaryinvasion, a rash of gay-bashing and gay-baiting articles about
Afghanistan appeared in the U.S. and British corporate media.
Many of these articles purported to analyze sexualities andgenders and the organization of the sexes in Afghanistan.

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAIn some of the coverage, “experts”—who are not Afghan—focused on sexual andsocial organization in Pashtun culture, the majority culture in Afghanistan, as
though it was the only culture. Other non-Afghan “authorities” didn’t
differentiate between the diverse cultures in that ancient land, including the
Durrani, Ghilzai, Wardak, Jaji, Tani, Jadran, Mangal, Khugiani, Kuchi, Safi,
Mohmand and Shinwari; or Uzbek or Arab. Most reports did not differentiate
between peoples of the lowlands and those in the mountain ranges. Or between
peoples who lead nomadic lives, and those who dwell in crowded cities. And
speculations only focused on same-sexuality between male-bodied individuals.
Colonialism and imperialism have always studied the cultures they sought toconquer and destroy. The job of embedded anthropologists is ultimately always
to claim cultural superiority—the rotten plank on which white-supremacist
ideologues stand.
Not a word coming from the imperialist occupiers about Afghan cultures has any
validity. Some of the most bigoted theories these articles rehash and spew aboutsame-sex love and gender expression, and their relation to women’s oppression,
do need to be exposed and combated.

Imperial anthropology
The organization of the sexes, socially accepted sexualities and gender
expressions in Afghanistan are rooted in that country’s ancient history, and are
not the same as in the U.S. or Britain. The existence of other forms of socialorganization and sexual and gender expression challenges the biologicaldeterminists who argue that sexuality is genetically fixed in the human species.
Therefore, colonialists and imperialists have historically used racist
characterizations like “obsessive sodomy,” “promiscuity” and “unnatural
sexuality, and gender-phobic baiting of oppressed males as “effeminate” or“hyper-masculine” to excuse the inexcusable: imperial domination andexploitation.
Brian James Baer, associate professor of Russian Literature and Translation at
Kent State University, wrote about the bias in the spate of Western reporting
about sexualities in Afghanistan in an article in the Gay and Lesbian Review,
March-April 2003.
Baer noted, “Journalists repeatedly used Western concepts such as ‘gay’ and ‘thecloset’ to characterize the Kandahar situation, thus imposing their notion ofhomosexuality as a minority identity.” And, he added, “In their reporting Westernjournalists insisted on reducing relationships that are often long-term emotional

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-118/[2/3/2011 5:25:42 PM]

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Published Dec 18, 2007 11:51 PM

RespondU.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistanbonds to a crude sexual bargain.”
Baer pointed out: “Maura Reynolds of The LA Times noted that ‘there is a strong
streak of dandyism among Pashtun males. Many line their eyes with kohl, stain
their fingernails with henna or walk about town in clumsy, high-heeled sandals.’
But this equation makes sense only if we accept two Western assumptions: thathomosexuality and effeminacy are automatically linked; and that the practices
described are in fact ‘effeminate.’”Baer stressed: “Despite statistical evidence demonstrating that pedophilia in theWest is more common among heterosexual men, the association of homosexuality
and the sexual abuse of children remains prominent in Western anti-gay
discourse, propelling ‘save our children’ campaigns to restrict their contact withgay adults. By constructing age-stratified homosexual activity in Kandahar as
pedophilia, Western journalists provided themselves a link to the ever-popular
issue of child abuse—especially hot, what with the unfolding scandal in the
Catholic Church.”
Baer took journalist Michael Griffin to task for writing in The Times of London
that the Taliban hated women and that resulted in making sex with other males
popular in Afghanistan. On the eve of invasion, articles in the imperialist media
centered on the claim that the Taliban was repressing same-sexuality.
Baer also challenged Griffin for flipping the argument in the same article byclaiming that woman-hating appears to be “the product of a repressedhomosexuality.” Readers were spared theories about what is at the root of women
loving women.
The claim that same-sex love arises from hatred of women or that misogyny isrooted in unexpressed homosexual desire pits sexes and sexualities that are both
oppressed under patriarchal class rule against each other.
Most of the imperialist war-time media reports claim that many males in
Afghanistan have sex with each other because of “extreme segregation of thesexes.” Some of the same journalists did not attempt to reconcile thecontradiction to their theory when they quoted Afghan males who are married to
women and have sex with other males.
The “prison” theory of homosexuality is an old one. It assumes thatheterosexuality is hard-wired and “natural” and that sex between males or
females only takes place when the sexes are segregated.
Even the term “segregation” is judgmental. Every society has its own organizationof the sexes. However, in pre-class societies, in which women were not ruled overby men, same-sex organization in collective households or hunting or rituals was
not oppressive. On the whole, such societies made room for more sexes,
sexualities and gender expressions, and socially accepted sex reassignment thanis allowed for in the patriarchal organization of modern imperialist societies.
Dubbing Afghanistan as a “prison culture” for oppressed sexes and sexualities
allowed post-invasion articles in the U.S. and British media to make it seem as
though “gay liberation” was a collateral benefit of imperialist massive bombing
raids, invasion and military occupation.
But imperialism has tried to lock down Afghanistan like a prison. The “don’t ask,
don’t tell” Pentagon command didn’t bring liberation from the Taliban. It
brought the Taliban. It was the CIA and “Defense” Department that armed andtrained the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and other counter-revolutionary forces
to crush the 1978 Revolution—which was taking action, with women in the lead,to liberate Afghanistan from semi-feudal rule.
After the Pentagon hammered the country with bombs, and Special Forces
battered down the doors of homes, U.S. and British journalists in Kandahar
followed behind, demanding that peoples under siege and under occupation talkpublicly about sexualities in their cultures.

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U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan

While admitting, “There appears to be no shame or furtiveness about them,although when approached, they refuse to talk to a western journalist,” Reid
turned around and charged the Pashtun with “lying” because they did not confessto his definition of their sexualities.
Maura Reynolds quotes Mohammed Daud, a motorbike repair person, in her Los
Angeles Times article. “These are hard questions you are asking,” he says. “We
don’t usually talk about such things.” (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2002)

Rambo gay bashing
The Pentagon brass—which carry out a crusade of terror against gay, lesbian,bisexual and trans GIs in its own ranks—gay-bashed Afghanistan, too.
Just days after the Pentagon began dropping a torrent of high-tech ordnancefrom the sky over Afghanistan, the Associated Press released worldwide aphotograph of a gay-bashing epithet, “High Jack This F—-,”scrawled on one of
the bombs on a fighter jet parked on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise.
The widely circulated photo created uproar among lesbian, gay, bisexual andtrans (LGBT) organizations in the United States. However, all but one of thesegroups debated it from the standpoint of a hate-speech issue; they did notdenounce the aerial bombardment and post-9/11 Pentagon military aggression
against Afghanistan.
AP spokesperson Jack Stokes used the weapon of xenophobia to deflect anger,
saying that the photographer “is not American, and that [epithet] meant nothing
to him.” Stokes didn’t bother taking a stab at explaining how the photo got past
everyone else in the process of selection and production.
At the Pentagon, Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli said the ship’s crew had
been told to edit “the spontaneous acts of penmanship by our sailors.” Heconcluded, “We want to keep the message positive.” Pietropaoli is referring tomessages written on bombs about to drop on the population below.
The release of the photograph was very much in keeping with the menacing psyop messages of U.S. and British imperialism. Political pundits, late-nighttelevision comics, newspaper and Internet cartoons gay-baited and transgenderbaited the Taliban and Osama bin Laden—including threats of anal rape. The
threat of rape and sexual and gender humiliation is a primary weapon of CIA andmercenary interrogators of Muslim men and women.
The following quotes, vicious and offensive, are repeated here solely to spotlightthe threat of violence that smolders in these reports, which are broadcast aroundthe world.
In an article in The Scotsman on May 24, 2002, journalist Chris Stephen wrote,“In Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan
mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat—being propositioned byswarms of gay local farmers.”
British Royal Marine James Fletcher said: “They were more terrifying than theal-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go
about hand in hand, mincing around the village.”“It was hell,” said Corporal Paul Richard.
“They put some music on and ask us to dance. I told them where to go,” said Cpl.
Richard. “Some of the guys turned tail and fled. It was hideous.”
These quotes from military aggressors are a “homosexual panic defense,” bywhich gay-bashers later claim in court that they were justified to torture andmurder because the victim made sexual advances.
Even after the U.S. and British invaded Afghanistan—dominating the country

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-118/[2/3/2011 5:25:42 PM]

U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan

militarily and crafting a legislative and political façade of independent
government and law—the imperialists did not remove the law which they had
said in pro-war agitation made same-sex love a capital offense.
Next: Same-sex rights: Dec. 18 New York Times pits Iraq and Iran.
Read parts 116 and 117 on Afghanistan and the entire Lavender & Red series atwww.workers.org. Look for the Lavender & Red logo.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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'Life better for gay & lesbian Iraqis under Hussein'

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Email this article'Life better for gay & lesbian
Iraqis under Hussein'

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Lavender & red, part 119
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Jan 27, 2008 7:55 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZAThe New York Times—an imperialist mouthpiece—admitted in a
mid-December article that social life was better for those who it
described as “gay and lesbian Iraqis” under the seculargovernment of Saddam Hussein. The Times also confirmed thatsanctions, war and occupation crushed that social progress andushered in death-squad terror.
The Dec. 18 article was a political feature, not based on breaking news. The
original headline summed up: “Gays Living in Shadows of New Iraq: Violence
Replaces Tacit Acceptance.”
Times journalist Cara Buckley interviewed Iraqis who she described as gay. She
reported, “And, until the [U.S.] American invasion, they said, Iraqi society had
quietly accepted them.”
Buckley said those Iraqis she interviewed offered this view of life before sanctions
and war: “For a brief, exhilarating time, from the mid-1980s until the early
1990s, they say, gay night life flourished in Iraq. Whereas neighboring Iranturned inward after its Islamic revolution in 1979, Baghdad allowed a measure ofliberation after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.”
The New York Times newspaper—“all the news that’s fit to print”—doesn’t see fit
to mention that U.S. imperialism instigated the Iran-Iraq war. The Reagan
administration armed both sides. Instead, the article continues to attempt to pit
the two oil-rich countries against each other.
At the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Buckley continued, “Abu Nuwas
Boulevard, which hugs the Tigris River opposite what is now the Green Zone,
became a promenade known for cruising. Discos opened in the city’s best hotels,
the Ishtar Sheraton, the Palestine and Saddam Hussein’s prized Al-Rasheed
Hotel becoming magnets for gay men. Young men with rouged cheeks andglossed lips paraded the streets of Mansour, an affluent neighborhood in
Baghdad.”The Times quotes Ali Hili, who left Iraq in 2000 and is now living in London,
where he heads the organization Iraqi LGBT-UK. Hili stressed that before theU.S. war and sanctions, “There were so many guys, from Kuwait, from Saudi
Arabia, guys in the street with makeup,” Hili recalled. “Up until 1991, there wassexual freedom. It was a revolutionary time.”
Buckley noted, “Then came the Persian Gulf War, and afterward Saddam Hussein
put an end to nightclubs. Iraq staggered under the yoke of economic sanctions.”
The late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a bourgeois nationalist, reportedly
added a religious law that made anal intercourse, prostitution, rape and incest acapital offense in 2001. The edict came after almost a decade of economic
strangulation, as the U.S. pressed for shock-and-awe military invasion.

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Respond'Life better for gay & lesbian Iraqis under Hussein'

Buckley asked two of the Iraqis she interviewed what life was like in Iraq forthem and acquaintances after the 2001 law was written. She reported, “Whileanti-gay laws were increasingly enforced, Mohammed and Mr. Hili said they still
felt safe. Homosexuality seemed accepted, as long as it was practiced in private.
And even when it was not tolerated, prison time could be evaded with a wellplaced bribe.”
The admission by the New York Times that social attitudes towards male-male orfemale-female sexuality were freer under the secular Ba’athist government of
Saddam Hussein is particularly shocking after U.S. finance capital has enforced
12 years of economic warfare, unleashed two blitzkrieg wars and continues to be
the military occupation force against the entire population of Iraq based in parton the Big Lie.
Prewar media agitation about a virtual fascist dictatorship for “gays” in Iraq
targeted newspapers aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans audiences in the
U.S. and Britain, and helped sell the war as “liberation.”
But imperialism, and colonialism before it, has never brought liberation to theMiddle East. Just the opposite is true. For example, the Times neglected tomention that British finance capital outlawed “sodomy” in Iraq—almost a centuryago.
For the purposes of the Dec. 18 New York Times feature, however, Iraqi history
begins with the mid-1980s, and “gay” and “lesbian” are fixed categories, identicalto Western concepts, and transcend economic and social relations, cultures anderas.

Translating sex & love
More than a century ago, as the historical sun rose on capitalist economic andaccompanying military expansion, Europeans also judged and condemned,
speculated and sensationalized, categorized and theorized regarding Arabsexualities, particularly about expressions of love between adult men andadolescent males.
Scholar and author Khaled El-Rouayheb pointed out, “The tendency is very muchin evidence already in Sir Richard Burton’s remarks on ‘Pederasty’ in the‘Terminal Essay’ to his translation of The Arabian Nights in 1886. Writing before
the term ‘homosexuality’ was introduced into the English language, Burton stillassumed that he was faced with one phenomenon, ‘pederasty,’ which he claimed
was widespread in the Islamic world and regarded as at worse a peccadillo.”
El-Rouayheb is the author of a meticulously researched book, entitled “Before
Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World., 1500-1800,” that was published by
the University of Chicago Press in 2005.
Khaled El-Rouayheb cautioned, “The assumption that it is unproblematic tospeak of either tolerance or intolerance of homosexuality in the pre-modern
Middle East, would seem to derive from the assumption that homosexuality is aself-evident fact about the human world to which a particular culture reacts witha certain degree of tolerance or repression.
“From this perspective,” he continued, “writing the history of homosexuality isseen as analogous to writing, say, the history of women. One assumes that theconcept ‘homosexual,’ like the concept ‘woman,’ is shared across historicalperiods, and that what varies and may be investigated historically is merely thechanging cultural (popular, scientific, legal, etc.) attitude toward such people.”
El-Rouayheb concluded, “The concept of male homosexuality did not exist in the
Arab-Islamic Middle East in the early Ottoman period. There was simply nonative concept that was applicable to all and only those men who were sexuallyattracted to members of their own sex, rather than to women.”

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'Life better for gay & lesbian Iraqis under Hussein'

Next: British outlawed ‘sodomy’ in Iraq.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
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Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

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British colonialism outlawed 'sodomy' in Iraq

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British colonialism outlawed'sodomy' in Iraq

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By Leslie Feinberg
Published Feb 1, 2008 11:17 PM

RED HOT: EGYPT, NORTHAFRICA & MIDDLE EAST, ANTI-WAR,
HEALTH CARE,
CUBA, CLIMATE CHANGE,JOBS JOBS JOBS, AFGHANISTAN ,STOP FORECLOSURES, IRAN, IRAQ,

CAPITALIST CRISIS, IMMIGRANTS,LGBT,POLITICAL PRISONERS, KOREA, CHINA,HONDURAS, HAITI, AFRICA,WOMEN, SOCIALISM, GAZA

British colonialism outlawed “sodomy” in Iraq after World War I.
The edict was part of an entire body of colonial law created by
British overlords more than half a century earlier, which theEnglish called “The Indian Penal Code.” The code was notindigenous to India. It was the legal system that the Britishcolonial rulers forced on India in 1860.
Article 377 of that colonial code made “carnal intercourse against the order ofnature” a crime punishable by up to 20 years of deportation or up to 10 years
imprisonment.
The term “sodomy” originates in the Bible: “Sodom and Gomorrah.” British
Common Law derived from ecclesiastical—church—law.
In 1533, as England’s church split with Rome, King Henry VIII had made“buggery”—synonymous with “sodomy”—a capital offense punishable by hanging.
A British colonial law in Ireland in 1634 also called for the death sentence. Later,
the 1885 British Labouchère Amendment reduced the sentence to imprisonment
with hard labor.
As the British colonial empire expanded, its overlords imposed and enforced
Article 377 and similarly worded edicts against “sodomy” in Nigeria, Kenya,
Uganda and Tanzania, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore,
Malaysia and Brunei, the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca,
Hong Kong, Fiji, the Malay Peninsula and Burma, Sri Lanka, the Seychelles andPapua New Guinea, “British” Honduras (today Belize), Jamaica, Anguilla, the“British” Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Bahamas, Tobago,
Turks and Caicos, and St. Lucia, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia.
In the Middle East, British colonialism made “The Indian Penal Code” the law of
the land in Aden, Bahrain, Kuwait, Muscat and Oman, Qatar, Somaliland, theSudan and what is today the United Arab Emirates.
Any system of law, as Karl Marx explained, cannot break free of its economic
foundation. Colonial Britain imposed its patriarchal capitalist “order of nature”—
theft of labor and natural wealth, brutal state repression, attempts at cultural
genocide, and guarantee of commercial distribution, private ownership andproperty rights—on the pre-capitalist, essentially feudal economic system in Iraq
in 1918.
The outlawing of “sodomy” in 1919 was part and parcel of British structuring ofArab family and kinship, sexuality and society, in order to exploit the greatest
profits from the oil-rich region.
Colonial ‘law’
During the first interimperialist world war, from 1914-1918, the British promised
the Arab people that if they fought to defeat the Ottoman Empire, with its

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RespondBritish colonialism outlawed 'sodomy' in Iraq

administrative center in Turkey, that England would grant them independence.
World War I was the first international military bloodbath between imperialist
rivals over the division of global capitalist markets and resources. The massive
human toll, military and civilian: 20 million dead and 21 million wounded.
Yet even as they sent their armies into battle they were cutting backroom deals
with each other. England, France and Czarist Russia signed the secret SykesPicot Treaty, which divided up the Middle East into colonial “possessions,”
during the middle of the war, in 1916.
After World War I, the Supreme Commander of the British Forces of Occupationin Iraq drew up the penal code—including the outlaw of “sodomy”—in 1918 andimposed it on the population of the capital city on Jan. 1, 1919. Later the British
applied it to the whole country.
The colonial penal code was written and published in English. No Arabictranslation was made for the first two years after it was established as the rule oflaw in Iraq.
The British legal code wasn’t translated into Arabic until 1921. Discrepancies
between the English version and the Arabic translation created legal chaos.
As far as the British were concerned, the English version was definitive andbinding.
Jehoeda Sofer wrote in the essay in “Sexuality and Eroticism Among Males in
Moslem Societies,” a book co-edited with Arno Schmitt, “In 1956, this Code was
replaced in the British territories of the Persian Gulf by a new Penal Code. Article
171 made sodomy punishable by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, with orwithout corporal punishment.”
First step toward independent law
After decades of vicious imperial rule, an Iraqi military rebellion on July 14, 1958,
lit the fuse of an anti-colonial revolution for independence.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed an estimated 20,000 Marines toLebanon to block the Iraqi national independence movement from widening in
the region and was prepared to send a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier to the Gulf.
But the determination of the Iraqi population to oust imperialism and nationalize
the country’s vast oil wealth helped stay imperialism’s hand. Anti-imperialist
solidarity with the Iraqi national democratic revolution of 1958 from the socialist
governments of the USSR and China—and support from India under Nehru andIndonesia under Sukarno—also sent a strong message to U.S. finance capital not
to intervene militarily.
However, the U.S. and Britain never gave the newly independent Iraq a moment’s
peace to rebuild its society, free from the legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
In 1969, the independent Iraqi Ministry of Justice issued, in Arabic, the first Iraqi
revised penal code. It was a first step towards creating an independent national
legal system.
Did the 1969 code legalize “homosexuality”? Those who ask reveal their
historically based, economically bound cultural concepts of sexualities.
‘Sodomy’: a colonial concept
The British imported the concept of “sodomy” in order to outlaw it.
Khaled El-Rouayheb is the author of “Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic
World, 1500-1800,” which was published by the University of Chicago Press in
2005. He explained, “Homosexuality is usually seen in the modern West as aninnate and abnormal condition of a minority of humans which reveals itself in a
regular desire to have homosexual intercourse, but also in various other ways.

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British colonialism outlawed 'sodomy' in Iraq

For example, a ‘homosexual’ is widely assumed to be effeminate, promiscuousand sexually uninterested in members of the other sex. McIntosh argued thatsuch a homosexual ‘role’ or stereotype only emerged in England in the late 17th
century.”
El-Rouayheb stressed, “The concept of male homosexuality did not exist in the
Arab-Islamic Middle East in the early Ottoman period. There was simply nonative concept that was applicable to all and only those men who were sexuallyattracted to members of their own sex, rather than to women.”
He concluded, “[T]he encounter with European Victorian morality was to haveprofound effects on local attitudes toward what came to be called ‘sexual
inversion’ or ‘sexual perversion’ (shudhūdh jinsī).”
Next: Independence brought greater social freedoms; imperialism rolled themback.
For more on Iraq, read Part 119 at www.workers.org, where the full Lavender& Red web-book-in-progress is posted.
E-mail: lfeinberg@workers.org

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying anddistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty
provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news DONATE

http://www.workers.org/2008/world/lavender-red-120/[2/3/2011 5:26:24 PM]