This makes the book useful reading for anyone who wants to begin by grasping a few basic facts. For example: in the years before the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party was in the forefront of the fight to repeal that country's anti-gay Paragraph 175. Eduard Bernstein defended Oscar Wilde (himself an iconoclastic socialist) in the pages of the SPD's theobook notes ment's best allies in the 1920s. These basic facts are worth reiterating, if only because some recent scholarship has managed to
There is another side to the story. Trained in the Trotskyist tradition, Lauritsen and Thorstad have a keen eye for the (many) failings of social democrats and Stalinists The German Social Democrats succumbed to the temptation to gay-bait when samesex scandals among the German empire's aristocratic elite emerged; Social Democrats and Communists succumbed again when Nazi SA head Ernst Roehm was available as a
Stalin re-criminalised homosexuality in the USSR in 1934. Communists in many countries obediently turned their back on their earlier stands and began to identify gays with bourgeois decadence and even fascism. By the time lesbian/gay liberation went though its resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s, an uphill battle had to be fought against anti-gay prejudices inside much of
Lauritsen's and Thorstad's focus on Germany helps them avoid noting that the left in other countries, like the United States and the Netherlands, fell short even of the German left's mixed record. Beginning their account late in the nineteenth century saves them from mentioning Marx's and Engels' homophobia, which surfaced not only in private letters but in published writings. Ending in the 1930s saves them from discussing the shortcomings of later, even anti-Stalinist Ambivalent left tradition
Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left has been put together with more scholarly thoroughness. It benetits from two decades of accumulating research, and suffers from no inhibitions about exposing the left's shortfalls. The result is a set of valuable investigations. The strong development of gay studies in Dutch universities (where two of the three editors are based) is
The one contribution that focuses on the Netherlands (by Gert Hekma) is a useful demonstration of just how ambivalent early socialists were about sexuality. The anthology also does well to look at several different left traditions - "utopian" anarchism and Marxism - in a single volume. For anyone who wants to learn about topics as varied as how André Gide squared his homosexuality with sympathy for the USSR, what the early Frankfurt School had to say about gays, or the complementary roles of East Germany's Lutheran Church and Stasi (secret police) in creating a gay movement there, this book is a good starting place.
Yet most of the authors are hampered by three major flaws in their approach. First, though many of them clearly have leftist sympathies, their methods owe little to the left. They work as empiricist historians; few of them seem to see how Marxism, feminism or any other radical paradigm can help them analyse societies. Second, the book as a whole is marred by a double standard, in which Marxist traditions are more harshly judged than others. Third, few of the authors have learned much from social historians' discoveries about the lives of ordinary gay men and lesbians, who after all made up past movements and parties. Public vs. private
In their introduction, the editors say that "socialism is singled out for particular attention here because its project was, and is, to fulfil the emancipatory goal of the Enlightenment: the universal liberation of humankind from oppressive ideologies and exploitative social structures." (p.7) This argument for holding the left to high standards is absolutely right.
The editors are also right to criticise socialist credulousness about "scientific" biology and medicine, which contradicted the left's distinctive emphasis on historical and social factors, and to criticise socialist praise of working-class "manliness", which ignored the female half of the working class. But they fail to grapple with the difference between abstract application of principles and a project of liberation carried out by concrete historical agents emerging from really existing capitalism.
Ultimately, when the editors appeal to the classical liberal distinction between public and private realms, they are judging the left by criteria that are alien to the left. "The private sphere has enjoyed far less protection under socialist regimes than under liberal ones," they say. (p.16)
They do note in passing that liberals (in the European sense of constitutionalist, secular free-market advocates) were in practice usually even more anti-gay than leftists. But they fail to explain why. In fact the
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION retical journal, Die Neue Zeit. The Bolsheviks repealed anti-gay laws when they took power in Russia, and supported the pro-gay
World League for Sexual Reform throughout the 1920s. The German Social Democratic and Communist parties were the gay move-
Penny Duggan & Heather Dashner (editors)
• £2.50/$4. Cheque payable to P. Rousset, IIRE, Postbus 53290, 1007 Amsterdam, Netherlands.
liberal private-public distinction leaves straight male power in the family unchallenged. Women's and lesbian/gay liberation require transforming the family in ways that are bound to "interfere" in "private" life.
The authors not very profound methodology sometimes limits their predictive ability. For example, in his article on contemporary France, Jan Willem Duyvendak moves beyond his earlier work in describing the difficult "balance between desires and interests" that gay movements need to strike. (p. 370) But lacking a deep analysis of how much those desires and interests are repressed in France today, he predicts continuing demobilisation of French gays - who in fact began mobilising in steadily more impressive numbers before the ink on his article was dry. [see "We might as well die houting" "Vulnerability and resistance," International Viewpoint #287, April 1997]
The book's liberal critique of the left's sexual politics is limited mainly to Marxists. Saskia Poldervaart's essay on utopian socialists and Walter Fähnders' on German anarchists are not just sympathetic, but almost wholly uncritical accounts, citing inspiring passages from their subjects' works without paying much attention to the reality
It is valuable to recover these lost voices of sexual radicalism, to note sex-radical insights in Fourier that Marx dismissed, or anarchist pro-gay positions that were better than those of contemporary Marxists.
Anarchist Hubert Kennedy exposes Marx's homophobic attacks on gay German Lassallean leader Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, though without shedding much light on the issues between Marxists and Lassalleans that probably concerned Marx more.
Richard Cleminson's careful, historically informed research on the Spanish anarchist magazine Revista Blanca sets a higher standard, in an article that shows how anarchist puritanism gave way in the 1930s to greater tolerance.
The articles focusing on Marxists mostly fall short of Cleminson's achievement. In fact, of the ten contributions that deal mainly with avowed Marxists, only two or three show much knowledge of Marxism. Four deal largely with Stalinist regimes or spies; twenty years after Lauritsen's and Thorstad's basic exposition, these articles make little distinction between Stalinist sexual politics and earlier Marxist positions.
Laura Engelstein, writing about Soviet legislation, ends up asking in bewildered ignorance, "Why did homosexuality escape the law between 1917 and 1934? That is the still obscure and intriguing tale." (p.173) Harry Oosterhuis, who chronicles anti-gay statements in Social Democratic and Communist anti-fascist propaganda of the 1930s with justified indignation, blames the homophobia on Marxism as such; he either does not know or prefers to forget that earlier socialist positions were more pro-gay.
David Thorstad, who contributes the one article dealing with the U.S. left, is of course knowledgeable about Marxism. He lays out the reactionary positions of the CP and Maoists at the time of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, cites the enlightened comments of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, exposes the limits of the SWP's position, and contrasts it with somewhat better positions taken by other Trotskyist groups.' He rightly criticises positions that in the best of cases tend to dress up defences of minority rights in radical-sounding verbiage instead of attacking the deeper roots of heterosexism.
Unfortunately Thorstad chooses as his decisive criterion agreement with his and Lauritsen's demand for repeal of ageof-consent laws. Thorstad and Lauritsen have every right to be bitter: The attacks on them not only by the FBI and Jesse Helms but also from within the lesbian/ gay movement have been appalling.
Sadly, this seems to sour Thorstad's vision of the movement as a whole. The same sourness disfigures the "Afterword to the Revised Edition" of The Early Homosexual Rights Movement. "The mainstream gay organisations of the present" are dismissed as "politically correct zombies," and the "radicalism of such groups as Queer Nation" as "bizarre and offensive behaviour" (p. 102) Substantive lesbian/gay radicalism is certainly on the defensive, but the scene is not quite as bleak as Lauritsen and Thorstad Class and community
Manfred Herzer's article on "Communists, Social Democrats, and the Homosexual Movement in the Weimar Republic" stands out in "Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left," not only for its sense for historical context but also beause it points to new frontiers for investigation.
Herzer shows how other writers wrench quotations from the Social Democratic and Communist press out of context, simply editing out reaffirmations of opposition to anti-gay laws that are inconvenient for anti-Marxist arguments.
German gay leaders, he shows, whatever their personal politics, acknowledged the crucial support their movements received from the left. But he goes further and deeper, pointing out that gay leaders treated Nazis like Roehm with kid gloves and failed to mobilise their own members against fascism because a high proportion of their membership was right-wing. Herzer has no explanreviews* ation for the disproportionate right-wing sympathies of the gay movement's rank and file: this would require a far-reaching "social" history and analysis of the pre-war
Only in the last few years have gay historians begun to explore in depth the historical interaction of sexuality and class. George Chauncey's Gay New York makes a strong case that gay identity as it exists today emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a mainly middle-class phenomenon, while U.S. working-class men continued until at least the 1940s to identify only "passive" malemale sexual behaviour with "fairies" and to consider men who played an "active" role in sexual intercourse with either women or men as "real men." 3
If this same pattern held true for pre-war Central and Western Europe, it could explain many things. It could explain for example why self-identified gay men in Weimar Germany came largely from middle-class backgrounds and largely shared the conservative politics of their social class. It could also help explain why more left-leaning gay groups, like Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, tended to put forward "old-fashioned" "third sex" theories, while a more "modern" approach was characteristic of more right-leaning groups like the Community of the Special.
All this is speculation. Although historians like John D'Emilio have already begun linking the social archaeology of emerging lesbian/gay communities in the post-war USA with the wellsprings of lesbian/gay politics,* similar work on the pre-war USA and Europe has not really begun. There is certainly plenty to study. Left-leaning "sex reformers" like Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Crystal and Max Eastman and Floyd Dell in the United States and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Holland were increasingly active in the 1910s, and networking internationally by the 1920s.
Studying sexual changes in the broader societies is difficult, given that almost everyone who was alive then is dead now. All the more reason why all possible sources should be sought out and the exploration begun. Reprinted from the May-June issue of Against the Current (USA). Peter Drucker is an advisory editor of Against the Current and Grenzeloos. He is currently compiling an anthology on "same-sex sexualities and popular struggles in the Third World" for Gay Men's Press (forthcoming 1998). He has lived in Amsterdam since 1993. Notes 1. Thorstad's resentment against the SWP leads him to dismiss all groups that resulted even remotely from SWP expulsions in the 1980s, including Solidarity (the group that sponsors Against the Current, the magazine in which this article first appeared). (346, n.14) People interested in understanding Solidarity's lesbian/gay politics should not rely on Thorstad, but read the section on lesbian/gay liberation in Solidarity's 1986 Founding Statement as well as its 1994 pamphlet, Socialist Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Liberation. 2. For anther view of the U.S. movement, see Peter
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Do the workers have a country?
by José Iriarte "'Bikila"
Drucker, "What is queer nationalism?" Against the Current, 43, March/April 1993 3. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940, New York: Basic Books. 1994. 4. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
June 1997 #289 • 35
Russian Labour Review
Publication has been definitively suspended. It has been two years since the last issue appeared.
As an English-language journal published in Russia, RLR always depended on the ability of a small pool of expatriate supporters. This narrow base made RLR a highly unstable operation.
us who volunteered our ideas and energies believe that producing the journal was a correct initiative, and that our contributions
It is ironic that the closure of RLR comes at a time when labour disputes in Russia are experiencing an important upsurge. Workers who have gone unpaid for many months are now recreating the traditions of solidarity and struggle that were developed in Russia many decades ago.
Reports and commentary on these new battles are still available! Articles are posted on the Internet conference < labr.cis>, available in many countries from Association for Progressive Communications affiliates such as Peacenet in the U.S., and Pegasus in Australia.
Renfrey Clarke (Moscow-editorial) and Alex Chis (Berkeley-distribution). Red Orange Robert Cymbala writes "This is a new journal devoted to Marxist critical and theoretical inquiry into everyday life. It offers the reader a coherently integrated knowledge of seemingly disparate contemporary practices by locating these within the context of the dynamic, structured concrete global capitalist social totality in which these practices make sense and from which it becomes possible to conceive of and work towards substantial progress in the struggle for emancipation, justice & equality." PO Box 1055, Tempe, AZ 85280-1055 web.syr.edu/rcymbala/ro.html Viento Sur #32 In Spanish. Dossier on the public education system in Spain • Orlando Núñez (FSLN) on the left in Nicaragua • labour market reform • economics and ecology Apartado de Correos 50.522, 28080 Madid <vientosur@nodo50.ix.apc.org