Gay
and Lesbian People and the Organized Left
Part
II
My examination
of the organized left in theory has, in Part I, put forward the best of
socialist and communist theory with regard to the causes and origins of gay and
lesbian oppression and has stated that this theory is still lacking and
problematic when it comes to gay and lesbian justice. I would now like to examine the organized
left in practice, and I will do so by examining it in its manifestation in U.S.
political parties, based on my involvement with these parties. In the domain of practice, one finds more
clearly delineated the left's failure on gay and lesbian justice.
Preliminarily though,
I would like to state and briefly discuss several observations about the
organized left in the U.S. with regard to gay and lesbian persons, the first of
which has been stated otherwise above. These observations, which are fleshed out
in the succeeding discussion, are the following:
1- The left is a cover for gay
and lesbian people seeking justice on the basis of their oppression qua gay and lesbian people;
2 - The organized left in the
U.S. is homophobic;
3 - The organized left in the
U.S. is heteronormative;
4 - The organized left in the
U.S. has failed to adequately promote and defend gay and lesbian justice;
5 - Many parties and
organizations of the organized left purport to promote gay and lesbian justice
while also supporting, endorsing expressly or inexpressly, organizing with, and
generally trafficking with anti-gay groups.
The
more I have been involved with the organized left over the years, the more I
have come to believe that gay and lesbian persons often gravitate to the
organized left and join or affiliate with its organs because they, for certain
reasons, cannot bring themselves to fight directly for gay and lesbian justice
itself. Thus, the left consists, in its
membership, of persons in whom one senses only a second order support for
economic injustices, while the true motive of their participation in the
organizations of the left is forever left in the closet (again). The closet of the left may be in some respects
a better closet than the closet of liberal society, but, well, ....one does not
need any conclusions spelled out here.
Ironically,
it is ignorance of the left in the majority of L.G.B.T. persons that emerges as
one of the foremost reasons why gay and lesbian justice organizations themselves are
rarely radical. Thus, it makes sense
that gay and lesbian persons who are
radically oriented would seek out leftist organizations, even as these
organizations give us short shrift.
Radical and revolutionary gay justice organizations have also been reduced
in number due to the sustained and successful drive by the neoconservatives to
undermine the bases of progressivism. This effective campaign on the part of
the ultraright also leads to a situation in which leftist organizations can
attempt to exculpate themselves for their failures on queer justice by claiming
that they first have to worry about staying alive, and that criticizing the
left for such a failure is akin to kicking someone when he or she is down. But the left itself has, (and mostly with good reason),
stuck to its principles, and has done so to the point that the left in the U.S.
with its petty numbers of adherents, is highly fragmented and factionalized,
dividing over what can seem at times to be almost incomprehensibly petty
or unclear differences. One might observe that it
is a pity that this moral strictness has not for the most part extended to the
question of gay and lesbian justice, though one might be able to think that
this would be a more important sticking point or point for the breaking off, disaffiliation from, or dissolution of leftist organizations than, for
example, differences manifested in all the tirades against "Stalinism"
or disputes about the exact composition of the revolutionary class.
The
homophobia of the organized left is perhaps most evident in a tendency it
shares with liberal political groups, and that is the problem of the shift of
the topic and the shift of the conversation whenever queer justice is brought
up. This tendency manifests itself as the evident compulsion to bring in the
more general case whenever queer justice starts to come to be addressed. One can hear the evasion in such statements
as "This organization supports equality for all persons" or some
such. The reluctance to directly, wholly, and singly address queer justice in
itself and at length is also evidenced in the listing of L.G.B.T. rights in
lists of things that the given organization supports. While other topics and problems are given
complete focus in their own right, L.G.B.T. questions are most often only
brought up with a whole carload of other related questions of justice, and, worse
yet, any direct and sole focus on queer justice is done very lopsidedly once a
year in June, during what has come to be known as Gay Pride month.
The
heteronormativity of the organized left shows up in many ways, but at the
present time perhaps its most salient manifestation is in the manner in which,
when it comes to gay and lesbian lives, the left almost instantly
de-radicalizes itself, and its various organizations sound less like communist
or socialist ones, and more like liberal ones.
In the gay marriage debate, for example, leftist organizations got
behind marriage as if it were suddenly unproblematized and suddenly
disconnected from its highly pathological historical aspects. It is as if, when it comes to queer justice,
the left gets lazy and its heterosexist and anti-sexual character comes
especially to the fore, with all of its delusionality, and liberal frameworks
for "liberation" are endorsed with barely a word said on, to take the
same example, the unacceptability of marriage as an institution for any free
people.
Relatedly,
the record of the left in promoting gay and lesbian justice is not that of
revolutionaries. While in the era of the
Sexual Revolution the left did show itself, in general, to be one of the best
friends of gay and lesbian people, its promotion of queer justice was
opportunistic and second order, coming as it did on the back of social
movements. In an even earlier
generation, it was queer persons such as Harry Hay who supported the left, and
not the left who supported queer persons. Sadly too, in still earlier
generations it was liberals such as Havelock Ellis and even armchair fascists
such as Radclyffe Hall who carried the torch of queer justice, in spite of and
alongside communists who were only revolutionaries within a masculinst,
heterosexualized world of their own delusions.
The early Soviet Union, as Alexandra Kollontai presciently pointed out,
was a masculinist world of relative sterility when it came to the sexual aspects
of the social.[1]
It
is again the laudable tendency of the organized left to insist on the
importance of having correct interpretations of history and of events and a
correct programme which points up more starkly its looseness and laziness when
it comes to such austerity in support of queer justice. Here, nary a though is
given, it seems, to the thought and history and policy of organizations with
which one might enter into cooperative, unifying, or coalitional efforts. Gay and lesbian persons look with
disappointment and the rosters and credentials of those with whom the organized
left will traffic, since it is apparent that decisions about such matters are
being made in a way that does not give primacy to any given organization's
background and record and policy (or lack thereof) on gay justice. Thus, in the matter of queer justice,
tightness of program is out the window, as homophobic after homophobic
organization or government or person is invited into group efforts, as long as
that organization or government or person has all of its ducks in a row,
with the matter of queer justice excepted.[2]
In
support the foregoing observations, I would like to examine the organized left
in the U.S. by briefly reporting here on some of its various political parties
and their record on eliminating heteronormativity and on the question of the
primacy and adequacy of their promotion of queer justice. Here below I examine
seven leftist political parties, all of them parties with which I have had direct
experience.
Revolutionary Communist
Party
I
remember going to a gathering of R.C.P. members and supporters several years
ago, when the attack on gay and lesbian people via the "gay marriage
debate" was well underway. I
remember being disgusted by the fact that so many of these R.C.P. affiliates
were wearing wedding bands, and I was appalled that they could reconcile this
with progressivism or with support for queer lives when this "gay marriage
debate" was the latest club being used to beat queer persons into degradation,
silence, and death. What was most
appalling about this was both the lack of awareness of how abusive this was,
and also the typical, preposterous, heterosexist excuse-making that went on
when I confronted them with this problem.
This
typical and highly offensive support of anti-gay institutions on the part of
heterosexuals and this typical unwillingness to take any real stands or make
any real sacrifices for gay and lesbian lives though, pales in comparison to
the R.C.P.'s much more significantly offensive and abusive "position"
on gay and lesbian lives. By 2001 the
R.C.P., under the leadership of delusional heterosexist clown Bob Avakian, had
"decided" that it had been wrong about homosexuality, and
"changed" its "stance" on our lives. The new and revised position ((as if
heterosexuals had the right to take positions on our lives) takes up a common
line of heterosexist quackery, that of the idea of "practicing"
homosexuality and the concomitant separation of practice from essence, which
this new position claims to disavow, even as it uses its language. The new
position statement asks, ".....will homosexuality still exist through
socialism and communism?" The
stated answer: "Who knows?"[3]
R.C.P. can never seem to get to the correct
questions, questions like, "Why does heterosexuality exist?", and
"Does communism have a future after its dismal failures and loss of
credibility in the matter of queerness?"
As my friends and I made clear to R.C.P. members in New York, it is in
no way acceptable for heterosexists to just "change positions" and
march onward as if everything is now "fixed"; for R.C.P. to ever
again have any credibility, Bob Avakian must step down in dishonor and the
party must dissolve itself and start over with a total repudiation of its
past. This is another way of saying
that, whatever the viability of communism in a thoroughly queer future,
R.C.P. will play no legitimate role in it, since everyone knows that neither
R.C.P. nor perhaps any other leftist organization is going to make the
requisite sacrifices for queer justice and all believe that they can have it
both ways and just make reformist amends and changes and continue sailing
forward into a heterosexual future. In other words, in the eyes of the
organized left, queerness and the injustices committed against gay and lesbian
persons are not sufficient grounds alone for revolution from within or for
revolution in the society.
Irredeemable, essential, fundamental, and profound errors and abuses are
treated as gaffes that can be patched up in the manner of liberal
reformism. So much for the revolutionary
integrity of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The Party for Socialism and
Liberation and the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
The
Party for Socialism and Liberation and the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition are related
in that they both spun off, for officially undisclosed reasons, from the
Workers' World Party in 2004. Workers'
World had, in 1959, split from the Socialist Workers' Party. Though the
organizations work rather closely together, in my experience the P.S.L. tends
to be a much more youthful organization, while a preponderance of the persons
at A.N.S.W.E.R. meetings seem to be older persons, many of whom were presumably
W.W.P. members at one time.
An
examination of the P.S.L. and A.N.S.W.E.R. on the question of queer justice
brings up the question of the feeling and atmosphere of organizations. One can, on paper, seem to be a pro-gay
organization while still giving L.G.B.T. persons that creepy feeling that we
get when in heteronormative environments.
This is, especially of late, evidenced in part by the wedding and
engagement rings that one sees creepy heterosexuals displaying, displays which put the lie to real revolutionism, which
must make social justice primary.
At
P.S.L. meetings, there is little mention of queer justice per se, even though
many young persons come to the P.S.L. first because they are gay, and not
because of any clear consciousness of economic injustice or relations. I can remember one specific P.S.L. meeting where
there were, as there often are, some persons in the room with very little
knowledge of the left or of the P.S.L.'s thought and program. One of these was a very young man who spoke
up about queer justice and its importance for him and asked for the P.S.L.'s
position and philosophy on this. The
speaker at the meeting deferred to another, who referred back, in a manner
which indicated that this was a sidetracking of the important questions, to the
origins of property relations. The
conversation on queer justice, instead of being encouraged, was muted then, by
the tenor and letter of the response, which came from the side and corner of
the room, and from backup, as if perhaps the younger speaker were a bit afraid
of addressing this issue herself for fear of overemphasis or incorrectness.
What
is typical and yet at the same time odd about the left in general and the
P.S.L. specifically, is the fact that each has many gay and lesbian members,
and yet the environment at meetings and such is definitely not one which would
be described as queer. In any truly
revolutionary organization, one would feel the reverse of what one feels at a
P.S.L. meeting; that is, one would feel that
the situation was one in which a queer-identified circle of knowledge or
leadership was welcoming in, conditionally, heteronormatives, in a corrective
process. Rather, one feels the reverse:
that heterornormatives are welcoming in , conditionally, queer voices and
questions.
To
speak briefly about the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition, let me again call up that creepy
feeling in a room of wedding rings, family identifications and centeredness,
and the smug opinions of old heterosexuals at the dais. The social conservatism of the left, evident
to me at A.N.S.W.E.R. events, is not the social conservatism of the right, that
is, there is little or no little or no pushing and selling of family values,
and rather a sort of pretended ignorance of its continued centrality and an
attempt in conversations to avoid its valuation, even as wedding bands are worn
and queer lives and perspectives and sexuality are buried in silence. With the significant improvement over
right-wing hysteria and desperation about proving the value of family that such
leftist groups as A.N.S.W.E.R. evidence and provide, it is no wonder that gay
and lesbian people gravitate to these groups, only to be disappointed in other
ways.
A.N.S.W.E.R.,
though, is willing to traffic with anti-gay organizations such as the New Black
Panther Party, with which they have co-sponsored at least several events. When confronted with this crime against
L.G.B.T. persons, A.N.S.W.E.R. was silent - they refused to ANSWER.
The Socialist Workers' Party
With
very few exceptions, heterosexuals can be trained, with nonrevolutionary training
methods, to support queer justice only opportunistically and only so long as it
is convenient. Revolutionary reeducation is necessary to go further, and if
this is not done, leftist parties and
organizations will continue to take their liberties with history on the backs
of queer persons. This is persistently
evident in, for example, the left's refusal to repudiate the Cuban Revolution
because of its crimes against gay persons.
There is no other way: the Cuban Revolution must be fully repudiated and
discredited, and revolution in Cuba must begin again with a repudiation of
Castro and his legacy.
The
Socialist Workers' Party supports the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro. A brief analysis of an article that ran in
the Socialist Workers' Party's primary newspaper The Militant in 2012 is very instructive regarding the issues in
the ongoing and delusional support of this "revolution" with anti-gay
origins, the lines of which continue.[4]
This article covers the May, 2012 visit to the U.S. of Mariela Castro EspÃn,
director of Cuba's National Center For Sex Education, and daughter of Fidel
Castro. During visits to San Francisco's Gay and Lesbian Center, the New York
Public Library, and elsewhere, Castro made even the liberal-reformist idea of
an apology by the Cuban government for its disgusting heterosexist masturbation
posing as revolutionary action and mobilization (i.e. the exclusion of gay men
from service to the revolution and the promotion of their denigration,
sequestration, and sidelining) as ridiculous.
Much less an option then, one can presume, would be the queer
revolutionary demand, not for an apology, but for Fidel Castro and the
revolution to repudiated completely and disgraced thoroughly. Instead, issuing from Cuba and from Mariela
Castro was the common reformist idea that it was acceptable for old white
heterosexuals just to "take responsibility" verbally for their crimes
against us, while suffering nothing for them.
Once again, when it comes to queer justice, the left suddenly turns into
a liberal-reformist political movement and revolutionism goes right out the
window.
Worse
than this and yet somehow more honest, was S.W.P.'s former open opportunism
with regard to queer justice. The S.W.P.
decided that supporting queer justice per se was a distraction from its program
and goals, and that it would "narrow its appeal, and cripple its ability
to mobilize the masses on political questions."[5] Queer persons then are again (and again, and
again, and again) expendable when it comes to the onward march of workers'
revolution. The mythology and mysticism
of the worker as the only or primary vehicle of revolution (even doctrinaire
and nonrevisionist Marxists question this and discuss its centrality and
relevance), no matter what his or her consciousness, or lack thereof, dictates,
has exposed again the problem of pretending that the revolution cannot be
co-opted by the right on a social basis.
To look again to The Militant,
a newspaper I was thrilled to look for and sometimes find on the streets of New
York as a young gay man and developing communist, even if we could somehow
overlook the ultra-insulting piece lauding the Castros and their nepotistic
self-apologetics, we find this
mysticization of the working class's social authority in an even more
recent issue: "These results [of
ballot measures in four U.S. states which overturned anti-gay marriage laws]
reflect changing attitudes within the working class, striking a blow to a form
of prejudice and strengthening workers'...capacity to be the standard bearers
in the fight against all forms of discrimination."[6] This way of putting the developments, aside
from the fact that, again, revolutionaries turn into instant reformists when it
comes to queer justice, adopting the liberal idea that the heterosexual
regime's marriage institution is good for queer persons also, paints the
workers as having been a legitimate vehicle of
communist revolution even before their "attitude" changed
(into a liberal bourgeois one!), that is, when they were just another group of
social reactionaries with heterosexist delusions. Let's imagine the reverse scenario as
dialectical antipode to homophobia: heterosexuality
and heterosexuals under vicious attack by all classes as a result of
developments linked to the history of production. With this as an unfolding and
necessary dialectical moment in the history of the forces of production, will
the left have the courage of its own historical convictions, the courage to
name such an unfortunate turn of events as a necessary contradiction of capital's machinations?
The
International Communist League
Here
it is valuable to reiterate two positions of gay revolutionism. One is that
there is no going back, no redemption, for parties and groups which have
changed their minds, positions, or understandings of homosexuality. To allow for such whitewashing of fundamental
errors, abuses, and crimes would be reformist, and, more importantly, would set
gay and lesbian persons in very poor stead, to say the least, for the future.
What this kind of attempts to escape full culpability and to pay the penalty do
is to establish a never ending cycle of reformist correctives to the same abuses. When no one suffers any loss whatsoever for
his or her crimes against queer freedom and justice, abuses and heterosexist
delusions will only take on new guises and aspects, and even come around again
in their former guises, and sometimes even in more virulent ways.
The
second position to reiterate is that any left-wing organization which has not
problematized heterosexuality itself cannot stand as a true revolutionary
organization. Heterosexuality has been so full of delusionality in its history,
and heterosexuals so easily confused, duped, and ready to go along with the
agendas of social conservatives, that it must be itself considered one of the
foremost repositories of false consciousness, and problematized politically per
se. No party or group who has not done
this in a serious and fundamental way could be considered revolutionary.
The International
Communist League is of course eager to bury its embarrassing past, in which it
was the donkey of bourgeois conservatives' ideological baggage, of formulations
such as the idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle. Like typical, ever-delusional and
self-absorbed (yet uninteresting) heterosexuals, the I.C.L. parroted this
grotesque stupidity, making it part of its reasoning, both internally and
externally.[7] Like
many Trotskyist groups, the I.C.L. tries to disguise its ugly heterosexist past
by using a common trope of left-heterosexist apologetics, one especially common
among parties and organizations spun off from the S.W.P., that of the
"Trotsky good/Stalin bad" message, which assumes that the matter of
the left's sad record on queer justice is settled by explaining that Stalin and
supporters of Stalinism are an unfortunate deviation from true
revolutionism. Not wanting to be left
out (again) of a revolutionary movement, the Red Flag Union (originally the
Lavender and Red Union), an organization formed in criticism of the left's
positions on gay justice, decided to buy into this mythology and join forces
with the I.C.L., ending its own existence and effectively erasing its critical
and separatist position. In doing so, of
course, the R.F.U. had to swallow the I.C.L.'s patronizing correction,
disguised as a welcome but looking to those with eyes to see like a donkey
talking. The donkey, as bourgeois social
conservatism's baggage carrier, of course put this correction in the language of its de facto
masters, describing the R.F.U. as "gay lifestylist".
Finally,
while the I.C.L./Spartacists are to be lauded for their refusal to fall into
the anti-pedophilia hysteria created by the neoconservatives and their
flunkies, the end result, practically and in reality, of interactions and
liaisons with I.C.L. members is found most relevantly in that feeling that one
gets when in their presence. It is not a feeling of being in an environment
where queer is the norm, but rather one of being in a heteronormative social
milieu, one in which heterosexuals are permitted to have opinions about queer
lives and queer freedom, but with these opinions being issued from a
heteronormative comfort zone, rather than the other way around, as is
revolutionarily necessary.
The Committee for a Unified
Independent Party and related organizations
The
Committee for a Unified Independent Party, IndependentVoting.Org, and The
Social Therapy Group are all names for elements of a constellation of
organizations which changes over time in terms of names and organizational
bodies, but behind which are the postmodern leftists led by the late Fred
Newman, Lenora Fulani, Jacqueline Salit, and others. They are very different from the left as its
generally known, because of their desconstructionist base and approaches, and
yet they are clearly after extremely progressive goals and in fact are of the
left economically, politically, and socially.
The groups under this changing umbrella, unlike the rest of the left,
are groups which are willing to operate politically using the same kind of cynical
politics of co-optation, use, opportunistic coalitions, and so forth. These tactics have served them rather well at
a time when the left has been floundering.
The
group is pro-gay in a rather sterile, desexualized way, which is not altogether
unattractive, and yet which is also ironically more typical of the modernist left, which
has often seemed frigid and sexually austere.
Despite this, the various groups of this constellation are expressly
pro-gay, though they are willing to traffic with anti-gay monstrosities and
clowns like Patrick Buchanan. The fact
that they do so at all is, on the one hand, insulting, and on the other,
considering the fact that they clearly do not respect such people and do
consider them clowns, almost refreshing in that they are using right-wing
monstrosities and liberal jackasses as pawns in their postmodernist-leftist
game. The cynicism of this position is
problematic though when considered in the context of queer history. Historically, queer lives have been forced to go
underground, forced to represent themselves through subterfuge and
dissimulation, and a significant part of the gay movement was about being
freely honest and completely open. Seen in the light of this history, the C.U.I.P politics of subterfuge can seem all too familiar, and
contrary to the spirit of queer justice.
The
sterility of the group is something that, though not making queer voices and
persons invisible, does not allow for the voluptuousness that one finds in
organizations that have been founded closer to home, that is, in organizations
that have been founded qua queer
organizations. I remember a liaison with one member of the C.U.I.P. group who
spent a night in bed with me tripping out on a homepsun pharmaceutical industry
drug cocktail. Even though there is no blame or problem residing in this kind
of situation itself in the view of the group, there is perhaps a problem in the fact that such affairs are not
spoken about openly in politically strategic or informative meetings, and this
silence and sequestration on the subterranean life of queer voluptuousness and
desire for bliss seems to me to be a part of a kind of heteronormative
puritanism, even if such a puritanism is sometimes established or perpetuated
by queer persons themselves. In queer
organizations, even some non-radical ones, there is much more of an authentic
mixture of such party and sex stories and even an incorporation of them into
the general economy of the strategic political, sometimes in the form of
anecdotes, sometimes otherwise. The
converse sterility which C.U.I.P. et al. evidence can be problematic on its
own, but when combined with the fact that postmodernism, the school of thought
that forms the group's theoretical and even tactical base, has been a mode of
thought which has tended to erase gayness as a stable and coherent identity, is
more problematic. For all of the
deconstruction and reconstruction of identity that postmodernist thought has
brought about, it has not helped improve queer lives in their actual political
and economic circumstances. Rather, it has provided merely a way to make a game
or party of oppressed identities, without removing the roots of
oppression. An ever-present danger in
postmodern thought and its actualizations, is the pretended overcoming of abuse
and oppression, when in fact only a petit-bourgeois and academically removed
and playful, artful gloss has been put on these abuses and oppressions,
allowing queerness to seem more authentic because this playfulness with
identity has been prominently claimed or even created by queers (e.g. Michel
Foucault, Judith Butler).
A final problem with the constellation of
groups which I here place under the C.U.I.P. rubric, is something they share
with other groups, and this is their problematic support of anti-gay
organizations in the black community, at the expense of queer
justice. One can name for example a
positive and supportive relationship with the thoroughly preposterous and
thoroughly, irredeemably anti-gay Nation of Islam, and the C.U.I.P. group has
supported the anti-gay African Union. In
attempting, like other groups, to grasp onto anything that seems authentically
black and grassroots and that seems to have radical potential in a world where
liberalism-manufactured churchgoing, civil, and civil rights-supporting black
Americans are the unfortunate mainstay of black progressivism, C.U.I.P. looks
for radical authenticity, but at the expense of gay and lesbian persons. Even if such a cynical politics can be argued
to be ultimately in our favor, can we abide the means and avenue to such as it
treats (once again) queers as expedient? Briefly put, the answer is no.
Freedom Socialist Party
The Freedom Socialist
Party is one of the best of the leftist parties I have been involved with on
the score of queer justice. The party
was founded with and on express statements of queer justice and the feeling one
gets at F.S.P. and Radical Women events and gathering is not one of a
heteronormative organization reaching out to gay and lesbian people, but one
lead by gay and lesbian persons and one which has achieved healthy social
environment and culture within for the most part.
The
foremost problems with the Freedom Socialist Party are that it supports the
irredeemably anti-gay Cuban Revolution and that it refuses to make queer justice
central and primary in its propaganda and communications, but rather always
feels a need to include any mention of queer justice in a list of injustices
(e.g. statements about F.S.P.'s support of justice for black, for Native
Americans, for women, for the homeless, and for L.G.B.T. persons), as if
queer justice just were not worth fighting for per se, and as if
promoting queer justice per se would somehow offend or alienate somone
(whom, one wonders might be the offended or slighted party....could it be....heterosexuals?). It's funny that on the left all other
oppressions are dealt with rhetorically in and of themselves, and no one feels
a need at all turns to include them in their relational context every time they
are mentioned. Whenever gay justice is
mentioned, however, you can bet that other injustices will be thrown in
alongside it, and one can sense the fear and aversion to addressing queer
justice per se. There is also
present in F.S.P. an old-fashioned conservatism with regard to queerness which
shows up in its desexualization and sometimes in heteronormativization. For example, F.S.P. members might attend a
wedding and show support for a person's decision to get married (marriage is
inevitably heteronormative) but the organization would not sponsor a gay sex
party. I remember seeing one F.S.P.
associate at an underground gay sex venue, where he asked me not to tell other
members that he had been there. In
short, gay shame is still running through F.S.P.'s sexual conservatism and
asexuality, as vestiges of the old austerity-as-masturbation communist puritanism.
As
another party within the lineage of spinoffs from the S.W.P., alas, the F.S.P. also
has the heritage of the S.W.P. too present times within it to the extent that the F.S.P. has
failed to adequately or radically repudiate the S.W.P. repeatedly and specifically on the matter
of queer justice, oddly seeming to have done so more apparently early on in its
life, and less so later. Staking a
party's or organizations life on the repudiation of anti-gay abuse and heteronormative
bias is now the precondition for revolution and for the continued existence of
the left.
All
this said, F.S.P. is still far above other organized leftist organizations on
the measure of queer justice when one considers both its letter and spirit, and
the F.S.P./Radical Women is the only party with which I have been involved
where the very important feeling that one gets in the presence of comrades is
not one of heteronormativity, but rather one of a queer normativity, to the
degree that I have had it explained to me politely that certain persons at
F.S.P. meetings were not queer in terms of sexual orientation, with this kind of
explanation being necessitated by the
environment of the F.S.P. being something closer to the revolutionary necessary
presupposition of queerness of identity and politics.
Time
and again though, queer persons come to me with the reservation about F.S.P.
that it seems too weak. I hear
frequently that the name, the symbols, the propaganda, the rhetoric, the
events, are too weak to inspire those (especially young) queer persons who are
looking for fire, anger, and majesty in a leftist party or organization. Here one wishes for the unification of
revolutionary fire, queer anger, and communist organization and philosophy, and
for the placement of extreme radicalism onto queerness. This kind of attitude in these persons who
are desirous of more fire on the basis of queer justice though, critical and
dismissive as it is, is actually an indication that, if the left revolutionizes
itself in the name of queer justice, it can be redeemed.
Other
Parties Which Purport To Be Of The Left
Following is a list of parties
which purport to be of the left and with which I have had some direct experience, but which I do not actually consider to be so,
since they support, endorse, and show respect the Democratic Party and other
bourgeois politicians.
The Workers World Party/International
Action Center
The Socialist Party (S.P. - U.S.A.)
Communist Party of the United
States (C.P.U.S.A.)
Conclusion:
Both
the most outrageous and the most necessary thing that needs to be said to the
left is that Gay and Lesbian Justice is prior in importance to economic justice
and to economic class justice. We have supported the left in various ways even
as the left has tried hard to fit us into its theories, and, when it did so,
has fit us in in the typical heterosexist way, that is, derivatively and
secondarily, and then only when social forces conspired to force it to do
so.
Origins
are not the only determinant of primacy. What is important is motivation toward
justice - undoing the origins of the oppression of an oppressed class cannot be
the only or the primary focus of the fight for justice. Thus, a primary focus on the origins of such
things as private property and the elements of various stages in the history of
the forces of production cannot be the basis of social liberation. The social, psychological, and political
aspects of human life as they relate to more purely economic forces must be
addressed primarily and in their own right as reified and central aspects of
human existence. The left's failure at dealing with these aspects in a primary
way has allowed it to excuse itself from many battles and has begotten a
situation where the left is for gay and lesbian persons primarily a cover under
which we seek justice on the basis of our oppression qua gay and lesbian
people, a cover which forces us still to hide our real emotions and real sense
of justice, albeit on a higher level of justice. This higher level of justice though is still
not justice, and no adjustments to the left will ever be adequate to address
its failures. Only a revolution on the
left in the name of queer justice will make the left acceptable as a vehicle
for queer justice, and only with such a revolution, a revolution which will be
painful and repudiative and yet liberatory and uplifting, will the left survive
and be given social credibility.
[1]
Kollontai advocated 'free love' as a communist, and long before the Sexual
Revolution. See Farnsworth,
Beatrice. Alexandra Kollontai. Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1980, p.
36 et passim.
[2] A
notable example, though not discussed herein because of my lack of direct
involvement with the organization, is the Freedom Road Socialist Organization
(frso.org) which, in 2013, publicly congratulated the preposterous anti-gay
thug and embarrassing political charlatan Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PNF on
their election win, which occurred under manipulation and duress. Mugabe has waged a thirty-three year war on
L.G.B.T. persons in Zimbabwe, in the most crude fashion possible. With typical heterosexist ignorance and
blundering lackeyism, Freedom Road falls over itself to congratulate a
murderous anti-gay monster, who just a month before had threatened to behead
gay persons. See the Freedom Road website statement of August 3, 2013 on the
website's Statements page
(http://frso.org/about/statements/2013/frso_congratulates_mugabe.htm)
[3]
Revolutionary Communist Party. 'On the
Position of Homosexuality in the New Draft Programme' Position Paper. Revolution,
2001. Reprinted without issue date. (http://revcom.us/margorp/homosexuality.htm)
[4] Stone,
Betsy, and MartÃn Koppel. 'Mariela
Castro Speaks in U.S. on Rights of Women and Gays' The
Militant Vol. 76, No. 24 (June 18, 2012), p. 1.
[5] Shepard, Barry. 'Continuing the Discussion' in Thorstad,
David, Gay Liberation and Socialism.
Documents From the Discussion of Gay Liberation Inside the Socialist
Workers' Party 1970-1973. Part II
(1976), n.p Published at Internet
Archive (https://archive.org/details/GayLiberationAndSocialismDocumentsFromTheDiscussionsOnGayLiberation_120).
[6]
Studer, John. 'Gay Rights Referenda
Votes Register Gains For Working Class'
The Militant, Vol. 76, No. 43 (November 26, 2012), p.1.
[7]
'Homosexual Oppression and the Communist Program' Workers
Vanguard No. 172 9 September 1977
(Excerpt reprinted at International Communist League Website - http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1004/homosexual-oppression.html)
