There are positive indicators regarding social attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Newsweek’s latest national poll numbers show a marked increase in pro-gay attitudes nationally. Not only do 52 percent currently oppose the federal marriage ban (up from 45 percent in 2004), but decisive majorities are for ending all sorts of discrimination against LGBT people—73 percent approve extending health care to gay partners, 86 percent are for equal hospital visitation rights, and so on.12 These are startlingly good numbers given the equivocation (at best) from politicians and the near-absence for many years of any activist movement until recently. Imagine the impact on consciousness if ordinary working peoples’ opinions were shifting not just on the basis of lived experience alongside the rising ranks of out coworkers, classmates, and family members but also inside organizations and struggles where sexual stereotypes were confidently contested.
There is a groaning hunger among scholars and social justice activists for knowledge and debate about the history, politics, and theory of LGBT liberation. This work makes no pretense about the author’s political leanings. Left-wing historians and scientists such as John D’Emilio, Estelle Freedman, Susan Stryker, and Anne Fausto-Sterling along with many others have shaped and influenced my understanding of LGBT politics and history enormously. As a lesbian Marxist who came of age in the neo–Cold War, AIDS-ravaged 1980s, I am part of the post-Stonewall generation. Many of my peers question the relevance or possibility of organization and struggle. But reality is forcing those alternatives. I would caution readers against narrowing their sights, presuming that LGBT battles will or should necessarily rise independent of wider outrage against expanding wars and a collapsing economy. Sexual minorities, after all, are directly affected by these unfolding catastrophes and our demands can and must be brought into broader battles that will eventually erupt and can be shaped by socialist ideas.
The Chicago example above shows that as a new political era begins to take shape, immigrant and labor groups can and in some places already are calling upon LGBT groups to join with them in organizing a response to the current crises. For those of us too young to have participated in the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and who have lived with the aching suspicion that we may have missed out on the revolution, take heart. In a world that bears a striking resemblance to elements of both the 1960s and 1930s—yet where attitudes about race, women, sexuality, and gender have evolved tremendously—it appears we are in for some heady times of our own.
What’s in a name?
Right from the get-go, I must admit that I cannot use what I perceive as an offensive epithet that was scrawled across my high school locker and spat at me from the mouths of innumerable bigots—the word “queer”—as a positive signifier in a book about the history, politics, and theory of sexual liberation. As a socialist who advocates sexual liberation for all, the modern conundrum of desiring to be all-inclusive and readable means that one must settle on how to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people collectively. I have chosen to largely use LGBT in keeping with many current historians as well as student and labor activists. There are, however, many places in which the words gay or homosexual are used as they are both historically and culturally accurate in those instances. Hopefully, the content of my exposition and arguments will satisfy even those most adamant in their preference for queer.
I think a truce on the issue of LGBT nomenclature is in order. Language is ever evolving in tandem with the wider society we live in, and time along with future struggles will tell what terms emerge from the current babble. I know that many feel quite passionate about this issue; however, after all the Sturm und Drang over this rather narrow question I believe that we ought to move on and respect each others’ linguistic choices. All oppressed people should have the right to call themselves whatever they choose, a right that must also extend to me.
Sherry Wolf
May 2009
The oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people hasn’t always existed, and neither have LGBT people as a distinct sector of the population. The oppression of all sexual minorities is one of modern capitalism’s myriad contradictions. Capitalism creates the material conditions for men and women to lead autonomous sexual lives, yet it simultaneously seeks to impose heterosexual norms on society to secure the maintenance of the economic, social, and sexual order.
Famous lesbians such as Melissa Etheridge pack concert venues and out comedian Ellen DeGeneres hosts an Emmy Award–winning syndicated talk show, while homophobic laws defend discrimination on the job and in marriage. LGBT people such as Matthew Shepard are brutally beaten to death by bigots, while public opinion has radically shifted in favor of LGBT civil rights.1 This apparently contradictory state of affairs in the United States can be explained.
LGBT oppression, like women’s oppression, is tied to the centrality of the nuclear family as one of capitalism’s means to both inculcate gender norms and outsource care for the current and future generations of workers at little cost to the state, as explained in detail below. In addition, the oppression of LGBT people under capitalism, like racism and sexism, serves to divide working-class people from one another, especially in their battles for economic and social justice. While capitalist society attempts to pigeonhole people into certain gender roles and sexual behaviors, socialists reject these limitations. Instead, socialists fight for a world in which sexuality is a purely personal matter, without legal or material restrictions of any sort. The right of self-determination for individuals that socialists uphold must include individuals’ freedom to choose their own sexual behavior, appearance, and erotic preferences.
Sexuality, like many other behaviors, is a fluid—not fixed—phenomenon. Homosexuality exists along a continuum. The modern expression of this can be found among the millions of men and women who identify as LGBT—often identifying themselves differently at different times in their lives. There are not two kinds of people in the world, gay and straight. As far as biologists can tell, there is only one human race with a multiplicity of sexual possibilities that can be either frustrated or liberated, depending on the way human society is organized.
Reams of historical evidence confirm that what we define today as homosexual behavior has existed for at least thousands of years, and it is logical to assume that homosexual acts have been occurring for as long as human beings have walked the Earth. But it took the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century to create the potential for vast numbers of ordinary people to live outside the nuclear family, allowing for modern gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities to be born. Not until the late twentieth century did some gender-variant people begin to identify themselves as transgender, though people who have defied modern Western concepts of gender-appropriate behavior have existed throughout history in many different cultures. The systematic oppression of LGBT people as it is experienced in most contemporary Western societies, therefore, is also a fairly recent phenomenon in human history. This is not to argue, however, that prior to capitalism humans existed in a sexual paradise free of repression or restrictions of any kind. Rather, legal prohibitions and social taboos from antiquity through the precapitalist era existed in many cultures on the basis of sex acts, often denouncing non-procreative sex, without the condemnation or even the conception of sexual identity as an intrinsic or salient aspect of a person’s being.
Contemporary industrial societies created the possibility for men and women to identify themselves and live as gays and lesbians, argues the collection Hidden from History.
What we call “homosexuality” (in the sense of the distinguishing traits of “homosexuals”), for example, was not considered a unified set of acts, much less a set of qualities defining particular persons, in precapitalist societies…. Heterosexuals and homosexuals are involved in social “roles” and attitudes which pertain to a particular society, modern capitalism.2
It was capitalism, in fact, that gave rise to modern individuality and the conditions for people to have intimate lives based on personal desire, a historic break from the power