PINK TRIANGLES

Pink Triangles

Radical Perspectives
on Gay Liberation

edited by Pam Mitchell

This edition published by Verso 2018

First published by Alyson Publications, Inc. 1980

© Alyson Publications, Inc. 1980

“Why Marxism?” © Gay Left Collective 1977

“Happy Families? Paedophilia Examined” and “Looking

at Pornography” © Gay Left Collective 1978

“Childhood Sexuality and Paedophilia © Gay Left Collective 1979

© Gay Left Collective 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

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versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-234-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-235-2 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-236-9 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Previous Edition As Follows:

Card Catalog No,: 80-67090

Mitchell, Pam

Pink Triangles.

Boston, Mass: Alyson Publications, Inc.

Printed in the UK by CPI Group

  Contents

Introduction, Pam Mitchell

I

Culture and Politics, Christine Riddiough

Cosmetics as an Act of Revolution, Charley Shively

Lesbians and Gay Men: Hetero Sexualities, Common Cause, Pam Mitchell

Looking at Pornography: Erotica and the Socialist Morality, Gregg Blachford

Old and Gay, Charley Shively

Happy Families? Paedophilia Examined, Gay Left Collective

Childhood Sexuality and Paedophilia, Jamie Gough

II

Why Marxism?, Gay Left Collective

Lesbianism: A Socialist Feminist Perspective, Susan Williams

Toward a Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question, Los Angeles Research Group

Some Thoughts on Gay/Lesbian Oppression, Christine Riddiough

III

Towards a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation, David Fernbach

Revolution in the Pursuit of Happiness: Love and Community-Building on the Left, Judy MacLean

Lesbian and Gay Oppression in the ’80s: Androgyny, Men and Power, Marc Killinger

  Introduction

Pam Mitchell

The fourteen essays that follow were written by a variety of activists involved in Left politics in general and in gay liberation in particular. They are not meant to represent all views or touch on all issues related to these topics, but to provoke thought about how the two can and must relate to one another. The collection is by no means comprehensive. Contributions by lesbians or gay men of color are notable for their absence. Issues of particular interest to gay men are better represented than are issues of specific concern to lesbians. We expect to publish a sequel to this collection that will include responses to these essays and that will provide a chance to correct these deficiencies. Because the essays were not written specifically for this anthology, they are not uniform in tone — some more academic, some more personal — and they vary in the extent to which they focus on theoretical issues. But as Judy MacLean notes, “to link socialism and lesbianism is to link the unpopular with the taboo”; and that shared experience of being double outsiders, gay people on the Left, leads to a common thread of understanding that runs through all the articles in this collection.

It is evident to all the authors that the existence of gay men and lesbians as a group with a culture of our own has political significance, and that our oppression is neither a historical accident nor an isolated case. The essays show that as a group we are in fact oppressed, and that we are oppressed because we are a threat. Reforms — gay civil rights, affirmative action for gay men and lesbians — will not and cannot be enough to overcome that oppression, although they may make life better for some individuals. Reformism pits our group against other oppressed peoples. At best it puts some of us in positions in which we can actively serve the interests of the class in power. It does nothing to alter the present political and economic system, a system that depends upon competition, hierarchy, the sexual division of labor, and that is therefore needed to oppress us in the first place. In order to overcome gay and lesbian oppression we must first understand why it arose and the functions it now serves in maintaining the status quo. Out of that understanding, and out of the culture and institutions that have already been created and adapted by gay men and lesbians, we must develop strategies and visions for massive social change that gets to the roots of our oppression.

The essays in the first section establish that a gay and lesbian culture (or cultures) does exist, and that the ideas and institutions that we share contain the seeds of our liberation but are also instruments of our own oppression. We cannot simply seek the freedom to perpetuate and expand gay and lesbian lifestyles as they now exist. Charley Shively points out some ways that gays oppress other gays. Christine Riddiough discusses some of the negative aspects of bar culture. The discussions on pornography and paedophilia and lesbian and gay male sexuality look at ways in which we express our sexuality, the most personal aspects of our lives as well as the ones for which we have had to pay most dearly, and show how our behavior often reflects sexist and capitalist ideology. At the same time, however, the authors show that our culture is subversive and potentially revolutionary — because we don’t conform to the traditional family and have come up with alternatives, because we affirm a sexuality that has nothing to do with reproduction, because we dare to be different, to challenge laws and norms out of a respect for our own needs and values as human beings. We can be proud of what we have and build upon it.

The articles in the section on radical theory and gay liberation share a belief that the experiences of gay men and lesbians uphold the validity of many of the basic tenets of traditional Marxism, but that an expansion of socialist theory is necessary. All the authors have been influenced by the women’s liberation movement and its critiques of socialism; and though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, and between the personal and the political, vary from article to article, there is agreement that gay people are in a unique position to contribute to a rethinking and revitalization of socialist theory. To the Marxist-Leninist Los Angeles Research Group, the capitalist bourgeoisie continues to be the only real opponent, while sexism and heterosexism are extensions of capitalist ideology. Gay liberation is a relatively minor issue, albeit a significant one for those directly effected; but more importantly, heterosexism on the Left is indicative of a more pervasive blindness to the significance of the meaning of sex and sexism in capitalist ideology, a blindness that will hold back the Revolution to come. The other authors are not as quick to identify patriarchy as a side effect of capitalism, and the relationship between the two is one of their main topics of discussion.

Because our very existence is inconsistent with the categories of sex and gender that many institutions are built upon, gay men and lesbians have an outsider’s view of how the system works as well as some experience with creating alternatives. In the third and final section three activists write about gay people on the Left, both as critics and as builders, and share their own visions of the process of building a new society. In his postscript to an article written in the early ’70s, David Fernbach talks about recent experiences that have radically altered his perceptions of what needs to be done. Judy MacLean discusses the needs of individuals within the movement and the ways in which meeting those needs now can contribute to a strategy for greater changes to come. Marc Killinger’s review article discusses and compares different strategies and visions. His postscript, which sums up his view of where the “lavender Left” is now and where he sees it heading, is a fitting end to the collection.

August 1980

I.

Culture and Politics

Christine Riddiough

Culture is one of those vague terms that tends to mean everything and nothing. Is culture simply aesthetic and intellectual endeavors like opera, ballet, painting — the fine arts and their allies? Does it include the more popular expressions of art like movies, TV, and disco music? Is culture even more than this? And what of culture and politics: do they interact only when a political group sponsors a concert as a way of raising money? Too often these limited views of culture and its relationship to politics are the ones held by socialists. In his paper “American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle” Jimmy Durham describes this very accurately:

For example, a group of white leftists decide to hold a conference. They know in an abstract way that they have been robbed of their culture and that culture is important in revolution. Therefore, they set aside one or two evenings during the conference as “cultural evenings.” Songs are sung and poems are read, but these “cultural activities” are not integrated into the conference itself — instead they are isolated as special events. More important, and more to the point, no one really sees and analyzes the ways in which the conference itself is a cultural event. (p. 1)

In order to act politically, to be effective and to understand the society in which we live, we have to have a fuller sense of culture. Durham goes on to say:

…all human beings are cultural beings; we cannot operate outside of society as “natural animals.” Our societies, our culture, define us, in large part, and our way of experiencing the world is through our culture. Politics, economics, science and technology, language, etc. are all cultural phenomena, finally, of course, political phenomena. (p. 2)

In the United States our culture is shaped by many forces including those things not often thought of as culture, like TV and popular music and shopping centers and political campaigns. And while all of us live to some extent in that culture — the world of MacDonalds and Christmas and cars — many of us also live in another culture, the culture of our social group. For while straight white men in the U.S. generally live in and define the ruling culture, those outside that group have brought with them and developed a culture of their own within the dominant one. Among these groups are gay men and lesbians.

Gay Culture

What is “gay culture”? Webster’s describes “culture,” in general, as “the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action and artifacts and depends on man’s [sic] capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. [It is] the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group.” Gay culture, then, includes institutions such as bars, centers, papers; it includes the language, humor and ideas of gay people.

In looking at gay culture, it is important to note first of all its unique relationship to mainstream culture. Gay people are both the most integrated and most isolated minority in this country. Unlike other oppressed groups, gay people are not relegated to certain jobs, social strata or neighborhoods. While there are some occupations and communities that are disproportionately gay, nonetheless gay people can be found in every workplace and neighborhood. We can also be found in every family. Because of this, gay culture is in several ways different from other minority cultures within the U.S. Gay people are not born into gay culture — it is something we enter as adults or young adults. Gay culture is not passed down with the family tradition, but is distinguished by being outside the family structure. Nonetheless, gay/lesbian culture does have a historical tradition (as documented particularly in Katz’s Gay American History).

Because of the aforementioned diversity of gay people, gay/lesbian culture has less of a geographic focus than most minority cultures, though in large cities there is likely to be a “gay ghetto” — an area where many gay people, especially gay men, live and work. Furthermore, gay/lesbian culture has a greater focus on social and personal institutions and, except for those few people who actually live and work in the community, has only limited connections to people’s work lives. In fact, for many gay people, a lot of energy goes into keeping the two parts of their lives separate.

These factors have shaped gay/lesbian culture; some non-gay people might even question its existence, but a rich and varied culture does exist. A full examination of it is not possible here (for that see, in particular, Jay and Young’s Lavender Culture), but we can look at some of the most important aspects of it.

The Bars

The concrete institutional focus of gay and lesbian culture is the bars. In The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren, one of the main characters, Harlan Brown, is near the Stonewall bar in June 1969. Seeing what is going on, he becomes angry and sad. He thinks, “I didn’t drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could understand how precious they were to us.” (p. 31) The bars have been the cornerstone of gay/lesbian culture and community. They are a place to meet friends and lovers, a place to dance, play pool, talk. They have provided a family for those who, having come out, no longer have families. They have provided a refuge from the straight world — little gay islands in a hostile sea.

Of course gay bars are at the mercy of that sea: frequently owned by straights (though less so now than in the past), they are subject to pressure from the police, organized crime and local “queer-baiters.” As primary meeting places for gays, they have clear limitations — most notably the alcoholism they promote.

Who goes to the bars? At some point almost every gay person does. Some people never feel comfortable in the bars, while for others they become a second home. In between is a large group of people who go to the bars on occasion — with friends, when visiting a new place or when looking for a new lover. It’s not unusual to see a group of people come into a bar after a feminist newspaper meeting, or a gay church service, or a women’s concert.

Thus while there are those who don’t like the bars, there are still enough people who go to them for every city of any size to have at least one. In the cities with the largest gay communities, there may be upwards of one hundred bars. In these places each bar will have its own particular atmosphere and clientele. Where there are many bars, some of them (10 to 20 percent) will be women’s bars, while the others will be primarily men’s. There are black and Latino bars, discos, leather bars and drag bars.

While there may be a generalized “bar crowd,” each bar will tend to have its own specific crowd. In Chicago, for instance, there is one bar that most appeals to feminist women, another where most of the women are over forty and/or have been out fifteen years or more. The first bar plays disco and feminist music on its juke box, while the second includes Bobby Vinton and the Beer Barrel Polka.

Going to the bars means learning bar behavior. There aren’t guides to bar behavior, nor formal rules of etiquette like Amy Vanderbilt or Emily Post, but there are informal rules. Many bars have rules, often unwritten, about what is proper attire. Bar owners will sometimes ban someone from their bar for what they consider improper behavior. And there are some unwritten rules for interactions among the customers — who you look at, buy a drink for, ask for a dance. Much of this sets the standards for cruising, especially in women’s bars where it may be less open than in men’s bars. That cruising is an important part of bar behavior for both women and men cannot be overemphasized. While in a straight bar the customers are usually sitting facing the bar, watching the TV or talking to the bartender, in a gay bar customers will frequently be turned at least partly away from the bar and looking at the customers. Since gay bars have been one of the few places where gay people can meet potential lovers, this cruisiness is no surprise.

The bars have been and remain, even now, the focal point of the gay and lesbian community. They are the most stable institution in a frequently unstable world. As such they shape the culture of gay life, even as they are shaped and changed themselves. They contain within them all the contradictions and weaknesses of gay life. Nonetheless, they are our territory, even with all the control that the outside world exerts. While political gays, especially feminist lesbians, often criticize the bars (and rightly so) for their weaknesses, their importance cannot be denied.

The Arts

Gay people have often been associated with the arts — theater, dance, literature, painting. We have often been thought of as shapers of art and fashion. At the same time the arts have often shaped the lives of gay people: from the salons of Paris in the ’20s and ’30s, to the “piss elegant” apartments of today. Art is the arena in which gay people have frequently been the most accepted and at the same time most ghettoized. There is a certain amount of glamour attached to the arts that somehow softens the impact of gayness for many non-gay people. An early issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation had an article on lesbianism that included the statement that “lesbians in Paris are exotic. Lesbians next door are perverted.”

The impact of gays in the arts goes beyond the “high culture” of ballet and theatre to the more popular forms like disco. Disco is the latest music craze in the U.S. One of its characteristics is that its popularity comes not so much through radio as through cabarets, bars and clubs. In this way it is made for the gay scene which also has a focus on the bars. Disco stars often got their starts in gay bars and still have gay followings. Some of the music, like the Village People or Disco Queen, is openly gay — at least to those in the know. The Village People’s title cut on their first album is not only a gay song, but actually a gay liberation song. Non-gay audiences seem to avoid making these connections no matter how obvious they are. Disco has roots in other cultures as well, as Kopkind has pointed out in a recent article; it comes from black and Latino music as well as the gay scene. But gay culture helped shape disco — gave it much of its emotion and energy and sensuality; and those characteristics are more apparent now in a gay disco than in a straight one. As disco has become more popular, it has become whitewashed and straightened out, but the original elements are still in it.

Disco also wrought changes in gay culture. It reinforced the role of the bars and at the same time opened them up. Many ’50s and ’60s gay bars hadn’t allowed dancing; disco changed that. It also made it more possible to dance in an emotional and sensual way without attaching that to a particular person; it is not a romantic form of music.

Another musical expression that has roots in gay, and specifically lesbian, culture is women’s music. Unlike popular music, women’s music is rarely played on the radio; records are often difficult to find. Nonetheless, there is a growing audience for it among lesbians and feminists (frequently overlapping groups). While the music itself is pretty much “middle of the road,” with occasional hints of country, rock and other styles thrown in, the lyrics are powerfully political — feminist, and often lesbian, oriented. The best example of lesbian music is the album Lesbian Concentrate, which is a collection of lesbian-oriented songs by many of the best known individuals and groups in women’s music. Alongside the music itself has developed a women’s distribution and production network, so that much of women’s music exists completely outside the “established” music hierarchy.

Both in content and production women’s music parallels other women’s art, particularly writing. There are more and more feminist novelists, poets, essayists; and in the production end there are feminist printers and publishers and bookstores. Though most of these feminist networks, and the artists and producers in them, are identified with labels such as “women’s music,” “feminist writers,” “women in distribution,” clearly many of the individuals are openly lesbian. More importantly, the tone and content of much of their work is lesbian, and belongs as much to lesbian culture as to women as a whole.

Language/Camp

In order to communicate, people within a culture need language; gay culture is no exception. While the language in the U.S. is English, there are words and phrases that have taken on different meanings, meanings that are only known to those within the gay/lesbian community (though of late some “gay words” have become popularized). Many of these “gay words” have obscure origins. An effort to compile a gay dictionary and trace word origins has been made in the Queen’s Vernacular. The meanings and uses of words vary from place to place and from time to time, but some words have been in use for a relatively long period. For example, “gay” itself has a long history, as do the phrases “coming out” and “in the closet.” These phrases have no equivalent in straight vocabulary because they describe the common experiences of gay people that are not a part of straight life.

Gay language has also been used as a way to communicate with and seek out one’s gay companions without revealing the subject matter to any non-gay people. The entry of “gay words” into everyday vocabulary — in the press, on TV — has many positive aspects, in terms of greater openness about gays. It also has some negatives, both in terms of preventing use of gay words as code words and in terms of corruption of the language. An example of the latter is the ads for a Chicago radio station asking country music fans to “come out of your closets.” Obviously this use of the phrase has corrupted its special gay meaning; it does not have, in this usage, the kind of powerful meaning that it has for gay people.

With the rise of the gay and women’s movements, there has been a lot of controversy around the use of language. For example, do words like “queer,” “dyke,” “faggot,” long used by gay people to defuse the derogatory meaning given to them by non-gays, constitute the language of oppression, or does gay use turn them into words of pride? Should women in the community be called “gay women,” or “lesbians”? Should people outside the community be referred to as “straight,” or as “non-gay”? (Even within this article there is some inconsistency on these issues.)

Closely related to these issues of language is the issue of camp and gay humor. It would be impossible to write about gay culture without discussing camp; yet camp, as many have suggested, is difficult to discuss. One author who has discussed it is Susan Sontag in her “Notes on Camp” which appeared in her collection, Against Interpretation. Sontag describes camp as a sensibility:

[Camp] is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. (p. 275)

She goes on to describe camp as an aesthetic, a vision of the world, a love of the exaggerated, “of things-being-what-they-are-not.” (p. 279) The camp taste in persons responds to the androgyne, to the feminine in virile men, to the masculine in feminine women; and, conversely, to the exaggerated masculinity in men and femininity in women. Camp sensibility is “alive to the double sense in which some things can be taken” (p. 281); it is to “understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”(p. 280)

Sontag further describes the theatricality, the extravagance of camp. Her notes are, in fact, very helpful in understanding camp, but they are flawed in one respect. Sontag is unwilling or unable to fully relate camp to gay culture. She first mentions homosexuality in Note 50, where she describes homosexuals as the “aristocrats of taste, the bearers of camp.” She draws an analogy between the relationship of homosexuals to camp and the relationship of Jews to morality and politics:

“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony…. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, camp taste is much more than homosexual taste…. Yet one feels that if homo-sexuals hadn’t more or less invented Camp, someone else would.”(pp. 290-1)

Simply stated, this is wrong; camp is much more inextricably linked to gay culture than Sontag was willing to admit. Because of this the full impact of her other comments is diffused. Esther Newton begins to address this in her book Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America. She describes camp as a homosexual ethos, a strategy for the situation. It signifies:

…a relationship between things, people, and activities or qualities, and homosexuality. In this sense, ‘camp taste,’ for instance, is synonomous with homosexual taste…. It is possible to discern strong themes in any particular campy thing or event. The three that seemed most recurrent and characteristic to me were incongruity, theatricality, and humor. All three are intimately related to the homosexual situation and strategy. Incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy. (pp. 105-6)

Taking Newton’s identification of camp with gay culture, our perceptions of camp come alive; now Sontag’s notes begin to make sense. Sontag’s description of camp — its “unnaturalness,” its love of things being what they are not, its response to androgyny, its love of playing roles, and so on — can be seen to have their origin in the life situation of gay people. For most gay people, living and staying alive require an ability to be what one is not, to play a role. Gay language, as we have seen, is often based on double meanings. And homosexuality, on some level, explodes the myths of the naturalness of masculinity and femininity and reveals them for the exaggerations they are. Newton’s third point, that the strategy of camp is humor, is well taken; for along with having its origins in the gay life situation, camp is also a strategy for dealing with that situation so that one can continue to live. As Newton says, “[Camp] is a system of humor. Camp humor is a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying. That is, the humor does not cover up, it transforms.”(p. 109)

Finally, camp is generally taken to be part of gay male culture and not particularly relevant to lesbians. While it is undeniably true that gay men have been the moving force in the development of camp, it does have a relationship to lesbian culture. Lesbians have been, to a greater or lesser extent, a part of gay culture and thus have participated in camp. For many lesbians who came out before the gay and women’s movement, their community was and often remains the gay community, including men. Furthermore, in looking at lesbian feminist culture we can see elements of camp as described above. For example, what could be more campy than Meg Christian singing “Sherry Baby, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” or the song “Leaping Lesbians”? So, like much of gay culture, while camp is male dominated it is nonetheless relevant to and shaped by lesbians as well.

Sexuality/Relationships

To non-gay people gay means sexual: the only thing that distinguishes us from them is the sexual acts we engage in; to non-gays that sex is not simply the driving force but the only force in our lives. In describing gay culture we can see the richness of our lives that extends beyond the sexual; yet it is important to examine the sexuality as a part of gay culture as well. The overriding quality of gay life in this regard is the openness to sexuality, an openness that is in striking contrast to the sexual attitudes of society as a whole.

Perhaps most striking is the acceptance within the gay culture of sexuality for women. Until the rise of the modern women’s movement, straight society pretty much denied the existence of women’s sexuality. For lesbians this denial was in contradiction to lesbian relationships between women, which are sexual relationships. This contradiction was a source of confusion, guilt, and shame for many, but in overcoming it lesbians implicitly revealed much about the role of women in society. Aside from demonstrating the existence of women’s sexuality, lesbian relationships also showed, by comparison, the inferior position of women in heterosexual relationships. Jane Rule reflects on this in her book Lesbian Images when she writes:

Radclyffe Hall was a courageous woman, and The Well of Loneliness is an important book because it does so carefully reveal the honest misconceptions about women’s nature and experience which have limited and crippled so many people…. [Hall] worshipped the very institutions which oppressed her, the Church and the patriarchy, which have taught women there are only two choices, inferiority or perversion. Inside that framework, she made and tried to redefine the only proud choice she had. (p. 61)

For both gay men and lesbians there has been the potential to examine society’s assumptions about nature and naturalness of sexual and other relationships. Do love and marriage actually go together (like a horse and carriage)? Do love and sex always go together? Need sexual relationships always be monogamous in order to be fulfilling? Particularly as the women’s and gay movements have developed we have seen an increased rejection of the heterosexual model for relationships.

There is also an openness within the gay community to other lifestyles often looked on as deviant. In particular, drag (especially among men but also among women) has been a part of gay life. Drag has not always been enthusiastically received by many gay men or lesbians, but it can’t be denied that it has played an important part in gay culture. Drag has been one of the few forms of entertainment available to gay people as gays (bearing a close resemblance to camp in this respect). Since drag has also been the most visible aspect of gay life to those outside the community, drag queens and drag butches have often been attacked. Drag flies in the face of established norms about appropriate dress and mannerisms for either sex. After all, what does it mean to say that a man is “impersonating” a woman? Newton discusses this point:

Homosexuals ‘passing’ are playing men; they are in drag. This is the larger implication of drag/camp. In fact, gay people often use the word ‘drag’ in this broader sense, even to include role playing which most people simply take for granted: role playing in school, at the office, at parties, and so on. In fact, all of life is role and theatre — appearance. (p. 108)

In the film Word Is Out a gay man, Tede, describes a scene on a bus. He is holding a Ken doll wearing a tutu, and a young boy asks him where he can get such a doll. Tede replies that the toy stores are sexist — you have to get the tutu in Barbie’s department. Later on Tede says that we’re all born naked, and that anything we put on is drag. The bottom line in drag is, who is playing whom?

How do all of these aspects of gay culture relate to politics, specifically socialist politics? Socialism is, in part, a way of analyzing, understanding society — it helps us go beyond the surface to underlying causes and connections. For socialism (and particularly socialist feminism) suggests that there are complex interactions between the economic system, the state and society as a whole; gay culture is certainly a part of this. One way, then, that politics and culture interact is in the impact of the political system on the culture.

Thus gay/lesbian culture does not exist in a vacuum, but is influenced and shaped by our society as a whole and by the economic/political system we live in. Capitalism may seem far removed from gay/lesbian culture, but even a brief examination will make some connections clear.

Perhaps the most obvious effect can be seen in the different roles of women and men within the gay community. In the examples of gay culture we’ve explored, this is clear. The bars are primarily male oriented; while many singers of disco are women, disco itself is oriented more toward the men’s bars. Camp and drag are focused more on the gay male community.

Two primary factors in the society as a whole are at the root of these differences within the gay/lesbian community. The first of these is economic: women make less money than men. This is as true of lesbians as of straight women. At a very basic level this means that lesbians have less money than gay men to spend at bars and discos. Lesbians also are more likely to be supporting children on their smaller salaries, which means even less money to spend. There are also lesbians remaining within heterosexual marriage, many of whom may not have any outside incomes at all; for them both the situation of marriage and the lack of an independent income limits participation in lesbian culture. The economic exploitation of women within the capitalist system winds up shaping gay/lesbian culture.

A second factor which shapes the culture is the different expectations there are for women and men in society. While young men are expected to “sow their wild oats” — explore their sexuality, be “promiscuous” — young women have been denied any knowledge of sexuality. While lesbians begin to break through this stereotype, it still has an effect on lesbian and gay men’s lifestyles. For example, lesbian culture is more apt to focus on a few bars and informal social groups while gay men are more oriented toward many bars, the baths and bushes.

The position of women under capitalism has also been reflected in the difference in attitude non-gays have toward gay men and toward lesbians: gay men are often abused and harassed, while lesbians tend to be ignored. Oftentimes lesbians will experience more oppression as women than as gay people. This has lead to, among other factors, a separation in the culture between men and women, and sometimes to a greater alliance between lesbians and non-gay women (as, for example, in the women’s culture) than between lesbians and gay men.

While economic and sexual differences between men and women in our society stand out, there are also other factors which shape gay and lesbian culture. Perhaps the next most obvious are race and class. Analysis of the full impact of race and class is well beyond the scope of this paper, but we can begin to explore it. We can note, for example, that in many places, especially large cities, gay/lesbian social and political institutions are generally divided by race and to some extent by class. There exist black and Latin bars and clubs that oftentimes are invisible to white lesbians and gay men. Furthermore, the predominantly white bars and groups have generally discriminated against Third World people, as have their counterparts in straight society. The development of a gay and lesbian culture among Third World people also is affected by the culture and the political situation of their racial group so that, for example, black gay culture is black as much as it is gay.

Class is a more complex factor to consider since class in our society is not well-defined. Often a distinction is made between “middle class” and “working class,” but this tends to avoid and negate any meaningful discussion of class. In looking at class and the gay/lesbian community, we can, at this point, better consider the differences between blue and white collar workers on the one hand and professional workers on the other (leaving out, therefore, any gay men or lesbians who are part of the bourgeoisie). Given these two groups — professionals, such as teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and blue and white collar workers, such as auto workers, secretaries, telephone operators, and steel workers — we can see some differences in the social milieu in which each group participates. Drag and role-playing have tended to be less significant among professionals, for example. Bars often are oriented toward one set of people. Much more work could be done to develop and understand the relationship of class to the gay and lesbian community and culture.

As a final indication of the impact of the political system on culture, we can note that the centrality of the bars to gay/lesbian culture is not a chance happening. Bars are businesses, and as such they operate within our economic system. Until recently they have generally been owned by non-gays, and thus the ultimate control of this central part of our culture has usually been outside of that culture. As businesses the main idea for straight owners (and generally for gay or lesbian owners as well) is to make money. People who go to the bars are expected to buy drinks. This makes gay and lesbian culture a commodity that is sold along with the liquor. Focusing the culture in the bars promotes alcoholism, making gay men and lesbians easier to control and oppress. Finally, bars are businesses that operate in a sort of sleazy, secretive half-world. They play on and reinforce the invisibility and negative stereotypes of gay men and lesbians. The bars have thus been an effective vehicle for straight control over the gay/lesbian community; through them society has been able to contain gay men and lesbians, maintain our oppression and make a buck off it at the same time. If this were the only relationship of the bars to politics, it would be a negative one. But it is not, as we shall see below.

These few examples of the impact of the political and economic systems on culture illustrate the variety of ways in which a culture such as that of lesbians and gay men is shaped. Though by no means complete, this discussion points the way to future analysis of these issues.

The politics of gay and women’s liberation has also had an effect on gay/lesbian culture. Since Stonewall there has been a tremendous increase in the number of gay/lesbian-operated institutions in the U.S. These range from more formal social groups to sports clubs to religious groups, from newpapers and radio shows to films. All of these have had an immense impact on the growth of gay culture, and have removed it from the limitations of the bars. The women’s movement as well has had an impact, especially through the creation of a women’s culture that includes feminist music, books and movies, as well as many women’s centers, consciousness raising groups, newspapers, work projects. Many of these efforts have a high percentage of lesbian input as well as content of concern to lesbians; this involvement along with the more general “feminist” orientation in the lesbian community since the rise of the women’s movement have had an impact on lesbian and, indirectly, on gay men’s culture.

Finally, by making gay/lesbian liberation a public issue, these movements have brought much of the culture out of the shadows. We now see the language of gay people emblazoned across the straight dailies in the headlines. Photos and films of gay bars and discos appear in magazines and on TV; TV shows have also shown gay characters and stories, sometimes in positive roles. Gay movies like Word Is Out now can play in mass market movie theaters. All of this has changed the shape of gay/lesbian culture as well.

Culture and Politics

Many of the examples given above of how politics shapes culture are well-known. Few socialists would argue with this kind of impact — how the political/economic system (the “base”) shapes the culture as part of the superstructure (though obviously some socialists have a lot of disagreements about the implications of this for a socialist view of gay liberation in particular). The obverse, that a cultural system can have a political impact, is less acceptable to many socialists. There are some socialists, however, who have begun to explore the effect of culture on politics; of particular interest in this respect are the articles by Caulfield and Boggs in Socialist Revolution. Their ideas are based (at least implicitly) on those of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was an Italian communist of the early twentieth century. He spent many years in prison under Mussolini, and it is there that he developed many of his original ideas. While it is unlikely (to say the least) that Gramsci ever envisioned the application of his ideas to gay liberation, they are, nonetheless, invaluable in the effort to integrate socialism, feminism and gay/lesbian liberation.

Of the many concepts that Gramsci developed, the one of most interest in looking at gay culture is the concept of ideological hegemony. Gramsci was a marxist and as such saw the primacy of the mode of production in shaping the historical development of a society. But he did not conclude, as do some marxists, that the superstructure of society — that is, those institutions outside the mode of production — was merely a reflection of the economic base. He saw the interaction between the two as complex, changing and reciprocal. To think otherwise would be undialectical and mechanical. Gramsci stated that cultural, political and ideological forces can shape the nature and the outcome of a struggle.

From this he developed the concept of hegemony. A regime can have political control through either domination (physical coercion through state forces like the police) or hegemony (ideological control of the population). Boggs, in his book Gramsci’s Marxism, defines hegemony this way:

By hegemony Gramsci meant the permeation throughout civil society — including a whole range of structures and activities like trade unions, schools, the churches, and the family — of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, morality, etc., that is in one way or another supportive of the established order and the class interests that dominate it. (p. 39)

Through ideological hegemony the ruling class gets the consent of the society as a whole to its rule; its ideas and values become the ruling ideas and values, and are viewed simply as common sense. Because of this, most working people will not view socialism as in their benefit because it is contrary to “common sense”; and even though the economic conditions may be ripe, the consciousness of workers will be so shaped by the ruling class that the revolutionary struggle will fail. As Boggs says, “In short, hegemony worked in many ways to induce the oppressed to accept or ‘consent’ to their own exploitation and daily misery.”(p. 40)

This concept, along with others developed by Gramsci, is rich in potential for gay socialists; in fact, it cries out for application to gay and lesbian life. Two writers have taken this concept a step further in a way that will be particularly helpful in looking at gay culture. In an article in Socialist Revolution Mina Davis Caulfield has developed the idea of “cultures of resistance”; and Carl Boggs, also writing in SR, has put forward the idea of “subversive culture.” These two ideas are similar, but not exactly the same. Neither Caulfield nor Boggs refer to Gramsci, though their ideas can be easily related to the concept of ideological hegemony. Caulfield writes about colonized people:

Imperialism assaults the total culture…. Imperial intrusion deeply affects social structures, economic relations, and cultural traditions. In response, many colonized peoples have developed resistance strategies centering around new forms of cultural affirmation directly or subtly opposed to the massive imperial affirmation of Western European cultural superiority…. [New] cultural and institutional forms are shaped, drawing in part on the older, pre-imperial culture and partly created anew in adaptation and in opposition to foreign impositions…. This conscious affirmation of cultural difference in the face of wholesale denigration on the part of powerful aliens plays an important and largely unanalyzed role in the building of both nationalist and socialist liberation movements. Marxist political analysis must take account of cultures of resistance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and within the United States. (pp. 68-69)

The role of a culture of resistance is to resist the imposition of an alien culture and to affirm the validity of the colonized people and their resistance to domination. A culture of resistance is, in fact, an attempt to resist the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. While Caulfield emphasizes their role in situations outside the U.S., she does indicate that such cultures can be built within the U.S.

In Boggs’ review of the book Blues and the Poetic Spirit, by Paul Garon, he talks about “subversive cultures.” He describes Garon as seeing the blues as “the music of the devil” that haunts the bourgeoisie because it challenges the very premises of established culture.”(p. 117) According to Boggs:

[Garon sees] in the emergence of an urban black subculture a force that was subversive of bourgeois hegemony. It is the secularization of Afro-American culture, the celebration of everything that is repressed and denied by capitalist morality: desire, imagination, the erotic impulses, community, equality. (p. 119)

These two concepts can be applied to gay/lesbian culture: as a culture of resistance, how has gay/lesbian culture affirmed the validity of gay men and lesbians and helped to resist the imposition of ruling class hegemony? As a subversive culture, how does gay/lesbian culture subvert the values, the hegemony of the ruling class not only for gays but for society as a whole?

Boggs was quoted in his description of Gramsci above as saying that hegemony works in many ways to induce the oppressed to accept their daily misery. The gay/lesbian community is one of the best examples of how this hegemony works. Gay people, raised generally within straight mainstream culture, are brought up, like non-gays, with the idea that homosexuality is sick, perverted, a threat to “the American Way of Life.” Coming out, realizing one’s gayness and entering into gay/lesbian culture means each gay person must face those ideas and accept or reject them. For some gay people anti-gay ideas have been so instilled that they cannot be overcome; this has led some gays to suicide or alcoholism or to the acceptance of the idea that they are sick and that the misery, the oppression they suffer is their own fault because of their sickness. Many gay men and women have been able to resist and overcome these ideas, at least to some extent. They have come to see themselves as valid human beings and have joined in the making of a gay/lesbian community. Part of this self-acceptance comes simply from knowing other people who are also gay and who have had experiences similar to their own.

The existence of places such as the bars, where gay people can be gay and can meet other gays, where gay relationships are given validity, thus plays a crucial role in enabling gay people to resist the hegemony of ruling class morality. It is far from happenstance that the main political celebration within the gay community each year, Gay/Lesbian Pride Week, commemorates a fight between gay people and police over a bar. It is not a coincidence that the gay liberation movement dates its beginning from that raid on the Stonewall bar. It is precisely because the bars have historically provided the bedrock on which gay culture is built that that raid takes on significance. A police raid on a gay bar is not a simple vice squad action, but an attack by the authorities on the fabric of gay life and culture.

Camp has been a part of the gay culture of resistance as well; for camp, as Sontag describes it, is a private code, a badge of identity. Its vision of the world — its love of artifice, its use of humor — explodes for its participants the “common sense” concepts of masculine/feminine, naturalness and so on, and in doing so resists the imposition of those ideas from the mainstream. Though Sontag describes camp as being apolitical, when it is placed in the context of gay culture it is strikingly political in its resistance to hegemonic values.

So gay/lesbian culture is a culture of resistance, but it is also a subversive culture, for it provides a challenge to ruling class hegemony for not only the gay/lesbian community but for society as a whole. In looking at blues as a subversive culture, Boggs says that blues “embodies a powerful urge for sexual fulfillment and erotic desire that is repressed or deformed by Christian-bourgeois morality.” (p. 122) Gay/lesbian culture contains a powerful urge for the sexual and the erotic as well. Its very existence challenges the idea that sex is for reproductive purposes only. The openness of gay/lesbian culture to exploring variations in sexuality, non-monogamy, sensuality, “promiscuity,” undermines the functional-ism and rigidity of heterosexual marriage.

Closely related to this is the challenge of lesbianism to stereotypes of women. Lesbian sexuality opposes the notion of women’s non-sexuality; and, beyond that, the existence of lesbians forces the rejection of ideas of women’s dependence on men, women’s “natural” role in the family, women’s passivity. It is not only because women are considered unimportant that lesbians are ignored, but because even admitting the existence of lesbians is subversive to some of our society’s basic ideas.

Drag, too, challenges sex role stereotypes. It is subversive of everyday ideas of masculinity and femininity; it raises questions about what is natural and who is playing at roles. In the preface to her book Newton says:

And when I first recorded that impersonators believed the major and most fundamental division of the social world to be male/female I thought I knew better. Now I agree with them, although I draw different conclusions from it than they do, and the same goes for their belief that American society produces people who want “a fast fuck, a quick drink and how much?” Perhaps what needs to be explained is why I was blind where they could see. Here we return to the questions posed by normalcy, or middle class culture. Middle class culture seems to me to have built-in social blindness, compounded by arrogance. I was prepared to find the views of deviants interesting, but never seriously considered that they could be correct. In the end, I have tried to let the impersonators speak for themselves. They say a great deal about America. (p. xiii)

The basic subversive nature of gay/lesbian culture is thus focused on hegemonic concepts of sexuality and human relationships and male supremacy. But there are other subversive elements as well. In Boggs review of Garon he says, “there is also a mood of anti-authoritarianism that permeates clubs, taverns, halls and other locales where blues is played; police are normally considered personae non gratae in such settings.” (p. 124) This is also true of gay bars; most gay people have some consciousness of the fact that in most parts of the U.S. they are criminals and that even where sodomy laws have been repealed gay people, bars and groups are subject to police harassment and to lack of protection by the police when attacked by non-gays.

Humor and camp also represent a subversive element of gay/ lesbian culture. Again Boggs writes of the blues:

The phrase “laughing to keep from crying” is familiar to anyone who has listened to blues. Humor, as Brecht has shown, can keep a rebellious spirit alive at moments of despair; through it the ego refuses to be annihilated. The unique ability of blues performers to communicate with their audience derives in large part from the double entendres, self-deprecating references, and mocking gestures they incorporate into the music. In most cases, no doubt, the humor runs no deeper than simply having fun, but often enough it is “lodged precisely within the context of the denial and rejection of bourgeois morality.” (p. 124)

A similar statement could be made about gay humor and camp.

With the rise of the feminist and gay movements, gay/lesbian culture has taken on an added dimension of subversion. This is particularly clear in women’s music, where songs like “Gay and Proud”, “Woman-Loving Women” and “Imagine My Surprise” add a new dimension to lesbian culture. In these cases the culture goes further than rejection of bourgeois morality and actively puts forward lesbian lifestyles as positive.

Clearly lesbian and gay culture must be seen as both a culture of resistance and as a subversive culture. It is important that socialists understand this and make further efforts at this kind of analysis. This is not to deny the many contradictions within that culture: the promotion of alcoholism in the bars, the misogyny of many drag queens and so on. But, by and large, socialists, even gay socialists, have erred too much on the side of rejecting the culture for its contraditions; and that imbalance must be made up for.

Toward Liberation

If politics affects culture and culture politics, then why do we not have a much more massive activist progressive gay movement than we can see around us? Boggs again: “The leap from subversive culture to socio-political movement is an enormous and complicated one…. We cannot assume that a political translation of subversive cultural movements will in fact occur.” (pp. 120-121) And later on: “But it is too easy for rebellious cultural forces to end up absorbed, deflected or commodified unless they are clearly tied to political struggles that advance radical goals.” (p. 127) Disco, for example, has been commodified and made straight for the mass markets; in the process it has lost much of its gay cultural content — even the Village People are trying to put up a straight front. And some lesbian feminist culture has been deflected into a separatism that refuses to engage in any political interactions with the powers that be.

Gay and lesbian socialists have the tools with which to understand and analyze gay/lesbian culture: an involvement in and knowledge of the culture, and the marxist politics and methodology which can explain its connections to society as a whole. This understanding cannot be developed outside of the culture, but by participation in it; and to be relevant, this understanding must be put to use through active engagement in the political struggles of the gay and lesbian community as a whole.

References

Boggs, C. Gramsci’s Marxism. Pluto Press, London, 1976.

Boggs, C. “The Blues Tradition: From Poetic Revolt to Cultural Impasse.” In Socialist Revolution, no. 38, p. 115, 1978.

Caulfield, N. D. “Imperialism, the Family and Cultures of Resistance.” In Socialist Revolution, no. 20, p. 67, 1974.

Durham, J. “American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle.” Unpublished.

Gramsci, A. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, International Publishers, New York, 1971.

Jay, K. & A. Young. Lavender Culture. Jove/HBJ, New York, 1979.

Katz, J. Gay American History. Avon Books, New York, 1976.

Kopkind, A. “The Disco Decade.” In The Reader (Chicago), 9, Dec. 9, 1978.

Newton, E. Mother Camp: The Female Impersonator in America. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972.

Rule, J. Lesbian Images. Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1975.

Sontag, S. Against Interpretation. Dell, New York, 1966.

Warren, P.N. The Front Runner. Bantam, New York, 1974.

Cosmetics
As an Act of Revolution

Charley Shively

When the Fort Hill Faggots for Freedom picketed Sporters [a gay bar in Boston] to protest its dress code, I joined and walked with Jeffrey, whose sign read: Give Looks-ism the Evil Eye. One passerby — a young hippie, blond, tight green pants, beautiful, stoned and (at least playing) straight and dumb — approached me perplexed and asked what “good-looks-ism” meant. I immediately wanted to take him home and answer his question personally, and in depth. But the watching police were keeping the picketers moving. I did not want to desert the line.

The difference between those of us carrying the signs and the man asking the questions struck me. Likewise I couldn’t miss the contrast between us and those entering the bar — us in our free box clothing, Woolworth jewelry, looking scruffy, radical; them — discreet, Bloomingdale beautiful, available but not too available. Perhaps nowhere in faggotry is a contradiction so clear. Everyone says that looks don’t matter. Other things are supposedly more important than appearance. Yet from the giddy to the heavy, everyone responds first and foremost to image, appearance, and in general to beauty.

I want to examine the cosmetic difference between what passes among us for beauty and what is dismissed as undesirable. I begin by rejecting all spiritual rhetoric. It is not the immortal soul (or even the personality) that inspires poets, pursuers and lovers. Most objections to my writing on this subject boil down to defenses of spiritualism. Defending beauty, one outraged critic protested: “I am much more than meat (which, even so, will never meet anyone else in the way you require),” he wrote. “I am an unbelievably beautiful person with a great heart and soul and mind and passion and insight and intuition and commitment and courage and loyalty and tenderness and eloquence — and I will give them all to the people I am fighting with and for, because they, too, have all these things, no matter how often forced to the degrading level of meet-meat.” I cannot accept so glibly this contrast between cosmetic physical beauty and the supposedly superior spiritual beauty. If we do not begin with a recognition that we are meat on the meat rack, nothing we say or do will get us off the grill.

Middle Aged and Dumpy Looking

Beginning with my personal experience, I was surprised at how much I knew about “being beautiful.” I had long thought of myself as being in fact ugly. Picking up on an article I wrote on “Revolutionary Phantasy,” a correspondent once called me a “not so ideal writer/artist… middle aged and dumpy looking.” Actually I now realize that I’ve always wanted to look that way (at least since I was ten years old). Most of my life has been a protest against “being beautiful.”

A friend made this clear when I was discussing the question of fantasy with him. Mike was then a prisoner in West Virginia. I had first met him as a teen-aged friend of Prescott Townsend. Mike began hustling at fourteen. He explained how being beautiful meant being what people dreamed they wanted you to be; you became a projection of their desires — trapped as it were in their need or “love” for some dream of theirs. We talked about what it meant to have all those eyes, desires, wishes focused your way. Like Marilyn Monroe. Could she feel all the men who masturbated over her calendar pictures? Could Mike?

Talking with him, I realized how I had refused to allow myself to become beautiful. I was very fat as a kid, with oddly crooked teeth which humiliated me. I always thought: if only I was skinny with straight teeth, then everyone would “love” me. But at some deeper level, I gloried in not having to play someone else’s game: my grotesque teeth and chubby body put me safely outside the good-grooming class of neat middle class people. I enjoyed being ugly; while it left me outside, it also left me my own person.

Part of my protest against “beauty” as such was against being or becoming a man. I particularly disliked cosmetics associated with manliness: smoking cigarettes, shaving, sports, cursing, automobiles, and fighting. When my beard began to grow, I remember not wanting to shave. A teacher took me aside and said, you have to shave or people will think you are a bum. He was being kind; doubtless he thought my parents were too shiftless to even mention such things. I understood, however, that just shaving would not bring me into the middle class or the man class. The two classes melded in my mind; both have a equal power of attraction and repulsion.

Although I refused to ever be a man, I had no special desire to be a woman; in fact, I had contempt for cha-cha shoes, bubble gum, hair curlers, and make-up in general. I disliked these things not because they were effeminate but because they were middle-class. My mother had none of them. While I often deplored the “fact” that my mother was so ugly and wished she looked more Betty Crocker, on a deeper level I admired the way she was — in particular her general indifference to beauty and society. I remember she had only one tooth for the longest time until it too fell out like the others (from too many unwanted pregnancies). Years went by before there was money to buy the false teeth. And we not only got by, but we lived without any toothpaste or tooth brushes. My mother once said that if she had the money of Mamie Eisenhower (World’s Best Dressed Woman in 1953) she too could be beautiful. But she made it clear that such effort would be a waste of time. Why bother?

While we lived in poverty, we dreamed of escaping our class and making it into the middle class. When money came through, my mother did get false teeth. And when I went to Harvard, the university lent me the money (which I still owe) to straighten my teeth. The crooked teeth were perfectly satisfactory for eating; they were just misshapen, with some uppers behind instead of in front of the lowers. To be middle class and beautiful, teeth must also conform: they have to be straight. No misalignments are allowed in the middle class. Although I got my teeth straightened, I quickly dropped any idea of becoming a lawyer, politician or rich person; and I resolutely stuck to my queer sexual tastes. My mother’s training in beauty persisted and despite straightened teeth I always managed to look seedy. I remember reading a nasty comment in the college newspaper about some poorly-shaven, grubby grind on a scholarship studying on Saturday night in contrast with Happy Jock out-on-a-date in Wellesley. I was proud to be grubby.

Nonetheless, I once chose to be beautiful, and learned more about society in that experiment than in all my Saturday night book reading. I had broken with a lover and decided that I would have to become “beautiful” if I wanted to be happy. Faced with what I saw as a long life of misery (I was still in my twenties), I decided sacrifice was necessary. So I went on a starvation diet, lost twenty pounds, bought some tight levis, and began saving money to get contact lenses. I remember the joy at the time in cashing my meager pay check of $25 and getting $35 by mistake from the cashier. I rushed out and bought an expensive bright red plaid shirt. I’m still not sure what I wanted other than the pretty shirt.

Being beautiful brought me no more tricks than before. In fact, it brought all sorts of annoyances. People pant after you when they find you beautiful. You become a bauble they want, which is almost as bad as being a bauble they don’t want. You are in fact like some hot piece of property, whose protection becomes a grinding preoccupation. You become a piece of real estate or a fancy car, develop worries about losing your wealth. Possessors suddenly want to own you, and when they do, they then worry about losing you. Beauty is really only a synonym for “middle class property.”

My experiment in being beautiful paid off handsomely. I met my present lover in 1965 on the Boston Esplanade, and he insisted I come home and stay. For a few years we were regular lovebirds, and I learned new lessons in being beautiful. He dressed me in ever tighter pants and brighter shirts — all the latest faggot styles of the day. I was toted from bar to beach to party as a hot new lover. One ancient syndicate heterosexual bar owner even complimented Agammemnon in private by saying how smart he was to finally get an Italian lover. I began meeting old lovers — my predecessors, who had often gone over the hill (as they say) into their thirties. Agammenon still had their teenage pictures, which he showed me as trophies. I had now become such a trophy.

I played the part adequately, perhaps well, considering that even with a little primping I’m not all that extraordinary looking. In bars I seldom, if ever, spoke for fear of destroying some illusion. Sylvia Sydney called me “Helen Keller.” And even if I was not so hot or so beautiful a young number as I was passing for, no one challenged my wrappings. Why should they? In the world of face value you can’t be too critical. Anyway, it didn’t really matter. In the passion play, to be beautiful you only need one person to really believe in you. Other people will go along if you don’t try to deflate them.

The Dialectic of Beauty

Being beautiful is an entirely dialectical relation. Beauty is not a thing in itself, but is at all times formed from some social relationship. Generally “beauty” is a form of service and submission to others, an act of obeisance. Too often discussions of beauty begin with God or Art, as commentators try to hide the real meaning behind beauty: it is a signal of submission.

Any discussion of the subject should begin not with philosophy but with grooming. We like to kid ourselves into thinking that the beautiful are born that way, but everyone knows better. Think of the industry going into training a child: diet, posture, manners and appearance. Clothing and ornament provide some protection from the weather, but their main purpose is to give some idea of who or what the person is within the social/sexual hierarchy. At one time it was even forbidden for lower class people to wear silver or satin. And in many places in the United States men are forbidden to wear women’s clothing. Clothing or ornament are never worn outside a social code; in this case the wrappings are almost the whole package.

A central part of grooming begins with the hair. The question of social power might be pursued in the story of Sampson and Delilah: in conforming to social norms about his hairstyle, Sampson becomes powerless. Or in refusing to conform, men with long hair or women with short hair gain new power. Hair among faggots plays a very special role. We have long been associated with hair dressing: the slaves dressing the slaves. And among ourselves hair is a whole form of communication. When people groom their hair, they are trying to tell something about themselves and their relationship to others.

The dialectics of hair becomes clearest with balding. Losing one’s hair, you have to decide whether to pretend your head doesn’t exist by hiding your baldness. In doing this, you play a part of youth, beauty, social acceptability; you are in fact making yourself for others. Or if you chose not to pretend, you challenge beauty norms in a very special way and run the risk of rejection. A little story might help: a moderately prominent actor, Jimmy, went home from Sporters with Johnny. Jimmy had a beautiful well-groomed head of hair. He and Johnny had great sex. Jimmy had made himself beautiful for Johnny and all the Johnnies in Sporters. The charade troubled him, so he flung off his toupee. Johnny gasped, because Jimmy was no longer being beautiful for him. Jimmy did not return.

The very word “grooming” gives away the show. As a verb: to “groom” a man or horse for some particular show or office is very similar to training him. Or as a noun it just means horse-servant or simple servant. In this sense, parents and high school authorities are correct: improper grooming is anti-social and rebellious. The willingness to be well-groomed and thereby beautiful is a way of conforming to the demands of society. Look at the marines: massive attention paid to appearance, masculinity, grooming and conformity. You really can’t distinguish where one begins and the other ends.

By contrast, check out the grooming in a mental hospital. There the two keys to grooming, gender and class, have been broken. Men and women no longer try to keep up appearance either as sexual or class servants (or possibly masters). As John Wieners portrays in his poem, “Children of the Working Class,” you can’t easily distinguish the women from the men in an asylum. Authorities trace recovery in no small measure by the individual’s return to proper grooming habits. An essay should be written on psychotherapy as a branch of cosmetology. At the very least, all such therapy is an attempt to train the mind as properly as society demands we train our hair.

Obedience to sex roles is obviously a part of good grooming and very nearly (if not entirely) the whole basis for what people call beauty. Charles Darwin supported this notion in his Descent of Man (Parts II & III). He argued that when there was a choice of sexual partners and when one partner was chosen for breeding over another, “sexual selection” occurred. Darwin concluded “that of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been the most efficient.” That is, Darwin argued that beauty consisted in discriminations that human beings made in their mating patterns. Darwin argued that biological evolution has made women ever more beautiful, “so that women have acquired sweeter voices and become more beautiful than men” (Chapter 20). They have been made properties.

Grooming works not only within a single generation but also across generations. The ruling class grooms itself so that biological and social “beauty” are not separated at all. Darwin himself explains that class privilege itself becomes a form of beauty and is incorporated into the secondary sexual characteristics of human beings. He explains:

Our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes; yet the middle classes are placed under equally favorable conditions of life for the perfect development of the body.

(As a good Englishman, Darwin just assumes that the lower classes are coarse and lacking in beauty.) In support of Darwin’s hypothesis, one of the Good Gay Poets recently noticed Caroline Kennedy eating a hamburger in Harvard Square. George said that Caroline’s hair looked like spun gold, not a split end or unhealthy strand in sight. Was it the Greek sun? Mediterranean water? The food? What was it?

I would suggest that it was the British Empire more than anything that has formed our notions of beauty in the United States. Among men, there is an unquestioned advantage for those looking like British nobility: tall, angular face, flat chested, blue eyed, blond. John Wayne and Robert Redford are examples from two generations. And there is a whole tradition of gentlemen preferring blonds. Those who were not blond were sometimes considered more sexual and therefore lower, unreliable and unworthy of marriage. You might vacation in the Mediterranean (Death in Venice) but for permanence you stayed with the blond. Racial discrimination is embedded in this system, with Jews, Africans and even Southern Europeans considered inferior or less beautiful.

The ties between beauty, race, class, imperialism and power were luminously developed by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton attempted a “beauty-map” of the British Isles, and he sought to construct composite photographs of the most beautiful inhabitants. He rejected anything except the most stereotypically feminine or super-masculine. His biographer noted that “any man with feminine traits would be likely to arouse his hostility.” While Galton wanted to breed and reward ever more masculine men with ever more feminine women, he wanted them bred mainly from the British ruling class. In a revealing article entited “Our National Physique: Prospects of the British Race,” Galton claimed that the British “are as capable human animals as the world can at present produce…. They are strong in mind and body, truthful and purposive, excellent leaders of the people of the lower races.” And within England he proposed breeding only the “best,” because the lower middle class of Britishers “are of coarser fibre than the Latins.” The whole science of eugenics, which Galton founded, was dedicated to weeding out those who were not healthy, energetic, able, manly, and courteous, as he claimed — and, we should add, “ruling class.”

H.G. Wells perceptively objected to Galton’s assumption that the most able were also the most successful — those in power. Wells argued that prisoners might in fact be more able and worthy of being bred because they were perceptive enough to attempt to resist their wretched environment. Jean Genet, those assassinated at Attica, and numerous others would testify to this.

My argument (with a nod to Darwin) is that our notions of beauty come from a social context that involves sexual discrimination and class discrimination, that grooming is a better way to study the meaning of “beauty” than is a study of Mozart or Michelangelo. For this essay a foray into ideals of Greek and Renaissance art, literature and music would be too great a subject to survey. I think that they, too, would show the marks of male and ruling class supremacy, that the allegedly great works of creation no less than good-grooming conform to a system of power. For the moment, though, I will settle for having explored the roots of good-grooming as a form of beauty.

Faggot Beauty and Straight Beauty

Beauty has always been defined by men as they sought women, and it has always been framed within a system of sexual reproduction. Heretofore, men have considered women as slaves and as beautiful; they have not (unless they were faggots) generally entertained the idea of themselves as beautiful. Nor have they wanted to study themselves as objects of beauty. For instance, in their book Patterns of Sexual Behavior Ford and Beach report all the things men around the world have found beautiful in women — breasts, ankles, asses, hair, face, ears, feet. But they say nothing about what women have found attractive in women or what men found attractive in men.

With the spread of the sexual revolution all this is rapidly changing. Women are aggressively beginning to define what they want and expect in men; impotence is being explored and being defined in a way never before imagined. And I think that gay liberation will soon lead to a similar fundamental shift. The old standards of beauty as defined by breeding heterosexual men (and which we still live by) will begin to fade and pass as those men lose their power and authority.

I think it is too little recognized that straight women and faggots do not find the same things attractive in men. I noticed this a few years ago as I was reading an article by Germaine Greer in Esquire in which she described (with photographs) the men she found most attractive. As I eagerly scanned the article, I was surprised at her choices, the pictures, and her reasons; they were not all that attractive to me. And I thought most faggots would give a very different assessment of what they like in men.

When I discussed this question with Richi Macdougall of Fag Rag he said that women had never found him attractive and that when he discovered that faggots like his looks he was himself transformed into a faggot. Such a statement might be read in many ways, but I would suggest that it is essentially true at face value. Not that faggots are failures in the getting-women competition, not that women don’t like us, not that we are afraid of women and of breeding sex, not that we are lured by the easy glamour of gay cruising — not any of these (although each argument might find defenders).

More to the point and more unsettling to the social structure: we find each other Beautiful, Attractive and Desirable — all in ways alien to heterosexuals. We have in fact created our own culture and society within the dead society of which we are an uneasy part.

I want to consider one tendency in particular among faggots (and to a lesser degree among men generally) — that is, phallo-centricism. The size queen embarrasses all our respectable ambassadors to the straight world, as well as those attempting to integrate lesbian and faggot experience. Yet I do not think the phenomenon can simply be dismissed as trashy or sick. Actually, men seem more worried about the subject than women. As a form of political protest at a beauty contest, a high school woman recently rose and asked the distinguished male speaker how big his cock was; she was trying to demonstrate that men only think sexually about women (“how big are your breasts?”) and how humiliated men would feel if they were in the same position.

Faggots have been sizing each other up for as long as we have any record, and straight men have generally found the prospect terrifying. I don’t defend discrimination. But I would protest against those who argue that discrimination based on personality, manners, breeding, intelligence, spirituality is superior to the discrimination of those who measure men by their cocks.

Phallocentricism among faggots has its unique structure. In faggot bars, men wear pants that strategically reveal (often over-emphasize) each inch. The notorious Bunny LaRue once parodied such showing at a Student Homophile meeting when he stripped, several pairs of navy blue socks stuffed in the LaRue crotch. Paul Goodman has a clever poem about a fellow carrying a tube of KY where his cock might be. Everywhere in fag country, a hard or half-hard cock serves as a come-on for other faggots. For women, by contrast, a man (particularly a strange man) with an erect cock is often an object of fear, loathing, or amusement; seldom something exciting the way it is for two men who are about to make it with each other.

We need to understand faggot costume and cosmetics in a new way. They are not so much parodies of conventional heterosexual costumes as they are an attempt to create a unique, specific form of art and beauty within a faggot culture and without any reference to the existing culture. Consider this in the seemingly opposite costumes of leather and drag.

Much has been written about the horrors of leather costumes: they are fascist, male supremacist, expensive, or obnoxious in some way. But I see leather quite differently: a wonderful faggot invention — not a copy at all. Have you ever seen a “real” man dressed with five cock rings, chrome studs all over his leather jacket spelling “STUD,” dog chains in his boots and around his neck and ankles, a few spikes, pins, emblems, emblazed tee shirts, several colored scarves or handkerchiefs and much more in one costume? When you see all that you know you are not looking at a straight man. You are beholding a wonderful creature costume that could only come from faggot culture. Consider your marine fatigues, cop uniforms, bike outfits, cowboy rawhide, scuba diving fins, and other accoutrements from San Francisco’s Barracks bar or New York’s Mine Shaft: none of these could be substituted for some straight man in Idaho or Ohio or Texas. In fact most of these costumes would find difficulty passing in a local supermarket.

Likewise with the fluff drags or even the serious cross dressers coming out of a faggot culture: they are not imitating (or mocking) women so much as they are creating their own world of costume and reality. Much of the criticism of drag has been written from the perspective that everything must be either heterosexual or an imitation of heterosexuality. But what if you move out of that mind set for a moment? What if drag is a wonderful, wild experiment/experience that is trying to move outside of the closed, cooped-in world of dimorphism?

Aaron Shurin’s wonderful poem “Woman on Fire” (printed as a chapbook and now in his book Night Sun) explains that drag is

Not to belittle women

not to mock them. Not to speak about women at all;

to speak of ourselves. Unnamed regions — rose-pink and rust-fire —

Beyond the stern

and arrogant borders of manhood.

This work of art and beauty that is being formed, coming to birth out of our bodies, cannot be subsumed within existing categories. It is in this sense and in this world that cosmetics can indeed become an act of revolution. How can any existing philosophical system frame the Latino queen dressed up with Christmas tree lights as she plugs herself in at a party:

Burning star-speckled

everyone is awestruck

electric rose-bird!

we are squealing in delight

Woman on Fire!

The Light! The Living Light!

And there races back

and forth across the party

instant sympathy, a revolution

of untold ecstasies. Woman on Fire!

Too much has been said of the differences between leather and fluff drag. They have so much in common. For one thing, they are much more egalitarian than other styles. Anyone can do it: the fat, old, bald, ugly, dumpy, middle-aged, paunchy or plain no less than the super-beauty. The transformation is only a matter of cosmetics. And while you can spend a large fortune on either fancy dresses or genuine leather, you can also do it very cheaply; a ripped up pair of Levi’s costs almost nothing. Likewise you can dress yourself in satin and lace from Morgan Memorial’s without a lot of money. Drag performer Sylvia Sydney makes her costume out of all sorts of wild things: a cucumber necklace, for instance. Almost too wild to contemplate! And you can eat them or stick them up your ass later.

Another important aspect of both leather and gown drag is the way they move entirely outside of the cruising game. These costumes are not primarily designed to snare tricks. If you want to catch a man, such costumes are almost irrelevant. They are not mating costumes. Thus they are wonderfully outside the turtledove, mating syndrome that dominates too much of faggot culture. Such habits are taken from the heterosexual mating patterns which are designed for effective breeding. They are utilitarian. No one I have ever heard has condemned either the leather or the fluff for being practical in any way. That is their “beauty”: they are self-creations.

Finally, that is the wonderful thing about these cosmetics: they are creations of a faggot culture, not of the culture of the political reformers among us who are trying to make us all look straight and middle-class. You just can’t pass the chains and gowns off as something ordinary people would want living next door to them in upstate New York. These things are terrifying and unsettling because they cannot pass as ordinary, conventional. Because in their own way they are revolutionary.

Revolutionary Beauty

What should be the future of beauty? The subject is one that contains contradictions. Just on the individual level, doesn’t everyone take some secret pleasure in being an object of beauty but at the same time deplore being just a piece of meat for someone else? Richi Macdougall once described graphically how awful he felt under the piercing eyes of so many in Sporters bar, drooling over a piece of cute fresh chicken. Yet that same faggot found being gay exhilarating because so many men found him beautiful.

Beauty is a powerful social control. In her essay on “Women” Brigid Brophy notes that “just as the sexual regions are the most vulnerable part of the body, sexuality is the most vulnerable part of the Ego.” Tell someone that they are not sexually attractive and you wound them in a unique way. They will spend millions on tooth pastes, soaps, hairsprays, mouthwashes and other aids to avoid being unwanted. Few things have such a power over our behavior as our approach to the beauty market.

Let’s be Utopian for a moment. Biologists speak of our dimorphism as characteristic of our biology, and they argue that this dimorphism makes one morph attractive to the other morph. Thus the latest book on beauty says, “When it comes to sex appeal, attractiveness is based largely on differences in appearance between male and female. The more exaggerated these differences, up to a point, the more sexually attractive a person is… In general men are attractive if they look unlike women, and women are attractive if they look unlike men.” Now, suppose we destroy this difference, so that men and women would not look different at all, gender free. Isn’t that a keystone of sexual revolution: abolishing gender-linked discrimination? Certainly most gay liberationists would never say “viva la difference.”

If gender differences continue to blend, eventually unisex will be a reality or at least a possibility. Now, my proposal is to go another step — perhaps Utopian since we’ve hardly gotten far on the first step — and abolish morphic distinctions entirely. I am not urging that the ugly be treated as though they were beautiful. I am not urging that we not favor the beautiful with our attentions. I am urging that we abolish beauty entirely, that the careful little boundaries we try to maintain between one form and another be dropped. If we were indeed indiscriminate in our sexual decisions, beauty would dissolve.

I would urge that this is not just a Utopian suggestion, but also a genuine possibility. Something we already see unfolding within the sexual revolution. In this the orgy rooms at some faggot bars, baths, and other places provide some clue to a new direction. Broken away from the social structure, such orgies allow a free flow of energy: people do people they would never otherwise do; they do things, act out possibilities otherwise closed to them. The sorrow of such places is not in what goes on there but that the baths don’t spill over into the rest of society. There is an emphasis on youth, big prick, muscles, tight ass, whiteness, and other standards derived from reactionary parts of our society. Nonetheless, the possibility of sexual freedom passes there in a way seldom found in, say, the Gay Academic Union.

For a socialist (according to Frederic Jameson) art “is the indispensable sign of the reintegration of a fragmented, alienated existence.” I hesitate to say my essay here on beauty is such a sign, but I would urge that the emerging gay culture does show hope of a yearned-for reintegration, although the deplored alienation and dissociation so often bemoaned in gay relations — particularly as exemplified in our alleged promiscuity — can indeed be cause for despair and hopelessness.

But if we cut these experiences off — shut out all reality, push aside the embarrassing size queen, leather queen or drag queen and rush on to some superclean rhetorical heaven — we will then be perpetrating more effectively than those we condemn the disintegration and fragmentation in our lives. We must all find ways to incorporate our sexual and our ideological selves into one union. If we are only sexual, we are nothing. If we are only ideological, we are worse than nothing. If we can combine the two, we might change the world — i.e., be revolutionaries.

Reprinted with permission from Fag Rag, Boston, Massachusetts

Lesbians and Gay Men
Hetero Sexualities,
Common Cause

Pam Mitchell

Lesbians and gay men make strange bedfellows, especially when it comes to sex. Since we’re classed together as “homosexuals” you’d expect that we’d have a lot in common when it comes to sex. And yet it is particularly around the issues of sexuality that differences between gay men and lesbians are the most obvious; this is illustrated by recent studies that show us on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the number of sexual partners we’ve had, the degree to which we tie intimacy to sex, the age of coming out, the longevity of our relationships, the importance we attach to sex in the genital sense.

In fact this union between us is so unnatural that it makes you wonder who did the matchmaking and why. Yet the social category of “homosexual” is a real one even though we didn’t invent it. We may re-name it: “gay,” so that all the emphasis isn’t on sex, “gay/lesbian,” so that women are clearly separate and clearly equal. We may embrace the category as a statement of opposition to its supposed “opposite,” heterosexuality, which is another social category we didn’t invent, or we may be forced by others to “join the club” because of the ritual meaning that they attach to a sexual act, whether or not that was the meaning we had in mind.

But what lesbians and gay men have in common is that there are certain sexual rituals we won’t participate in on a regular basis: those that uphold the myth that a brand of sexuality exists that can actually include both male and female meanings. Unencumbered by the lie of the basic compatibility of the sexes, we have been free to develop divergent lifestyles and ideas. These new cultures more clearly reflect and meet the different sexual and emotional needs that arise naturally out of our different socialization as males and females.

These gay male and lesbian cultures are variants of the same parent culture, but they emphasize different aspects. (It’s an oversimplification to speak of one American parent culture, but in very broad terms the relations between the sexes and the meanings of sexuality are similar from subculture to subculture.) Actually, in a sense each has two parents, a daddy culture and a mommy culture. But whereas heterosexual culture is an uneasy coupling of these two heterogeneous “halves,” which can be seen as two different subspecies that can still interbreed (in terms of feelings, values — and, of course, children), lesbians and gay men tend to go off on different tangents: not that we’re in the custody of one parent or the other, but we interpret each in our own unique ways. I feel little affinity with what gay men present as their “female” side, any more than I think of butch lesbians as “real men.” Similar appearances can arise out of very different needs and experiences and have very different meanings; in fact, if these are attempts at imitating the other sex it is apparent how little we really understand each other.

Whatever our conscious political and personal motives are for doing so, I see it as a major step in the right direction that we even admit to that lack of understanding or want to overcome the gulf. “Vive la difference!” or “what difference?” has long been the heterosexual response when this major chasm between women’s values and perceptions and men’s is brought up. Yet an entire civilization is built upon it — which is something like building a nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault, the sort of insane behavior that this civilization will also be remembered for if there’s anyone left to remember it. I don’t see this willingness to destroy the planet and the war between the sexes as unrelated phenomena.

Both the category “homosexuality” and the hatred of it are integral parts of the ideology of sex and sexuality that most men in America grow up with and make use of all their lives. Women grow up with a very different set of meanings and feelings about sex, as about most things, and some of these attitudes feed into our own oppression. This can be true for lesbians as well as heterosexual women. But it is the male ideology that dominates. Its basic tenets — belief in hierarchy, competition, contempt for weakness, the inferiority of women, the acceptibility of violence, all built into the social system and powerfully symbolized in attitudes toward sex — promote its continued dominance. Gay men don’t play by all the male rules but they don’t necessarily reject the whole ball game. Both out in the world and among themselves gay men often exhibit many of the opressive qualities of male culture: in their attitudes toward women and their willingness to take on traditional male “boss” roles that promote hierarchy, in the way they sometimes exercise their greater power over boys and leave their old and “not-so-beautiful” to wilt alone. Gay men rape each other, sometimes even kill each other. (Lesbians — or any women for that matter — are not noted for sex killings.) Yet when these values — and the class of men who know how to make the best use of them — dominate, one side effect is gay oppression. Another “side” effect may ultimately be the destruction of the world.

Since the category of homosexuality does exist and is used both to oppress us and to promote a destructive culture, it makes sense for those of us in the category to unite to fight back. But we are not fighting for gay men and lesbians as such. We are fighting for the ascendancy of values — belief in community, empathy, gentleness, closeness to nature — which have been traditionally associated with women, and for a new synthesis of female and male knowledge. Since much of our creative energy has long been going into doing just that, lesbians and gay men are in a unique position to provide such a movement with leadership and ideas and strategies.

We are condemned for the symbolic meanings that we attach — or refuse to attach — to sex, which the dominant culture sees as potentially subversive. Sex is very important to the ruling class. It’s important that it remain a thing that diverts energy and attention from other problems; it’s important that it remain a “tool” and weapon to be used against women’s culture (most explicitly through rape and violent pornography, but in more subtle ways as well).

It’s equally important to our side (those of us who don’t own the country, and that includes most heterosexuals as well as most gay men and lesbians) that we reintegrate sexuality and put our whole selves into our cause: to fight the lie that sex is the proper arena to fight out battles for self-worth and meaning rather than meeting some of those needs through control over our own productive work; to fight the lie that sex can be separate from connectedness, that other people ever exist to be used; to remember that our lives are political statements, and that the new meanings that we attach to our sexuality can be revolutionary.

As things stand now, lesbian sexuality and gay male sexuality are very different, and each is truncated, limited by its historical ties with only one piece of the heterosexual puzzle. As allies we can afford to learn from one another.

Lately gay men and lesbians have in fact become overt political allies, but our ties pre-date the current wave of activism. Both groups have sought and created a somewhat androgynous “middle ground,” a kind of “Esperanto” culture that has been rooted mainly in the bars and is largely about sex: sex as gay men like it, because while this “Esperanto” is no one’s native tongue it does tend to have a male accent. This partly reflects the male dominance that pervades the entire society. It is also because the evolution of the whole public gay culture was mostly male until relatively recently; lesbians, like other women, didn’t used to be “public” people. Gay men have been largely irrelevant to lesbians in our historical coming-of-age, just as boys and girls are irrelevant to each other when growing up. We’ve been on different playgrounds playing different games.

Compare, for example, the institution of the “circle jerk” with the institution of the “slumber party”! And it is not accidental that neither heterosexual nor lesbian women have developed an equivalent to pornography. While growing up, many of us had our True Romance and movie magazines, and our teenage idols who we wanted to know everything about. In some ways this was the inverse of the pics and flicks the boys were looking at. A lot of what pornography negates, we grew up cultivating in ourselves — acknowledgement of and empathy for others, deep emotion, caring for detail and context and substance. At the same time, much of what pornography encouraged in boys, we’ve gone without: we never learned as they did to know and take what we want, to be active participants, to take care of our sexual needs (or sometimes to be sexual at all, even though we were going through the motions), to stay in ourselves and with our own interests and not lose ourselves in others (I speak this as one with a pathological proneness to hopeless crushes). Either of these “sides of the coin” is lost without the other — one powerless, the other dangerous. The lesson is supposed to be that we each seek out our “opposite” in our own private way, rather than becoming whole. The “sexual division of labor” goes beyond who changes the diapers and who pumps the gas (or owns the oil company) and encompasses the “sexual” itself. And as long as this division between those who do and those who feel can be maintained, that oil company owner can stay right where he is. Other men will fail to look at and feel the consequences of his exploitation, and women will remain too powerless and unsure of ourselves to do anything about it.

For lesbians in particular the category of “homosexual” has been an inappropriate one. While gay men’s culture has embraced various kinds of sexual activities and symbols as some of its defining characteristics and gay men tend to place a lot of emphasis on genital sex, this has not been the case for lesbians. Many of us did not become involved with women because of feelings that could be called “sexual” in that limited sense, but instead experienced a comfort in association with women, and a trust and intimacy that eventually included sex. (Many lesbian feminists articulate their experience this way now, but I think it has been as true for lesbians in the past.) If a line of significance is drawn at the act of sex, it is not a line that women have drawn. Many men are “homo-social” but heterosexual, preferring male company but using women for sex (“like a kleenex,” to borrow the words of Audre Lorde). The experience of heterosexual women — and most lesbians were once practicing heterosexuals, although practice didn’t make it perfect — has not been a parallel one, however, at least not in recent generations. Women who sleep with men have tended to identify with them, prefer their company. This is only partly because men are where the power is; it is largely because caring and sex are intertwined for women in a way that isn’t as true for men.

Rather than accepting the heterosexual male definition that would separate caring and sex, or accepting the women’s definition within a heterosexual context which has the effect of separating women from each other, lesbian feminists have been evolving definitions of the “erotic” that celebrate the connection and our ability to share it with each other. These definitions denounce sex without emotion and caring as “pornographic,” as the opposite of erotic and as a travesty.

But where does that leave gay men, who often participate in casual sex? While gay men’s attitudes toward sex are largely an outgrowth of male sexual ideology, they lose some of their sinister overtones in the translation. What does casual sex mean outside the context of oppression of women by men, and between people without the romantic expectations that women grow up with? There are aspects of gay male sexuality that I find alien and some that I consider politically reactionary. But on the other hand, I sometimes see myself and some of my sisters attaching a lot of emotional baggage to a physical act that doesn’t necessarily belong there. Our expectations change and our dependencies crawl out of every corner the minute a “relationship” becomes sexual, dividing our sisters into “friends” and “lovers” as though this were a difference in quality rather than quantity; we give our power over to sex rather than deriving power from it. Ironically, while claiming that we’re putting less stress on sex than men do and that we put it in its proper context, we sometimes seem to attach more importance to it and make it a symbol for love rather than one — possibly fleeting — expression of it.

Recently I called up a gay newspaper to ask about the time and location of an evening of lesbian erotic art that I had seen on their calendar. “There’s a gay and lesbian erotic art show?” asked the man on the phone excitedly. I had to laugh. What a different evening that would be. I remembered the bikini disco contest at a gay men’s bar a few evenings earlier: that’s where they’re at with the erotic, I thought. When I’d heard about the contest I couldn’t relate — to the competition, the “looks-ism,” the impersonality of it. I think the response I had — a mixture of amused contempt and slightly curious, slightly annoyed envy — is a common lesbian response to the sexual exploits of our gay brothers. Let them have their fun, I thought. In a way I was glad to see them doing it to each other rather than to women. In a way I was envious of the way gay men don’t always feel the need to take their sexuality so bloody seriously, and to explore the meaning and intention and effect of absolutely everything. But I also believe that the need is real, whether they feel it or not, and that there are some gay men who would agree with me that if they don’t want to let their culture be a carrier of an ideology that includes their own oppression (and which will lead to ever-worse destruction of the earth unless it is stopped) they need to explore what sexuality means to them with as much seriousness as lesbian feminists do.

On the subway after this phone conversation I tried to visualize a “gay and lesbian erotic art festival”: the men would be in the front room mocking everything and flaunting their bods and in the back room sucking and fucking; and in the hallways in between would be the little pulsating pockets of very earnest lesbians, all of whom would be agreeing, either with nervous giggles or with outrage, that “the boys in there are being pretty weird!” (Many lesbians, including myself, often refer to gay men as “boys,” a somewhat affectionate but not very “politically correct” habit that I’m trying to break myself of because of its ageist and “be-little-ing” aspects.)

And then these clusters of women would go about their usual lesbianic rituals of patting backs and shoulder rubs and catching up with sharing the details of our lives bright unaverted eyes and flushed faces. And we’d be calling this an intermission or a walkout — the “erotic” stuff is going on inside. The funny thing is that hugging clusters of gossiping women in hallways (like singing clusters of rocking women at women’s concerts and howling strings of jumping women at women’s dances) are lesbian erotica.

But is that really sexual, and is it art? When we capture what it means to us in some symbolic form that we can communicate to others, it is art. But as for sex — well, maybe it does lack a certain something, despite the energy and the love and the intensity. When Audre Lorde comments (in her powerful essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power) that for her it is the same kind of experience to write a good poem and to make love with a woman she loves, I know what she means. These are two different actual physical activities, though, even if some of the feelings may be the same. And while Lorde is hardly guilty of either over-romanticizing or denying our physical, sexual, sensual selves, these are traps that we as women fall into easily. Women have been so long without a “cuntry,” have faked it, gone without for so long that we can’t state or reaffirm too often that we are sexual! We don’t need to deny sex as a bodily function or that an energy or attraction can exist that is not necessarily tied to True Romance (or even to deep feelings). We don’t need to ignore our genitals as one (very nice) part of our bodies that can pleasure us. At the same time we don’t have to fall into the other trap of pushing these like a drug, like the chemical equivalents to heroin it’s said may be naturally produced in our bodies. We know that doesn’t mean it’s healthy to shoot up. No need to imitate the men with their “needles” battery-operated Everready creatures of their sexes always on. We have to remember where the juice, the charge comes from, and that we can enjoy the juice without cutting it off from its source.

In my hypothetical lesbian and gay erotic art show the juice was running wild while the source was out in the halls, the earnest clustering lesbians dealing with feelings and context and everything but sex and action, the gay men having their fun and forgetting about other people and the significance of their actions. Lesbian feminist definitions of erotica attempt to put both the juice and its source on center stage, without drawing a line between them. I think that it’s in the interests of gay men to contribute to this synthesis. But while we’re waiting for them to give up some of the stage we can add to our repertoire what they have to teach us about playfulness and physicality and autonomy and sensuality and then go off and find ourselves a stage of our own (separatism is as often as not a decision to make the best of a situation that already exists).

And yes, I did eventually find that actual “evening of lesbian erotic art.” The evening was inspired by that Audre Lorde essay that I mentioned above, so I was jazzed! I thought of what she’d written about the shared deep feelings, the “unaverted eyes,” the strength and celebration of women together, and I was hoping for that sustained intensity and completeness. It was definitely a start, but I realized we’re not quite there yet. We aim for woman-identified definitions of our sexuality; but the irony seems to be that the minute we try to separate a particular set of experiences that is “erotic,” and then present it to an “audience,” we lose the whole point: that these separations are “man-made” and convey meanings we don’t intend.

There was a wide range of material in the show. Poems and songs and films used imagery of women cutting wood, riding subways, waking up in the morning, living in fear of assault; and there were more traditionally “sexual” photographs of women’s bodies, prefaced by a discussion by the photographers about the distinction between male pornographic pictures of women and lesbians’ more personal, more contextual, less de-humanizing photographs (yet for some reason — the need for anonymity? — the lesbians in the photos lacked faces and heads, which I found disturbing.) Some poets described women making love and gloried in the use of the word “cunt.” I found it interesting that the materials that were a “turn-on” for me in all senses (in all my senses) were consistently those that the performers said weren’t “erotic” when they created them and which weren’t on overtly “sexual” themes, though sexual imagery sometimes appeared naturally in context. Yet the artists presented them, because they seemed to fit. That intuitive sense of fitting reminds me that lesbians do share meanings about the erotic that we haven’t quite articulated yet, meanings that might well be overlooked or belittled by others, including our gay brothers.

There’s the old adage that “an army of lovers cannot fail.” Gay men and lesbians are two parallel armies with the same enemy: heterosexism, which is part of a system of the dominance of “male” values over “female.” Each army retains a part of the enemy within in terms of the way we relate to those in our own band. The gay man who uses others, refuses intimacy, glorifies violence, is embracing many of the ways of the oppressor, who he derives privileges from and has ties of kinship with; while the lesbian who gives up power to her lovers, ties too much importance to personal relationships, believes that getting in touch with her own feelings and spending her time socializing with other lesbians are the revolution (I believe these are very necessary but not sufficient), is perpetuating many of the old patterns of victimization and keeping herself locked in a world of feelings when action is also needed. Members of both “armies” can stand to be voyeurs and learn from one another.

Looking at Pornography:
Erotica and the
Socialist Morality

Gregg Blackford

One of the main contributions of feminism to socialist political practice is its stress on taking our political theory into all aspects of our private lives. Feminism has stressed the importance of breaking down the artificial barrier between the personal and the political. We, as gay male socialists, have accepted the validity of this. For us, many areas of our personal lives have changed greatly over the last few years because of our involvement in socialist and feminist political activity, such as how we relate to the people we live with, to our lovers, to those we work with, etc. But many areas of our personal lives still remain unexplored in terms of connecting them to our political practice. They are mainly connected with sexual behavior and include masturbation, cruising, S&M sex and pornography, not unimportant parts of many gay men’s, including gay socialist men’s, lives. Much work still has to be done to analyze these activities from a gay socialist perspective, especially since many of them are certainly sexist.

Having accepted the idea that “the personal is the political” it becomes necessary to evolve a socialist morality. The idea of creating a morality (or passing judgment on what should be considered as “proper” or “improper” behavior) would have been abhorred by the “do your own thing” libertarians of the ’60s and early ’70s counter-culture. Also, the strict, anti-sex morality that is imposed in so-called socialist countries like those in Eastern Europe, Cuba and S.E. Asia tends to make us wary of the whole concept of morality. But a commitment to eliminating the personal/political split requires an examination of our personal lives. We must consider the effect that our seemingly “personal” behavior has on others.

In this article, I want to examine how pornography can be analyzed from a socialist perspective. The definition of it must come first before looking more concretely at the attitudes of political groups to porn and their attempts to get it on or off the shelves of bookshops. What should our attitudes as gay male socialists be to these struggles, and especially to the perspective of many feminists? Can pornography have any place in our own lives as we are committed politically to a fight against capitalism and its manifestations in terms of economic exploitation and sexism?

Definition

Writing about pornography is difficult because of its problematic nature, its emotive connotations and because of the many forms that it takes. What is considered to be pornographic varies from culture to culture and from time to time. It cannot be analyzed as a concept or as a reality on its own. It must be placed firmly within the structural and historical network of the economic and social relationships from which it springs.

The term pornography itself was first used in the 1860s, meaning literally the photography of prostitutes, but it has its present origins in the 17th century and has persisted, developed and flourished throughout the 19th century to the present. Steven Marcus claims that the growth of porn is inseparable from and dependent on the growth of the novel. Both depended on urbanization and industrialization which provided an audience of literate people (while England’s population grew fourfold in the 19th century, its literate population grew 32-fold) and a process for mass printing and distribution. During these times of rapid change, there was also the possibility of increased privacy and private experience (an essential element of porn) in the urban areas especially. Sexuality, at the same time, was being confined to a separate and insulated sphere of one’s life.

A large part of pornography has to do with fantasy. But how are images of sexual fantasy constructed in our minds? People’s fantasies do not materialize randomly, although many people common-sensically believe that their sexuality (images and behavior) are private and therefore under their total control. But since all societies have to organize and structure sexuality to some degree, values will emerge dealing with how people should handle and think of sexuality. The exact relationship between these dominant values and the actual behavior and fantasy that people engage in is not a direct one however, and is quite complicated. Even the limits of acceptable behavior are not clear-cut. Also, the extent to which people feel guilty or embarrassed if their behavior or fantasies go beyond that limit is unknown.

Despite the lack of biological limits at the level of imagination, it seems necessary that limits on the extent of our sexual behavior and imagery are set (to some unknown extent) by the ideological values of society. If sexuality is socially constructed at all, it will of necessity be culturally limited.

But saying that sexual fantasy and its concrete form, pornography, are constructed within an ideology is not enough to provide a full definition. It is also necessary to note that the nature of pornography is inherently secret, furtive, guilt-ridden and essentially private. Its subject matter often involves power and violence in a sexual context.

It can be argued that erotica differs from porn in this respect. Erotica can be what is defined as sexually exciting but it may have little association with feelings of guilt or degradation. Art in certain times and societies has been blatantly pornographic by our cultural norms but there are few indicators as to whether it would have been associated with disgust or depravity in the society from which it came. Nevertheless, the line between porn, erotica and art is not clear and is problematic.

Attitudes to Pornography

Responses to porn vary considerably and are often related to an individual’s political perspective. The conservative, liberal and libertarian arguments have been aired sufficiently and don’t need elaboration here. Suffice it to say that, although they may seem quite different, they all share the same notion of a “sex drive,” of a biologically rooted “sexual instinct” which is fundamentally selfish, pleasure-seeking and anarchic. Liberals think that only children and “sick” individuals are apt to give way to this “beast” of anarchic selfishness, since socialization is usually a sufficient check. Therefore porn should be available to those who have been insufficiently socialized so as to provide a safe sexual outlet for them. Conservatives are less optimistic and see this beast lurking very close to the surface in everyone and therefore it needs to be kept closely and continually in check or the social order will be threatened. Therefore porn must be carefully controlled or eliminated if possible, or else it may act as a catalyst to the release of the beast.

The libertarians see the sex drive not as a beast but as a means of creative self-fulfillment, if it was not twisted and repressed by an oppressive state for its own ends. They would advocate that porn should be published without limits, if there is a market for it, to allow the demand to be satisfied. Whatever forms of sexual pleasure an individual desires should be catered to.

The feminist attitude to pornography and sex is what I want to investigate in most detail as I believe it raises issues central to porn in particular and to “the socialist morality” in general.

Objectification and Exploitation

The basic starting point of many feminists is that society is sexist, a place where men and women are taught and expected to behave differently in all matters and especially in the sexual. Men are given the power to exploit women economically, emotionally and sexually (although not all men use this power). Socialist feminists go further and say that the purpose of this relationship between women and men is for the production and reproduction of social relations in the capitalist mode of production which leads to the maintenance of the status quo. This perspective influences the way in which some feminists view pornography. Their argument can be divided into two sections.

1. Sexist elements of pornography. The publicly available content of sexual fantasy is almost totally defined by male needs, as is the content of pornography. Porn is made by men and for men. Even depictions of lesbian sexual behavior is sold to men for their titillation. It reinforces the male-dominated view of sexuality which sees men as aggressive and active in sex and women as passive, willing victims. Susan Brownmiller expresses a feminist contempt for porn by seeing it as a reflection of America’s cultural output which gives an ideological base to the continuation of female oppression in promoting “a climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged.” (p. 395) She claims that women are disgusted and offended by porn not because they are sexually backward or more conservative by nature, but because of “the gut knowledge that we and our bodies are being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to bolster that ‘masculine esteem’ which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing females as anonymous, panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanized objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded.” (p. 394)

Brownmiller links this to the philosophy of rape and says that instead of porn being a “safety valve,” it in fact encourages men to rape or use women whom they have learned are not “real.” She would also reject the libertarian view and say that individuals are not simply “doing their own thing” when masturbating to sexist images of women. They are, by extension, objectifying and therefore oppressing all women.

Men have recently been displayed as “sex objects” in slick soft-porn magazines such as Playgirl and the early Viva. One might conclude that the tables are turning. But feminists point to the different ways in which men and women are displayed in these heterosexual mags. The nude men are personalized and their hopes, ambitions and dreams are shown. They are sensitive, creative and deep, absorbed in their own activities, thoughts and bodies. But, at all times, their masculinity is reinforced by the text which underlines the butch message. Stunt man Nick “takes to chicks and violence the way a duck takes to water.” Shep, a soccer goal-keeper, finds the joys of sex in sport — “a climax and a feeling of conquest” — and vice versa. There is usually at least one outdoors shot to establish how healthy and natural, how basic they really are.

Women, on the other hand, are most often displayed as being conscious of being looked at by men, as being passive, waiting for a man. Little is known or said about them personally and what is said is bland and mundane. “Sexy Susan is a secretary and loves looking after her boss. Her leisure interests include sports, fun and sun.” Her personality is relatively unimportant compared to her naked body with breasts and genitals exposed. Therefore the way in which women and men are shown in porn reflects the way in which they are expected to behave in all other areas of their lives.

Gay porn is often no exception to this as it repeats the pattern of one partner dominant, the other submissive:

Eventually, he turned Marley onto his stomach and pressed his lips into the crevice between the throbbing cheeks. The whole frame of the smaller man began to tremble, and he begged weakly for Dick to spare him. “I hardly ever get fucked,” he whispered, “and by God, baby, you’re hung like a couple a’ horses…”

Dick held him firmly against the bed, removing his mouth from the tender channel just long enough to answer.

“They all get fucked,’ he said simply. “There hasn’t been a toy in this room that hasn’t gotten this iron up his ass!”

So, most porn, instead of challenging bourgeois notions of sexuality, goes all the way in reinforcing the most traditional views of sex and gender. “Hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, ‘dirty.’” (Brownmiller, p. 393)

2. Exploitative elements of pornography. The socialist feminists have not only argued against porn from the sexist angle but have also been concerned with the way in which porn exploits its consumers.

Porn has become a big, multi-million dollar industry. It has grown along with the development of capitalism. The continual search goes on for higher profits. The method for doing this has become quite sophisticated because what is being sold, especially in soft-core, is more than sex as a commodity itself, but sex as part of a whole lifestyle. A world is conjured up in readers’ minds that is slick, glamorous and romantic. And that world is for sale. Sexual success is linked with the professional or business success that is necessary to finance a glamorous lifestyle that will attract the beautiful people in these magazines to the bed of the reader.

America has seen a profusion of mags similar to Playboy oriented to a gay market such as Blueboy, Mandate, In Touch and Playguy. Homosexuals, feeling less self-oppressed than in previous decades, have reached a point where they are “open” enough to purchase products that are being marketed exclusively for a gay market. As a result, “Gay is Good” begins to mean “good for business.” The following are quotes from advertising magazines.

Gay money. Twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s how much your average gay worker earns in a year. Multiply that by 20 million gay consumers, and you’ve got an affluent and very powerful market. Gay dollars are just as green as anyone else’s. And West American Advertising will help you make sure that they stack up in the right place.

What people do in the privacy of their homes is their business — big business.

This gay lifestyle, though, does not speak to or for women or third world peoples or drag queens or anyone else who does not have the privileges needed to exist happily under capitalism.

In conclusion, both the sexist and exploitative elements of pornography set up an ideal world of objects that the readers are expected to desire. Like advertising and the ideology which encourages infinite expectations for “valued” goods, porn both sets the standards of the commodity market and denies the satisfaction of needs by encouraging insatiable wants and only temporary satisfactions through the creation of an illusory facade of both material goods and physical bodies, which is unobtainable, mystifying and alienating.

In this way capitalism, as it exists, comes under very little real threat from the “sexual freedom” advocated in porn. Social relations remain stabilized. It shows the ability of capitalism to co-opt potentially threatening groups or attitudes. Its markets can be expanded while ideological control is kept over the thoughts and actions of those in the society. Instead of liberating people sexually, as it claims to do, porn manages to continue to influence sexual thoughts and fantasies which most people believe to be their most private domain, under their own control.

What to Do

Unfortunately, knowing the problems with porn does not automatically tell us how to go about solving them, just as the knowledge that the image you are masturbating to is sexist, does not stop it from being sexually exciting. The immediate reaction is to ban all forms of pornography by having stronger obscenity laws, a proposal suggested by both conservatives and some feminists. I want to outline some problems that will inevitably follow this course of action.

First, efforts to legislate porn out of existence on the grounds of obscenity have always failed, not least because of the essentially subjective nature of all attempts to define it.

Second, attempting to enforce stronger obscenity laws would necessitate stronger and more repressive state apparatuses such as the police, courts, stiffer sentences, etc. This would be dangerous for the freedom of expression of ideas in areas other than porn. If censorship becomes acceptable, it will not be too difficult for the state to move it into political areas as well. And when the state goes in for control of sexual behavior, it does not only center on pornography. Birth-control information, access to abortions, prostitution, male homosexuality and the rights of women are attacked at the same time.

Third, the ends of both the Right’s morality campaign and the feminist campaigns are exactly the same — no porn — even if their reasons for doing so are opposite to each other. Will the mass media be able to understand the differences in the arguments? I doubt it. For example, a campaign by university students against sexist student magazines was reported by the press as a prudish anti-sex morals campaign.

Finally, as with any commodity in short supply, a black market is bound to emerge which will make porn even more degraded and furtive and may even increase the demand for it. And it will still be available to those with money, who will never question why it is being banned. The real basis of sexism would remain untouched while the sex shops have their front windows smashed.

If the existence of porn is to be threatened, then it must be only part of a much wider campaign to alter sexist social relations. Then men with some knowledge of what sexism means might reflect on the implications of porn for the situation of women and consider not buying it or using it. The threat of a ban could become a form of consciousness-raising and could be more effective than an actual ban.

Gay Male Pornography

Although gay porn has many similar elements to heterosexual porn, there are differences that need to be examined. One kind of gay porn includes the slick commercial magazines. These are aimed primarily at middle-class gay men who have money to spare and who want to buy all manner of things befitting a “gay lifestyle” — much of it unnecessary. But many working class men who see themselves as homosexual also buy these magazines because it is through them that they find a very acceptable alternative to the only other limp-wristed image of homosexuals that they have seen in the past. This may go part of the way in explaining why many working class gay men become middle class in their behavior and attitudes if they get involved in the gay subculture. Therefore, I believe that these magazines cannot be dismissed so easily out of hand as their heterosexual equivalents because, although the context is clearly exploitative, the images presented are important to many gay men because they furnish evidence that gay male sexuality actually exists! I remember the very exciting feeling I got when I first saw one of these magazines before I came out. There I saw men kissing and holding and loving each other; something that I never thought possible as the mainstream culture manifests itself in overwhelmingly heterosexual and macho terms. It was proof of a homosexual community and it was through porn that I learned of its existence.

The opposite to this is a magazine called Straight to Hell: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts. It is published periodically (over 37 issues to date), has a circulation of over 3,000, costs $1 and is definitely not slick. It is printed by just one man in photo-offset on cheaply coloured paper. It has two types of articles. In the first type, the anonymous editor lists the crimes that straight men commit, sexually, in business and in politics. He sarcastically attacks their machismo and bashes unmercifully at their hypocricy and violence. They are “homo but not sexual,” professing love for the women they only use as trophies, hiding their fears of homosexuals in hatred of homosexuals.

The second part of the magazine consists of stories from readers who write in and explicitly describe sexual situations that they have been in and enjoyed. Probably some exaggeration does occur in the telling of these stories but it doesn’t seem to matter. The editor continually compares the activities of homosexuals and asks how you can feel S.T.H. dirty and sick in comparison to the “real filth from the straight world.” In an answer to a reader who complains about “too much politics” in S.T.H., the editor answers that he “must cater to both those who like to read obscenity (the political news) and to those who like inspiration (the sex news).”

But how inspiring are the stories? It’s difficult to pick out one that is representative, but an example follows:

INDIANA.

It was a very hot, humid night in northern Indiana. 3:00 A.M. and still 94°. And to top it off I was starving for a load of hot come. While walking the streets in search of some horny stud I came upon Jeff, Reggie, and Terry — “straight” rough trade dudes that I bought grass from once in a while. Reggie asked me if I’d like to take a ride with them and try some of his new pot. I hopped in the car and noticed that they are only wearing swimming suits….

By the time we got to the beach I was so high on pot and horny from being with the guys that I was slobbering. We went to a clearing. One of the guys told me to get down on my knees. Terry looked at the other two and said, “Hey man I gotta take a piss but there’s no toilet around. I’d sure hate to get this pretty sand all wet with my nasty piss.” Jeff said, “Man here’s our fuckin’ toilet right here.”

Is this liberating? It has been claimed that it offends and therefore threatens bourgeois morality because it redefines “sickness” and calls on us to celebrate sexual behavior as a mutual exploration of pleasure in the human body without reference to marriage, property or “social normality.” I question the strength of this claim because it ignores the question of what makes these types of sexual fantasies exciting and, more importantly, it doesn’t ask whether we should be challenging or attempting to change these fantasies.

But we can learn something about the nature of our fantasies by looking at the contradictions that are blatantly evident in S.T.H. itself. Most of the stories are written by gay men, but a large majority describe well-liked sexual experiences with the same straight men that the editor castigates in the rest of the magazine — the “straight rough trade dudes,” the sweaty hardhats on the construction site, the nice hunky married Italian guy from down the street. This is a dilemma that clearly confronts us as gay, male, middle-class socialists. We hate macho behavior and all its manifestations but like it as far as sex or at least sexual fantasy is concerned. S.T.H. is significantly sub-titled “Love and Hate for the American Straight.”

The class element of the stories cannot be ignored where middle class men are still fantasizing about working class straight lads. Why? Andrew Dvoisin gives his explanation in a Gay Sunshine article when he says that “each one wants what the other has: faggot class and cultural superiority on the one side; on the other, straight macho supremacy.” What possible links with feminism and socialism could this attitude have?

So, although it vaguely links sex and politics, S.T.H. does not have a vision of what structural changes are necessary to bring about a society that does not have an ideology that is anti-homosexual, anti-women and anti-children. Do readers even begin to see that sex has something to do with politics? S.T.H. is, as yet, crude propaganda for sexual tolerance and awareness but it takes us nowhere in our struggle against sexism and for socialism.

S.T.H., though, cannot be dismissed, because it does show us clearly what many gay men’s sexual fantasies are and these cannot be wished away. We may abhor them rationally but they continue to exist. Also, its importance, although not primarily ideological, is structural as it has set up a production and distribution system quite independent of commercial interests. This advance is not at all unimportant.

Objectification and the Socialist Morality

Sexual objectification is a concept and a reality that has come up very often in this article and is continually being discussed in feminist and gay men’s groups. In this final section, I want to examine it in more detail because it raises broader issues beyond pornography about a socialist morality and how men and women should form relationships with people of the same sex.

As I have said, one of the strongest arguments against porn is the feminists’ claim that it objectifies and therefore exploits women. It encourages men to think of women only as bodies and not as whole individuals. The gay subculture also stands continually accused of encouraging sexual objectification by putting stress on physical appearance and not on “getting to know people as people.”

Inherent in the argument when presented as above is, I believe, a moral implication about the way in which women and men should relate to each other; that is, as whole or complete individuals: their personalities, ambitions, thoughts, beliefs, etc., must be known before they can see each other as possible sex partners. Sex only belongs within a relationship built on a strong emotional base where people see each other as equal individuals.

To me, this argument has two implications.

First, it seems too close to the absolutist notion of sex that the conservatives have where they say that sex is only allowed within the context of marriage and that any form of sexuality outside of that framework is perverted or criminal or sad, somehow degrading of “the real thing.”

It can also become a denial of the erotic, an eroticism that, despite its problems, has only just been allowed to surface ever so slightly over the last 20 years. It denies that sex can be a number of different things and used in a variety of ways all of which have the potential of being non-exploitative and mutually enjoyable if there is an understanding of the meaning of the sex act to those who are involved. This means that sex can vary from a brief encounter initiated by an erotic interest in each other’s physical selves all the way to sex being used as the basis of a long-term monogamous relationship.

It is clear that this is much easier for a gay man to say. Women, who have been treated exclusively and dishonestly as sex objects, may find it difficult to understand the open and prominent place that sex, especially casual sex, plays in many gay men’s lives. Carl Wittman in A Gay Manifesto attempts to explain what sex means to us. “Sex is precisely what we are not supposed to have with each other. And to learn how to be open and good with each other sexually is part of our liberation…. Objectification of sex for us is something we choose to do among us, while for women it is imposed by their oppressors.”

A second implication of the argument is that objectification is inherently “bad” or “wrong.” But in our highly specialized society, we objectify people all the time. When we purchase goods, we make the sales clerk into an object to satisfy our needs. Marx did not refer to objectification as inherently bad but generally as man’s natural means of projecting himself through his productive activity into nature: the production of the worker. But in wage-labor (that is, labor in the capitalist mode of production), “the object that labor produces, its product, confronts it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.” The worker has no control over the created object because of the nature of the capitalist relations of production.

Can we in the same way see sexual objectification as not inherently bad in itself? Instead the problem could be seen as resting in the power that men have been given over women and the way in which that power is used in the daily contacts and relationships between men and women institutionalized as sexism in the structures of society. So, what is objectionable is not objectification itself but the power that exists in one person (the male) to determine the nature of the sexual and emotional relationship and retain control over it: in the family (husband/wife); in the advertising business (adman/nude women used to sell products); on the streets where men feel justified in whistling at women or even in raping them.

This view of objectification is summarized by Carl Wittman when he says that the use of human bodies as sex objects is legitimate (not harmful) only when it is reciprocal. Objectification to work must be open and frank. People are sexual objects, but they are also subjects, and are human beings who appreciate themselves as object and subject.

What is reflected in pornography is the unequal distribution of men’s power over women. Porn is a symptom and a reflection of a sexist society characterized by its anti-women bias and violence. This has to be the target of the attack, not the emphasis in some porn on the potential for joy in sexuality.

Good Looks

But this view of objectification, while admitting the power differential between men and women, ignores another form of power that enters into relationships with regards to differential physical attractiveness. Human beings in the sexual market place are evaluated according to their “exchange value” in the market, some being systematically denied opportunities for sexual behavior because of the unequal distribution of the socially defined marketable capacities. So even the “honest” objectification as put forward by Wittman may be seen as alienating because some may not even get the opportunity to objectify someone else even if it were to be on an equal basis.

A second criticism of Wittman’s approach is that it has the inherent assumption that both male and female sexuality inherently needs an object. As Freud says, there is a need for a detached object “from whom sexual attraction proceeds” (p. 45). This assumption ignores the argument that since men and women are socialized differently with respect to gender expectations, then there is the possibility that it is only men who need objects and that women may not need objects to get sexually excited. If this is true it might explain women’s objection to being used as an object when they, in return, do not receive any pleasure from a similar objectification of men. Evidence pointing to this might be given by the example whereby seeing more and more of the bodies of naked women in men’s porn mags was considered to be better and more exciting whereas women seem to have less need to see men copulating or with erections and may in fact be able to achieve sexual satisfaction without reference to an outside object or even an image. Kinsey reports that a majority of males (77 percent) were “aroused” by visual depiction of explicit sex while a majority of females (68 percent) were not aroused. Further, “females more often than males reported ‘disgust’ and ‘offence’.” (Brownmiller, p. 394)

Objectification then, as a concept, needs further clarification and explication before moral conclusions can be drawn. There needs to be continuing debate about the positive and negative aspects of objectification in porn specifically and in relationships generally.

At the present time in this society, a struggle is going on over pornography on two levels. The first is within capitalism itself where porn is consistent yet contradictory with dominant values. As a commodity, it has exchange value — that is, surplus value can be extracted from its production. But is also has a use value for its consumers that is contrary to some aspects of ruling class ideology with respect to sexual behavior.

Second, there is a struggle going on in our lives as socialists who may find certain aspects of porn exciting despite the fact that the images are sexist and involve exploitation that may carry over into the “real world.” The question remains, can we retain the erotic elements of sexual images and eliminate the sexist and exploitative elements? Can we wrench porn from its ideological moorings? Can we turn porn into art: that is, something that is Utopian, ideal and therefore anti-status quo? These questions must be tackled in our continuing struggle to integrate our political theory and practice into our personal lives: an evolution of a socialist morality.

Bibliography

M. Bronski, “What Does Soft Core Porn Really Mean to the Gay Male?” in Gay Community News, Boston, Jan. 28, 1978.

S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, Penguin, 1975.

A. Dvoisin, “A Personal View of Pornography,” in Gay Sunshine, No. 24.

S. Freud, On Sexuality, Penguin, 1977.

S. Marcus, The Other Victorians, Corgi, 1969.

J. Palmer and I. Manson, “Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short,” Unpublished roneo.

Straight to Hell is available by subscription at $1 per copy. Make checks payable to Cash and mail to: Box 982, Radio City Station, New York, NY 10019.

Nigel Thomas, Carol Sarler, Russell Southwood and Tony Nicholls, “The Sex Mags,” in The Leveller, No. 4.

Ruth Wallsgrove, “Pornography,” in Spare Rib, No. 33.

Margaret Walters, “Play Males,” in Spare Rib, No. 33.

Carl Wittman, Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, San Francisco, 1970.

This article ends with many questions and very few answers. The issues of socialism, morality and objectification are just beginning to be aired. More work must be done. In the formulation of these questions, I want to thank Andrew Hodges, John Marshall, Frank Pearce, Ken Plummer, Steve Smith and the Gay Left collective for their assistance.

Reprinted with permission from Gay Left, London, England

Old and Gay

Charley Shively

Growing old as a faggot is such a fearful topic that no one talks about it. Read virtually any gay liberation publication: most of the articles center on problems of youth and the graphics portray sleek virile bodies (usually white, anglo-saxon). In discussion groups or rap sessions, our first homosexual experience (“coming out”) usually preempts other topics. Straights likewise ignore the problems of older faggots. Many study the young homosexual and dismiss those over thirty-five as incurable. Typically, Irving Bieber concludes, such “patients” will probably “fail to achieve a heterosexual adaptation” (Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), p. 302). The gay reform (and revolutionary) movement holds out little more hope than the shrinks for any change in the older homosexual. At worst, we shudder and hurl epitaphs/epithets such as “dirty old man!” At our best, we have been silent.

We differ greatly, old and young faggots — alcohol versus drugs; closet versus coming out; conformity versus rebellion; joy versus despair — many marks of time separate us. And in the capitalist economy, nothing is worse than being marked with time, obsolescence and age. In 1893, the very gay Oscar Wilde wrote: “The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years” (A Woman of No Importance). In gay liberation, we have too often absorbed the prejudices of our society — slaves of the capitalist progress mythology — we have admired only youth and newness.

Because the “New Left” was new and vital in the sixties and because we were a part of it, our energies in gay liberation have been largely directed toward struggling with those calling them-selves the “New Left.” At Mayday, Miami, or just about any demonstration — we have had to fight to be included — although we were often as much a part of (if not more of) the movement than those heterosexuals embarassed by our presence. “The Freaking Faggot Revolution.”

In our absorption with problems in the “New Left,” we have neglected our “own people,” particularly those over thirty-five — those much more closeted, straight-jacketed and hurt than we have been — the faggots who ran the gauntlet before us — who have spent decade upon decade in merely surviving. Too many young faggots who have just come out remain naive about our survival problems. They grew up with silver spoons (instead of cocks) in their mouths — attending big universities with three meals a day on the college dining tables. They believe stereotypes about wealthy faggots — about Beacon Hill townhouses, executives, successful hairdressers, designers, writers, artists, et cetera. (Compare gentile fatasies about Jewish wealth.)

Not to downgrade in any way the achievements faggots have made — often against tremendous odds — but their success is exceptional. (Jackie Robinson, Buffy Ste. Marie, Sandy Koufax or Shirley Temple don’t make the “average” Black, American Indian, Jew or child feel they are well off — indeed, you feel worse contrasting your nothingness with their glory.) Most faggots grow old without any security at all. If you have inherited wealth (a Salton-stall, for instance), you might survive. But most faggots lack the advantages of birth. Black, Irish, Italian, Jewish and other oppressed, impoverished people tend to downgrade the faggots within their own community. And while otherwise oppressed, married heterosexuals can exploit one another and their children — or at least lean on them — but old faggots have no one to harm but themselves.

I remember a Black faggot (about forty-five or fifty) talking with a friend of mine (Black, gay and about eighteen). He said with fierceness and desperation in his voice: “There are wolves at the door, all the time, every minute of the day, they’re clawing away just waiting to get at you — you relax, just once — take it easy just one time, and they’re in, at your throat — and you’re dead, dead as can be.” He was trying to tell my friend not to be so irresponsible, so free — hanging around with me (I was only twenty then), not going to school, making it all the time with abandonment. He was saying, remember you’re going to become old with even fewer options — and Black people (especially Black faggots) don’t have that margin of freedom and survival others have (like white faggots).

We have struggled and worked with the Attica Brigade or the Miami Convention Coalition despite their sexism. But we have not similarly struggled as comrades with our gay brothers — often mired in despair, racism, sexism, disillusionment and class prejudice — particularly when over thirty.

We can forgive a Jerry Rubin or Eric Mann or Mark Rudd when they either ignore or insult faggots because we feel a duty to work with them and help them change. In the meantime, we dismiss Homophile-Mattachine males because they “simply don’t want to deal with changing the status quo around class and race.”

Because I believe sexism to be a primary contradiction I think we should change our priorities: we need as faggots to organize first around our oppression as faggots. And to seek alliances with lesbians and other women in fighting against the male supremacist hierarchy that underlies the capitalist, imperialist, racist ruling powers.

Age is a barrier to our organization; it is not a fundamental contradiction or difference among faggots. It is only a way straight male supremacists have used to divide us. Our energies and concern are deflected away from our own organization as faggots and instead are directed toward “working with” our oppressors. If we are divided between young and old, we will inevitably be the losers.

I feel this in a very personal way. I was born in 1937 and my lover of nearly eight years in 1925 (both of us would rather not publicize our age). My GLF friends (considerably younger) easily understand helping someone tripping, speeding, down or stoned or freaked out — but they have only outrage for Agamemnon (I use a pseudonymn) when he is drunk. Once Agamemnon came into a Fag Rag meeting in our apartment — storming drunk and rather obnoxious. Everyone tried to ignore him as usual, and when he left someone shouted, “Sieg Heil!” Agamemnon didn’t have to be told how my friends felt about him. As he said once when I was urging him to be more friendly: “How can I even talk to them? They don’t even speak to me; they treat me like I was a piece of shit.” Agamemnon was essentially right, not only about himself but about the movement — if you’re not young and with it, you’re a piece of shit. I played liberal and at the time was quiet (in part because I was uncertain — in the middle I saw truth on both sides), but to be honest in retrospect, I was afraid that if I spoke out in defense of Agamemnon, I would lose my vibrant and young friends.

Aging in the gay community generally does not reassure you that you are still worthwhile, loved, wanted or a human being. You become at best a problem to relate to; or to avoid; or to ignore; or someone to insult, hurt and degrade. I appreciate the honesty of someone I knew (he had once sucked me off on the Fenway but I don’t think he remembered it) who said, “I just could never go to bed with anyone over thirty.” Whether he knew my age or not (perhaps I looked younger), what he said made me feel shitty.

I’m not saying that the aged gay is the best person imaginable. There is reality to some of the “dirty old man” stereotypes, but it’s the same kind of reality as welfare mothers taking taxi-cabs to pick up surplus food. People rush to blame the victim for his or her fate. We will tolerate an older man so long as he is properly deferential, non-aggressive, solicitous, gentle and kind. Should he demonstrate the slightest degree of uppityness, aggression or self-assertion, we immediately cancel our toleration. A faggot friend told me the most repulsive thing about “dirty old men” to him was the way they stared at his crotch! He was essentially saying he could only tolerate them when they entirely repressed their sexuality; for younger people, he wouldn’t hesitate to show it hard. I share these values. Last summer I was raped by a man probably about twenty years or so older than myself and found the experience horrifying. Had the man been younger or more attractive I would’ve probably enjoyed it — or not minded so much.

Even if you are old and dignified and properly non-self-assertive, you won’t be loved very much. Indeed, you’ll be condemned for the very qualities that preserve you from being a “dirty old man.” You will be told that gay people can no longer be timid, shy, quiet, non-aggressive — you might even be asked, “Why don’t you pick up the gun?” And your lifestyle won’t be praised no matter what it is. If you’ve tried to be feminine, they will call you an “old auntie,” “ribbon clerk,” or “piss elegant.” Embroidery, sewing, cooking, houseplants, cats, dogs, knitting, crocheting and such housewifey activities are chic for the young faggot — but I’ve never heard anyone praise an “old queen” for these things. Or if you try to pass, you’ll be attacked for your “straight identification.” Your suit and tie will disqualify you immediately for anything but contempt; and if you wear the latest young men’s clothing, you’ll be laughed at for trying to look young (and perhaps condemned as well for not looking more effeminate).

Gays share some of the values about age with the courts and police. It is illegal for someone under age to have sexual relations with someone over age. In court, there are no extenuating circumstances — the guilt is prima facie with the older person. He is presumed to be the aggressor. If a young homosexual is killed, even in the Fenway Rose Garden as an example, the police search down the murderers almost as industriously as they would for a heterosexual victim. But much less concern is shown for an older homosexual — especially if his assailant be a younger person. Generally just bringing up the issue of sexuality is enough to get the murder charges dismissed. (“Dirty old man, he deserved what he got!”) I believe the number of cases of older homosexuals being murdered is much higher than anyone realizes. Family, friends and relatives usually conspire to hush up such details; the papers and police cooperate; and as a result, everyone (including gay liberationists) thinks being a closet homosexual is a lot safer than it is. I know a friend (he was about 50) who died this way: a “guest” from New Jersey was visiting, and in the night the apartment was burned out and the “guest” disappeared. The case was marked down as a drunk falling asleep in bed with a cigarette, but it wasn’t a cigarette he was in bed with.

Both young heterosexual males and young faggots presume that the only reason sexual relations might occur between a young and old man is for some money or other consideration. Both faggot and heterosexual youth assume that older homosexuals are fair game for attack, robbery, blackmail and general abuse. And even where there is sex, young faggots and straights respond about the same to older men: they just lie there and get their cocks sucked. Neither would want to “go down on,” to kiss or to live voluntarily with the older man. Generally only desperation (horniness, poverty, a rainy night, the need for a ride) can bring the young to sleep with their elders.

As with so many of our “problems,” victims suffer not only from external victimization but equally from internal self-contempt and hatred. We really believe somehow that there is something dirty, contemptible and mean about being older. We lie about our ages (in tea-rooms, we slip notes to each other and one of the first questions is “how old are you?” I once answered “75,” although I’m not that old now.)

As we grow older we continue to slide up the line between “young” and “old.” A really young faggot usually tries to look and act older because of the drinking and age of consent laws. But most of us try desperately to look younger than we are. As we age, we resort to a whole array of hair pieces, contact lenses, sprays, sun lamps, oils and other artifices to look younger. We run after the latest fashion of the young consumer market (whether in clothing, music, or ideas) hoping to find some magic fountain of youth. Of course, we share this age oppression with women — another example among many of the ways in which our liberation and women’s liberation are pieces of a whole struggle against sexism.

The worst oppression we face is the inability we have to love others of our age and older. Older gays just aren’t happy with each other’s company generally — not that we should be isolated in reservations or concentration camps (“old age homes”), but we should be able to enjoy each other’s company more than we do. Or if we are willing to share our time and lives with older homosexuals, we often draw a strict line between sex and company, preferring sex with young strangers (often anonymous) and camaraderie with others our own age. Couples over thirty are an exception, and they have usually met before one or both became thirty.

All of this might not interest you now if you are under thirty, but it should — because as the years pass, you too will become older. Unlike the oppressions of other “minority” or “ethnic” groups, everyone has an opportunity to become old. It’s either that or suicide. If you’re white, you can escape the oppression of Black people; if you are a man, you can escape women’s oppressions; if you are a heterosexual, you can escape gay oppression. But you can’t escape getting old, and in Amerika it’s no fun — particularly if you are a faggot.

Reprinted with permission from Fag Rag, Boston, Massachusetts

Happy Families?
Paedophilia Examined

Gay Left Collective

The Challenge

It is striking that over the past two or three years conservative moral anxiety throughout the advanced capitalist countries has switched from homosexuality in general to sexual relationships between adults and young people. Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexual campaign began as a crusade to “Save Our Children”; the Body Politic in Canada was raided following an issue on paedophilia; in France and elsewhere a moral panic has been stirred up over the issue of child pornography and “exploitation.” And in Britain this has lead to the rapid passage through Parliament of a restrictive Child Pornography Bill which received no scrutiny and very little principled libertarian opposition from lawmakers. Even the recent Gay News trial had as a significant undercurrent the issue of paedophilia, a topic and stigma with which the prosecution made strenuous efforts to tar Gay News. The attacks on lesbian parenthood are obviously related to similar questions, while those organizations which counsel young homosexuals and help them to meet one another seem to be coming under increased surveillance.

There has, it seems, been a clear extension of concern from adult male homosexual behavior, which dominated debates of the ’50s and ’60s following the Wolfenden Report, to the question of paedophilia and childhood. In 1952 the Sunday Pictorial published a series of articles on adult homosexuality called “Evil Men.” By 1972 “The Vilest Men in Britain” (Sunday People, May 25, 1975) were members of the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) and the News of the World in 1978 (June 11) enjoined the members of PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) to “Keep Your Hands Off Our Children: We expose the truth about this pack of perverts.” “Child molesters” and “exploiters of children” are the new social monsters.

Why is this so? Realistically, the moral right wing cannot get much support out of campaigning against homosexuality as such. But they can hope to build up a new moral consensus around the issue of protecting childhood, particularly in the context of the current political emphasis on the family. Adult homosexuals can be dismissed as unfortunate historical deviations to be pitied, with all efforts being put into preventing any more children from “falling” into such a life. Here they can build out from their traditional evangelical core, which rejects all sex outside of marriage, building a coalition with various people from disillusioned libertarians to confused progressives.

Moral reactionaries can serve their cause better by building alliances on easy issues such as the protection of childhood. Their success in pushing through the Child Pornography Act in Britain is one proof of this. At the same time, gay opposition is minimized because of the wish to dissociate ourselves from the traditional public image of being “dirty old men.” A moral panic can be drummed up over childhood because it is an area of such easy controversy. If, as bourgeois morality informs us, “the child is the father of the man,” then it is of major concern to a conservative stratum that children are protected, cossetted and channeled in the right direction — towards heterosexual familial patterns. We have all been brought up from infancy in such patterns, and know the scars we suffer in endeavoring to emerge with our own gay identities. Childhood is a battlefield that gay militants have to be concerned with. And to that degree, the moral Right is correct. Homosexuals are a threat; we can, in their language, “corrupt.” Gay socialists cannot afford to avoid these issues.

Paedophiles, Parents and Power

The question of paedophilia raises a multitude of issues, from those of simple civil rights to matters of sexual theory. As socialists we must join with other libertarians in defending the right of paedophiles to associate and organize to raise social awareness about the issue without harassment from press or police, or violence from the right.

The Gay Left Collective, like many others in the gay movement, has had many discussions about paedophilia. We do not feel it would be a justified position to discuss adult/child sexual relationships simply on libertarian grounds. It is no good merely to say, people feel like that, feeling is valid, let it all happen, right on. We know that feelings are socially constructed and we must view all feelings with great suspicion and scrutiny.

There is an argument that has developed from some quarters of the gay movement and the left which suggests that children are sexual beings like adults; and that since they are oppressed by parents, teachers, etc., and no paedophile experience could be any more harmful, paedophile relationships are therefore all right. This is a false and idealist argument. It likens childhood sexuality to the experiences of adult sexuality, an equation that cannot be made as children cannot be read back as small adults. Paedophile relationships raise the question of power too sharply for us to treat them glibly. A radical approach to the question can only come through the interrogation of two areas:

a) the question of the dominance in our culture of certain categories of sexuality, of which “homosexuality” and “paedophilia” are examples. Is it, in other words, valid to think through the questions of sexuality as if these are pre-given, determined and firm? Do they clearly enough embrace the varieties of behaviors which they seek to pull together within rigid definitions?

b) the question of childhood sexuality specifically, the real focus of the debate and the key to the issue. Conservative thought dismisses any idea of childhood sexual feelings and experiences, and much public opinion is reticent in acknowledging their existence. At the other extreme are those who see childhood sexual feelings as being identical to adult ones. Both are wrong. We began our own discussion of this area with Freud’s essays on children’s sexuality. Whatever the limitations of Freud’s categories, they are valuable in indicating the existence and diversity of childhood sexuality. But our present limited knowledge of children’s sexual development still makes discussion of paedophile relations very difficult.

What is Paedophilia?

One definition would embrace all sexual activities between “adults” and those under the age of consent. In countries like ours, however, where the age of consent for male homosexuals is so high (21), such a definition would be meaningless. An age of consent, in theory at least, would seem to be meaningful only in the context of an entry into social and sexual maturity, which in turn suggests a relationship to puberty. The problem is that puberty is a process rather than a particular age, occurring roughly between the ages of eleven and fourteen, though individuals differ greatly in their physical and emotional development at this time. Together with the sexual development of the body puberty implies a growing awareness of the social world, particularly through greater contact with peers and older children as sources of education and experience. Most of the Gay Left Collective recognize that puberty is a useful framework. For convenience we define a paedophile as someone who is emotionally and sexually attracted toward children, that is, toward pre-pubertal people.

In their pamphlet Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) defines it as “sexual love directed towards children,” and they refer to “children,” “both in pre-puberty and early adolescence.” In practice, they state that the age group that attracts paedophiles is “usually somewhere in the 8-15 range.” From our definition it is clear that we find this equation of adolescence and childhood confusing. Another issue with which we have to deal is that sexual/emotional relations between adults and children need not be between members of the same sex. In fact the majority of such relationships are heterosexual, and in practice, between heterosexual men and young girls, usually in the context of the family. But it also true that the (relatively tiny) number of people who have identified themselves as paedophiles are usually male and boy lovers. This already suggests the complexity of the issue: a yawning distinction between behavior and identity immediately appears. But once we recognize the very different context in which heterosexual and homosexual sexual relations take place, and the traditional invisibility of female sexuality, the “yawning distinction” becomes yet another example of the inequalities of conventional roles and relationships. The Collective feels that male heterosexual and homosexual paedophilia raise different questions.

The whole imagery of adult/child relationships is fraught with contradictions which reveal the symbolic differentiations between men and women, adults and children in our society. Whereas a male homosexual is invariably seen as a potential child molester, and a lesbian paedophile identity is socially non-existent because it presupposes an autonomous female sexual identity, the image of an older woman initiating young men fits in with traditional male fantasies of woman. At the same time the deflowering of the young virgin has a special place in male mythology. Given these factors and conditions, it is not surprising that the less common forms of adult/child relationships, involving homosexuality, receive wider publicity and hostility than the much more common heterosexual pattern. And it is for this reason that a distinct male paedophile identity emerges within the range of homosexualities.

Paedophilia centrally touches on the question of homosexuality precisely because of the question of “corruption.” The terror of homosexuals corrupting minors into their way of life has been a sub-text of opposition to adult homosexuality at least since the 19th century, and behind it of course has been the terror of homosexuality. In certain ways homosexuality greatly overlaps with the heterosexual norm; i.e., loving relations of “equals,” living in types of relationships different from but not alien to heterosexuals. Children have been seen as needing protection from going down the homosexual road because of the potent challenge it poses to the family, and to protect them a whole battery of ideological devices have been employed. The major one has been the notion of corruption; of forcibly diverting the innocent child from the paths of righteousness to those of deviance. The use of this imputation has been an important method of control of adult homosexuality. We can already see that the campaigns such as those of Anita Bryant and Mary Whitehouse, ostensibly for the protection of children, become vehicles for assaults on all lesbians and gay men.

The Homosexual Category

The category of the “homosexual” is, as we have argued before, a historical creation, a cultural attempt to describe and control a variety of sexual behaviors between members of the same sex. The emergence of love or sexual desire by one person for another is pretty near universal. The attempt to describe this within rigid categories is relatively new, and did not take off dramatically until the late 19th century. The definitions of homosexuality have varied during the last hundred years; its origins variously described (genetic, environmental, “corruption”); its manifestations outlined (abnormal sized bottoms, wide hips, inability to whistle); its likely effect delineated (unhappiness, suicide). But those thus defined have fought back. We have created our own sense of identity or identities; we have begun to assert and impose our own sense of ourselves, our own definitions (“gay”). The gay movements throughout the West, the great sub-cultural expansions, are all part of this process of self-definition. But even today a high proportion of those who engage in some forms of homosexual activity (e.g., in public lavatories) do not define themselves as gay. And many would fall into the cultural category of “heterosexual” by their usual patterns of behavior (marriage, etc.).

These cultural categories are, in other words, arbitrary, only partially describing what they are supposed to, and are artificial divisions of sexual desire. They have a reality because they have social institutions backing them (the family, the law, medicine, psychiatry) and because they set the parameters within which we set out to live our various lives. But even for those of us who define ourselves as gay there is no essential identity, no single identifying pattern of behavior. There is not a single “homosexuality” but various “homosexualities.” It is politically vital for gay people to organize to defend our right to our own sexualities, but we should be clear that a radical perspective does not mean defending a gay ethnicity (the equivalent of a national or racial identity). It means defending the validity of homosexuality and, beyond that, the many-faceted nature of sexuality in general. It is not so much an oppressed minority that the gay movement is about as an oppressed sexuality. Freedom for gay people will not come simply when we have better facilities, freedom to marry or inherit property; it will develop as rigid cultural categories are broken down. It is a paradox that the only way for this to happen is through using these categories, organizing within them and bursting their bonds.

The Paedophile Category

Paedophilia, like homosexual behavior, has existed universally, and has been variously treated in different societies. “Boy Love” particularly has often played an important and even socially approved role in some cultures — e.g., pedagogic relationships in Ancient Greece and puberty rites in various societies. In the 19th century it was possible even in Britain to have sentimental and even physical contact with children without social disapproval. During the past century the category of the corruptor emerged, so that today almost any non-familial contact between adult and child can become suspect. Partly as a defensive measure, paedophiles themselves have begun in recent years to assert their identity, a few openly in organizations such as PIE and other equivalents in Europe and America. But just as there is little uniformity in adult homosexual behavior, there is also little for paedophiles. Paedophilia in many cases is a matter of identity rather than actual sexual activity, and many of those adults who have sexual experiences with children would not in fact identify themselves as paedophiles. For instance, a German survey suggested that among 200 cases of men sentenced for indecent assault on children “there was not even a single one preferring children to adult partners.” (Quoted in Childhood Rights, Vol. 1, No. 2, published by PIE.)

Just as assault or rape by a man on a woman cannot be defended, so no paedophile would defend assault or rape of children, or any alleviation of laws relating to these. Nor would they approve of the conscious use of power to “persuade” children. (PIE, for instance, apparently disapproves of parent/child incest.) The issue then comes down to the question of an affectionate relationship between a child and an adult which involves sex.

Three issues immmediately emerge: first, the legitimacy of childhood sexuality; secondly, the adult fetishization of a particular age group; and thirdly, the changing meaning and significances given to different parts of the body throughout an individual’s life. The problem in discussing paedophile sexual relationships revolves around the prioritization of certain parts of the body along adult lines in relations with pre-pubertal children who may not have such priorities. Can paedophile relationships ever be justified, and what should the attitude of socialists and feminists be to them?

Some issues seem fairly clear. It seems unlikely that youthful sexual activity rigidly determines later orientation (object choice and emotional structuring seem to take place much earlier in life), and we see a homosexual choice as equally valid as a heterosexual one. We must reject the dominant idea that it is an issue whether a child is influenced into a homosexual rather than a heterosexual life. We must demystify sex. The notion that sex is the great secret, the ultimate mystery, is at the root of the worship of childhood innocence. It is the puritans who elevate sex into the embodiment of holiness. We should argue for sex as pleasure, not sacrament. If it is pleasurable, on what grounds can we deny it? We must also recognize that it is often the young person who initiates sexual activity. It is the intrusion of the law or panic-stricken parents which often causes misery and guilt in the child in a caring paedophile relationship rather than the relationship itself.

But of course there are difficulties. There are practical questions such as potential early pregnancy in girls, and the problems connected with venereal disease. A more rational attitude in society towards contraception, a realistic attitude toward VD and better sex education would help. But it still leaves the question as to whether children have the emotional resources to deal with paedophile relationships and the emotional crises that can happen. It is important to stress that the paedophile issue is not one of molestation. No one can defend sexual violence in any situation in which one party is unwilling. It is in a crucial sense an issue of consent — an appallingly difficult concept to define in this particular context. This raises two related issues. In the first place, “consent” has different meanings for children and for adults and takes different forms. And secondly, specific sexual acts have different meanings, and a specific sexual act will have a different meaning for the adult and the young person. In this context what does it mean for a “child” to “consent” to “sex” with an “adult”?

Fundamentally, these are issues of disparity of experience, needs, desires, physical potentialities, emotional resources, sense of responsibility, awareness of the consequences of one’s actions, and above all, power between adults and children. This is the crux of most opposition by feminists and gay socialists to paedophilia.

Childhoods

We must recognize that “childhood” is itself a historical category, and like other cultural categories we have mentioned, is a fairly recent one (its evolution is traced in Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Aries). Only since the 18th century have we reified the position of young people into our particular embodiments of “innocence.” The intervention by the State to “protect” children often flowed from economic and political pressures, leading to laws that controlled child labor and extended the period of schooling, for example. But it was also tied to concern with the family, and so laws controlling prostitution and homosexuality contained age of consent regulations. This all aided in the construction of the longer period of “childhood” we know today. Emotional relationships have been largely confined within the family and the independence of the young has been seen as a threat.

Only since the last century have we so paradoxically both denied the existence of childhood sexuality and been preoccupied with curbing its manifestations, such as childhood masturbation and sexual games. Even today, while our moralists rush to protect children, the capitalist system they support constantly incites sexuality (including childhood sexuality) at all levels to sell its wares. But people will say that there is a difference between a child having sexual experiences with someone of the same age and having them with a more experienced, potentially exploitative adult. There probably is, but how is this difference to be recognized? Should a line be drawn, and, if it is, how should it be enforced? A legal age of consent is an arbitrary fiction. Emotional ages vary and someone of 10 might be more able to “consent” than someone of 16. An age of consent in law does not prevent the sexual activity from taking place; and it serves to perpetuate the myth that most, if not all, adults can and always do “consent.”

Sexual expression between adults and children need not be harmful, and so it cannot be condemned just because it takes place. But it is problematical because it raises issues of disparities of power. How can we safeguard the child’s right to consent? In Questions and Answers PIE answers this question in four ways:

a) by suggesting that we overdramatize the question of moral choice involved in accepting a pleasurable act. “All that matters is whether the act is pleasurable.”

b) the child is quite capable, from infancy, of showing reluctance. “If the child seems puzzled or hesitant, rather than relaxed and cheerful, he [the adult] should assume that he hasn’t [gotten the child’s consent].”

c) the best way to encourage choice is by encouraging different attitudes to sex. “A healthier attitude would make it easier for the child to speak up, without feeling embarrassed about it.”

d) if the adult persists and enforces his will on the child, “the adult should then be liable to legal action and social condemnation.” It seems to us that (a) and (b) are vague and circular. Enjoyment is not necessarily a sign of having consented (an argument often used against raped women), and it is not a justification in itself for accepting a particular act. One may be hesitant but consenting. An adult can manipulate consent almost unconsciously.

Points (c) and (d) are the keys but they need to be closely defined. This means that two strategies will need to be developed and discussed in the gay movement. First, we need to be clearer about the implications of using legal action. We need to find means of protecting young people’s rights which do not patronize, introduce the arbitrariness of an age of consent, or destroy with a blunderbuss.

At present we have a situation in which adults have supreme power over children — economic, physical, intellectual and emotional. So it is at least problematical whether in this situation relationships of some equality can be formed which involve sexual expression. In an ideal situation, in which relationships took place in the context of mutual agreement and without major social consequences for both parties, this may be possible. But some paedophiles stress that the sort of relationships they want with children can take place in the existing framework.

However, we have to take account of the real social situation in which we live, of the vulnerability of children and the relatively effortless way in which adults can manipulate in pursuing their desires to the point of ignoring the interests, wishes and feelings of children. Children may not be equipped, either experientially or physically, for adult-defined sexuality. Children are very sensual and enjoy physical contact, but they may not have the same conceptual categories as adults about sex. With children’s autonomy and awareness at such a low level, their inability to say no should not necessarily be taken as agreement. For this reason it would seem that paedophile relationships are likely to be unequal, though in this they only parallel other adult/child relationships in our society.

To sum up this point, it would appear that the criteria exist for recognizing the validity of relationships when there is some approximation of meaning. This does not imply identity of age or interest, but it does imply an ability on the part of the child to recognize some of the significance in social and sexual terms of her/his actions. We are inclined to believe that this does not usually happen before puberty. The problem becomes, then, how do we socially recognize this?

In the present climate some members of the Collective support proposals that the “age of consent” should be reduced to 14 as the only realistic possibility, and that this age should be enforced outside of criminal law in special children’s courts. These courts would deal with all sorts of children’s rights outside the bureaucratic disaster of present legal interventions in this area.

Other members of the Collective, believing that any age of consent is unjust and unworkable, want the repeal of all legislation relating to the age of consent in the field of sexuality. Offenses would be considered on the basis of the use of violence, force or pressure rather than an arbitrary age. The concept of consent would have to be used on a pragmatic basis, each case being judged on its particular circumstances rather than within the straitjacket of present legislation. This would mean removing criminal sanctions from non-violent sexual activity while providing the maximum social means for protecting the child. In this situation the responsibility of paedophiles would have a major part to play.

Care and Control

As a long-term issue we have to debate the whole question of changing attitudes toward sexuality. We can all agree that we need better sex education, advice on contraception and VD, etc. But how do we fundamentally transform social mores? How do we ensure that in the end the young person is allowed to grow at his or her own pace, untrammeled by over-rigid categorization of childhood, protected from abuses of power, and yet able to grow in caring relationships with other (perhaps older) people?

Part of the difficulty is in the way we have defined and constructed the problems. If we ask, “how can we safeguard the child’s right to consent?” we are already relegating to second place, if not totally ignoring, the ability of the child to safeguard that right for himself or herself. At present we find ourselves as third parties entering into a dialogue between unequal sides. The dialogue is one-sided because the children involved or potentially involved are not seen or felt capable of presenting their own case. In intervening, moral crusaders, and even people like ourselves, may serve not to decrease the power imbalance but to perpetuate it by totally excluding children from the debate. Adults are responsible for recognizing the limitations of children’s ability to be responsible for themselves and for acting accordingly. But children still need to gain more autonomy within new social relations in which adult responsibility is not synonymous with parental authority. An important step towards this would be the strengthening of organizations such as the the National Union of School Students and School Kids Against the Nazis. It is there, as well as in the sphere of adult life, that issues such as children’s sexuality and their rights should be discussed and fostered.

It is paradoxical that it is in the area of sexuality that there is so much uproar about the power imbalance between adults and children. Where is the debate around the gross economic differences between adults and children, the intellectual and physical advantages adults have? All of these can be and are used to exploit and “corrupt” children. It is paradoxical because it is in the sphere of sexual/physical pleasure that children could have the relatively lesser disadvantage. It is the one currency of social relationships that children are best versed in — we operate on the “pleasure principle” from birth. We do not deny that even on this level there are difficulties. But it is crucial that the debate has centered on child sexuality to the exclusion of other aspects of adult/child relations. What we must avoid is a totally “adult-centered” solution.

Reprinted with permission from Gay Left, London, England

Childhood Sexuality
and Paedophilia

Jamie Gough

The editorial on paedophilia in Gay Left was a welcome opening up of the discussion in the left press of a previously taboo subject. However, it does not seem to me, overall, to provide a good framework for the discussion. In this article, I will try to sketch an alternative.

The Oppression of Children as a Revolutionary Question

I think that the starting point for the discussion should be a historical materialist analysis of the social oppression of children, and its contradictions; and the perspective that this opens up for the liberation of children.

In the peasant and early petit bourgeois family the child was put to work at the earliest possible age in order to contribute to the collective or private production that the family was engaged in, but work was carried out under the discipline and violence of the father. In the development of industrial capitalism in England, children were increasingly used in factory production, gradually coming under the direct discipline of the capitalist. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, the gradual rise in the real wage, the exhaustion of the reserve army in the countryside, together with a certain pressure from (adult male) working class organization, meant the removal of children from the workforce. In the latter part of the century, the slackening rate of accumulation produced a parallel decrease in the involvement of women in industrial wage labor. This allowed the re-appearance of the form of the petit bourgeois family out of the decay into which it had fallen during a hundred years of frenzied accumulation. Backed up by an extension of schooling, this structure could meet the need of capital for a more skilled, disciplined and healthier labor force. Thus the creation of the new role for children, the creation of modern “childhood,” coincided with a qualitative intensification of the definition of women as wives and mothers.

By the late nineteenth century the productivity of labor was such that it was technically perfectly possible for the family to begin to wither away, for housework and child care to become a social task, and for the subordination of children to their parents to become obsolete. Only capitalist social relations, with their tendency to privatize responsibility, to atomize the working class, and to keep down the cost of reproducing labor power, prevented this from occurring. From then on, there was a latent possibility of children’s liberation, which could therefore become a political question.

The moral of this is that the oppression of children is not the result of some abstract power of adults over children deriving from their difference in age, strength or social experience, but is a limited historical phenomenon. Moreover, it is now rooted in capitalist social relations. The liberation of children is thus inseparable for the achievement of socialism.

Unfortunately, this is an aspect of the construction of socialism that has received little discussion to date. But some outlines are fairly clear. Children would not be tied, whether legally or socially, to their biological parents, and parents would no longer have the responsibility for the economic maintenance and social care of their children. Rather, this would be the responsibility of the whole community. This does not mean that children would be in nurseries twenty-four hours a day (as some feminist and socialist writing sometimes tends to imply). Children could be integrated into communal households where they could develop stable relationships with a variety of adults, and where they could choose which adults they wanted to be with. This would lay the basis for attempting to progressively overcome the separation of children and youth from the major social, economic and political institutions of “adult society.” Thus, schooling would no longer be the confinement of children in the artificial world of abstract learning, safely away from the world that this learning is supposed to reflect. The struggle for the liberation of children would thus involve not only the moment of separation, of the autonomy of children, but also the moment of integration, of superceding the divide between adult and childhood social institutions.

The removal of the authority of adults over children, and the special emotional relationships that children are compelled to have with their parents, together with the possibilities of greater autonomy and privacy of children, would allow enormously increased scope for children’s sexuality. This is very obviously the case for sexual relations between children. The general changes already outlined imply also a completely different framework for sexual relations between children and adults. First, the involvement of children in adult society will mean that, while children cannot have the same experience as adults, they need not be systematically deprived of an understanding of adults, as at present. Relations between adults and children, including sexual ones, could then be on a much more equal basis. Secondly, within the households or communities of which they are a part, children will have a much greater ability to shape their relationships with the adults than they presently have within the nuclear family.

A third important change will result from the increasing role of men in looking after children in nurseries and “at home.” Because of the specific role of women in the care of children, women are allowed and, within certain bounds, encouraged to have relationships with children, particularly their own, which are very physical and sexual. (The limits of this would seem to be that when women have relationships with young people that are sexual in adult terms, they are regarded not so much as corrupters of youth but as neurotic.) It is for this reason, as well as the general denial of women’s sexuality, that women are very seldom considered as paedophiles or capable of having paedophile relationships. An increasing responsibility of men for child care will mean increasingly physical relationships between men and children, thus putting into question the distinction between men and women in this respect. It will also mean that the sexuality of women itself will no longer be denied by the very process of its compulsive focusing on children.

The intertwined process of children’s and women’s liberation would therefore inevitably mean a widening of sexual relationships between adults and children. This would, in fact, seem to undermine the existence of paedophiles as a separate group of people. And this change would be inseparable from changes in the sexual identities of (adult) women and men.

Puberty

In the context of sexual relations, the definition of “child” is usually taken (at least among liberals and leftists) as being those before puberty. What marks out puberty, in the first place, is the ability to participate in reproductive sex. While this is a biological given, the importance attached to puberty is socially constructed. The possibility of creating and rearing children, and the social relations within which this takes place, remain the core of the family structure and the central sexual-political question. The “problem” of puberty, presenting itself as the difference of pre- and post-puberty sexuality, is in fact a political, not a natural one. This point is missed in the editorial. It describes puberty as “the entry into social and sexual maturity…. Together with the sexual development of the body, it implies a growing awareness of the social world. …” This definition slides blandly from biology to the social. On this basis, a natural gulf between child and adult sexuality is constructed, one that in itself makes paedophile relationships “invalid”: “The criteria exist for recognizing the validity of relationships when there is some approximation of meaning… We are inclined to believe that this does not usually happen before puberty.” This is a central argument of the editorial, but the criterion for “validity” (oppressiveness?) seems to me arbitrary and in fact absurd. It is certainly the case that a sexual relationship between an adult and a child will have a different, socially defined meaning within the life of each. As we have already seen, this meaning is likely to be very different under socialism; but it will still be there. But there is also a systematically different meaning in, for example, sexual relationships between adult men and women, and in non-sexual relations between adults and children. Are these, too, “invalid”?

A more substantial problem is that of the degree of understanding of the meaning of the relationship for the other. We have already seen how society mystifies paedophile relations for both adults and children. The understanding in each case will vary enormously, depending on the individuals. But this is in any case not a firm foundation on which to legislate, either literally or morally.

Consent

The real problem is not one of puberty, or of meanings, but of power to coerce. Here again, the editorial takes a rather naturalistic view: “‘Consent’ has different meanings for children and adults.” In the sense that children express consent in different ways, and have different social opportunities to consent, this is true. For instance, in some situations children will be afraid to express disapproval of what adults do; in others they will express disapproval directly where adults would be embarrassed to do so, or be unable to conceal their feelings. But what appears to be meant is that our (adult) conception of consenting simply does not apply to children.

I think that this is simply the conventional view, which is at the center of the oppression of children, that children do not and cannot know their own minds. The point here is not at all to understate the social power of adults to manipulate children. But precisely because that power is social, it has cracks in it. Only the most oppressed children are really unable to show to adults their consent for or against things that they do with those adults, whether sexual or not. Children can, and even now do, seek out and find things that correspond partially to their needs. There are sexual relationships between adults and children to which the children manifestly consent, for instance where they go to great length to continue the relationship, or where they have actually initiated it. In concrete instances, the question of consent cannot be judged a priori. All forms of social power contain contradictions; if they did not, there would not only be no possibility of revolution, there would be no possibility of even thinking of one’s own oppression.

The State and the Law

But what of the use by adults, this side of socialism, of their power to coerce children? Does this not require an age of consent in the law at least for now?

First, it is necessary to point out how little the law does to protect children from harassment. For instance, by far the most common form of sexual coercion of children is of a girl by her father. But the girl is effectively prevented even from going to the police, not only by the fear of moral blackmail from the father, but because the result would simply be for her to be taken into care, that is, imprisoned.

In fact, the law not only does not protect, it exacerbates the problem. There is, of course, a whole battery of legislation that effectively makes children and young people the prisoner and possession of their parents. But the age of consent law plays a particularly important role within this. First, it implies that children do not have any “real” sexuality (and conversely, that only reproductive sexuality is “the real thing”).

But children’s sexuality is not simply non-existent — it is also dangerous! The law implies that children are not really capable of consenting in an area where their strongest feelings are involved, and by extension, in all areas which are of greatest importance to the child itself. Secondly, the early age of consent legislation was seen at the time of its passage as being a way of emphasizing the importance of male protection to women: girls would be protected from men, especially at work, up to the age of sixteen, when they would require the “protection” of a husband. This moral still has force today.

Third, the law prevents people under the age of consent from obtaining contraception and abortion, since they could only want these things for illegal acts. Fourth, the law mystifies sex to children. “Sex education,” even at its best, does not, and cannot at the moment, tell children anything about their own sexuality. What it tells them about adult sexuality is totally abstract, since if this were portrayed concretely it would imply a real exposure of children to it, a sort of paedophilia-in-thought. All this actually makes it much harder for a child to discuss a sexual relationship with an adult that it may have or have had, because it is dealing with something which has been rendered mysterious and which seems to be a cause for shame. This, of course, increases the possibility of exploitation. Finally, the actual application of the law terrorizes children. The police use all the powers at their command to extort “confessions”; and the court proceedings teach the children that they have been involved in something dirty, whether, or not that was their estimation at the time.

The law, and the court cases that the press goes to such lengths to dramatize, are thus a very important part of the way in which children’s continued subordination is ensured. It is therefore nonsensical to argue on the one hand for measures to liberate children, and on the other to support their continued “protection” by the law of the age of consent. What is necessary at the level of the law is a prohibition of assault or demonstrable coercion.

We should be clear, however, what the limitations of such a change in the law would be if not accompanied by the wider social process of the liberation of children discussed earlier. Only a complete change in the social position of children can effectively prevent their sexual coercion by adults. The solution of the editorial here is hopelessly inadequate and liberal: it proposes “providing the maximum social means of protecting the child. In this situation the responsibility of paedophiles would have a major part to play” (my emphasis).

Moreover, under the present form of the state, it is guaranteed that in the actual application of the law nothing would change. In cases in which the child has consented, the police, judiciary, and in many cases the parents would do everything to ensure that the “child molester” was convicted. The state apparatus would still be dominated by a class that had an interest in the perpetuation of children’s oppression. The editorial, however, argues that an age of consent of fourteen might “be enforced outside of criminal law [?] in special children’s courts which would deal with all sorts of children’s rights outside the bureaucratic disaster of present legal interventions in this area.” The problem, though, is not bureaucracy, but the class nature of the state. Once again, the question of child sexuality points to the need for a socialist revolution.

This is not at all to say, though, that a campaign against the age of consent law is not important. A campaign led by young people themselves would be a very sharp way of challenging the whole reactionary ideology that surrounds child sexuality. It is never too soon to start to do this!

Conclusion

I have argued that it is vital to see this issue in its class context, to see its place in the contradictory structures of society as a whole and its relation to the power of the ruling class. Seen in this way, it is evident that the questions of child sexuality and paedophilia cannot be solved except by a massive social and political struggle. This is in the first place the struggle of young people themselves, whose rebellion has made child sexuality a political issue.

The oppression of children and young people, and in a secondary way, that of paedophiles, is a cruel oppression, and the struggle against it cannot be “managed” or postponed.

Reprinted with permission from Gay Left, London, England

I.I.

Why Marxism?

Gay Left Collective

Since the early 1970s there has been a widespread movement towards Marxism amongst feminists, gay liberationists and others who participated in the post-1968 would-be revolutionary euphoria. Many individuals joined established socialist groupings. Others have contributed to the creation of a socialist current in the women’s movement and the gay movement. This move towards Marxism implied a rejection of the spontaneist and counter-cultural stress of the early sexual liberation movements and a search for a politics that could more effectively link our particular concerns with wider political struggles against class exploitation, patriarchy and racism. Marxism offered a politics, a theory and practice, a history of class struggle and struggle against oppression with which we could identify. What does this mean practically?

First, as Marxists we reject reformism — the belief that all we socialists and gays desire can be attained within the confines of existing society. This does not mean that reforms are impossible within capitalism. If we believed that, we could make no sense at all of changes that have taken place. Neither does it mean we should not struggle for further reforms, such as abolishing an absurd age of consent, and for the protection of lesbians and gay men against the police and the courts. The struggle for reforms can, indeed, have a vital mobilizing effect, both in drawing in hitherto unpoliticized layers and in developing within us self-confidence and awareness. What a rejection of reformism does mean is recognizing clearly what can and what cannot be attained within a patriarchal-capitalist society. An awareness of the endemic nature of sexism and patriarchy in our society will inevitably lead one to a rejection of reformism.

The changes of the past decade have revolutionized the possibilities of leading an openly gay life. But it is, as David Fernbach once put it, “Liberation, Capitalist-style.” The major change within capitalism has been the acceptance of homosexuality but only within the confines of a patriarchal and familial framework. There has been a sustained, if unconscious, effort at containment, testifying to the overwhelming strength of exclusive heterosexual norms which express the imbalance in the social/sexual relations between men and women; an imbalance which simultaneously contributes to the orderly maintenance of capitalism.

There has been an extensive overlap between the values of the gay sub-culture and the heterosexist culture (in clothes, consumerism, disco culture, etc.). At the same time our separateness as people is confirmed by continuing and increasing state harassment; by media attacks on other minority sexual preferences such as paedophilia; by the differential treatment of lesbians and gay men, with the former still treated as a subject largely for male titil-lation, while for men in certain circumstances it is tolerable, even modish. Our aspirations as socialists must be to change more than this. We must oppose exclusive heterosexual, male-dominated norms, enshrined in the family, backed by Church and State.

Second, Marxism involves an identification with a revolutionary tradition of struggle against capitalism. This implies a recognition that there are objective barriers within capitalism to the full development of the forces of production and the release of new social energies. The development of a socialist society will provide the economic and social conditions for the full equality of the sexes, the necessary condition for the final downfall of patriarchy and sexual oppression. As a revolutionary politics Marxism provides a framework for an analysis of the ways in which the exploited and oppressed can struggle against capitalism and its attendant oppressions. The precondition for economic and social change then is the winning of political power from the dominant classes; the employment of this new power to begin the destruction of old attitudes and ideas; the creation of new forms and relationships. The working class, rooted as it is in the major centers of production, has to be the material basis for this revolutionary struggle.

But, third, our acceptance of Marxism does not preclude a critique of the Marxist tradition in order to reject its deformations. In particular, the anti-sexist movements have revealed new areas of struggle against patriarchy and capitalism to which Marxism has to respond. We reject, however, the concept of a “Gay Marxism” as a special variant. We are anxious, on the contrary, to identify certain absences in the Marxist tradition as it has developed and to attempt to remedy them.

Shortcomings of Traditional Marxism

Marxism is a tradition of revolutionary political struggle by the working class for socialism. As a corpus of theory it embodies the tradition of struggle, the lessons of success and failures; and as a theoretical expression of that tradition, Marxism is a guide to present and future action. In this context, Marxism is also a theory of history, an analysis of the workings of a capitalist economy, a science of society. As a science of revolutionary politics, it has to learn all the time from its testing in experience. But as a wider science of society it is still greatly underdeveloped, not only in crucial areas such as ideology and the state, but also in specific areas such as psychology and sexuality. A Marxist method, we believe, can contribute to an understanding of these areas. Hitherto it has been left to bourgeois ideologies (biologisms, eugenics, etc.) to fill the gaps in Marxist theories. The whole area of sexuality is an example of such an absence. This does not mean that socialists generally have not been concerned with questions of sex and gender roles. But there has not, we argue, been a properly Marxist understanding of sexual oppression, nor can we claim at this stage to have one ourselves. The interactions of patriarchal structures and capitalist social relations are so complex that we are only at the beginning of understanding them. Such an understanding, we suggest, lies in grasping the relationship between the economy, ideology and culture, and the insights supplied by recent developments in the study of sexuality.

This approach implies and demands a rejection of economism, a deformation to which Marxism has been particularly prone. Because Marxism is a materialist theory of society it has been too easy to understand this in purely economic terms. As a result, in some Marxist texts, the economic has often appeared as a piece of clockwork, inexorably and inevitably striking the death of one mode of production and the appearance of the new, with scarcely the appearance of human agency. Socialism is seen as the inevitable product of a capitalism which must perish by its own inherent contradictions. This makes for passivity and reformism.

Even when activism is stressed it can still suffer from economism; for if the stress is placed entirely on the economic as the motor of historical change, then struggle can be conceived entirely in economic terms. Workers’ struggle is not limited to a fight for better wages and work conditions. A worker’s position is also a result of a structure of social relations which are initially inculcated through the family and reinforced through bourgeois ideology. Thus gender roles as defined in the family are central to the male/female dichotomy of work relations. Economism ignores this whole dynamic and suggests that social relations will be naturally transformed in a post-revolutionary situation. The experiences of “socialist” regimes throughout the world suggest this is unlikely to happen. Thus state ownership of the means of production has been achieved, though without workers’ democracy, whilst the ideology of the family and the social relations which stem from that ideology remain and these are similar to those in Western capitalist countries.

This sort of approach leads to the neglect of ideological, cultural, and above all political struggle. Even Lenin, who in practice (and polemically) rejected economism, never entirely abandoned it in his theoretical asides. And Trotskyism, which in many ways has attempted to keep alive the tradition of activist revolutionary socialism through many dark decades, has as its theoretical basis another form of economism in its “concept of the Epoch” — the idea that we live in an age of “capitalist crisis, war and revolution,” so that the only question confronting the working class is that of a correct revolutionary leadership. The consequence of this brand of Trotskyism has been major sectarian battles among rival Trotskyist groups as to who constitutes this leadership.

At its heart is a too narrow interpretation of the “economic base,” and a subordination of a full scientific understanding to what is essentially a topographical metaphor — “the base/super-structure.” In recent years the revival of Marxism as a creative guide to political action and social analysis has led to a recovery of the insights of those earlier Marxists who rejected economism — especially Antonio Gramsci. A creative debate has developed within Marxism, concentrating on the different levels — the economic, the ideological and the political — and their complex articulation within the mode of production. The ideological is itself a material factor in society, not, as long tradition suggested, a simple reflection of the “base.” Ideas are not a product of simple illusion or false consciousness but as acted on can become real material forces in helping to shape social practices. Societies are not pieces of clockwork but are multilayered formations in which the economic is mediated through complex social relations, ideological forms and political practices. The basic reality is of class conflicts taking many different forms — from struggle on the shop floor through constant ideological and cultural battles to the supreme conflict at the level of state power.

The past few years have seen a major development in the effort of Marxists to understand the forms through which bourgeois hegemony has been maintained, and in particular the role of ideology. We define as hegemony those forms of ruling class supremacy, leadership and influence which are outside the formal repressive structures of state power, e.g., education, cultural, political and social ideas.

This is relevant to the struggles of feminists and gays because it is at the ideological level that most of our oppression as gays is expressed, and not on the economic level. This is more true for gay men than lesbians. The oppression of women has a dominant economic expression. But there is also an increasing awareness that the questions of gender and sexuality cannot be simply derived from capitalism. Hence the recent debate on patriarchy and the articulation between capitalism and patriarchy.

One avenue, much pursued of late, has been that of psychoanalysis, conceived of as the “science of the unconscious.” Despite a high degree of obscurity, the reassessments of Freud, especially through the work of Jacques Lacan and the debate stimulated by Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, have as their common aim the attempt to grasp how we become social beings, as “men” and “women.”

[This work] opens the way to a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis as a theory which can provide scientific knowledge of the way in which patriarchal ideology is maintained through the formation of psychological “masculinity” and “femininity.” Such knowledge is obviously a precondition of any successful cultural and political struggle against patriarchy — the point being not merely to understand the unconscious but to change it.

There are problems in this route. Psychoanalysis has the advantage of taking us beyond the purely descriptive and classificatory. But the pursuit of the truth of psychoanalysis can lead to a sort of despair of political action or any wider social or collective activity, and to an indulgence in theorizing for its own sake.

Psychoanalysis and the debates on ideology provide a theoretical basis for the continuing struggles of women and gays against patriarchy. For if the capitalist social formation is a combination of levels, there are similarly different levels of practice and struggle, though they must not be artificially separated. As gays our specific struggle is ideological, though as socialists we fully participate in the necessary economic and political struggles against capitalism.

The Family

In previous issues of Gay Left the heart of gay oppression has been located in the family and we have attempted to explain why this should be so. In retrospect we probably overstressed the purely economic aspects of the family and mechanically assimilated homosexual oppression to it. But the stress on the family must still be central for it is here that in each generation the boy-child and girl-child enter into the rules of social life. Here also is where the dominance of reproductive sexuality is maintained. In our culture these rules closely relate gender-identity to a particular form of sexual expression. Male homosexuality has until recently been interpreted in terms of having “undesirable” social characteristics such as effeminancy, or in terms of a perverse disease/sickness model.

Lesbianism, scarcely defined at all, has suffered from the general ideological stress which has equated female sexuality as secondary, responsive and maternal. The ways in which male and female children enter the social world, with all its attendant expectations, are not yet clear, though psychoanalytic theory may be able to help our understanding. The usefulness of such an understanding is that it transcends essentially social and historical divisions of sexuality into heterosexual (good) and homosexual (bad), and strategically links the struggle against homosexual oppression in our culture with the struggle against patriarchy and for women’s liberation. The fight for gay liberation is thus an aspect of a wider struggle against male domination.

But having recognized that, and the need to work closely with an autonomous women’s movement, there are specific areas where homosexual self-activity on the largest possible scale is vital.

• in the defense of gay rights, especially when they are threatened with erosion by court and police pressure, and by public prejudice in this period of economic decline;

• in struggling for further gay reforms — for the rights of lesbians and male homosexual parents; against the age of consent; for extension of civil rights to all homosexuals, etc.;

• in the development of a theoretical and practical awareness of our situation;

• for lesbians and gay men, independent struggle for the development of our own non-oppressive community, leading to the articulation of a positive identity; including, in this, discussions of central areas such as the nature of relationships, sexuality and role playing.

The gay movement is wider than any specific organization. Indeed we can argue that the movement as such can have no single organizational form; gay liberation is the self-defined activity of gay people fighting to gain control of their own lives and destinies. This struggle for sexual self-determination will not cease because a society calls itself socialist, as the gruesome experiences of homosexuals in many of the self-described socialist countries of the world today testify. The transition to socialism will not obviate the need for an autonomous gay movement or feminist movement; they will in fact be more essential, for in the struggle to determine the form of a new society, the activity of oppressed groups and identities will be decisive. But the essential precondition is our self-organization now.

Autonomy and Party

In the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism, a vital task of gay socialists must be in the ideological and cultural spheres. This includes exposing the oppressive nature of bourgeois familial forms, questioning the dominance of heterosexual norms, exploring forms of relating which can go beyond compulsive coupledom, developing a critique of the various forms of patriarchy and sexism, and striving for a theory and practice now which can begin to challenge bourgeois hegemony. The socialist current in the gay movement has an important role to play in this work.

This poses acutely the relationship between the gay movement, the wider revolutionary movement and a possible unified revolutionary socialist party. We believe an autonomous gay movement (as an autonomous women’s movement) to be essential, and reject any effort to subordinate the movement to any one political sect. Political militants of various left tendencies will and should contribute their ideas to the gay movement, but it is foolishly self-defeating to offer a purely organizational answer to gay socialists seeking political leadership — “the answer, comrades, is to join the party.” A major weakness of the British left is its sectarian fragmentation; for any one political sect to arrogate to itself leadership as the revolutionary party is an extension, not an abandonment, of sectarianism. While supporting the existing work of comrades in left organizations we believe that as a long-term aim, the realignment of revolutionary forces is essential as the only basis for the building of socialism.

But what does this concretely mean? Sheila Rowbotham recently questioned the whole Leninist tradition for its hostility to a broader socialism, and wondered whether a party form which demands democratic centralism and elitism can incorporate the sort of changes that the women’s and gay movements have illuminated. J. Ross, on the other hand, in a recent Socialist Woman (No. 6/2), has made a radical distinction between political leadership, which has to be organized through a Leninist party, and social movements, guided where appropriate by the insights provided by Marxism as a revolutionary science, which have to organize autonomously, in a complex dialogue with the political organization and with other social movements. The two points are not necessarily exclusive. The forces making for socialism in the West are wider than any single political form at present could embrace and, as we said above, any attempt to incorporate all such forces into one party form will be self-defeating.

The distinction between party and movement is one issue; the other is the form of the party: is a Leninist organizational form necessarily the correct one? Is a vanguard party necessary in advanced bourgeois democratic societies? Is the Bolshevik model of the “seizure of power” the one we should work on here? There are other questions that might be asked but it is clear from the disarray on the left that the answers are not preordained.

But the separation we have suggested between party and movements implies the need for some sort of revolutionary working class party to the building of which we want to contribute: revolutionary because it is only a break with capitalism and reformism which can remove the blocks to a socialist advance; working class because it is only the proletariat (“traditional” and new) which can provide the material base, in its collectivist strengths and traditions, for a socialist society; party because it is only a political formation of the working class and other revolutionary forces that can finally organize against the political strength of capitalism centralized in the state. Social movements such as the gay movement can contribute through ideological struggle to the undermining of bourgeois hegemony; but the struggle for power, in the last instance has to be on the political level. Nevertheless the nature of the political formation has still to be determined through actual political practice.

The struggle for socialism will be a long and arduous one; but it is only in that struggle that a meaningful end to restrictive definitions of sexuality will come. In this process the very concepts of “hetero-sexuality” and “homosexuality” will be challenged. It is foolish for anyone to claim full knowledge of the processes and changes that this will involve. What we continue to need is both theoretical clarification and the constant testing of theories in practice.

Reprinted with permission from Gay Left, London, England

Lesbianism:
A Socialist Feminist
Perspective

Susan Williams

I am a lesbian woman, and my daily struggle to survive in a capitalist society is a crystallization of the oppression of all women. Most women experience conflict between their own self-determination and the societal definition of women as subservient to men; I, as a lesbian, learned to understand deeply the nature and extent of societal repression and my experience propelled me to develop a radical political analysis that recognized the source of oppression to be the capitalist system and the key problem facing the oppressed to be the very relationships amongst us.

Who are we? — Where do we belong? — What shall we do? Is there a synthesis for our personal, political, intellectual, and sexual selves? I believe there is, and that the future for lesbians lies not in sectarian, bitter disengagement, but in true solidarity with the world of the scorned and persecuted. Relationships with other women are, for lesbians, the paramount source of emotional, personal, and political support, providing the context for growth and constructive interaction. The strength and independence of functioning outside the domination of an individual man can be a positive and central force her life, as well as the focus for a major contradiction, because society defines woman’s self-determination as a maladjustment and her love of women as a sickness. Operating as an individual, it is impossible for her to completely escape accepting and internalizing the negative and degrading attitudes toward her independence and her sexuality that prevail in this society. A lesbian daily confronts hostile people and institutions that excessively limit her choices and alternatives in life.

As she realizes that the problems she faces have their origin in the social system and not in her own “sick” personality, a lesbian may decide to direct her energies against the source of discrimination and move into one of the more respectable homophile organizations. Here she is likely to find that her energies are channeled into working for reforms that are primarily aimed at the needs of middle-class gay men. Sexism within the male leadership of liberal gay organizations chronically emerges, exploiting the skills of the lesbian woman while ignoring her special needs and inhibiting the development of her leadership potential.

Aware that she is oppressed as a woman within the gay movement as well as in society at large, a lesbian woman becomes aware of her particular stake in the feminist struggle. The conflicts she finds within the straight, white, liberal feminist groups is enormous. The women’s struggle for liberation is her movement, for the subjugation of women into secondary roles, dependent on men, is central to the lesbian’s oppression; yet within this established and respectable sector of the movement, her needs as a lesbian are subordinated, her leadership repressed, and often her very existence denied. Even worse: her political integrity as a thinking human being with a radical view of sociology is challenged and feared.

As she sees reform after reform result in crumbs to heterosexual white middle-class women, while the needs of those more oppressed are unmet, the lesbian realizes that full equality for her, for poor and working women, for minority women, requires basic change in the socioeconomic system. Investigating established groups on the left, she finds a history of void, ambiguity or hypocrisy in regard to lesbian or feminist consciousness; she observes many socialist groups recruiting people from the gay movement who see the connection between their oppression and the class struggle, but it is apparent that these socialists do not themselves contribute to the developing consciousness and capacity for effective struggle of the gay movement itself.

Rejecting the opportunism of some socialist groups, the radicalized lesbian may embrace lesbian separatism. Here she once again finds limitations to her attempts at personal solutions or advancing as a single-issue group. She sees the unmet needs of her lesbian sisters who are also oppressed on account of race and exploited as workers, and realizes that the oppression of lesbians is integrally tied to the subjugation of other groups. But separatism ultimately develops into suffocation, isolation, and ineffectiveness, which initiates the lesbian’s understanding that withdrawal and formation of alternative life-styles, communities, and counter-institutions will neither eliminate our oppression nor prevent its being perpetuated on to the next generation. It is impossible to escape or transcend the established wealth and power of a ruling elite that can destroy us all financially, psychologically, and physically a dozen times over.

The liberation of all people and the development of a free, cooperative society can only be accomplished through the united energies and resources of all oppressed groups. Our theory and actions must be based on the synergism of the class, race, and sex struggles. An adequate analysis of lesbian experience and struggle is vital to a truly revolutionary socialist feminist movement. The evolution of lesbianism into a revolutionary force requires a sound socialist feminist analysis of the source and nature of our many oppressions, and the creation of organizational forms that are consistent with the deep roots of our exploitation and the titanic measures necessary to eradicate those roots. The lesbian, as a product of society, must turn outward to transform that society, and mar-shall her keen talents and resources for conscious and determined political action of a revolutionary nature. Only in this way can our sexual natures and our political insight be harmonized for the benefit of all humanity.

I am a lesbian. And that is why I am, and must be, a revolutionary, a political, and a radical organizer advancing a socialist feminist analysis of our struggle.

Origin of Sexism

Sexism developed in response to social reorganization of production. Although sexual division of labor prevailed in primitive societies, all labor was performed for the community as a whole. Men’s hunting activities made sporadic contributions to the clan, while women, through gathering and growing foods, provided a consistent level of production for the community. The women’s productive activities led to their developing many of the tools, skills, and techniques that were basic to human social and cultural evolution. The women’s role in production was the source of social power — the status of women and of men was equal. In place of monogamous “father-families,” there were large kinship groups defined on female lines.

The first class division between men and women emerged from the existing division of labor. Men held dominion over cattle in the same way women had dominion over the home and domestic tools. The herd’s milk and meat provided the first surpluses which were used as currency-exchange, and therefore, a source of power. Because men owned the herds, accumulated wealth became the property of individual men. The monogamous family unit emerged to provide for descent of accumulated wealth through the male line, and to guarantee the paternity of heirs. Women moved from primary productive labor for the community to private isolated domestic labor for individual families, and so were removed from social production and power, which Engels calls the world historical defeat of women.

This first class division between men and women forms the basis for the exploitation of the working class. The capitalist class extracts the women’s domestic labor necessary to maintain male labor and the reproductive labor of replenishing the working class at no expense to the system. Because women perform this free domestic work, we constitute a pool of cheap labor and are correspondingly underpaid as workers in social production. The institution of the nuclear family is absolutely vital to the capitalist system, because the equitable payment of both household labor and of women’s currently underpaid work in the labor force would seriously impair profit-making.

The sexism intrinsic to capitalist economics is the cause of the current legal, financial, and psychological bondage of women. Male domination in our culture is not the result of any innate biological, physical, or mental superiority. Sexism is generated by forces in society — private ownership, with accumulation of wealth and its transmission through patriarchal lines, and the isolation of women from social production. We can attack societal conditions that generate sexism and we can eliminate our oppression at its very source — capitalism. Moreover, destroying the roots of oppression is the only way we can free ourselves.

The Nature of our Oppression

Sexism is the institutionalized system of oppression by sex, and it is manifested by the domination of men over women. We are assigned to roles that are consistent with our sex-defined relationship to social production. Our capitalist system designs men to be wage-earners, and so defines men as aggressive, strong, and superior. Women are used as a source of private labor, giving isolated service to individual families, and so are defined as weak, passive and inferior.

Because the nuclear family and the private domestic labor of women are vital to the capitalist system, all of society’s norms and institutions function to maintain the “woman’s role.” Social norms, law, religion, jobs, education, the media, psychiatry are all used to keep us in our place and exploit us while doing so. The educational institutions brainwash women into accepting basically private lives as wives and mothers. Religion and the media reinforce the mystique of this “natural” role for women. Married women lose their legal identity to their husbands. Single women are discriminated against on the basis of their marital status. Our prescribed role of private labor is used as a justification for giving women lower pay, and for denying us opportunities for more training, higher education, and more responsible jobs. The result is the perpetuation of a system that keeps wealth, power, and ascendency over women in the hands of men.

Women as a group are confined to rigid, oppressive roles and are exploited by capitalist society. The same economic forces that relegate women as a whole to a secondary position also provide strong sanctions against those who assert their right to individual self-determination. Women who are lesbians, women who are financially and/or emotionally independent of men, women who refuse to be passive and subservient, and who defy societal sanctions threaten the primacy of the nuclear family. As a result, these women are doubly oppressed, on the basis of both sex and sexuality.

Society’s definition of lesbians as abnormal and degenerate results in legal, economic, and psychological oppression. The educational and psychiatric establishments perpetuate the values of a sexist society by guiding people to acceptance of societally-approved, debilitating roles and by working to destroy the self-esteem of lesbians and of feminists who reject traditional female roles. In many states, lesbian behavior is illegal. If her sexual identity becomes known, a lesbian is likely to lose her job, perhaps being forced to accept lower-paid, less responsible work. Those of us who are lesbian and/or independent intensely experience the subordination of women, because we have no access to the pay-offs in financial security that the sexist system allows women who operate under a man’s domination, whether privately or professionally.

For centuries, women have been trained to be silly, subservient, less than human. Women who cannot accept these limitations are told that we are maladjusted, immoral, or sick. It is not we, but society’s definition of us that is pathological, and we face real problems generated by real social tyranny.

Lesbianism as a Feminist Issue

The secondary status of women and the oppression of homosexual women and men stem from a common source: the sexism that is basic to a capitalist society. Lesbians are persecuted for rejecting the “woman’s role” and for being a blatant affront to the myth that women must depend on men for their economic survival, entitling men to our private labor and emotional servicing. The persecution of lesbians is an extension and intensification of the oppression of all women. A feminist struggle that is serious about improving life for all women must address itself to the needs of those who are more oppressed — women who are lesbians, as well as poor and minority women.

A lesbian woman faces double oppression. If she is also non-white or poor, her oppression may be trebled or quadrupled. Experiencing the increased contradictions that result from layers of oppression provides conditions that augment the development of leadership, not because of superiority as individuals, but because “leadership comes from definite sociological strata, from precisely those human beings whose history, needs, and consciousness equip them to fulfill the specific demands of leadership at any given time.”¹ Women who are more intensely oppressed will more quickly recognize the source, nature, and extent of exploitation and repression in capitalist society, and will be more strongly motivated to move against it.

The independence, strength, and assertiveness of a consistent feminist will be expressed in all facets of her life, including her sexuality. In this way she deviates from sexual norms and so embraces a minority sexuality. The commonality in experiences of lesbians and feminists stems from shared rejection of the stereotypic female role. All women who live independent of men are more likely to develop responsibility, resourcefulness, activism, all those “male-identified” traits that are necessary for independent survival and strong leadership.

The myths used to persecute lesbians are extensions of those that oppress all women. Their use against lesbians tyrannizes all of us, because “lesbian,” “dyke,” and “castrating bitch” are the labels that men use to let women know when we have crossed the boundary of our sex-role. It is time that women recognize that the oppression of any group of us is the oppression of us all.

Role of Feminism in the Lesbian Struggle

Lesbians have a vital stake in the feminist struggle for women’s rights. Women who are to survive independent of men need to have equal pay. We need to have access to training and education. We need the legal basis on which to fight discrimination in jobs, housing, and financial transactions. We need the power of self-determination.

Being a lesbian is not in and of itself revolutionary, any more than being black is. Unless supported by political analysis and action, life-style can be used as a substitute for radical politics and can lead to unprincipled affiliation with reactionary forces. Those people who adopt a particular life-style in an attempt to transcend reality, ignore the basic contradictions between full human liberation and the context of capitalist society, and so cannot participate in the struggle to eliminate those contradictions. Socialist activism is the only life-style that can lead to basic social change. The transformation of lesbianism into a revolutionary force requires a socialist feminist analysis of the operation of sexism in society and within the lesbian community, and mobilization of our forces against the source of oppression.

Our human relations are controlled by our economic relations in a capitalist society. The sexist definition of women and our secondary status is central to the traditional, monogamous male-female bonding. In the past, many lesbians have perpetuated our common oppression by modeling their relationships on the typical heterosexual contract, which has been defined by a sexist and repressive society. A thorough understanding and elimination of sexism and its roots from our society is necessary if lesbians, if any of us, are to build egalitarian and supportive human relationships and make true human liberation possible.

The Multi-issue Nature of our Oppression

The economic forces that control sexism also caused and now perpetuate discrimination by race and by class. Racism and sexism are both profitable, and further serve as a stabilizing force in capitalist society by dividing the exploited working class and all oppressed people. Human liberation involves the end of discrimination against entire groups. We cannot afford “reforms” that are made at the expense of another, usually more intensely victimized group.

Single issue reforms may meet important immediate needs, but they can never by themselves eliminate oppression. If not connected with and followed by more basic demands, reforms may become a conservative mechanism, producing minor changes so that the system as a whole can be preserved. However, it is the system itself that is the cause and the connecting factor in all our oppressions.

Reform on a single issue cannot even liberate the particular group that it effects. Many of us are subjugated on more than one basis: as women, as lesbians, as racial minorities, as workers, as poor people. Beyond this, the persecution of any one group is used against us all. Society’s degradation of lesbians is used to “dyke-bait” independent women. Discrimination in the labor market against women and minorities helps keep all workers’ wages low. None of us can achieve full equality and freedom as a single isolated group.

Separatism leads directly to opportunism and the co-optation of one oppressed group by others who belong among their comrades in struggle. In the past, many women’s groups have dissociated themselves from the particular needs and oppression of lesbian women. They have actively rejected the leadership of lesbians through fear of discrediting “their” movement, and consistently promoted benefits for white, middle class, and professional women at the expense of lesbian, minority, and working women. The reformist nature of this sector of the women’s movement is a direct result of a failure to grasp full the historical and material development of sexism and to recognize that a truly revolutionary feminist movement must be based on an understanding of the interconnections of the subjugation of lesbians, racial minorities, workers, and all women.

Among most groups on the left, inability to deal with women’s issues generally becomes intensified in relations with the gay movement. Some socialist groups have repeatedly sold out lesbian struggles because they perpetuate within their own organizations some of the sexist contradictions generated by capitalist society. All socialists must recognize the capacity for leadership and the primacy of needs of those who are most oppressed — by sex, by race, and by class. A “revolutionary” party that concerns itself only with promoting the interest of white male trade unionists can never achieve a mass revolutionary movement, much less a socialist democracy for all people.

Gay Liberation as an entity separate from socialism and feminism is an illusion, a political impossibility. Failure to recognize the interdependence of all sectors of the movement has led gay separatists to actions and reactions toward other oppressed groups that are counter-productive, obstacles to building the type of political movement necessary to achieve our common liberation.

Our advance toward a free, cooperative society requires the unification of all oppressed groups. Unity must be based on respect for and understanding of our different levels of oppression within society, while recognizing their common source. We must make the needs of those who are most oppressed our top priority, seeing that our needs complement rather than contradict one another. Women are the connecting link in our separate struggles. We form the most intensely oppressed sectors of the working class and of racial and sexual minority groups. Minority working class women experience subjugation by class, by race, and by sex, and so embody the needs of all oppressed sectors of the working class. It is those people who understand the connections between their own struggle and that of other and more oppressed people who will provide the revolutionary leadership for the entire class.

Liberation Through a Socialist Revolution

Feminism, lesbianism, and every other struggle for liberation from a specific type of bondage expresses the necessity of a socialist transformation of society. Capitalism cannot eradicate sexism — or racism or poverty or war or wage exploitation — because it relies on these for profit. Real equality for all people demands the end of capitalism, the end of private property, and the end of the state endorsement of the nuclear family.

The rights of women, sexual and racial minorities, and poor and working people are inseparable from socialism. Our freedom can only be achieved within a communally organized, non-profit, cooperative society that puts an end to false divisions among people and between the individual and her/his society. Socialism is a way of reorganizing production, redistributing wealth, and redefining the scope and purpose of state power, replacing the power of the bourgeoisie with the power of the people — workers and their allies.

In women of all races, sexualities, and ages lies a vast potential for revolutionary strength and leadership. Building human liberation for all people demands our commitment to responsible struggle to achieve a socialist democracy for all.

Notes

1. Dorothy Mejia Chambless, Discussion Draft for Radical Women Conference, April 8 and 9, 1972; “Race and Sex, 1972: Collision or Comradeship?” Seattle, p.9.

This essay was originally published as a pamphlet by Radical Women, 3815 Fifth Ave. NE, Seattle, Washington 98105.

Toward a
Scientific Analysis
of the Gay Question

Los Angeles Research Group

We are a group of approximately ten communists who are gay women. We have come together because we are increasingly concerned with and disturbed by the spreading and consolidation of an anti-gay line which is expressed organizationally by the refusal to allow gays membership in communist organizations. Although this line has reached its clearest expression through such organizations as the Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League (OL), its influence is certainly not limited to these organizations. We feel that particularly in this period of rising political struggle concerning the building of a party, it is extremely important that this question be met head on and struggled with. The approach taken toward resolving this question will indeed reflect the way that the communist forces deal with finding the correct line on other important questions. Incorrect thinking does not stay confined to one neat little area, but spills over into other political struggles in that it reflects an overall approach to political questions.

We found the most concrete expression of this incorrect line on the gay question in a paper the RU wrote for the Attica Brigade. While the RU disavows this paper as an official document, our experience has shown that the arguments used in that paper are the basis for the anti-gay line put forward by all the other communist forces that espouse that line. Our criticisms of the RU paper are therefore not limited to the RU, but are extended to all such evidence of this incorrect line within the communist movement.

The purpose of this paper is to refute the incorrect analyses that are dominant today in the communist movement. Our purpose at this time is not to put forth a complete analysis of our own on all aspects of gayness. Our investigation and study on the gay question is incomplete. However, we do have a clear perspective from which we have approached the question. Our experience and practice leads us to believe the gay question is integrally and structurally tied to the woman question, and the key to the resolution of both is found in the division of labor between the sexes. The nuclear family as an economic unit with its corresponding superstructural aspects has been, since the introduction of class society, the great perpetrator of the division of labor between the sexes, to the benefit of the ruling classes. Until this division of labor is broken down, by the introduction of women into production and social and political life on an equal basis with men, and by the socialization of the functions of women within the nuclear family with respect to the reproduction and maintenance of labor power, there will be oppression of women and oppression of gay people.

Because of our limited experience, this paper concentrates more on lesbians than gay men. However, our position that it is politically incorrect to exclude people who agree on ideological, political and organizational questions from communist organizations solely because of their sexuality clearly holds for both gay men and women. Our conclusion is based not so much on our experience as lesbian communists but from applying Marxist methodology. Consequently anyone utilizing the same method of investigation, be they gay or heterosexual, should arrive at the same conclusion.

Methodology

To arrive at a correct analysis, a communist must derive theory from practice, using the tools of dialectical and historical materialism. These generalizations must be tested in practice and what is learned from that must again be summed up to form the basis for new directions which will push our practice even further.

It is with this methodology and world outlook that we read and assess the RU and other anti-gay analyses. We ask: where is their investigation and study? Where is their historical and material evidence? Such questions should be kept in mind throughout the rest of this paper.

Is Gayness a Response to Decaying Imperialism?

The basic premise of the RU’s position on gay people is stated in their unsupported assertion that “homosexuality in the US today is an individual response to the intensification of the contradictions brought about by decaying imperialism: in particular, it is a response to the contradiction between men and women which is rooted in male supremacist institutions and male chauvinist ideology.”

The fact is that homosexuality has existed in all historical periods; it has been socially accepted and even encouraged in societies prior to capitalism (for example, in primitive communist societies such as the Iroquois and Mojaves). If, as Marxist-, Leninists, we know that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, then homosexuality in pre-capitalist societies clearly was not a response to decaying imperialism, which had not yet historically occurred.

The unsupported statement that “homosexuality is a response — consciously or not — to a male supremacist society” has no basis in historical fact. (The October League has similarly asserted that homosexuality arises in periods of societal decay and in times of extraordinarily severe oppression of women.) The truth is that homosexuality existed in matriarchal societies in which male supremacy was not dominant (such as the Philippines before the Spanish invasions of the 16th Century). Thus gayness exists in periods of female dominance or periods in which women were highly respected, and not just in times of heavy oppression of women. Looking to U.S. history, the pre-Civil-War period in the South was a period of great oppression of women, but there is not recorded a corresponding rise in gayness.

The RU seems to base all gay relationships on a reponse to male supremacy and chauvinism, and the increased alienation under decaying capitalism. Although it is true that capitalism intensifies alienation in all members of society, particularly the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, it does not follow simply that alienation is the source of sexual relations, be they heterosexual or homosexual.

First, as we have shown, the RU and others offer no evidence that gayness is a “response” either to decaying imperialism or male supremacy and chauvinism. Further, to label something merely as a “response” suggests a linear analysis of history rather than a dialectical approach.

Second, it is a mistake to focus on response and label it negative. Take for instance, the historical phenomena of capitalism and imperialism. Class struggle and wars of national liberation are “responses” we support and participate in. Class collaboration is also a “response”; it is a response to be isolated and defeated. Thus it is insufficient to dismiss a phenomenon as a “response” and as such to label it negative. What is key is the form it takes, whose class interests it advances. Class collaboration is an incorrect “response” to bourgeois rule because it perpetuates the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working class. Class struggle and wars of national liberation support the interests of the international proletariat.

We assume the RU labels gayness not only a “response” but an incorrect one. However, no real evidence is presented as to how or why gayness retards class struggle. Heterosexuality, in and of itself, is neither progressive nor reactionary. It is not sexuality which determines class stands, it is the world outlook people bring to their relationships and work. Our limited study and experience leads us to believe the question of why people are gay is much too complex to be dealt with in such a facile and subjective way as “it’s a response.”

Is Gayness a Reflection of Petty Bourgeois Ideology?

Following from the RU’s main premise is the thrust of their anti-gay line, which is that gayness is a manisfestation of (petty) bourgeois ideology, and not proletarian ideology, and that this is reflected in several aspects of gayness. Let’s examine these.

Ideology: The RU says “homosexuality is an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie.” First of all, this is an incorrect use of terms. Ideology is a reflection of class; it is a world outlook. In the world today two classes are competing for power: the capitalist (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat). There are two world outlooks, two competing ideologies. Although in capitalist society there are middle classes between the bourgeoisie and the working class, there is not third ideology. Caught between the two major classes, the petty bourgeois reflects aspects of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is their social and economic position between the two dominant classes (neither capitalist nor working class), the fact that they are neither the ruling and expropriating class, nor the exploited and revolutionary class, that historically leads to petty bourgeois types of thinking (empiricism and subjectivism) and behavior (vacillation, individualism, opportunism, and tailism).

To use “ideology” as the RU does one would have to say that in general individual love relationships in this society are an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie. But it is ridiculous to speak of an individual relationship as an “ideology.” Sexual relationships exist and will exist in all societies, primitive, feudal, capitalist, communist. What is true is that such relationships will be marked by the ruling ideology of that society. Homosexuality is no more an ideology than heterosexuality is.

Escape: Having made the unsupported statement that gayness is a response to male supremacy and decaying imperialism, the RU goes further to characterize this response as turning “its back to the struggle between men and women,” and as “premised upon the unwillingness to struggle with the opposite sex in very important relationships.” Further, “Lesbianism is…an escape from male chauvinism; male homosexuality reinforces male chauvinism in its refusal to deal with relationships with women.” (emphasis theirs) These characterizations run into several problems.

Love relationships are not the source of male chauvinism and supremacy; rather, like all aspects of life under capitalist class relations and culture they merely reflect the reality of class divisions. Therefore, as communists we know that male supremacy and male chauvinism will not disappear through men and women struggling in individual love relationships.

In other words, we see mass collective working class struggle as key and primary to the ending of women’s oppression, and individual struggle in love relationships as decidedly secondary and supportive. To make a blanket assertion that gays turn their back on the “struggle between men and women” is to deny the dual nature of the struggle, i.e., its mass character which is primary, and its individual character which is secondary.

No one — male or female — can “escape” male chauvinism and supremacy in a capitalist society. Capitalism needs and perpetuates them. Male supremacy is not such a weak, isolated part of bourgeois ideology that a person can “escape” by merely changing whom they relate to.

Indeed, not only is homosexuality not an “escape,” but for gay people the oppression by male chauvinism and supremacy is increased. The bourgeoisie uses male supremacy and chauvinism to whip up anti-gay prejudice to further divide the working class. When gay women are told that what they really need is a “good fuck” it is not totally unanalogous to the chauvinist idea that every woman secretly yearns to be raped, that “no” means “yes” or that a “good fuck” will cure a woman of frigidity. Nor is it surprising that a woman who is strong and assertive, or intelligent and competent, or athletic, may be called a lesbian to intimidate her into a more “suitable” role, i.e., passive and supportive. People will wonder if a man is gay if he is gentle or softspoken, or into art or poetry, or not bragging about the women he’s had, because he is not acting like a “man” but like a “woman.” Indeed, one of the initial strong points of the gay liberation movement was its recognition that it must fight not only anti-gayness but the oppression of women in general.

Finally, we are struck by the consistently negative, one-sided way that the RU views gay relationships. In fact, their view of gayness as an “unwillingness” to relate to, or as an “escape” from, the opposite sex closely relects the bourgeois sociologists’ and psychologists’ view that gayness is “unnatural,” or represents an “inability” to relate to a person of the opposite sex. We think it is important to look at the other side of the coin: gayness is the ability to relate to a person of the same sex. This is not an idealist approach but a dialectical one. We believe that the gross and consistent negativism of the RU concerning gays comes more from their own subjectivism than any correct concern with petty bourgeois individualism.

Individual Choice: The RU seems particularly concerned with the negative aspects of the individuality of gay women, particularly those in the women’s movement: “These are women who… wouldn’t or couldn’t deal with men in their personal relationships.” But if we look at this dialectically, lesbianism, per se, does not necessarily mean rejection of men. It can and often does say something affirmative about a woman’s relations with women.

This is not to deny that there are gay women who enter gay relationships because of negative sexual experiences with men; there are also gay women who express strong anti-male feelings. However, there are many gay women who do not. By mentioning only the former, RU’s conclusion is one-sided. Similarly, it is onesided to focus only on gay women who voice anti-male sentiments, and ignore the countless heterosexual women who express equally strong anti-male comments and actions. Likewise, the actions of many heterosexual men exhibit disrespect for women and anti-female attitudes, of which rape is only an extreme example.

Anti-male sentiments expressed by gay and heterosexual women (and anti-female actions and feelings of gay and heterosexual men) reflect the appearance of things; the essence is the material oppression of women and the existence of sexism under capitalism. The key point to understand is that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (and its ideology) has oppressed women. Consequently, there is at present a contradiction between women and men. Communists, gay or heterosexual, seek to resolve this contradiction by: first of all, recognizing that the material conditions to end the oppression of women can exist only under a socialist economy; and secondly, working to unite all who can be united to fight both for the full democratic rights of women and for socialism.

Bourgeois ideology, in its attempt to divide the working class, has worked to keep women fighting and competing with each other. The crushing pressure, first to “get that man” and then to “keep that man,” proofs of a “real woman,” makes women suspicious of and fighting with other women, rather than uniting and fighting the real enemy, imperialism.

The women’s movement has shown that there is more to unite women, particularly working-class women, than to keep us fighting each other. Through common political struggle and practice deep friendships form. Some of these have become sexual, not so much from a refusal to deal with men, but rather from the realization that women are also people with whom meaningful relationships can be had. For professed Marxist-Leninists to read into women loving women a rejection of men reflects the bourgeois ideology that a woman is not happy or fulfilled without a man, that women in their primary relationship should love a man more than a woman, that men are superior to women.

This rejection theory also hints at the subjective fears and threats felt by men conditioned by a male chauvinist and supremacist society, when confronted by women who do not rely on them. To the RU, however, “Such a choice is clearly individualistic; it says: I have a right to relate the way I want to, I can do what I want with my body.” (emphasis theirs) We are confused by the RU’s indignation at a woman saying she has a right to relate how she wants, or that she has a right to control what happens to her body. If a woman refuses to continue to relate to a man who constantly beats and humiliates her, is she being individualistic? How about a woman who decides she wants an abortion? Do we not support a woman who refuses to be sterilized or used as a guinea pig for an experimental IUD or birth control for “individualistically” deciding what she wants to do with her body? What subjective prejudices is the RU operating under here?

We agree with the concept that a person’s individual needs are secondary to the needs of the revolutionary struggle. We also believe that socialist revolution is the start of the resolution of the contradictions between socialized labor and private ownership, and of the oppression that comes from that contradiction. This implies a respect for the individual that is lacking under the rule of capital.

Individual Solutions: Moving right along, the RU says that “… [Gay] relationships can be only individual solutions to the contradictions of imperialism…” and what “makes it individual and not progressive is not that it is done alone… but that it does not engage the masses of people to fight around their needs.” Futher, “because we put class struggle first, we are opposed to all relationships which are seen by the people in them as the main source of their well-being, or as a sources of personal salvation.”

Has the RU ever talked to a gay person, or indeed to any of the people they work with? No communist — gay or heterosexual — sees personal relationships as the solution to the contradictions of imperialism. Some relationships strengthen the persons involved so they can engage in class struggle; others deplete energy and encourage backward ideas. Relationships are not absolute “things-in-themselves.”

It is precisely one of the functions of bourgeois ideology to promote the idea that there is a wall between productive life (work) and personal life. We are told, in a thousand different ways, that while the wages we receive from our work give us the means to live, it is only at home, in our relationships, in the family, at the beach or in the mountains, that we really “live.”

As presently constituted most relationships in this society, gay or heterosexual, “do not set the basis for organizing people to fight for their needs.” On the one hand, personal relationships (and the nuclear family) are used by the bourgeoisie to mask the real contradictions in society and to perpetuate bourgeois ideology (e.g., sex roles). On the other hand, personal relationships (and the nuclear family) are indeed one of the primary sources of people’s enjoyment and give them the strength and will to go on. As communists we must educate the working class as to the dual role of relationships and the nuclear family and lead their struggle against what is negative and strengthen what is positive.

Periphery of Society: Not only are gays individualistic, says the RU, but they are outside “the mainstream of society” because they are the “subject of public abuse.” This is nonsense and the RU knows it. If gays are indeed “forced to live on the periphery of society,” then they have a lot of company: communists, minorities, undocumented workers, unmarried couples, military deserters and draft resisters, prisoners, etc., are also subject to public abuse. Gays are next to you at work, at school, in the supermarket, in Mayday committees and party-building forums, in other political work. They are assembly-line workers, steel and rubber workers, hospital workers, students, electricians, teachers, lawyers, unemployed, mothers, and fathers. The vast majority of gay people, like the vast majority of people in this country, are workers, and even the bourgeoisie doesn’t have the stupidity to characterize workers as peripheral to society.

We do not pretend that the working class is wildly enthusiastic about gay people at this time. Workers in general are not presently enchanted with communists either. Both are subject to much public abuse. Bourgeois ideology and propaganda have seen to this. But it would seem that while some comrades think the working class can handle communism (and the fight against white and male chauvinism and supremacy), it can’t handle gayness, so we will just tail after the workers on this one. When the anti-gay jokes fly, we’ll just laugh too and show the workers how much like them we are. It’s not important anyway, so why make it any harder on ourselves?

It is our belief, based on concrete practice, that the RU’s attitude in fact belittles the working class and its ability to recognize bourgeois ideology for what it is. As communists we must surely believe that people are not static but instead can change and move forward. Indeed, our concrete experience as workers has shown us that the people we work with are often more tolerant and willing to listen and struggle and change their attitudes than are many of our comrades. The process of “coming out” to co-workers may indeed be difficult and painful because of deep-rooted anti-gay prejudices, but the struggle and the resulting higher level of trust, respect, friendship and unity that often occur has been worth it. To struggle and share with co-workers, and to later hear them say that they are glad we told them and talked about it, can only reaffirm our faith in the working class as the true revolutionary class. An exemplary indication of this was the “Green Ban” strike (a strike over a non-economic issue) by an Australian building construction local to defend the right of a gay professor to teach at the university.

Strains and Self-indulgence: The RU’s depiction of gay relationships as “extremely difficult,” subject to “enormous strains over and above… heterosexual relationships,” and as “rarely long lasting,” “requiring much more cultivation, much more time and energy, in short, much more self-indulgence” is only more evidence of their failure to investigate and to think about what they are saying.

Gay relationships are less than ideal; heterosexual relationships are less than ideal. Gays do have to deal with pressures coming from anti-gayness that many heterosexuals don’t have to deal with: fear of getting fired, repression by the vice squad, psychological pressures of having to deal with being told you are “sick” and “unnatural,” family rejection. However, personal lives in many other sections of society, particularly among national minorities, are subject to “strains over and above” those of white heterosexual relationships. Black relationships are subject to the “additional” pressures of white supremacy and chauvinism, such as economic discrimination, police repression, welfare rules which break up families. Yet we doubt that the RU would characterize principled relationships between black people as requiring much more cultivation or “self-indulgence” — to do so would be blatantly chauvinist. And to so characterize principled gay relationships is only further evidence of subjectivism and muddy thinking on the “gay question.”

Anti-Imperialism and Communism

The RU concedes that gays have the ability to be strong anti-imperialists. However, they then say that gays “cannot be communists…. Because homosexuals do not carry the struggle between men and women into their most personal relationships, they are not prepared in principle for the arduous task of class transformation.” Further, “to be a communist, we must accept and welcome struggle in all facets of our lives, personal as well as political … Homosexuals cannot be communists, that is, belong to communist organizations where people are committed to struggle against all aspects of their lives.” Portions of these statements are correct; others are absurd and undialectical.

It is true that communists must accept struggle in all facets of our lives. It is not true that communists are committed to struggle against all aspects of our lives. As communists, we are committed to struggle against those aspects of our lives that retard or hold back the struggle for socialist revolution. As communists we support — not struggle against — those aspects which further our goal of a socialist revolution. A personal relationship between two anglo people, or two Afro-Americans, or two Vietnamese people or two proletarians does not mean that such people are therefore not prepared to struggle against national oppression, imperialism, or the bourgeoisie. And, contrary to the RU’s wishful thinking, a relationship between two men or two women does not therefore mean that they are not prepared to struggle, in principle, against male chauvinism and supremacy.

No matter how much the RU wishes to prattle about gays “in principle,” the concrete fact is that gay comrades have shown that they are prepared, in practice, for the arduous task of proletarian revolution. We have participated and taken responsible roles in almost every significant revolutionary movement in recent years. If you did not see us or know we were there, it was not because we were deceitful or hiding in shame. We have not considered sex and our love relationships as primary to our political work. We had other priorities: study, political work, etc. Also, we were isolated from other gay comrades and unwilling to press the struggle forward on the gay question as individuals. We believe that our former silence involved an amount of liberalism toward a line we disagreed with and a certain lack of ideological clarity which inhibited our abilities to take the question as seriously as we should have. This situation has changed, and we have no intention now of sitting idly by and letting such subjectivist garbage as the RU and other communist organizations are putting out gain hegemony among the communist forces. While we do not see that the “gay question” is a major issue, we do believe that its correct or incorrect resolution will ultimately affect the success of the coming socialist revolution and the building of socialism and communism.

Material Oppression

Once again, the RU fails to stop and think, or even investigate what it is saying, when it writes:

“Imperialism profits directly from the oppression and exploitation of women. This is not true for gay people. They are not materially oppressed as a group, and the denial of their democratic rights does not secure great profits for the ruling class.”

But in real life it is rarely such a simplistic matter as the direct immediacy implied in the formula “oppression equals great profits.” Rather, in advanced capitalist society there are many superstructural and ideological forms that do not directly “secure great profits” but which are indirectly “useful” in that they help maintain conditions (disunity, apathy, cynicism, backwardness) that allow the continued expropriation of “great profits.”

To say that there is no profit to the capitalist in the oppression of gays is to ignore the basic theorems of the science of Marxism. Does the RU believe that it is simply an accident, or “natural,” that gays are oppressed? The fact is that gay people are materially oppressed and the material basis for that oppression indeed lies in the maintenance of profit and power for the capitalist.

Our investigation leads us to believe that the material basis for the oppression of gays can be found in the role of the bourgeois nuclear family under class society in the maintenance and perpetuation of the division of labor. The bourgeois nuclear family is the economic institutionalization of personal relationships under capitalism. It is a socially isolated unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. The husband works outside the home. The wife, whether or not she also works outside the home, Works within it at invisible labor which maintains and reproduces the labor force. The purpose of the bourgeois family is to: first of all, socialize children into understanding and accepting class relationships as they exist in this country today; secondly, reproduce the class structure in microcosm; and thirdly, privatize the maintenance and reproduction of the working class. Class society establishes, maintains, and perpetuates divisions of labor, including sexual divisions. Sexual division of labor is of incalculable use to the bourgeoisie, dividing workers into two great camps, those in social labor and those in private labor; those in private labor can and have been called forward as a reserve army of labor according to the needs of the bourgeoisie.

Historical Perspectives: Historically, as collective economies broke down and economic relations based on patriarchy and rising capitalism emerged, man’s labor was increasingly that of commodity production and his role included the provision of the material necessities for the maintenance and propagation of the family. (The sexual division of labor had existed prior to this historical development, but it was not accompanied by the superstructural characteristic of sex-roles — standards of personal character and behavior according to gender.) Woman’s labor was increasingly individualized and restricted to items of use value, i.e., for private and indirect consumption. Her role included the maintenance of current labor power (husband), the rearing and education of future labor power (children), and the care of expended or discarded labor power (sick, injured, and elderly).

The sexual division of labor, reified as “natural,” is of material benefit to the bourgeoisie in a capitalist society where collective replacement of daily needs is not provided for. The working woman in the home does not directly sell her labor power as such. Under capitalism, the value of her “invisible” labor power is appropriated by and benefits the bourgeoisie through her role in the family, which requires her to shop for food, clothing, etc.; cook, maintain the home, and look after the family, including the wide range of emotional and psychological needs, such as defusing her husband’s anger from the exploitation of his job.

With the industrial revolution and the full development of capitalism, some women were incorporated into the public sector of the working class. Nevertheless, the working woman’s role at home has not changed materially. Because her nurturing and service role has not been recognized as having economic value necessary to the maintenance of capitalism, but only as a “natural” and biologically determined sex characteristic, it is likewise considered “natural” that the working woman continue to bear the primary burden of creating a healthy home life for the family.

To maintain the division of labor so crucial to the maintenance of its rule, the bourgeoisie has developed a powerful and pervasive ideology. It includes the radically opposing sex models which permeate education and culture: women learn to be supportive and passive, men are to be physically strong, courageous and combative. Starting with childhood, both boys (cars, mechanical sets, guns) and girls (dolls, sewing kits, play stoves) receive the toys which will train them for their eventual roles in the economy. Bourgeois ideology and institutions make sure this indoctrination continues throughout a person’s life.

Sexuality, Reproduction, and Sex-Roles: Similarly, anti-gayness is a necessary part of bourgeois ideology. Implicit in the fact of two men or two women relating to each other is a rejection of the necessity of basing a relationship of the socially defined “inferiority” or “superiority” (according to physical characteristics) of its participants. When men and women see themselves as equal the bourgeoisie loses one of its basic “divide and conquer” weapons. Working men can recognize that the sexual privileges and short range benefits they derive from the bourgeois oppression of women are minimal and not in their class interest. Likewise, women in rejecting definitions of inferiority can see themselves as workers and become militant fighters for socialist revolution. The bourgeoisie, terrified by the communist spectre of the equality of women and men, labels sexual equality as unnatural. Gayness is also labeled “unnatural,” and therefore a threat to bourgeois dominance, precisely because it rejects the “natural” bourgeois society as reflected in the “natural” bourgeois/proletarian relationship of the nuclear family; it also implies that sexual relationships need not be tied to reproduction.

The ruling class should be encouraged by the fact that they are not alone in this perception. They have what we consider to be some very unlikely allies. The October League strongly condemns gay relationships on the grounds that they cannot produce children and thus are anti-social and attack the family. There are two basic errors in this position. One is the confusion of sexuality with reproduction. The other is the failure to understand that when societies undergo a qualitative change, so do all the basic institutions that uphold them — including personal relationships and childrearing, and the dominant and subordinate nature of sexuality and reproduction within them.

Sexuality and reproduction are not synonymous. The history of civilization has been in part the ruling class’s attempts to enforce the connection between sexuality and reproduction in order to preserve private property through the institution of inheritance. Repressive laws against adultery, pre-marital sex, illegitimacy and homosexuality (which often carries the heaviest penalties), are examples of the repressive measures taken by the ruling class to punish those who rebel against its false unity of sexuality and reproduction. Of course this does not mean that as communists we advocate that people place primary emphasis on the gratification of their sexual urges. At this time, love relationships between two people are probably the best way of meeting people’s emotional and sexual needs. Also for most people these relationships are now the most practical way of carrying out reproduction. But if two women, for example, should choose to build such a relationship, this does not mean that they either will not or have not had children. Indeed, many gay people do have children; some of us were involved in heterosexual relationships before we came out, and we have fought long and hard for the right to keep our children from being taken away by the judicial arm of the bourgeoisie. As scientific socialists, we cannot deny the possibilities of the role that the continuing development of science and technology may come to play in reproduction. Just as it is possible to avoid reproduction through scientific methods of birth control, it is also possible to aid reproduction through artificial insemination.

Reproduction, as the primary basis for personal relationships, is already decreasing in importance under capitalism. This process would be accelerated under socialism. In a society run by workers, the needs of one are the needs of all. The care and upbringing of children is a social obligation in which every citizen takes part. For example, the People’s Republic of China has long recognized the foolishness of keeping most of the female workforce at home with their children. Continuous child care centers are set up, staffed by members of the community, thus freeing parents from direct responsibility. There is no reason why gay people could not participate fully in such programs.

In summary, the bourgeoisie does not oppress people because it thinks such oppression is funny; and the oppression of gay people is anything but funny, nor is it so slight that it can be dismissed as negligible. It runs the gamut from denial of democratic rights, such as housing, employment and education, to police repression and brutality, to the imprisonment, castration and lobotomizing of gays, to the use of adversive conditioning (chemical and electrical shock) to “cure” gays in state prison hospitals such as Vacaville. Economically, it is our experience that many open gays are forced to work in the lowest paying, non-unionized small manufacturing shops where the boss is not much concerned with who a person sleeps with, but who uses a worker’s status as added leverage for increased exploitation. Denial of child custody, over-priced “gay ghettos,” Mafia-controlled bars — all provide evidence of the material oppression gay people. It is no less heinous because its victims are determined by sexuality instead of by color or class. Rather, it is the conscious oppression of gay people by a class conscious bourgeoisie acting only out of its own material interests.

Democratic Rights

The RU, when dealing with the democratic rights of gay people, is even more muddled and unclear than usual:

The RU supports the democratic rights of gay people under capitalism, but we do not feel that the Attica Brigade has to take a stand on this. Although we support these democratic rights, we do not do so in an abstract way. We oppose the arbitrary use of laws against homosexuality and we oppose bourgeois methods of treating homosexuals as “criminals.” We do not uphold any so-called general abstract “right to be homosexual.”

But it is not that they support the democratic rights of gays “in an abstract way,” they don’t support the democratic rights of gays in any way. It is not even a matter of “all talk, no action.” Nowhere, except in this position paper, have we found a reference by the RU to the democratic rights of gay people.

The Gay Movement

After laying out its “theory” on the gay question, the RU goes on to discuss the practice of the gay liberation movement. Once again, the RU cannot deal with reality when it differs from their subjective attitudes. There is empirical evidence for the RU to view the gay movement as anti-working class, just as there is empirical evidence for women to see men as the enemy. However, what we must learn is to apply the unity of theory and practice to our analysis. It is not sufficient to collect isolated empirical data ripped from historical context.

The RU says the gay movement raised homosexuality to a principle by raising the slogan “gay is good” as a strategy for defeating imperialism. But the slogan was not raised as a strategy for anything. Its purpose was to strike out against the bourgeois thinking promoted by sociologists, psychologists and religious leaders that gayness was bad, evil, sick, unnatural, arrested development. Given the subjective and objective conditions of gay people at the time it was a necessary slogan and had a tremendous liberating effect on the collective consciousness of gay people. If the RU indeed is so concerned with people raising their sexual preference to a “principle” they should look at themselves. They have truly raised sexuality to a “principle” by making heterosexuality mandatory for membership in their organization.

The gay movement, like the student, anti-war, Afro-American, women’s and other movements, has its contradictions. The gay movement operated in the same context as these other progressive struggles. Chief among the contradictions within the gay movement, as in other groups, was the predominance of petty-bourgeois elements. The communist forces in the gay movement were also small in number and still primitive, and got very little support for their work from other communists. Many gay communists saw anti-war work and the working class movement as more important; gay women communists saw the women’s movement as a higher priority than the gay movement. As a practical result, the gay movement was abandoned by communists to the leadership of the petty-bourgeoisie so that it is now dominated, on the one hand, by a few opportunists and reformists, such as the Gay Community Services Center (GCSC) and Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), who are bought off by government and foundation grants; and, on the other hand, by those in the gay community who put forth gay separatism and chauvinism as the solution to gay oppression.

These separatists, along with the gay reformers, are the most vocal segment of the gay population. But they are not the representatives of gay people, and they do not speak to the real aspirations of gay people. The fact that anti-gay communists take the most conspicuous gay people for the whole points again to their one-sided, superficial and subjective approach. These same communists do not base their analysis of the Black national question on the NAACP, SCLC, or the Black Muslims, who at one time were the dominant forces in the Black liberation movement.

In summary, the gay movement is not in its present state because it is innately bad or incorrect. Rather, it is because the communist movement has failed thus far, through its own subjectivism and pri-mitiveness, to recognize the progressive aspect of the gay movement and therefore to unite with it and give it working class leadership. The gay movement must be looked at historically, in its concrete context, and not as any “thing-in-itself,” immutable and incapable of changing.

Conclusions

In summary, the RU and others fail to support any of their assertions with concrete, historical, material facts. These groups do not offer a shred of evidence proving gayness is an individual (petty-bourgeois) solution to imperialism, nor that it per se precludes struggle around male supremacy and chauvinism.

The contradictions between homosexuals and heterosexuals is nonantagonistic; it can be worked out through principled struggle. Communists, gays and heterosexuals alike, must unite with the progressive aspects raised by the gay movement. Gays are not inherently revolutionary (as some gay groups would say), nor inherently reactionary (as some “communist” groups would say). The class nature of gay liberation will change only when given revolutionary leadership. Even the working class, left to itself, can only develop trade union consciousness, which in the last analysis is bourgeois. To expect the gay movement to be different when left without proletarian leadership is pure idealism. Gay people, particularly working class gays, are perfectly capable of enthusiastically grasping the science of Marxist-Leninism and of being disciplined revolutionary fighters. To make enemies of potential allies is to abandon the working class and its interests.

Appendix

Space does not permit including the entire text of the RU paper criticized by the Los Angeles Research Group. The short summary that concludes the R.U. paper is reprinted below.

Summary from the Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union on Homosexuality and Gay Liberation

Our position can be summarized in three main points: 1) Homosexuality in the USA today is an individual response to the intensification of the contradictions brought about by decaying imperialism; in particular it is a response to the contradiction between men and women which is rooted in male supremacist institutions and male chauvinist ideology. Because homosexuality is rooted in individualism it is a feature of petty bourgeois ideology which puts forth the idea that there are individual solutions to social problems.

2) Because homosexuality is based on petty bourgeois ideology and deals with the contradiction between men and women by turning its back to it, (at least in intimate personal relationships), homosexuals cannot be Communists, that is, belong to communist organizations where people are committed to struggle against all forms of individualism, all aspects of their lives.

3) Gay Liberation in putting forth gayness as a strategy for revolution in this country is a reactionary ideology and can lead us only down the road of demoralization and defeat.

Some Thoughts on
Gay/Lesbian Oppression

Christine Riddiough

It is only in the last ten years that socialists and socialist organizations have had to deal with gay/lesbian liberation, at least as far as the current movement goes. Slogans ranging from “homosexuality is bourgeois decadence!” to “workers of the world come out!” have been put forward. Amidst the absurd and the ridiculous, and sometimes destructive, there has also been some serious exploration of gay/lesbian issues. Like a socialist perspective on anything, a socialist analysis of gay/lesbian issues has to be based on the concrete realities of our world: what does it mean to be gay; who are gay people; what specific forms does gay oppression take. And like socialism in general, for socialist ideas of gay issues to have meaning they must be put into practice and not just be empty slogans.

In looking at gay/lesbian issues, even more than many others, that concrete reality comes hard. The U.S. census doesn’t ask any questions about who’s gay and it doesn’t have any data on where gay people live or work. Most of the studies that have been done have focused on special groups like psychiatric patients or prisoners. So what can be said about gay people is based on one’s own experiences and those of friends and what’s been written in the books that have been published recently, and a few other similar sources. In some ways this is pretty subjective, but in many ways it is more useful than tables of data, because from such personal experiences one can begin to get not only the facts but the feel of the gay/lesbian experience.

Gay/Lesbian Oppression

Given the limited information about gay people this discussion is subjective, as stated above, but we can use the experiences of more and more gay men and lesbians to form the basis of an analysis of gay/lesbian oppression. From what we know so far, we can delineate three facts of gay oppression — coming out, overt discrimination, and covert oppression (being in the closet).

Coming Out: For each gay person there comes a time when she/he acknowledges their gayness, sees themselves as gay. The process around that self-awareness is called “coming out.” Coming out can itself have different aspects — it can refer to one’s first sexual experience with someone of the same sex, to one’s revealing one’s homosexuality to others, or to one’s perception of oneself as gay. In talking about coming out here we will be using it in the last sense.

Coming out, in this sense, is different in many ways for different people — it can occur at any age, it may happen rapidly or very slowly. What it has in common for most gay people is the awareness that one is different. You are no longer one of “us” — one of the good guys, “normal people” that you’ve been raised to be, but are one of “them,” one of the “perverts” — dirty old men or old maid women.

Coming out reflects some of the ways in which gay oppression is significantly different from other forms of oppression. First of all, one does not grow up being gay — a person can realize that they’re gay from a very early age, but one is still a part of straight society and generally a straight family. This means that gay people don’t have the same kind of cultural and historical roots that others do. It also means that gay people are almost always raised with the same sex role stereotypes and expectations and the same homophobia that straight people are. While other minority groups are certainly subjected to stereotypes, none are subjected to them in so all-encompassing a way. Thus in coming out a gay person has to not only gain self-awareness but must also overcome ten, eighteen or more years of being taught to be anti-gay. One must overcome guilt and shame at being what one has been taught is beneath contempt. For many people, if not most, this is a difficult experience; some may resort to chemical dependency, some may retreat to heterosexual marriage, others to celibacy in order to deal with the conflict about being gay. But many people are able to get beyond these initial problems of coming out.

Overt Discrimination: If a person comes out to others they can face many forms of oppression. One of these is ostracism — you may be isolated or avoided by others if they know that you’re gay. Perhaps the most difficult situation in facing this is with one’s family. We are generally taught that even if all else fails, we can always count on our family — parents, siblings, children. But if you’re gay, that might not be true. The same parents who would stand by their child were she/he found to be a murderer or drug addict, might very well disown that child if she/he reveals to them his/her gayness. There have been instances where this has in fact happened, and more cases where it has caused an estrangement for a time.

Openly gay people also face discrimination in employment. In some instances, when people are found out to be gay they are fired from their jobs. This is particularly true in so-called sensitive jobs where there is direct contact with children. We’ve seen recently, with the efforts to repeal gay rights and in California to prohibit gay people from teaching, just how deep this goes. Even other jobs can be a problem. One gay activist was fired from his job as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory. Many people have gotten dishonorable discharges from the armed forces for being gay.

Similarly, in terms of housing discrimination, gay people have been kicked out of apartments when they were found to be gay. Gay ghettos, areas in large cities where more openly gay people live, tend to be higher rent areas. People are particularly sensitive about housing issues because it might force people with children to live near gay people. Much of this kind of fear is based on the notion that gay people are somehow prone to child molestation.

If one is openly gay in public places such as buses, restaurants, movie theatres, and so on, one is often subject to harassment — being called a “queer” or being laughed at or threatened or even beaten up. In Chicago a few years ago, two men were arrested for disorderly conduct because they kissed each other in a public place. In San Francisco more recently, a man was killed by some young men who shouted “faggot” over and over as they stabbed him to death.

For openly gay people with children there is the possibility that they can lose custody simply because they are gay. In many instances women have been declared unfit mothers because they are lesbians; even when custody is awarded to gay parents, the judge may place strict limitations on them. In one case a woman was given custody only if she agreed to live separately from her lover and not see her in the presence of her children.

Gay people, especially men, can also face legal harassment. In most states there are laws prohibiting homosexual activities (that is, sexual activities that gay people and often straight people engage in). These activities are sometimes referred to as the “detestable and abominable crime against nature.” In some states gay people could be jailed for twenty to thirty years. In a recent case the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states had the right to legislate against sexual acts by consenting adults in private and could enforce these laws discriminatorily against gays.

The mental health profession also tends to oppress gay people — many psychiatrists still see homosexuality as a mental illness even though the American Psychiatric Association has taken it off its lists. Gay people going to a psychiatrist are often treated for their homosexuality even if that is not related to the problem they have. Psychiatrists have tried to “cure” people of their homosexuality through the use of aversion therapy, lobotomies and other such techniques.

These are just a few of the ways in which gay people are discriminated against and oppressed. Other resources, such as books and films, give greater details about what forms this oppression takes.

The Closet: Most gay people do not, however, face these kinds of oppression very frequently. Most gay people are “in the closet,” pretending most of the time to be straight. And for most gay people being in the closet is both the main protection they have against overt oppression, and the worst force of oppression they face.

Most oppressed groups cannot hide from the rest of society — it is usually pretty obvious who’s a woman, who’s black and so on. While a few people from these groups can “pass,” most cannot. For gay people this is not true — most gay people can, and do, pass for straight. In fact, one generally assumes that everyone around them is straight unless there are some very obvious indications otherwise. Often gay people who are in the closet will do things to preserve a straight image. This can range from talking about having dates with people of the opposite sex to bringing other-sex people home to the family or to office parties to getting married. For the approximately twenty million U.S. gay people who act in these ways, being in the closet is a protection against job discrimination, being kicked out of one’s home, losing one’s family, and so on. Most (if not all) gay people are in the closet for some part of their lives.

But for all that the closet is a form of protection, it is also the most oppressive aspect of being gay. Being in the closet means having to lie about a part of one’s life that is central. It means fragmenting one’s life into little boxes — parts where one can be gay and where one has to play straight. It means being alienated from those around you — at work, where you live — in a basic way. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of being in the closet and the one most unique to gay people is the alienation from one’s family. People generally rely on their familes for love and support. Gay people may be starting new relationships or be in long-term ones and have to deny those relationships and their happiness in them with their families. Or gays may be breaking up and have to pretend that all is well. They can’t bring home lovers, as lovers, and thus periods around holidays may be especially hard.

Many of the same things can be said of one’s interactions with friends and co-workers. Being in the closet makes one isolated from such people and unable to join in with much of the general camaraderie that often goes on. This can often make it difficult to form and maintain friendships when part of it has to be based on lies.

Another aspect of being in the closet is the need to ignore anti-gay statements and jokes. Often one has to listen to a relative talk about someone being a “queer” or a “fag,” or sit quietly as people laugh at some anti-gay joke on TV. You may be faced with someone who tells you that all queers should be shot or sit behind people on a bus who are talking about Anita Bryant and how great her anti-gay campaign is. All of these things can take a tremendous toll on people.

Why are Gay People Oppressed?

These are the facts of gay/lesbian oppression, but in order to act on this we have to understand the underlying basis for why gay people are oppressed. Many reasons have been given: people’s fear of their own homosexuality, the pervasiveness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in our society, and so on. As socialists we want to go beyond this — why, for example, should people be so afraid of homosexuality in themselves? What connections, if any, does gay/lesbian oppression have with the oppression of other people in our society?

Though socialism may seem miles apart from gay issues (after all, one is interested in economic relationships, one in sexual relationships), underneath the surface there are connections. For socialism goes further than the economic to investigate how the economic system affects all human relationships and human life in general. For many marxists, the relation is a simple one — human behavior, all activities in the “superstructure” of society, are a reflection of the economic base. Our society is a capitalist one, and so the superstructure reflects that economic system. Given this simplistic analysis, it’s easy to see how the simplistic responses to gay issues that too many socialists put forward have developed. If social relations, the gay situation among them, are simply a reflection of the economic base, then socialist views must tie the two together. Depending on one’s initial proclivity this can lead to such seemingly divergent slogans as those mentioned above: “Homosexuality is bourgeois decadence” and “Workers of the world come out” — simplistic slogans based on a simplistic understanding of the world (and of Marx).

But while it’s easy to criticize such lines, it’s another thing to come up with a more adequate analysis of gay oppression. Such an analysis has to be based on a dialectical conception of the world — of the interaction of base and superstructure, of economics and consciousness. One marxist who has begun this is Antonio Gramsci. Carl Boggs, in his book Gramsci’s Marxism, says:

For Gramsci, therefore, the only philosophical standpoint consistent with revolutionary marxism was a conception of knowledge, ideas and consciousness as both an expression of the material world and as a creative transforming agent — a dialectical notion that was a definite advance beyond the determinism of the positivists and the formal theorists. (p. 30)

Gramsci’s marxism can give us a basis for understanding gay/lesbian oppression and linking it to the structures of society as a whole.

Gramsci’s Marxism: Gramsci agreed with the basic premise of marxism that the mode of production was primary in shaping historical development. However, Gramsci’s concept of marxism was a “philosophy of praxis” — that is, it is not only theoretical but political. It presupposes both thought and action, a philosophical understanding and a political involvement. How is this to be reconciled with the concept of the primacy of the mode of production? At first glance this primacy would seem to lead to an economic determinism where “every fluctuation of history and ideology can be presented as an immediate expression of the structure (i.e., base).” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 336)

But this conception is undialectical and Gramsci rejected it. Rather he posited a dynamic relationship between base and superstructure, where the economic base shapes development in the long run, but may in fact be influenced by the superstructural forces on a short-term level. Gramsci insisted on the role of consciousness in revolutionary changes and suggested that material forces are meaningful through human definition.

In order, then, for revolutionary changes to occur, socialists must take account not only of economic conditions, but of the political and cultural conditions of a society. One way in which this question may be posed is to ask, how does the ruling class rule? Simply owning a lot of factories or land doesn’t in itself give control — after all, the sheer numbers of workers would overwhelm the few rulers. Gramsci said that the ruling class has two tools at its disposal: political society and civil society. Through political society the ruling class exercises authority by domination or coercion, while through civil society it exercises by direction or hegemony. The coercive tools of the ruling class include, for example, the army and the police.

Civil society includes institutions outside of the state and the economic system, like the churches, schools and the family. There are areas where there is overlap between these sectors; for example, trade unions are a part of civil society as well as functioning in the economic realm, and political parties function as both civil and political society. Through these institutions the ruling class is able to gain hegemony — that is, a worldview that includes a system of values, beliefs and so on that supports the interests of the ruling class and is accepted by all people in the society.

Gramsci further indicated that any stable regime would have to rely on hegemony rather than coercion in order to maintain its rule. The comparative role of coercion and hegemony would depend on the specific conditions within a given society. In advanced capitalist societies such as the U.S., the ruling class has many more tools with which it can manipulate the consciousness of the working class than it has in less advanced capitalist societies. For example, the schools and the media in the U.S. are highly developed.

How does this apply to the question of gay/lesbian oppression? Gramsci most likely never considered that it would, but he did discuss some aspects of the family and sexuality as they relate to civil society. Boggs summarizes these:

Though Gramsci nowhere formulates a theory of the family and sexuality, he does produce some insights into the nexus puritanism-capitalism-family that were paralleled within Marxism only by the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich. Gramsci argued that the stabilization of sexual relations within the monogamous family, with the full support of religious dogma behind it, was central to creating a work force that is efficient and obedient. In this sense the family constitutes the basic social unit of civil society, and puritanism is its underlying ideological justification. As capitalism expands and increases its reliance upon technology and bureaucratic structures, “these new methods demand a rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts… and with it a strengthening of the ‘family’ in a wide sense and of the regulation and stability of sexual relations.” Thus the repressed sexuality that is the outgrowth of the nuclear family operates to restrict psychically the worker both within and outside the workplace: “It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants the man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction. The employee who goes to work after a night of ‘excess’ is no good for his work.” It would not be surprising, therefore, to find that the most progressive approaches to sex and morality tend to come from those groups furthest removed from the production process; nor would it be surprising, Gramsci suggests, to discover that women’s struggle against patriarchal oppression inevitably activates new patterns of thought and behavior that help to undermine bourgeois hegemony in the workplace itself.” (Boggs, pp. 44-5; internal quotes from the Prison Notebooks)

Not only are there lessons taught us in the family, but the family itself recreates the ideology of the ruling class. It is itself authoritarian and hierarchical. So thorough is the hegemony of the ruling class within the family that we are taught that this is the natural order of things. The family is based in particular on a relationship between men and women which represses sexuality, especially women’s sexuality. We are taught that there is a natural bond between sexuality and reproduction. Within the family this is further linked to childrearing and sex roles and sex stereotypes. These are then extended to the other spheres of life, such as work. Anything that contradicts these concepts of sexuality and sex roles is considered to be not only abnormal and contrary to common sense, but unnatural.

The family has also developed an important role within working class life, as both Zaretsky and Fernbach have pointed out. The family is the one place to which people turn for emotional and social support — support which is not available at work or in other parts of our lives. It is also a place where working people can develop an identity and respect for themselves as human beings. So the family has support from the working class and from the ruling class, because it serves the needs of both. This makes it a very stable institution.

Gay people, by our existence, our lives, challenge many of the ideas on which the family is based and thus threaten the hegemony of the ruling class. Earlier we discussed three aspects of gay oppression: coming out, overt discrimination, and being in the closet. The crux of these is, first of all, in our dispersal throughout society and our isolation from one another; and, secondly, in our invisibility. We can see from our above analysis how it is necessary for gay/lesbian oppression to take these forms.

As mentioned earlier, coming out is a critical point in each gay person’s life because it is at that point that we recognize our sepa-rateness from those around us. We recognize that we are not only different from other members of even our own families but that we are, at least implicitly, threatening to them and thus estranged. We can understand the force, the import of coming out if we look at it in the context of the family’s role in building hegemony. The ideology of the ruling class is, after all, not only inculcated in straight people, but in gay people as well. As we recognize our differences from these ideas, we have to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class — coming out, in this sense, means some level of rejection of that hegemony. Since these ideas are perceived as normal, natural, common sense, this means a rejection of what we have been taught is the only way to live. Because the family plays such a critical role in society, this rejection and its affect on gay people’s relationships with their families is critical as well.

Our invisibility, then, can be understood to be the result of the need to prevent our existence from challenging ruling class hegemony for those around us. For our existence does contradict those basic notions of sexuality — its channeling into heterosexuality, its functionalism. This is particularly true of lesbians. Within the family male sexuality is repressed and restricted, but female sexuality is considered nonexistent.

Beyond this challenge to these sexual ideas is the challenge to sex roles and stereotypes. Again lesbians in particular are outside the sex role assigned to them, and in trying to “take on” in some sense the male role (that is, being independent, strong and so on), lesbians are trying to take on male prerogative and are more of a threat than gay men, who are “downwardly mobile.”

It is thus important to the ruling class that gay people stay in the closet. How is this accomplished? Three main factors can be distinguished. First of all, gay people retain a large part of ruling class ideology — while coming out signifies a break, it doesn’t mean that years and years of indoctrination can be wiped out. Second, even were most gay people to abandon ruling class ideology completely, we would still know that that would not be true of others. We would still be attacked if we came out, as has been the case in the past. Finally, the ruling class has the power of the state behind it, and there are penalties for coming out, as indicated above. Through these factors the ruling class has largely kept gay people in the closet.

With the rise of the gay movement, there has been an increase in openness about gay people. Even before that, there were some people who were openly gay. Why didn’t this cause the downfall of ruling class hegemony, if gay people do pose such a threat? Two interlocking reasons can be seen. On the one hand, as stated earlier, the family is an extremely stable institution (not individual families, obviously, but the ideology of the family) because it supports not only the hegemony of the ruling class, but also meets the needs, to some extent, of working class people. The efforts of the gay movement have often been seen as an attack on the family and thus as an attack on the working class and on working class people. The right has played on people’s fears (for example, Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign). There has been an increase in fear about gays, particularly because there have been no alternatives presented that would somehow meet the needs now being met by the family. Simply saying that gay people aren’t against the family won’t allay those fears, because people won’t buy it. This is tied into a larger problem for socialists in general. Boggs describes it this way:

Gramsci realized that the erosion of ideological hegemony created only the possibility for advancing toward socialism; demystifying the old consciousness did not inevitably bring with it new forms of revolutionary consciousness. (p.41)

Thus, while gay liberation demystifies ruling class ideology, it does not necessarily put forth an alternative consciousness. Part of the responsibility of gay socialists is, then, to develop such a vision. Finally, it has to be understood that, while gay life demystifies, or challenges, part of bourgeois ideology, there are still aspects of that ideology that may remain untouched. Any socialist vision must not simply create alternatives in a patchwork manner, but must construct a total alternative. It is in this task especially that gay/lesbian socialists must work together with others to put forward a vision of society that will be able to move people to action.

I.I.I.

Towards a Marxist Theory
of Gay Liberation

David Fembach

The precondition for gay liberation is the complete separation of human sexuality from being determined by the needs of procreation. Only when this is achieved can homosexuality flourish alongside heterosexuality as a form of human relationship.

This goal is not in the least Utopian. We know from the findings of anthropology and psychology that every human being has a bisexual potential, and that it is only the social control of sexuality that leads to exclusive and compulsory heterosexuality. We know that twentieth-century scientific developments, in particular birth control and artificial insemination, have laid the technical basis for the complete separation of sex and reproduction. The oppression of gay people and the repression of homosexuality in general is only part of a wider system of sexual relations, which is now coming under attack from the women’s liberation movement, from a perspective closely related to our own.

The present article is an attempt to explore the dynamics of the nuclear family and the sexual patterns of our society in terms of the Marxist science of history — historical materialism. Its starting point is Engels’ analysis in The Origin of the Family, but I have tried to develop the classical Marxist theory of the family to deal with the specific character of gay oppression, and with the new contradictions at work in the family today, ninety years after Engels’ book. At the end of the article, I try to draw some political conclusions for Marxist gay liberationists.

Capitalism and the Family

The nuclear family characteristic of developed capitalist society is a determined product of capitalist relations of production. That is, it developed as the only way in which the working class (including white-collar salaried workers and professionals) could reproduce itself under capitalist conditions, and thus provide a continuing supply of labor-power for capitalist production.

Capitalist production is organized quite independently from any form of family or kinship system. The capitalist buys the labor-power of individual workers and combines this only inside the factory. He is thus relatively indifferent as to how the workers organize their non-working lives, as long as they return daily to the workplace to sell their labor-power and propagate what Marx called “the race of laborers.” Child-rearing must therefore be carried on outside the sphere of production, which provides no framework for it. The workers have to create separate social relations for child-rearing. Since a child-bearing woman in capitalist society has no direct claim on means of subsistence, an arrangement has to be made for the support of child-bearing women by wage-earners. The nuclear family (one woman plus one man plus children) is the simplest unit for child-rearing, and as in a capitalist society women and men have to group into families without any pre-existing kinship ties bringing them together, it is obvious why the nuclear form of the family was the easiest to achieve. Given the separation of home and workplace, and the traditionally high birth rate, it was inevitable that women’s child-bearing activity should be extended into a responsibility for child-rearing and housework in general. The sexual division of labor in the family also affects the division of labor in the factory. Men’s wages have to cover the support of their families, but female labor power is available to the capitalist at a much lower rate — a wage differential of some 2:1 has been more or less constant for over a century.

If the nuclear family is the determined product of capitalist relations of production, it is so primarily as an adaptation that the working class itself makes to capitalist conditions. But given that the nuclear family is the most convenient way for the working class to reproduce itself, the capitalist state has intervened to support this family form, by means of a framework of marriage and family law, welfare systems, etc. The nuclear family is thus supported both from “above,” by the state, and from “below,” by the working class. That is why it is so strong and stable an institution.

Sexual Oppression

The sexual patterning of our society can be explained in terms of the nuclear family. The economic dependence of women on men was inevitably translated into a general social and in particular a sexual subordination. Sex became one service among others that a woman had to provide for a man in return for her keep.

The family has to bring up its children to fit its social demands — the “facts of life.” Girls have to derive fulfillment from their subordinate role. In particular, to become women, they have to repress their autonomous clitoral sexuality, seek satisfaction in being penetrated by the penis, and sublimate their erotic needs into child- and male-care. Boys on the other hand are brought up to devalue women; they are encouraged to cultivate an aggressive sexuality which seeks satisfaction without considering the needs of their partners. Freud’s theory of the oedipus and castration complexes is an attempt to explain the psychological processes by which this is done. He presents the key differentiating mechanism as the “discovery” of female castration, which really refers to the importance given by parents and educators to the presence or absence of the penis, which is presented as the unique organ of sexual gratification.

The psychological production of masculinity and femininity involves the repression of homosexual tendencies, but this process works differently for each sex. For the girl, it is not specifically lesbianism that is repressed, but rather any claim to sexual autonomy independent of the penis. For the boy, homosexuality seems equivalent to castration, involving the loss of his position as a sexual subject and becoming like women the object of male sexual aggression. The famous “male bond” serves to guard against this by harnessing male penises in parallel, so to speak, towards the penetration of female sexual objects.

Because both male and female sexuality have to be violently forced into the patterns demanded, and because this is done in millions of separate families each with their own small but significant deviations from this ideal norm, not everyone grows up into a happy wholesome heterosexual. Probably only a minority of children fit without too much difficulty into the slots prepared for them. A large number succeed only with a lesser or greater struggle, and in a few cases the mechanism misfires in one way or another, and the child’s sexuality is channeled into a compulsively homosexual instead of a compulsively heterosexual direction. The aggression that the less well-adjusted heterosexuals have to mobilize to keep down their own homosexual trends inevitably finds a further target in the gay minority, who represent in visible external form the desires that they have to repress in themselves. Thus the family has a three-fold effect on homosexuality: (1) it represses homosexuality in general; (2) it does this unevenly, so that some children have difficulty in repressing their homosexuality, and others grow up to be gay; (3) it makes the gay minority the focus of the aggression mobilized in particular by the inadequate heterosexuals to repress their own homosexuality.

Homosexuality and the State

The structures of masculinity and femininity that result in the repression of homosexuality and the oppression of gay people are reproduced in the family from one generation to the next. They go back basically unchanged far beyond capitalism, right to the time that private property broke up the tribal community and made child-bearing women individually dependent on men: what Engels called “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.” However, although this primary form of gay oppression that derives directly from the family has remained more or less constant, there is a second form of gay oppression which has varied substantially even within the history of capitalism, and this is the policies toward homosexuality of the state (and its subordinate agencies — media, schools, etc.), as the regulator of family and sexual relations on behalf of the capitalist mode of production. Although state functionaries certainly have their own personal emotions, in making laws and policies they are not just expressing their hang-ups, but must pursue as rationally as possible the capitalist class interest. Why, then, did the Labouchere amendment of 1885 step up so considerably the legal persecution of gay men, and why did the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 remove even the traditional common-law sanctions on homosexuality?

My hypothesis about this is as follows. In any social system based on private property and the individual family, children are an economic burden on the small family unit that produces them. They are especially so in a developed capitalist society, where the unit of production is outside the family, children cannot earn their keep for many years, and the child-rearing women are excluded from production. In many circumstances, therefore, marriage has to be postponed until the prospective parents can afford children. But if the heterosexuality for which the family has prepared its members will lead to pregnancy, then premarital heterosexuality must be restrained. This is partly done by girls resisting male sexual demands in their own interest against getting stranded as unmarried mothers; but it also requires the backing of the state or a powerful religious authority. In this way a pressure of pent-up sexual energy is created, male in particular, which if not also hemmed in by public authority, might burst through the psychological barriers erected against homosexuality, as it often does for example in prison situations. The gay minority, which is otherwise marginal to society, and does not even reproduce itself, then becomes a possible source of “contamination.” In a capitalist society this is a particularly acute danger, since marriage involves a heavy economic burden, and is not at all necessary for productive activity, and for men, therefore, homosexuality is in fact economically advantageous. The pre-1967 law against homosexuality was always justified by the notion that gay men might otherwise “seduce” adolescent boys in their formative years and prevent them from making a heterosexual adjustment. However, it is only when the temptation of heterosexuality is artificially removed, by economic, legal, or religious barriers, that homosexuality can possibly threaten a heterosexuality that has not only as strong a natural basis as homosexuality, but is strongly cultivated by the family, to say the least.

The restraint on premarital heterosexuality thus requires the formal proscription of homosexuality as an ancillary. The stronger the first is, the stronger the second must be too. This was notably the case in the heroic period of the bourgeoisie, who had to defer marriage until a comparatively advanced age in the interest of capital accumulation. In a puritan regime, all forms of extramarital sex are forbidden, precisely because marriage itself is such a difficult achievement.

In the early days of industrial capitalism, the state did little to control the family and sexual life of the masses. It is notorious that in the teeming industrial slums of the nineteenth century, religious and family controls were gradually crumbling. Procreation, however, was not at first a problem; capitalism could obtain all the labor-power it needed at a subsistence wage. However, as the dangers of epidemics of cholera and of revolution mounted, the capitalist state developed an increasingly interventionist policy towards the working-class family. A stable flow of relatively healthy recruits to the labor force now had to be produced within the industrial cities themselves, and the Factory Acts, compulsory education, welfare benefits, etc., were all elements of state support for the working class in enabling and encouraging it to have a family life. This was nevertheless always a struggle for working-class people to achieve and maintain, and it was only after the Second World War that virtually all working-class people could afford to marry sooner or later. Ordinary working people thus had to restrain their heterosexuality until a late marriage, for the same economic reasons as the bourgeoisie had before them. If the Labouchere amendment is understood in this context, it appears as one of the many “services” that the capitalist state performed for the working class, in helping it to establish the nuclear family.

The “Sexual Revolution”

Over the last hundred years, of course, the nuclear family has become extremely well established. The working class has made a splendid adjustment to capitalist conditions, and marries at an ever earlier age. In these circumstances, one might anyway expect the legal sanctions against homosexuality to relax again somewhat. But what has emerged in the meantime is a new fact of world-historical significance, which has completely transformed the situation. The almost universal spread of birth control has broken the causal link between heterosexuality and procreation. It has thereby undermined the proscription of premarital sex, and no moral or religious commandments have been able to hold back this “sexual revolution.” But now that the heterosexuality produced in the family can be given free rein, there is no longer any danger at all that homosexuality will “snowball” out of control. The structures of masculinity and femininity can be safely left to reproduce themselves. The state can step out of the arena of sexual orientation, for sexual orientation is no longer relevant to the reproduction of labor power. If there is such a problem in the future, it will be of a completely different kind. The capitalist state might have to apply pressure on women to have children, but will not have to apply pressure on men to be heterosexual.

Gay oppression is like an iceberg. The family produces it in the unconscious below the water-line, and the visible intervention of the state is only a shiny summit. The homosexual situation in the present period is characterized by a peculiar discrepancy. The tip of the iceberg is rapidly melting away, for the first time in the history of class society, under the warm sunbeams of the (hetero) “sexual revolution.” The last few years have seen the first foundation of a right to be gay, which is increasingly upheld by the state, the church, the media, and other public agencies. Discrimination against gay people still exists in fields such as housing, certain branches of employment, etc., but this is residual and will take little pressure to change. In the sphere protected by public agencies, gay people can live their lives with little trouble. However, below the waterline, within the family, and in everyday life at work, in the local community, etc., where social relations are largely governed by the emotions that the family generates, gay people will continue to be mocked, beaten up, etc., by the same people who have always done thus, primarily men insufficiently confident of their own heterosexuality. (The police, of course, at a local level are often in a position to act out their own emotions rather than enforce the law.)

Gay liberationists have always recognized that changes in the law and other superstructures do not add up to liberation. We have also recognized that a much stronger force than us is working to change the oppressive family structure, that is, the women’s liberation movement. Here then are some notes on how I see the situation in the family developing, which should provide some guidelines on how we can best direct our own energies.

The Family and Women’s Liberation

By the time the nuclear family had reached its fullest flowering, in the mid-twentieth century, the forces acting to undermine it were already being prepared. Engels had seen the transformation of the family as possible only via a transformation of the relations of production that surrounded it, but three developments produced by capitalism itself have opened up a field within the nuclear family in which women can struggle for their liberation here and now. These three developments are, firstly, the drastic reduction in the death rate and therefore in the level of female fertility required to reproduce the population; secondly, the slow but significant decline in the volume of housework, due to both the decline in family size and to increasing mechanization, the shift in tasks such as food preparation from the family to the factory, etc.; thirdly, the universal spread of birth control together with other developments in the technology of procreation such as artificial insemination.

Birth control, in particular, is enabling women to do two things. Firstly, and most obviously, to bear children only as and when they decide to do so. Secondly, but just as important, it is enabling women to reassert their sexuality, for the first time in the history of class society. For its effect is to take sexuality out of the marriage bargain. In the past, women have had to police the ban on premarital sex, and thus collaborate in further suppressing their own sexuality, which had already been crippled enough by the family. Now that women are free to have heterosexual relations before marriage, they are in a position to explore their own sexual needs and demand of men a more satisfying and egalitarian sexual relationship. Control by women of their own bodies, both in their sexual and reproductive capacities, is an immensely powerful weapon. As women reclaim this independence, they do not desperately desire children and husbands as a sublimation for their repressed clitoral sexuality. They become less willing to bear children if the price of this is dependence on a man. They will begin to demand, backed by a falling birth rate, that the state take on full economic responsibility for the costs of child care, and guarantee equal pay and job opportunity for women. (The birth rate has already begun to fall significantly, both in the United States and in Britain, with the rise of feminist consciousness in the last few years.) They will gradually stop forcing their children through the castration complex, and instead will teach their little girls how to us their clitoris, and teach their little boys that their penis, although bigger, is by no means better, and also has its disadvantages (only one orgasm at a time!). The abolition of the castration complex will finally allow male and female children to develop both their homosexual and heterosexual trends in a non-compulsive and non-male-dominated way.

Women’s Liberation and Socialism

In the era of birth control, capitalism as such no longer imposes any absolute barriers to women’s liberation, and this struggle can therefore make considerable progress this side of a socialist revolution. But capitalism certainly acts as a brake on women’s liberation, and in a particular capitalist society such as our own, where the male-dominated nuclear family produced by an earlier stage of capitalism is so firmly established, the liberation of women and the socialist revolution are certainly connected by a complex relationship of interdependence. For a capitalist economic system, the social provision of child care, like other social services, is an overhead cost on production that will be resisted for as long as possible, and only conceded insofar as it is no longer avoidable. The capitalist state might indeed respond to a falling birth rate, not by extending child-care facilities but by restricting abortion and contraception, as even some allegedly building socialism have done (Russia in the 1930s, Romania today). The sexual division of labor within the social sphere (women’s concentration in the low-paid service sector), although originally an effect of the nuclear family, is nevertheless, once established, one way in which the capitalist economy spontaneously works to perpetuate the economic dependence of women. Although women can make definite progress within capitalism, and will not listen to those “Marxists” who tell them to leave sexual problems until “after the revolution,” in their struggle for liberation they will certainly come up against the barriers of class society. The development of an autonomous women’s movement in today’s conditions is thus in no way a “bourgeois feminist diversion”; it has an objective anti-capitalist dimension and can link up with the working-class movement on this basis.

A Direction for Gay Marxists

What indications does this theory of the family and women’s liberation provide for the work of Marxist gay liberationists? First, it is wrong to believe that gay people can be organized against the capitalist state and for socialism on the basis of civil rights. The capitalist state is rapidly withdrawing from its intervention into the field of sexual orientation, and in the more advanced bourgeois democracies such as Holland it already appears to gay people as a positive friend, defending gays against the emotional hostility generated by the family. Second, as the structures of masculinity/ femininity are gradually undermined by the women’s liberation movement, anti-gay emotions will slowly decline, and there will be a steadily wider field for gay people to operate socially without harassment or discrimination. The mass gay movement, for which the homosexual problem is necesarily limited to one of gay people being “accepted,” has a steady path of development open to it, as there will be a constant succession of fields of social life in which gays can successfully win acceptance. This however is very definitely a struggle with no broader revolutionary potential; it is essentially cashing in on a development happening independently and elsewhere, i.e., the undermining of masculinity/femininity effected by the women’s liberation movement.

The Gay Liberation Front attempted to combine the mass organization of gay people with a struggle against the structures of the family that it correctly perceived as the basis of gay oppression. It failed, because the possibility for gay people, by definition outside the family, to participate in the struggle to transform it, is very limited. One of the few fields in which this is perhaps possible is sex education work directed at schools, etc., i.e., a cultural field that closely surrounds the family and aids in its reproduction, and the education group of Birmingham GLF has done some pioneering work here. If anything of the old GLF survives, it is likely to be specific projects such as this.

Since there is no basis for a broad revolutionary gay movement, as there definitely is for a women’s movement, gay Marxists must make their main field of struggle that within the Marxist left. In the post-GLF era it is possible, for the first time, for gay people to work openly as such in the Marxist organizations; gay caucuses have grown up in at least three of these since the first Gay Marxist conference, and there are rumblings in one or two others. In Britain the Marxist left is at present very small, and in the process of rebuilding a revolutionary proletarian party, as the indispensable instrument for overthrowing capitalism, gay people, as well as women’s liberationists, can get in at the ground floor.

Gay Marxists who engage in the struggle for socialism cannot avoid any more than straight Marxists the bitter controversies over theory and strategy that at present divide those in Britain who define themselves as revolutionary Marxists. But our shared awareness of the problems of sexuality should give us a certain common consciousness of the limitations of all existing Marxist organizations. The women’s and gay liberation movements have presented a major challenge to the Marxist organizations in this country, and so far I can see little sign of any of them having risen to this challenge. Those that believe that the proletarian revolution is around the corner, or that it can be made on the basis of the existing consciousness of the working class, will of course never do so. In my view, no socialist revolution in Britain will be possible without a prior cultural revolution in the minds of the working class, which are today so befuddled by racism, social-imperialism, and sexism. The British revolution is still a long way off, and Marxists in Britain are only at the stage of laying the foundations of a revolutionary proletarian movement (generally, unfortunately, these are laid very badly). Lenin, however, wrote that “the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory” and he wrote this with particular reference to a country in which the “national tasks of Russian Social Democracy are such as have never confronted any other socialist party in the world” (What Is To Be Done, chapter 1, section D). The problem of making a socialist revolution in an advanced capitalist country has also never yet been solved by any Marxist party. In order to solve it, it is essential that Marxist theory and practice be extended to integrate the sexual contradiction. Unless a Marxist party understands all the mechanisms of the society it is trying to transform, and bases its strategy on such a comprehensive analysis, it will never make a successful socialist revolution. There is no short cut to revolution, and opportunist attempts at cutting the corners always land up in the swamps of reformism.

This will undoubtedly be the fate of those Marxist organizations in Britain today who pander to working-class sexism (let alone middle-class) in their recruitment policies. No one can call themself a communist in a country such as ours, in which women’s and gay liberationist movements have already arisen, representing new social forces that are objectively part of the movement from capitalism to communism, unless they clearly understand the significance of these movements, and carry out in practice a struggle against sexism. This is not at all a moralistic position, the plea of gay people or feminists for a place in the sun. On the contrary, it is a precondition of successful Marxist practice. By taking a firm stand against sexism, Marxist organizations will attract to themselves the energy of women and gay people rising for struggle and demanding liberation. By fuzzing over the question of sexism they will lose this energy, and gain in return only the support of the few extra male misogynists still too backward to accept the ideas of women’s and gay liberation — and therefore not ready to be real communists.

In general, British Marxism cannot rest content with the critique of capitalism developed at other times and in other places. The only way forward is to sharpen and deepen the critique of all aspects of life under capitalism, until it finally has enough strength to bite through all the sophisticated ideologies and social controls that tie people to the present social order. By inscribing on their banner the goal of gay liberation, and carrying out in practice a struggle against sexism, Marxist organizations will in the short run risk seeming more way out to many people than they do at present, and will no doubt arouse a certain additional amount of hostility. However, it is only by standing firmly on the side of the new social forces that history has unleashed, that we will in the long run be able to offer British people something really worth making a socialist revolution for.

A 1980 Postscript

Seven years have passed since I wrote this article for Gay Marxist in July 1973. I’m glad to see that people still find it worth reprinting, but it was written very much as a contribution to the debate in the British gay movement at the time, and both objective conditions and my own responses to them have changed a great deal by now. It really requires some explanation, to make sense in the 1980’s.

I came into the gay movement in 1970 as a Marxist. The Gay Liberation Front of the early 1970’s left an indelible mark on my ideas, making me aware of a whole dimension of social relations I had previously ignored (for all their hefty effect on myself!). My idea of communism became more radical, as I now saw the possibility and necessity for a society freed from gender as well as class divisions. Yet I always remained committed to the general project of human liberation, of which gay liberation was only a part.

The short-lived Gay Marxist groups and magazine (1972-74) served as a forum in which the fairly diverse group of radicals disappointed by the ebb of the early revolutionary spirit of GLF debated what to do next. Some ended up concentrating on alternative lifestyles, some flowed with the tide and became activists in the gay civil rights movement, some kept the torch of socialism alight in the gay movement at the price of retreat to an academic approach (Gay Left). None of these solutions suited me, and I ended up trying to struggle for the ideas of gay liberation back in the straight left for a few unsuccessful years.

The argument that led me to this position is stated in my 1973 article. Though there are certainly some ideas put forward here that I would still stand by, I now see the strategic conclusion I reached as vitiated by an unwillingness to question certain central dogmas of Marxism, seeking to tack gay liberation on as an accessory, whereas what was really required was a more advanced model of revolutionary theory altogether.

The anti-gender positions put forward in the London GLF Manifesto of 1971 had developed very much under the influence of early American radical feminism. It was writers such as Martha Shelley, Robin Morgan and Shulamith Firestone who showed us how our particular struggle, as gays, was an integral part of a world-historical transformation. Interestingly, the term “radical feminism” was used in the British gay movement at that time not to mean that all men were the enemy, nor that the class struggle was merely a male trip, but simply that a radical transformation of sexual relations was required as well as a radical transformation of class relations. What I tried to do in “Towards a Marxist Theory…” was to show how the two processes were connected.

The London Gay Marxist Study Group to which I belonged saw its ideology as “materialist feminist,” as opposed to the “idealist feminists” who held male domination to be the simple emanation of male biology. As Marxists, we saw the sexual division of labor, and the correlated psychological differentiation, as historical and subject to change. But if this was so, then wasn’t the gender system, however important, ultimately a by-product of the class system, as Engels classically explained? And how could the class system be dissolved except by the classical path of proletarian revolution? The role of the anti-sexist struggle, then, in the total process of communist transformation, was at most to help undermine the structures of bourgeois hegemony; the decisive shift of power would still take the classical form, even if “after the revolution” it would be necessary for women and gays to continue and complete the dissolution of gender, in the more favorable economic context now provided.

Today, I see a far more intimate connection between the oppressive dimensions of class and gender than is allowed for by traditional Marxism. It may well be that women were not oppressed at the dawn of human society, before an economic surplus arose, but there was already the primary sexual division of labor in which women have always specialized in childcare, men in hunting and warfare. (This division of labor, of course, is “biological” only in the sense that the long period of dependency of the human infant, and the constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth and lactation to which women were subject, left only men free for tasks further afield from the domestic base.) In some “primitive communist” societies, this division is more pronounced than in others, depending on the particular ways in which they produce their subsistence. But insofar as violent activities are part of the social pattern, it is invariably men who specialize in these.

Engels regarded the sexual division of labor as only “natural,” and did not see it as having any particular effects on the historical process. But he could only ignore the “feedback” effect of gender on class because he saw the class division as arising only with the development of individual private property. In his presentation, this first took the form of animal herds, whose management “happened” to be a male specialization. It is clear from the present level of historical knowledge, however, that the first form of class society, in the sense of the “theft of other people’s labor”(Marx), was based on collective private property, in which a warrior and priestly elite (force and fraud) seize control over the labor process of their society, exploiting via the state in the way characteristic of all the early empires, both in the Old World and in the Americas. (As Rudolf Bahro argues in The Alternative in Eastern Europe, it is this earliest division between “mental” and “manual” that persists in the so-called “socialist” countries of today, more fundamental and difficult to erode than private property in the individual sense characteristic of capitalism.)

But if this is so, then all class division directly depends on the gender division. Class domination is established by the extension of the masculine function in the sexual division of labor, originally hunting (war against animals), to war and the enslavement of other societies, ultimately resulting in the continuous war of a ruling minority against the oppressed majority. Engels saw the core of the state apparatus as its “special bodies of armed men,” but missed the significance of the fact that these are precisely always male in composition. The vital religious function in society, which originally women shared on equal terms with men, also becomes a male monopoly once distorted to serve as an instrument of domination.

What does this mean, then, for the anti-gender struggle today? In attacking male supremacy and the gender system, the feminist and gay movements are simultaneously undermining the psychological foundations of class rule. For it is only through the psychological differentiation of gender that “men” are produced, i.e., that the male half of the human race grow up, in the “normal” case, to be readily susceptible to mobilization by the armed forces of the state, whose existence is precisely based on a readiness to dehumanize other sentient beings and kill them. (Civilian bureaucracies, priesthoods and all active exploiting classes depend on the same psychological mechanism that enables them to view other human beings as mere objects of manipulation, the military being exceptional only in representing the extreme form of this mentality.)

If this were the whole of the story, though, it might seem that the anti-gender stuggle would still act on the class system simply as a softening-up mechanism, helping to create more favorable conditions for the proletarian revolution. Unfortunately, however, the very terms on which this classical form of liberation struggle is waged require the violence of the state and its “special bodies of armed men” to be challenged and overthrown by a movement that has to adopt many similar forms of violence in order to succeed. Violent revolution places a premium on the masculine virtues, which may also help explain how the great revolutionary movements of Russia, China, et cetera, so rapidly crystallized into a new system of domination, for all the undoubted benefits that the peoples of those countries won in the process.

In the West today, however, the situation is very different. The crisis facing our societies is in no way simply the classical Marxist crisis of a struggle between exploiters and exploited coming to a head. It is rather a global crisis of our civilization, the main forms of which, i.e., the danger of nuclear war, the steady ecological deterioration, and the widening gulf between rich and poor countries, all face the peoples of the Western world with the choice of a reorganization that is in the interest of everyone, or a more or less rapid collapse of the conditions of civilized life altogether. Rather than the masculine culture of violence being at a premium in this situation, it is quite the reverse. The feminine culture of empathy (into which all human beings are born, but which little boys are subsequently pulled away from in order to become “men”) urgently needs to be propagated here and now, this side of the revolutionary change of direction that alone can save our society; for it is literally true today, as our gay brother W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, that “We must love one another or die.” Besides the struggle against our particular oppressions, therefore, the women’s and gay movements, in challenging the gender system, represent a vital element needed to solve the general problem of human survival and evolution.

If I dropped out of the gay movement for several years, shortly after writing this article of 1973, it was because the movement had swung so sharply to a purely civil-rights course. There is still a serious tension between the immediate needs of the gay minority, and the struggle against the gender system that is a need of the whole society (a need beginning to be felt today even by many straight men). Gay Marxists are rightly horrified by many of the forms taken by the “post-Stonewall” gay subculture, under the pressures of capitalism and male domination; indeed, I believe we should be far less liberal and restrained in expressing this horror. But from the way I now see the relation between gay liberation and the overall social transformation, I am far more optimistic as to the possibilities of winning gay people for the great ideas of communism (with a small “c”) on the basis of the particular contribution that homosexuality can make to the achievement of a new society. As the practical result of this, I am now involved in a publishing project, Gay Men’s Press, committed to advancing the gay liberation cause.

“Toward a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation” first appeared in the now-defunct British journal Gay Marxist in 1973. It was reprinted in the U.S. in Socialist Revolution (still publishing, as Socialist Review). The postscript was written in April, 1980 for this anthology.

The new Gay Men’s Press to which the author refers can be reached at 27 Priory Avenue, London, N8 7RN, England.

Revolution in the
Pursuit of Happiness:
Love and Community-
Building on the Left

Judy MacLean

1972: A Washington anti-war march — I am marching with a group of sign-carrying socialists. A few yards back the march organizers are heatedly arguing with a group of lesbians who carry pro-lesbian, not anti-war signs. The organizers are afraid the lesbians will turn people off.

1977: A Chicago anti-Anita-Bryant demonstration — I march with a group of lesbians. The march organizers heatedly argue about whether a group called “Gay Socialists” will turn people off.

As a socialist-feminist and a lesbian, I find it hard to talk about all my politics with people who don’t share them (and that is most people, after all). Particularly, to link socialism and lesbianism is to link the unpopular with the taboo. Every time I get someone convinced about one, I have to take a deep breath and wonder if I can muster the energy to start on the other.

A socialism that doesn’t include the women’s movement’s insights into intimate and social power arrangements is not worth fighting for. On the other hand, a feminist revolution that leaves out class, and doesn’t learn from and use the world legacy of Marxist theory and strategy doesn’t have a chance. I won’t say more in defining socialist-feminism here, but more definition is needed, both in writing and in the action of building a socialist-feminist movement.

The question of being a lesbian within a revolutionary movement is one part of the question of how our personal and sexual lives relate to our political goals. The questions of how and who we love, energy for our personal lives vs. energy for our political ones, are not just decisions we need to make individually. They are political questions that need to be part of our whole movement. The American culture, with its stress on individualism and, in the past few decades, stress on fulfillment through sexuality, means that for us, among all revolutionaries in the world, these are burning questions.

In the little more than a decade since the women’s movement burst on the scene, one idea that can help us a lot has begun to suffer benign neglect. That’s the idea that the personal is political. Our most personal dreams, possibilities, decisions and actions are shaped by the political reality in which we live. These are therefore issues for political struggle. But more than that, without political struggle it is unlikely that we can make the changes we want. A final corollary is that political struggle often changes us personally, though not always in the ways we thought it would.

For me, the years before I became part of the women’s movement were years of trying various things I thought would make my life happier. Through it all I was pretty unhappy, and doubly so because I felt it was all my own fault, and that if I were somehow more together, my life would be better. When I found the women’s movement, the idea that the personal is political, that I wasn’t responsible for my own unhappiness, was liberating in itself. As I gradually concentrated on political activity, a funny thing happened. My life got better personally, too. And though some women had a different experience, I am far from an isolated case. The transformation of individuals has been an underlying theme in all revolutionary movements. But there are particular reasons why this is even more important in the U.S. today.

Increasingly over the past century, ordinary people have been encouraged by the media and by the circumstances of their daily lives to find fulfillment exclusively in their personal lives. (Eli Zaretsky in Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life gives an excellent description of how this has happened.) It wasn’t always so, and needn’t always be so. As capitalism in the U.S. has developed and life has become more complex, people experience less and less ability to be creative or effective in the world as a whole. At work more and more jobs, even those with traditionally higher pay and more autonomy, make people feel like cogs in a machine. To compensate, we are increasingly told by TV, popular songs and psychotherapists, we can find fulfillment, happiness and ourselves in our personal lives. Recent developments have put the issue of lesbianism at a key contradictory point in our lives. In the 1950s, the focus of most of this alleged happiness was the family; by the mid-sixties it had switched to sexual relationships. We are all absolutely bombarded with the message that a satisfying sex life is the key to the good life, and that it is achievable, for one and all, if only certain products are used, or certain therapies applied.

In contrast, when women (and some men, too) can honestly talk about how they feel about sex (see the Hite Report) they describe a great deal of misery. And we’re all doubly miserable, unhappy with our sexual lives and unhappy again because we are told that it is so important that we be happy, and our fault if we are not. This contradiction has been one of the factors in the rise of both the feminist and gay movements.

Sexual liberation issues are crucial now because the culture is so keyed up about sex and we therefore grow up focusing most of our love energy there. A fascinating article by Carol Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” published in the Autumn 1975 Signs, tells of a very different emotional setup for women in this country a century ago. Working from diaries and letters, Smith-Rosenberg reconstructs an apparently common American milieu where the center of women’s emotional and affectionate lives were lifelong woman-friends, and husbands were shadowy background figures, emotionally speaking. Although the diaries and letters are full of mention of embraces and kisses, and though it was a common practice for a man to sleep in another room so his wife could share the bed with her close friend when she visited, for the most part, Smith-Rosenberg believes, the women were not lesbians. In a culture that downplayed sexuality, making the relationship sexual was apparently not the next step.

On the other hand, the same emotions those women felt would lead much more strongly to becoming lesbians today, in a culture that preaches fulfillment through sexual relationships. I raise this example because I think that a different culture can mean we experience our needs for love and the ways we fulfill them in widely differing ways. And right now, cultural forces tend to lead us to want, if not True Love, at least The Relationship, with a capital “R”.

The catch is, that’s very hard to do. A friend of mine recently said she just couldn’t handle working in the women’s movement anymore. “I’ve got to get in a relationship I can feel good about, get a job I like, and some friends I can rely on,” she said, “then I’ll get active again.” Another friend decided to do this five years ago. Not only has not become active again, but from all I can see she’s personally unhappier than she was when she was politically active. We can’t get it all together first. That’s an aspect of the personal and political I see a lot of feminists forgetting. That’s one big reason the women’s movement got started, because the social and power structures in our society prevent that.

A lot has been written about how the power dynamics between men and women that permeate the whole society can poison heterosexual relationships. Lesbian relationships are exempt from one central problem: one half has not been programmed to oppress the other. When two women are lovers, both bring expectations of taking a lot of emotional responsibility for the relationship. Two women, especially two feminists, can be unambiguously supportive of each other’s development. And without the role models we’ve all been raised with constantly impinging, lesbians are freer to explore new ways of sharing intimacy.

But if we look for fulfillment exclusively in our lesbian relationships, we’re still falling into a trap capitalism sets for us. Because there are other reasons, besides sexism, that relationships go wrong. They are forced to carry so many burdens — economic and emotional security in an increasingly hostile environment, fun, a place of rest and fulfillment, personal growth, et cetera — no wonder the fragile craft of love founders and sinks. Because we have no other way to fulfill these needs, we try to fulfill them in personal relationships. But we never quite make it. Under capitalism our intimate lives are like a bed without enough covers; an arm, a leg or even a whole person is always out in the cold. And this is often just as true of lesbian relationships as heterosexual ones.

And yet we live in a society that makes us need personal fulfillment more than anything else, just to keep functioning. The only way we’re going to transform the society is to understand this, and build a movement that understands this. This is a lesson the women’s movement sometimes forgets as we go about our daily lives.

The problem is that we have another kind of erotic need besides the personal, sexual ones. I believe that it is just as strong, but that we’ve had to suppress it so thoroughly we’re often not aware we even have the need (just as all those women a century ago were unaware of a need to be lesbians). We don’t even have a good word for the need I am trying to describe; I like to call it the need for community love.

The difficulty in creating good personal relationships is a social one. It comes about because our need for a loving community — a community that works together to provide basic things like food, shelter, safety, health care, security in old age, and, less tangibly, good vibes and support around us all — is systematically denied.

A revolutionary movement must challenge power relationships and gather power for the ultimate challenge, eventually. But there are other criteria we can use in evaluating the success of such a movement. Is it a place where people get a taste of community love, and where we are each transformed, as we work? One indication of the health of the movement is how many people begin to feel better about themselves personally and begin to come to terms with the need for community love as they become active. Although this has been true in all revolutions, it is crucially important for us here, because so much of our oppression is played out on the terrain of personal life.

I have a few ideas about how our movement can become a place where this can happen more easily.

Many of us in the past years have made our political decisions about how we work and what work we do based on doing what seems most important, what will lead to revolution the quickest, or at least what attacks the most basic problem. It sounds like a good way to make a decision, but it has led to unnecessary putting down of what other people are doing. For example, several years ago feminists who were more interested in organizing for political power and feminists who were more interested in building a women’s culture argued about it and, in many locales, parted company. It would have been much better to look at how the two kinds of activities could interplay and build each other to create a stronger movement. It is happening now in some places. Blazing Star, an all-women’s chapter of NAM of which I am a member, has mixed culture building with political organizing very well in the past two years. The debates of a few years back about which was more important took up valuable time and weakened the movement.

This may not help with a personal choice about where to put energy. But one thing that does help is organization. So many small feminist projects get caught up trying to do everything — meet personal needs, organize women, challenge racism, be non-hierarchical — and then members get a sense of failure when they don’t meet all the goals. When you are in a large organization made up of many such groups, you can have more limited goals for each project, knowing others are working on other goals and that you are all evaluating the projects together in terms of how they contribute to the overall goal.

Looking at things in this way, I want to describe why I see lesbian liberation as a crucial part of an overall revolutionary strategy (though not necessarily what I think everyone should be working on right now). First of all, it’s an absolute necessity and a matter of survival for the estimated ten percent of us who are lesbians. It is a worthwhile goal in itself. Second, the liberation of lesbians can help all women. Being a lesbian is tied up in complex ways with personal autonomy, with making choices instead of being chosen, with living a life, however precarious, independent of men in one fundamental, intimate way. If that alternative is available and acceptable for women, it will have a ripple effect even on women who never choose to love another woman. It will be a factor that strengthens them and supports their choices, whatever they may be.

By returning some control to women over sexuality, an aspect of our personal lives that this culture stresses so much, the struggle for lesbian liberation can make us all stronger. It can strengthen women who have very different demands to make in their personal lives. It can encourage women who are saying no to low pay, to violence at home or in the streets (as victories there can encourage lesbians). Any reform that gives us more control can strenghthen us, especially a reform in an area where we all, at one time or another, feel a lot of anxiety.

Beyond this, a socialist revolution will have to include a lot of rearrangement of how men and women relate. Women going into this process stronger can only make the struggle, both to transform men and women and to create a new society, more likely to succeed.

But there are many other things that need to be done, too. And a lot of our political work just doesn’t make sense in isolation; it needs to be part of a more consciously organized movement. Especially in times like this, with the right so ascendant, there is a need for an organized movement in which we can look at each other’s work with an experimental sense — and create an atmosphere where we can evaluate the many mistakes we are sure to make, and move on, together, from there. It is in these interchanges, and in the reliance on many others beyond our small group or small community to be there for the long haul (though not always at the same intensity), that we can begin to build a sense of community love. Of course, we can build it at the highs, too. At big demonstrations, and victories in the smaller struggles. But we all need something more sustained, and we are going to have to consciously build it. If we can, we can lay the foundations for a much bigger revolutionary movement than we now have, the movement we so desperately need, which is, paradoxically, the only road, however rocky, that can lead to individual happiness, too.

Lesbian and Gay
Oppression in the ’80s:
Androgyny, Men and
Power

Mark Killinger

The premise of Gay Oppression and Liberation or: Homomphobia: Its Causes and Cure is that lesbian and gay oppression is an inherent part of capitalist and particularly patriarchal dominance and hence that “gay liberation must be committed to building organizations to fight capitalism as a whole.”(p.95) This exciting and useful document was written by two lesbians and two gay men who are part of the Gay Theory Work Group of Movement for a New Society (MNS) in 1975-77. They remain unidentified because “part of our oppression as gay people is not being able to be open about our identities.”(p.2)

Gay Oppression and Liberation sees lesbian and gay oppression as located in a comprehensive web where it is linked to many other exploitive relationships throughout our society. It is written from this theoretical perspective while also concluding with a section on strategy and “next steps” so that the readers’ understandings can flow to political action and response.

The paper suggests a Socialist Feminist perspective on lesbian and gay liberation, though like MNS in general it shies away from the word “socialist.” Its authors shift their focus back and forth between the personal and the political, insisting that there is no inherent split between the two (that indeed the split is created by capitalism). They pose a challenge to all of us to struggle at building new relationships, whether lesbian, gay, or non-gay, as part of pushing forth our political work. Finally, it demands that we do all our organizing in ways that provide constant challenge to hierarchical domination as well as racism and sexism and other “ism’s.”

I am a member both of Philadelphia NAM and Movement for a New Society, the latter by virtue of membership in a vegetarian anti-profit food service collective called the Fatted Sprout that is a participating collective in the local MNS formation. MNS is a decentralized network of collectives all over the country that are involved with non-violent living, training, organizing, and the building of alternative institutions. It grew out of the Philadelpia Quaker anti-war movement and is now growing steadily, particularly with the expansion of the anti-nuke movement in the late ’70s.

I wish to be frank and open with my supportive criticism of NAM and particularly of MNS, the latter of which will be obvious in this paper. I gain insights from MNS as well as from NAM, and certainly don’t feel that any group or party represents “the way” for gay liberation and socialism. MNS strongly supports both individual lesbians and individual gay men; and while I think it is confused about the need to broaden itself, it is supportive also of lesbian and gay liberation in general. The Gay Theory Work Paper is meant to widen MNS’s own understanding and practice, to be an outreach tool and is only the first draft towards a final position paper. This review will, I think, contribute to those goals.

A note on language: the paper uses the spellings “womon” and “wimmin” for woman and women

because the word “woman” means literally “wife of man….” In a paper on gay liberation we do not think it appropriate to write about “men” and “wives of men.”

Others may react strongly one way or another to this usage; I really do not. I’m not sure that this is the place to alter sexist language if it makes reading more difficult and turns people off. I do, as MNS people do, think the question of how to develop new language as part of the cultural revolution we must make is important; the issue for me is how to do it in ways that make it easier rather than more difficult for radicals to talk to our less initiated working class brothers and sisters.

Like much of MNS theorizing, Gay Oppression and Liberation flows from a description of oppression, and an analysis of that oppression, to a vision of how things might be, and finally to a non-violent strategy for getting from here to there. I think it makes sense to flow through that order in reviewing the paper also. I find the analysis of patriarchy, the vision of liberated sexuality, and the amazing comprehensiveness of the paper particularly exciting. As will be seen, I do have reservations about an analysis that emphasizes sex roles and separatism such that sexuality is seen as dangerously pliable and “correct” or “incorrect.” There is also a real gap in the treatment of gay male “culture” and organizing possibilities. Finally, I think the writers’ non-violent approach leads them to not see the extent to which unequal power is a pervasive dynamic in our society and that, as one result, violence is in fact quite widespread.

Our Oppression

The range of oppressions lesbians and gay men are “caught in the web of” is well laid out here; the almost total lack of civil rights, combined with outright discriminatory laws and practices (for example, laws outlawing sexual relations, decisions against “out” lesbians in child custody cases) and other institutional sources of oppression such as religion, the family and the medical establishment, are understood to be part of a more subtle system of societal oppression.

Being “in the closet,” and hence very likely hating ourselves or not knowing ourselves, is the first reality of lesbian and gay oppression. The paper deals with coming out a little bit in the section on the family:

Because of the supposed or genuine closeness of family ties, deciding whether to come out to our families is a heavy issue in the life of every one of us. (p. 23)

In general, an understanding of the psychological toll of anxiety, fear and self-hate pervades this section of the paper.

Of course once we admit our gayness to ourselves we must face our internalized oppression, or

the anti-gay feelings, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that we have been taught and which we have unconsciously adopted as our own… the internalization of feelings which lead to the lack of self respect, self-love and self-confidence is one of the important mechanisms by which gays and other groups are kept oppressed and must be combatted.(pp. 19-20)

Reinforcing this oppression is “The Heterosexual Assumption”: lesbians and gay men have no real identity when surrounded by a heterosexually-oriented culture: “Once we have figured out our gayness, the lack of recognition of our mere existence by our own society and culture is very alienating, and one of the reasons why we need to keep publicly affirming it.”(p. 17)

The need to stay “in the closet” for employment, custody, or other reasons makes it difficult to be public about our gayness, as does the threat of physical violence. Women have to deal with an ever-present threat of violence in a way that gay men don’t have to, since gay men still benefit from male privilege. Mention is made in the paper of “the sexual hassles wimmin now experience as waitresses, pedestrians on the street, secretaries, etc.” (p.52) But sexual hassles are on a continuum that for me includes rape, wife battering in the “safety” of marriage, and the threat of violence that pornography embodies. It is strange that many of these examples are never really mentioned. I perceive that violence pervades our social relations, though it becomes systematized and, I think, obscured by work, family relationships, and the law; and, in addition, it is carefully dissipated and perhaps sublimated by spectator sports, the assembly line, by religious taboo and also by the law.

Analysis

The MNS analysis of this web of gay oppression begins with heterosexism, “the institutionalization through ideology and social structure of enforced heterosexuality” in an “intricate system of oppression that pervades all of society, not just bedrooms.” Heterosexism is “part of the system of sexism because it centers on maintaining the subservience of wimmin to men by preventing homosexuality and any deviance from the traditional masculine and feminine heterosexual roles.”(p.31)

Though the statement that “sex was the original class division” (p. 164), made without substantiation or discussion, perhaps draws the lines too tightly, locating lesbian and gay oppression in the systemized organization of male power, or patriarchy, seems correct. It follows that the writers choose to divide their analysis of lesbian and gay male oppression: “since it is a part of partriarchy, the essential features of heterosexism are different for wimmin and men.”(p. 32)

Lesbian oppression is rooted in the taboo against sexual relations among women and the importance that that taboo has for maintaining men’s power over women’s lives. Maintaining strict sexual roles that differentiate between men and women and keep both in certain (trained) positions is essential,

because they are the roles of submission and dominance. This society is fundamentally based on submission and dominance: on bosses dominating workers, on parents and schools dominating young people, on the United States dominating “underdeveloped” countries, (p. 41)

For women this role enforcement has the effect of keeping women’s energy from one another: commitments to friendships among women invariably play second fiddle to a heterosexual “lover” commitment, especially since sexuality so powerfully defines commitment in this country. Hence, the possibility of knowing about their sexual selves without male definition is very rare for women: “the conditioning that a woman is weak, incomplete, needing a man for strength, fulfillment and protection tells wimmin that they… cannot commit themselves to wimmin, that they must serve men.” (p. 36)

On the other hand, men’s role in patriarchy is to work together “within each economic class… in such a way as to maintain their power over wimmin and over the classes below them. Competitive masculinity defines how men must work together.”(p. 36) Masculinity as a role model is taught and competition is encouraged, and heterosexism is an ideological and physical means of punishing deviation; “real men” are never “faggots and queers.” Heterosexism “trains men to believe that safe, caring, supportive relationships between men are impossible.”(p.39) I assume that men are also trained to exploit women, though the writers put it more benignly, stating that “men’s role is to be the provider, the thinker, the protector for wimmin.” (p. 40)

While I am in agreement with this understanding of lesbian and gay oppression that places it largely within patriarchy, the tendency here is to see patriarchy as defined too largely in terms of sex roles. To say, for instance, that “sex roles cannot exist without the repression of homosexuality” (p. 40) overestimates the centrality both of sex roles and of homosexuality. Patriarchy is a system of power, and if capitalism rests on economic and material power and manipulation, then patriarchy is likewise based ultimately on physical power. Homosexuality can become more widespread while the same system of power is perpetuated because the system of male violence is not dependent solely on individual perpetration of violence via sex roles; it is increasingly tied into institutions of production and the legal system, as well as the family. Lesbians in particular do not escape these expressions of patriarchy. In this context more mention needs to be made of why gay men and lesbians have only the possibility of unity; sexism continues to pervade the gay male world and gets reinforced in spite of sexual orientation.

The other systems that come into play in enforcing patriarchy are at least touched on in Gay Oppression and Liberation. Imperialism and racism have roots in similar attitudes and structures of domination. Capitalism clearly benefits from sexism and heterosexism, as both are alienating; sex roles contribute to the maximum economic exploitation of both sexes and they legitimate the existence of a low-paid reserve force of workers. Finally, the nuclear family is integral to capitalism and sexism. It reproduces and trains workers, encourages high domestic consumption, and “sets up the structure for men to control and exploit wimmin” (p. 46). Needless to say, it is also one of the most crucial and personal locations for the enforcement of the “heterosexual assumption.”

Any attempt such as this work paper to provide a comprehensive analysis of the roots of lesbian and gay oppression is bound to have gaps such as the ones I have touched on. Some of the subtleties of the way capitalism and patriarchy are intertwined are missed in such a cursory treatment of capitalism. Sex roles and their maintenance vary to some extent with class position; for instance, in talking about marriage, to stress its “numerous economic advantages” (pp.84-5) such as material goods and job benefits is largely to talk about middle-class conditions that don’t necessarily extend to the working class or working poor. Also, because of the realities of work and homophobia in the United States, working-class people might more likely have to stay in the closet; professionals more readily have the means to live a more comfortable, separate existence, away from a tightly-knit homophobic family or community.

The cursory treatment of racism (“as oppressed minorities… gays and third world people are subject to much the same treatment”) is to be criticized on similar grounds. Racism is a system that, because of the mark of skin color, seems to me to exist more powerfully in Black, Hispanic, Indian and Asian lesbian and gay men’s lives than does heterosexism. Again, the racism of the gay male subculture testifies to the fact that homosexuality can be integrated into straight white male society without a general liberation struggle.

Vision

We think it is essential to describe at least in broad outline the kind of society we think will liberate gayness… By making the vision explicit, we put it in the public arena where it can be challenged, changed and developed. (p. 48)

This MNS vision is one which sees the necessity to totally free sexuality from reproduction and has androgyny as its central notion.

The authors quote from the Gay Revolution Party Manifesto:

Gay revolution will not lead to freedom of association in a predominantly straight world, nor will it lead to straight-defined homosexuality with marriages and exclusive monogamy. Gay revolution will produce a world in which all social and sensual relationships will be gay and in which homo- and heterosexuality will be incomprehensible terms. (p. 54, quoting from Out of Closets, p. 14)

Androgyny means that there is a “single character ideal to which all can aspire, whichever gender”(p. 54). This character ideal encourages and rewards such characteristics as nurturing, coopera-tiveness, initiative and sensuality, and will confront objectification, domination and selfishness. Most people will want to be sexual with people of both genders, so bisexuality will be widespread, though the authors suggest that no norm for sexual choice will exist.

The distinction the authors make between sexuality and sensuality is particularly insightful. In a world where sexuality can be a way of loving, playing and reaching outside ourselves much more than is true today, the emphasis we experience today on sexuality, along with the lack of sensuality, of real feeling, would disappear:

affection and touching are recognized as desirable and necessary for human health and sex loses its genital and orgasmic preoccupation. (p. 51)

Of course a whole range of institutional changes would be needed as part of the revolution that would liberate sexuality. The guiding principle here is that “the fabric of society can be a resilient floor for our individuality, supporting our upward reach for greater love and understanding, or it can be like a collapsed tent, stifling us with accumulated distresses” (p. 56). New institutions would include a socially owned, democratically controlled economy that would be decentralized, ecologically sound and based on full employment, as well as egalitarian political structures and non-elitist cultural institutions. Since “non-violent action is a set of tools which brings conflict to the surface” (p. 58) we would have non-violent ways of dealing with conflict. Finally, unisex dress, universal daycare and communal child-rearing would support the replacement of the nuclear family with a “loving circle of friends” (p. 58).

I am not in fundamental disagreement with any of this vision section, but one issue for me is how it is used to guide strategy. The listing of new institutions contains no ranking of importance, so I have no sense of which might come a little sooner; surely unisex dress and a socialist economy are not of the same priority, for example. However, I have more significant problems with the place of androgyny in this vision. Perhaps as an ideal this androgynous vision does make sense, but for the period before this ideal can be reached I think a vision in which people do have some preference without coercion based on anyone’s norms makes a little more sense.

Strategy

The strategy section of Gay Oppression and Liberation deals with separatism and even sexual orientation as tools for social change, then lays out a long-term revolutionary strategy, including many helpful specifics around gay liberation. First off, the personal and feeling levels and the organizational necessity for lesbian feminism is laid out. Essentially this is a strategy of separatism, as there is “a strategic need for oppressed groups to organize separately, and to be separate in many instances”(p.61). This need exists because women need separate time and space to identify and analyze their oppression and so that women as individuals can get support and rid themselves of internalized oppression, since “such safety cannot completely be obtained in the presence of people who have been socialized into oppressor roles”(p. 62).

Separatism means not only separate organizations but caucuses within organizations. This allows struggle on the basis of equality and strength:

Separatism must be seen clearly as the only way to combat the real and devastating ways that different groups in this society are socialized to oppress each other, so that we can come together in solidarity to pull down our real enemy together. (p. 65)

“The ultimate goal of this separation,” then, “is solidarity”(p.61).

In the context of political struggle I am supportive of women’s separatism and feel the argument is well made. This section goes on to become an effective polemic for a lesbian feminist political lifestyle. Despite their positive views on bisexuality the authors suggest that it makes sense for women not to act on their heterosexual side (“side”?) in order to fight their own internalized sexism and their deeply socialized dependency on men while building women’s culture in the widest sense. In addition, men can be pretty obnoxious and it becomes hard not to condemn men in general if one is relating to them all the time.

Finally, feminism is inevitably strengthened, the authors feel, by individual women-identity. Men sap energy, especially since “all heterosexual relationships are by definition a power struggle.” Building a political movement of, by and for women that can give needed support while is continues to be politically effective is made easier by lesbianism. Female bisexuality is to some extent trashed, since “it is impossible for wimmin to live out their goal of being androgynous under the patriarchy”(p.86). Non-gay women should be supported in their woman-identification, but lesbians should “refuse to discuss ways that wimmin’s heterosexual relationships might be improved”(p. 86).

While I am supportive, as I have said, of a separatism that is clearly grounded in understandings of heterosexual and male privilege, and I am aware that as a male it is hard to break down my socialization to completely understand and accept separatism, I have problems with this further elaboration of lesbian feminism. To say that “a lesbian womon is in a position to be very clear with the world about her feminism”(p. 74), to link up sexual preference with political ideology so completely, implies that sexuality should be used in certain political ways. I fear that people are not quite so pliable in their sexual orientation, and that while people must struggle with living out their political positions by opposing dominance in their personal relationships they will nonetheless continue to be in a variety of relationships. Exploiting heterosexual privilege can certainly be challenged without heterosexuality per se being “incorrect.” The authors seem clear, as I am, that capitalism manipulates sexuality in certain ways; hence, I am wary of the ideological use of sexuality on the left, too.

In general there is a tendency in Gay Oppression and Liberation to view people’s homosexuality as more central to our lives than it may in fact be, and perhaps this explains the authors’ tendency to see sexual orientation as so crucial to politics. Oftentimes the paper overstates itself, and this is particularly evident as it tries to make a case (a good one!) for our generalized oppression: to say that “our oppression as gays pervades every aspect of our lives and so is relevant to almost all topics”(p. 15) ignores how comparatively insignificant it may be for middle class gay men; it also ignores how overriding racism, sexism and class position can often be for blacks, women and working people.

Every man should in any case read the section on “Gay Men in the Feminist Struggle” for its good suggestions on men’s responsibility under patriarchy. First of all, “there is no such thing as men’s oppression.… [It] is true that men are limited and dehumanized by the patriarchy; but they also receive the power, status, greater wealth and feelings of superiority that the patriarchy confers upon men”(p. 84). Since gay men “still receive most of the privileges of being male,” our role is to be essentially a supportive one for the basically woman-led struggle. While lesbians “form the cutting edge of feminist revolution” (p. 85) because of their double oppression, gay men need women’s liberation, led by women, in order to achieve their own sexual liberation.

Nonetheless, the authors find much that men can do to be supportive. By visibly opting out of oppressing women by not having primary relationships with them and by committing ourselves to our brothers we can be on the cutting edge of men’s feminism. This is, of course, if we don’t retreat into a men’s world that is as old and as dominant as ever: “Wimmin have no reason to assume that men, including gay men, uniting around their own interests are going to do anything beneficial for wimmin”(p. 89).

Gay men can be clear in their organizations that they speak only for men and should respect women’s need for separatism. When working in coalition men need to challenge other men’s sexism; the guideline here is that “gay men should support wimmin and if they cannot be supportive they should separate rather than dominate” (p. 86). Areas in which gay men can give support include doing childcare and providing financial support, both individually and organizationally. I also think gay men can play a role in feminist political fights; for example, men have been active in Philadelphia in support of women’s fights against violence against women and against sexism at the Daily News.

The other responsibility gay men have is in changing ourselves; we need to renounce male aggression in a way that retains firmness but moves us toward an androgynous personality vision. Statistics show that of all relationships gay male ones are the briefest in duration (lesbian relationships are the longest); gay men must deal with what power has done to us; we must work on our socialized tendency to dominate and sometimes chose to not to be involved with anyone if it takes too much energy.

Finally, gay men have an important role to play among men in general. Our oppression can give us special insight into how patriarchy functions, and we can challenge sexism while sharing nurturing skills. In encouraging men to support each other, “gay men can also raise consciousness about why it is important to stop draining wimmin’s energies”(p. 89).

Whether we should “challenge straight men on their rigid heterosexuality directly”(p. 89), I am not sure, as what I have said earlier should imply. It certainly follows from the paper’s analysis that straight feminist men’s sexuality is “incorrect.” However, I don’t want to be used by some straight man who thinks it would be more politically correct to be gay; and I think men can be convinced, like straight women, to be supportive of gay liberation without being pressured to change their sexual orientation. Again, it is a question of the priority you place on the different components of your vision: the MNS document sometimes seems to want everything at once, while the political period we are in tells me we need to get support from non-gay men and women without waiting for them to change their personal sexual orientation.

The rest of the strategy section details the movement and alternative building and workplace organizing (though there isn’t a lot of support for the latter in MNS) that must happen in the context of a five-stage gay liberation struggle. The five stages of the long range strategy include:

1) Cultural preparation: consciousness raising, education, cultural work and especially personal growth to “change our image of ourselves and of the nature of oppression”(p. 98);

2) Organization building: new style egalitarian decision-making structures to “live the revolution now” and to “enhance solidarity rather than factionalize and… [to] integrate the personal with the political”(p. 101), including affinity groups, radical caucuses and alternative institutions. A note here on attempts to bring more national coordination in the lesbian and gay movement: loose coordinating structures “should come only when the grassroots level is flourishing,… people are freed from… authoritarianism and when skills of egalitarian decision-making are widespread” (p. 103). This is a view based in MNS’s anarchism (“a complex form of organization based on innumerable agreements between small groups of people”), a view that I think wisely challenges a “let’s have a big march on Washington” syndrome but ignores the possibility that such skills might in fact be learned in the process of building much needed coordinating structures;

3) Propaganda of the deed: “a stage of confrontations in which the good sense and human needs of gays are contrasted with the rigidities of the patriarchy” (p. 104), usually a “dilemma demonstration” the point of which is to benefit the gay cause whatever happens;

4) Mass economic and political non-cooperation: boycotts, strikes, tax refusal by large numbers of participants who have already been won over. “Coalitions will provide a mass basis for non-cooperation” (p. 106);

5) Parallel institutions: power shifts into the structures people have built, through which the new society can be organized. “How gay the new institutions will be depends on 1) how much gay pride and determination there has been… and 2) how well gays have built alternatives that are workable, which genuinely meet the legitimate needs of people”(p. 107).

A nearly final section of the paper, on lesbians and gays within MNS, tells a promising story of support and debate in the networks. It includes areas of particular importance for struggling in mixed organizations around the issues of support for gay liberation, fighting homophobia and liberating sexuality. The concluding section, “Next Steps: Gays All Together,” emphasizes education, building alternative institutions, training, direct action, and ridding ourselves of our oppressive behaviors and attitudes, especially racism. There are many excellent and specific examples of things we can be doing to build gay liberation.

The ending is extremely useful, but confusing as well, particularly in relation to the five stages. It is clear that the stages overlap and do not strictly follow one after another, but that “the stages are in the order that they are for a reason”(p. 98) is not clearly explained. Building alternative institutions, for instance, is listed in stage two and also in the ending section, I assume as a more or less immediate priority; war tax resistance, on the other hand, is listed in stage five along with (and most importantly) coalition building, yet today many MNS members practice tax resistance, though with at most symbolic effect, while Philadelphia MNS is a notable non-participant in local coalition politics.

Given this confusion in the handling of an extremely useful set of strategic suggestions, the basic outline that MNS embodies — of an anarchistic, decentralized revolutionary strategy moving out from centers of liberation — is clear, and for me quite contradictory. On the one hand, gay liberationists have much to learn from a strategy that stresses the interlocking sources of oppression and places our oppression firmly in patriarchy. That this leads to a personal politics and to coalition politics on the basis of autonomous strength, along with local education and public activity, is a powerful socialist feminist understanding.

Nevertheless, the MNS reality is one steeped in the relative comfort of, as sociologists would say, deviant subculture. “Living the revolution now” is difficult but also safe, and as we build alternatives we must be careful not to make them so culturally separate from ordinary working people that they become irrelevant.

Throughout this review I have stressed that I see many power relations based in social institutions, while the writers tend to view them more in terms of personal growth and internalized oppression. Because of this I find the five stage analysis of how the revolutionary transformation will occur deficient; how can small, decentralized collectives in the “belly of the monster” survive and coordinate in light of state power? How do alternative institutions really take over entertainment, educational and productive capacities on the mass scale that they exist today?

There are always unanswered questions, and the Gay Theory Work Paper is to be lauded for asking and answering. My differences with MNS around strategy regarding gay liberation tend to pale in this immediate period compared to my differences with “gay rights” oriented liberal activists (who need basic understandings of long-term strategy and of feminism!). I feel the ’80s bring us a period of defense and entrenchment wherein we may need to be a little more practical in what struggles we can wage as we build links between groups and with the wider working class. But lesbian and gay liberation will only succeed in a revolutionary process that is thorough-going and attuned to the deep divisions that power relations have wrought in our society.

Gay Oppression and Liberation or: Homophobia: Its Causes and Cure is available for $3.00 from Movement for a New Society, 4722 Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia, Penn. 19143.

A 1980 Postscript

I first want to note that the preceding review, written a year and a half ago, was based on a published first draft of Gay Oppression and Liberation or Homophobia: Its Causes and Cures. Since then my article has contributed to a revision of the paper by Movement for a New Society people in several cities. Having seen a part of it, I anticipate the incorporation of some of my suggestions as well as much new thinking. It should be out by this fall.

Fatted Sprout, the vegetarian catering collective through which I was a participant in MNS, no longer exists; however, I have been co-chair of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Task Force of the New American Movement this year while also participating in the formation of the national Lesbian and Gay Male Socialist network and the concurrent planning of the historic Lavender Left conference, held this month [May] at Appelfarm, New Jersey.

The network’s formation is indicative of both our diversity and our need for unity. (Indeed, the conference-planning process should be a lesson and a model for the straight left’s attempts at “left unity”!) Our diversity includes anarchism and spirituality, socialist-feminism and marxist-leninism; some quite different views of how a revolution for gay liberation and socialism will come about and what it will look like.

Our unity, then, needs to be explored more fully; it lies, in my opinion, in our understanding of how issues fit together and of the many strands of thought and feeling that make up our lives. Being lesbian or gay in North America brings a concrete, lived experience of the way sexual oppression and the channeling and shaping of our emotional, “personal” lives happens in a class society. We see how class society is shaped by a capitalist mode of production and by patriarchy and racism, and is reinforced by other forms of inequality.

Because of this lived experience, our analysis (or at least my analysis) has a rich, multi-dimensional quality. That analysis poses a challenge to the rest of the Left to quite fundamentally alter its view of the world. I believe that challenge is a vital and useful one, having common strands with the challenge from women, national minorities and workers to build a revolutionary process that is thorough-going and deep.

It poses a specific challenge to marxist-leninism and the notion of a vanguard party unifying all the revolutionary forces to lead the overthrow of capital. This challenge rests first of all on gay and women’s liberationists’ insistence on autonomy of formation; in the best sense of the term I don’t take autonomy to mean lack of either coordination or unity of programmatic action. This is what I meant when I challenged MNS to be more disciplined and to think with more care about how to relate their vision and experience to a broad movement for change, both in coalitions and in not just “living the revolution now.”

Gay oppression (and women’s oppression) can be shown historically to be autonomous (though linked) to the material means of production. (This was pointed out to me by someone who is not a socialist this way: “straights hate gay people everywhere, always have and always will.”) So since the elimination of capitalism is a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for the elimination of gay oppression, we will always need to prioritize gay liberation and keep various levels of autonomous organization.

Obviously I would take this point of view about many segments of the progressive community. It’s my deeply felt position that discipline and plurality are not contradictory. I think it puts a lot on the Party to have to do everything; not only is that position elitist, but I think mine is a lot more interesting, a fundamentally more creative strategy and one more apt for the United States in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

There is another challenge that gay liberation poses to the Left’s strategy, whether it be the vanguard-party Left or the social democratic one. My understanding of the autonomous nature of lesbian and gay oppression is linked to feminist understandings about the autonomous, material existence of patriarchy. As long as there is a system of male domination (ideas, structures, and ultimately, physical violence) then there cannot be gay liberation. This is laid out in the MNS paper in so far as it links lesbian and gay oppression to sexism and ultimately to systems of submission and domination that we fundamentally challenge.

Can there be a socialist revolution without a struggle against those elements of patriarchy, including lesbian/gay oppression, that reinforce capitalism? That is the central challenge. I believe not, and so my understanding of gay and women’s oppression poses a dilemma both to those Leftists who would have capitalism somehow end “first” and to those who suggest that capitalism can be made more “democratic” without a thorough-going revolution that goes beyond economic organization.

There is of course great difference of opinion within the lesbian and gay left about the issues I am raising. One of the reasons for the diversity of opinion is that there have historically been several different lesbian and gay movements; a single one unified across race, sex and economic class differences might not be possible. This is why I believe we should be striving to bring about exchange of views, leadership of the most oppressed segments of our community, and practical, programmatic unity rather than some sort of vanguard fusion.

Already this year we are seeing major splits in the lesbian and gay movement around issues of “androgyny, men and power” (as I titled the original review). There aren’t easy answers to the debates about S&M, pornography, or man-boy love and consent, partly because they are not phenomena easily reducible to material analysis and its incumbent categories and stock answers. We must struggle with these very divisions, particularly because they come from the same roots that our oppression does.

This brings me to a concluding task for our movement, one that is particularly crucial because of the resurgence and new sophistication of the Right. Be reminded that our movement has become a stronger one as a result of the attacks of the late 1970’s; lesbians and gay men found common cause to fight back. In both this unity and in our more traditional diversity we need to project our specific liberation vision, both in our own defense and to win new gains and see forward movement. When we respond to the popular moralisms of the Right with an accessible moral vision of our own, as was begun in the Briggs Initiative struggle [in California] we will have a better chance to expand and mobilize.

This is a challenge for the entire Left. People out there are concerned about families, sexuality, power; dare I say it, about love. It is our role to have exciting, challenging, and helpful things to say about these topics. We must go on the offensive and articulate our vision of new ways to be with each other and have relationships, to live lives of dignity with a new kind of freedom. The revolutionary Left is still quite isolated in North America today; my “liberation vision” may help to end that isolation and put real change, including lesbian and gay liberation, on people’s minds and in their hearts.