©2009 Sherry Wolf
Published in 2009 by Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
ISBN 978-1608460-76-2
Cover design by Amy Balkin
Cover photograph of the 2006 Heritage of Pride Parade in New York City © Bryan Smith.
This book has been published with the generous support of the Wallace Global Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in Canada by union labor on recycled paper containing 100 percent post-consumer waste in accordance with the guidelines of the Green Press Initiative, www.greenpressinitiative.org.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Roots of LGBT Oppression
2. Repression, Resistance, and War: The Birth of Gay Identity
3. The Myth of Marxist Homophobia
4. The Birth of Gay Power
5. Whatever Happened to Gay Liberation?
6. In Defense of Materialism: Postmodernism, ID Politics, and Queer Theory in Perspective
7. Biology, Environment, Gender, and Sexual Orientation
8. An Injury to One Is an Injury to All
9. Sexual Liberation for All!
Notes
Selected Readings
Index
To Judy and Richard Wolf, my parents, who encouraged their tomboy daughter to play sports, think for herself, question authority (though perhaps not theirs), and believe that what we do can make a difference
From a distance, writing a book appears to be a pretty solitary affair, and in many ways it is. But my worldview and ideas about sexuality and socialism have been shaped by many political collaborators over the years. I have the great fortune of working alongside some excellent Marxist writers, thinkers, and activists who are among my dearest friends. First and foremost, I must thank Paul D’Amato, my editor, for his insights and questions that forced me to clarify concepts and refine some rough edges. I’ve no doubt that working with me is a trial, and whatever faults this book has are surely my own, though I’m certain some of its attributes are due to Paul’s prodding editorial comments. In addition to Sharon Smith’s writings and speeches on women and socialism, U.S. labor, and a jaw-dropping range of topics, conversations with Sharon helped form many of the ideas that wound up in this book. I must also thank Ahmed Shawki for asking me to write the book—and thinking that I could, despite the fact that I’d never written one before.
Regular discussions with Joel Geier, Elizabeth Schulte, Alan Maass, Lee Sustar, Marlene Martin, Bill Roberts, Shaun Harkin, Lance Selfa, and Eric Ruder forced me to think more sharply about the audience and goals for this work. I must also thank Jesse Sharkey, Jason Yanowitz, Annie Zirin, Julie Fain, Lauren Fleer, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Susan Dwyer for mercifully saving me from having to endure my own cooking these last months; and also for pounding me with questions, arguments, rebuttals, and quizzical looks over many dinners. I’m not sure if they all realized they were helping me with the book as I ate their food and sipped wine, but those free-flowing discussions propelled me back into the library stacks more times than I care to admit. On a couple of chapters, I called upon the expertise of Dana Cloud, Aisha Karim, Matt Swagler, Phil Gasper, and David Whitehouse, all of whom made extremely useful comments. I also must acknowledge my new friends, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee and Ohio State’s Christopher Phelps, for sending along helpful articles.
Thanks also to Barry Sheppard for introducing me to the folks at the Holt Labor Library in San Francisco. Dave Florey’s sleuthing on my behalf in NYU’s Tamiment archives was a great help as well. And Dave Zirin’s advice to not think of it as writing a book, but just to work on seventy-two articles instead, was the kind of silly and spot-on help I needed from my pal the sportswriter for politicos who hate sports and athletes who hate politics.
Finally, I’d like to thank the folks at Haymarket Books, who accomplish extraordinary feats of publishing with a passion and persistence that live up to their mission of creating “books for changing the world”: Julie Fain, Anthony Arnove, Sarah Macaraeg, Rachel Cohen, Joe Allen, Bill Roberts, and Dao Tran. It’s an honor to be added to your list of authors.
There is a contradiction that pervades the politics and culture of U.S. society regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. On the one hand, top-rated TV shows and Academy Award–winning movies, such as Will and Grace, the L Word, and Milk, portray gays and lesbians in a favorable light. On the other, federal and most state legislation denies equal marriage, workplace, and civil rights protections for sexual minorities. Rates of violence against LGBT people remain alarmingly high, including incidents of murder.1 Current opinion polls, however, show a marked increase in social acceptance of a wide range of sexual and gender-variant behaviors.2 This contradiction is a product of both the emergence in modern capitalism of greater sexual freedom to form sexual identities outside the traditional family and capitalism’s continued need to reinforce gender norms that bolster the “nuclear” family.
This work uses a Marxist worldview to examine this and other historical, political, and theoretical questions of sexual and gender oppression in order to frame an argument for how we can organize for LGBT liberation. Socialism’s founders, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, lived in the Victorian era, many decades before the notion of LGBT liberation took form. They (and other Marxists after them) did, however, provide the theoretical tools necessary to both analyze and wage a successful battle against this and other forms of oppression.
What was the gist of their argument? Homophobic, sexist, racist, nationalist, and other divisions in modern society reflect the interests of the dominant class in society. This class—the ruling class—constitutes a small minority of the population; it therefore must use the institutional and ideological tools at its disposal to divide the mass of the population against itself in order to prevent the majority from uniting and rising in unison to take back what is rightfully theirs. The former slave and Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it aptly when he said of the slaveholders’ strategy against slaves and poor whites, “They divided both to conquer each.”3
The ruling class depends, argued Marx, on promoting ideas that reinforce division and a sense of powerlessness among the exploited. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch,” Marx and Engels noted, “the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”4 This holds true also for ideas about social and legal “norms” of sexual behavior under capitalism. Ideological and legal repression and control of sexual behavior in the United States and other industrialized societies, therefore, grow from the needs of the class in power.
However, oppression is not merely ideological but also material. The oppression of immigrants,