Black/Pink Solidarity Through the Decades

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes… It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair. Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name”, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Wilde Courtroom Testimony, 1895

Oscar Wilde did not single-handedly create the struggle for LGBTQQIAA+ rights but he did help catalyze its modern iteration. There is a direct correlation between his anti-imperialism as an Irish nationalist (cf. ‘Ave Imperatrix,’ 1881), his anti-capitalism as a socialist, and his anti-Victorianism as an openly gay man who was persecuted unto death at Reading Gaol, linked explicitly and articulated with his writings alongside his very openly queer public profile. His sodomy trials were a cause célèbre in its day and became a major political debate in Leftist circles. Eduard Bernstein, representative of the most conservative element within the German Socialist movement, advocated on behalf of Wilde precisely because he saw the dismantling of Victorian sexual mores as part of the radical movement, much as Engels had in 1884 with his study The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Over the course of the next century, constantly in the face of state-sponsored and vigilante homo/trans-phobia, a radical movement emerged from a framework that had solid anti-capitalist roots. In 19th century Germany, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, allied with the German Socialist August Bebel, sought to repeal anti-sodomy laws while founding a psychological hospital to research and affirmatively treat LGBTQQ folks, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Lenin and the Bolsheviks repealed tsarist sodomy laws after the Russian revolution of 1917. The Harlem Renaissance was simultaneously known as a period of great LGBT social advances within underground bohemian and speakeasy subculture, with a cross-pollination that led to the borough being known as a kind of Gay Mecca where same-sex marriages were celebrated.

During the heyday of the Communist Party USA, a tremendous number of LGBT artists, radicalized by the Great Depression, found a haven in the synthesis that existed between the Party and the various New Deal artistic programs, especially those involved in the theatrical and dance worlds. Harry Hay, who joined the party in 1934 and organized migratory agricultural workers (a significant sector of the Black workforce at that time), founded the first gay men’s organization in America, the Mattachine Society, based on the Marxist-Leninist schematic of national liberation in the aftermath of the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign. His biographer writes:

Since 1941, Harry had taught Stalin’s four principles of a minority; these were a common language, a common territory, a common economy, and a common psychology and culture. “I felt we had two of the four, the language and culture, so clearly we were a social minority.” This concept of homosexuals as a minority would be the contribution of which Hay was proudest… He suggested a comparison of the political manipulation and murder of homosexuals in Nazi Germany to recent firings of gays by the State Department [during the McCarthyite Red Scare]… “The post-war reaction, the shutting down of open communication, was already of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was going to look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was predictable. But Blacks were beginning to organize and the horror of the holocaust was too recent to put the Jews in this position. The natural scapegoat would be us, the Queers. They were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they were a group because they had never formed as a group. They – we – had to get started. It was high time.”

I bring to the forefront the Wilde trials and what followed precisely because this historical context is so distinctly absent from the essay which catalyzed my writing. What particularly alarmed me is that this catalytic essay makes the concrete statement that queerness and those who survive the brutality of homo/trans-phobia are incapable of revolutionary solidarity with others facing similar (but not exactly the same type of) oppression by hegemonic racial capitalism. I believe that the record shows that the contrary is the case.

The proposal that all queer politics and activism began with Michel Foucault is an ahistorical fallacy. The ontology suggested by Yuan’s essay, that queer identity is borne solely of Queer Theory (an academic discipline of dubious merit even within the banal Ivory Tower, as demonstrated by the Foucault-Boswell debate) disregards over a century of struggle and skips massive radical political discourse that was begun well before Queer Theory became the hip chic trend in academia during the Reagan-Bush regime. Norman Finkelstein, during his tribulations with DePaul University in the 2000s, authored a fine polemical take-down of many of the foundational thinkers of Queer Theory:

When I was coming of age politically, Althusser and his acolytes like Poulantzas [and Foucault] were all the rage. Who can forget that prose that induced the same aesthetic effect as it was chewed over in the mind as tin foil does when chewed over in a mouth filled with cavities? This fashion passed expeditiously enough when Poulantzas jumped off a towering edifice (showing enough consideration for humanity by, reportedly, carrying his books with him as he plunged to eternity), quickly to be followed by Althusser strangling his wife to death, all in the fateful academic year 1979. (On a personal note, having been a student in Paris at the time, I still vividly recall these untimely deaths, attended by the almost simultaneous passings of Sartre and Roland Barthes, the latter run down by a car.) This lunatic craze however was almost immediately superseded by the Foucault cult, when every half-baked, ill-educated dimwit imagined him or herself a philosopher after having dabbed in (excerpts from, if even that much) Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Paris master-thinker himself. Shortly thereafter began the Derrida fad with a fresh wagon-load of cliché and jargon unloaded at navel-contemplating conferences, pawned off as radical and cutting edge whereas it possessed all the intellectual and political content of marsh mellow topped with Redi-Whip; and – will the Lord ever forgive them for this sin – unloaded on unsuspecting students. I have on occasion, mostly for light amusement after a hard day’s work, picked up some of these texts, and wonder how poor, unsuspecting, innocent, naive young people have borne such utter rubbish. To inflict it on them is – and here I write as a committed, if atheistic, educator – truly a sin beyond redemption.

The politics of the queer community predate the formulation of Queer Theory by up to 120 years, depending upon one’s calculation. Certain strands of it were articulated as far back as the era of Walt Whitman, who himself admitted to Horace Traubel a certain affinity, if not doctrinaire subscription to, 19th century socialism and was subject of anti-gay reaction upon publication of his scandalous collection Leaves of Grass.

Is there alienation between the contemporary movements for Black and queer rights? Undeniably.

But two matters need to be emphasized.

First, the utility of homophobia by opponents of the Civil Rights movement. In 1963, two weeks prior to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond obtained and read into the record the entirety of March organizer Bayard Rustin’s arrest record, which included a 1953 vice crime arrest for homosexuality. Harry Hay likewise distanced himself from the Communist Party USA because of the nature of sodomy laws and their prosecution in American courts against wider radical political campaigns. In other words, to point out the fact the contemporary LGBTQQIA+ movement was created autonomous of the Black liberation struggle is an ahistorical tautology, not a diagnostic of embedded white supremacist orientation per se.

Second is the base-superstructure relationship between the Black and queer movements. It would seem the historiography of Michelle Yuan’s work begins with 1970, if not later, and was premised upon a set of conservative cis-gendered gay male authors and academics who by no means represent the broad spectrum of the struggle. Throughout this struggle there has been a distinct base-superstructure relationship between the Black radical tradition and its liberation struggle with the queer liberation struggle. Testimonials from those in the movement in the 1960s and 1970s say that they took guidance and inspiration from the Civil Rights era, something Hay’s aforementioned quote references. Indeed, one of the great uproars of the past decade within queer politics arose from the motion picture Stonewall (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2015) and its whitewashing away from the story Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major, two important BIPOC leaders of the rebellion.

Yuan’s essay includes a statement that orbits a certain political ideal but that diagnoses things in precisely the opposite meaning.

The most universal characteristic of queerness is perhaps that it cannot be succinctly or concretely defined. Moreover, it is scarcely questioned or critiqued by young people, liberals, progressives and radicals alike.

That ambiguity was intentional by design by radicals. “Queerness” was designated as a space that refused to integrate into hetero/cis-normative patriarchal racial capitalism. While the rest of the community got married with mortgages in red-lined neighborhoods, had families, served out and proud in the various military branches of Global Northern imperialism, and became gay members of the neoliberal order, to be queer meant to rebel, to reject the desire to integrate. It is in the same line of praxis as the ambiguity contained within the word “communism” and indicates a struggling toward a post-capitalist vision of sexual and gender relations of which we can and must dream in order to emancipate ourselves from the pain and legacy of the homo/trans-phobia whose scars we carry.