The core problem with the left for a gay and lesbian movement is the left's belief that, since property relations are the original source of actual social relations, these must be addressed directly and primarily and that addressing the outgrowths of property relations, such as misogyny and the oppression of gay and lesbian people, is secondary. The ultimate manifestation of this is a refusal to put gay and lesbian justice first and to make it primary and central in leftist programs. This mistaken focus on the origins of property relations is a result of absolutism, which always creates incorrect thinking. This particular absolutism on the part of the left is revisionist, and even counterrevolutionary in that it favors syllogistic logic, a mainstay of reactionaries, over inductive and dialectical logic, the correct logical templates for revolutionary justice.
This being said, it should be asserted that the left has a more correct hypothesis regarding the origins of sociopathologies than perhaps any other organized tendency, movement, or conceptual framework. And yet, at its center is the fundamental error of believing that the effect must not be addressed, but rather only the cause, even when that cause is highly transmogrified and fully removed from its inceptual context. The basic theory of the left, with regard to gay and lesbian justice, which it does not address directly or adequately, to say the least, is that private property produces relations of domination and oppression, including the idea that women are property. Women then as such are an oppressed class, since anyone who is the property of another is not free. Women were and are the owned, not the owners, and marriage is the guarantee of ownership, the continued truth of which is still manifest in the fact that women stay in marriages out of financial necessity only ("for the sake of the children").
The male persona took on the role of oppressor and property master because some inadequate and unsure males forced this template onto maleness and sealed its reality by going to war over property. Property as a usurpation and property relations produced ideas of dominance and control, which these inadequate males then pushed onto the idea and persona of maleness, as a cover for feelings of weakness and inadequacy. Maleness then came to exist for many as domination, complete with its attendant psychopathologies, such as competition and physical and emotional abuse. Women did not gain property except insofar as they were property, and also had the related and negative psychopathological, manufactured characteristics imputed to them and then made manifest through enforcement.
As more and more elements of life became pathologized by property relations and male feelings of inadequacy engendered thereby (the nature of property acquisition is to continually beget desire for more property acquisition), sexuality and sex itself became more and more thoroughly pathologized, becoming sadomasochistic. The male feelings of domination/inadequacy begotten by property relations then naturally created self-aggrandizement through the denigration of the female or the non-dominant male (the eunuch, the transgendered person, the considerate male, et cetera). Sadomasochism as a form of property-based identity was then the understanding that one person's gain was another's loss, or that one person's power meant another person's powerlessness.
In society, gay and lesbian persons are all women, and stand as women, and can indeed stand no other way. The fusion of a society of property and the concept of sexuality, which latter emerged from the fusion of Judaic ethics and science, produced the concept of heterosexuality in contemporary times. Heterosexuality then, became a core of property based sadism - a sexual fantasy world of dominator and dominated. It was in this context which modern gay and lesbian identity arose.
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A number of questions emerge from the basis for gay and lesbian oppression as understood by the left. One is the question of the origin of the desire for private property. Whence this desire, if it is not natural? The question goes back to Rousseau, who, in his conjectural anthropology, deigned not to answer it. The answer to this question from the perspective of the left now is that the historical circumstances of prehistory would have determined the development of this desire, but that those circumstances are more or less unknown to us. This hypothesis is reasonable enough, is consistent with the view of historical, societal, and dialectical determination of human behavior, and in any case is antecedent to the question of gay and lesbian justice and the left.
A second question is why gay men came to be identified with women. This has to do with the understanding of what a woman is through the eyes of the corrupted and ruined male. In the eyes of this kind of male persona, women do not exist per se, but only as "walking embodiments of men's projected needs" (MacKinnon). These needs of the corrupted male with a false persona are then also false needs, but real ones as well insofar as they determine an oppressive actuality. The sadist male as he has developed then must find others to dominate, and since sadism from property relations involves fundamental insecurity, the sadistic male also must seek constant reassurance for and reinforcement of himself. When he sees the falsity of his persona in the refusal of the gay male to be interested in the domination of women, he is enraged because this immediately removes the cornerstone of his false identity, revealing it for what it is, and showing that maleness has nothing inherently to do with domination and that he is rather a ridiculous fraud.
End Part I
MacKinnon, Catherine. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1989, p. 119
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