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Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume 39, Number 23. September 20, 1976

Intolerance Equals Myth — How Socialists should view the gay movement

page 14

Intolerance Equals Myth

How Socialists should view the gay movement

What is the nature, and what are the causes of gay oppression, and in what way are these linked to the oppression of other sections of the community under capitalism? What are the changes in society necessary to eliminate it? In answering these questions I am setting out to show that such changes are an integral factor in the programme for a socialist state, with a socialist concept of civil and human rights.

The most blatant and not least widespread form of gay oppression in our society is quite simply that of physical violence. In the eyes of many people "queer-bashing" is not just condoned, it is seen as something of a protective service. The gay person is seen as inviting violence by the mere fact of being gay, just as for the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk the black invites violence through the mere fact of being black.

Can we be surprised that such violence is so often tacitly condoned, when the law itself condones it. In cases of queer-hashing (which are significantly similar in this respect to cases of rape) it is most often those who committed the violence who are invited to bring charges, while the victim, in an obvious travesty of justice, becomes the accused. In the eyes of the law it can be worse to attempt to express a sexual emotion for another human being than to use all manner of brutality against one. A relevant telling remark was made at a recent gay conference in England by a Vietnam veteran court-martialled for his homosexuality : "They gave me a medal for killing men, and a dishonourable discharge for loving them."

We do not tend to think of the British law of 1861 punishing homosexual acts by up to ten years hard labour as an advance, but in fact it was a liberalising measure, before that time they were punishable by death. The New Zealand law of 1885 included provisions (since dropped) for heavy floggings. Violence against gays as a form of oppression has been institutionalised. Similarly, a man may still legally beat his wife, or a woman may be legally compelled to undergo nine months' unwanted pregnancy.

A second important form of oppression is the use of the weapon of shame. A public figure's career, for instance can be irreparably damaged from the moment the accusation of homosexuality is voiced against them, and not just their career, but the respect they will receive from the public and even from individuals who may once have seemed friends. Perhaps against no other section of the community has the weapon of shame been used so effectively as against gay people. Still today there can be very few gay people indeed who do not sometimes feel shame at some aspect of their sexuality.

The gay person is deprived of self-respect, essential to a social human existence. That is why restoring pride in being what one is, is one of the main aims of the gay movement, as it is of the black or women's movement.

The only types of gay person generally given public exposure are the ridiculed stereotypes derived, as one might say, from the enemy, from the oppressing straight. In this the gay person is like women in general, who are constantly subjected to exposure to stereotypes created by and for men.

As women have been, gay people are shut off from open knowledge about how to enjoy their sexuality, with the result that many do not even recognise their sexuality until they have been trying with disastrous effects to live as straights for years.

Gay people are deprived of a cultural identity. The gayness of great historical or artistic figures is hushed up, or at best, they are apologised for as being great in spite of, rather than perhaps because of then gayness. In this their situation resembles that of black racial minorities, who everywhere have been either deprived of knowledge of black cultures or taught that these are inferior. Both black and gay movements are concerned with re-asserting their real place in history.

If we cannot deny that gay people are oppressed in capitalist society in ways comparable to other sections of the community, we must, if we are to understand the function of this oppression within capitalism (and so understand why - and how - it is to be combatted), we must establish why gay people are oppressed.

Clearly, unlike the related cases of women or blacks, the reasons are not obviously economic. Gay people do not play a special economic role. This is not to say that they are not economically discriminated against, but such discrimination is in their case an incidental part of their oppression. It is only because they are already oppressed by stigma that they may suffer problems with regard to employment or housing, may find themselves ejected from a career they were embarked upon, or barred from taking certain jobs, or from being housed by certain landlords. They may be barred as often as not because they are seen as intrinsically undesirable; but in certain cases they are barred because they are seen as a liability, or as a security risk. They are easy prey to blackmail or to frame-ups. Limited employment opportunities may, then, cause gay people at times to form a proportion of the reserve army of labour disproportionate to their actual numbers (and such is quite blatantly the case with the drag community in New Zealand).

Another form of economic discrimination gay people can be subject to, which is equally suffered by other oppressed groups, and which is particularly relevant to both the source and the implications of their oppression, is the economic discrimination practised against anyone who does not live as part of a family unit. This may range from a few cents in the case of a family-sized packet of cornflakes or soapsuds, to to a few dollars in the case of rented accommodation, which is scarce in non-family-sized units in the first place, to a lot more than a few dollars in the case of taxation. Many benefits that are available to heterosexual couples (potential families) are not available to same-sex couples.

In this incidental form of oppression suffered by gays we have a clue to the basic reason for their oppression as it exists under capitalism. The particularly virulent stigma which is attached to gay people is at least partly because they are the most obvious enemies of the nuclear family, the basic economic unit of capitalism. They are, as it were, the scapegoat for the family system. Onto the scapegoat were loaded the sins of the community and it was driven forth into the desert to die, and the community sank back reassured of its sinlessness. The gay person epitomises all the sins of opposition to the family system, and she or he too is driven forth into the desert, to reassure the family system.

In fact, under the capitalist system all expressions of sexuality are oppressed to some degree other than sex between married couples for the purpose of procreation. Sex outside marriage is stigmatised; masturbation is discouraged, and considered sick or at best unmentionalbe; oral and anal sex between heterosexuals is considered every bit as wicked as between homosexuals, and in many places is equally prophibited by law. Abortion too is a crime, punished by the distress of nine months' unwanted pregnancy, and the inhibiting nuisance of rearing and paying for an unhappy unwanted child. Homosexuality is oppressed and punished because it is from the first so blatantly non-procreative.

But what is there to suggest that procreation is the prime function of sex between humans anyway? Of all the many expressions of sexuality even between heterosexuals there is only the one that may result in procreation, and that only under certain circumstances. At least an equal, and possibly the more important f function of sexuality is to draw us to associate with another, to co-operate with one another, to be a social animal. Sexuality pre-eminently opens up to us the possibility of relief from loneliness. But it is in the interests of capitalism to make us indifferent to one another, unaware of one another, so that on the one hand some few individuals will be sufficiently indifferent to the suffering they impose on others in order that they themselves may rise into the capitalist class, and on the other hand the oppressed masses will remain sufficiently indifferent to and even unaware of each other not to gather together. (Most people are simply unaware of gay people and their oppression.) When Engels remarked the fact that "with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' [unclear: comes] into the foreground", he was recognising the importance of this socialising function of sexuality to the growth of socialism. Capitalism can attempt to reduce love to a myth or sexuality to a commodity, but the socialising drive within us is hard to repress.

I am a faggot

It has been claimed among socialists reticent about giving too much support to the gay movement that this would be irrelevant to, or indeed tend to alienate the sympathy of the blue-collar worker, so potent is the homosexual stigma. But even the reverse might be true. As I mentioned earlier, the mass of people are simply unaware of gay oppression - but if the worker came to understand its nature, it could act as a special incentive : the worker knows that there are very good, indeed watertight reasons for his oppression under capitalism, but there are, let alone no fair reasons, not even any very good reasons for the oppression of gays. If he became fully aware of so real but so arbitrary an oppression, it might help the realisation that no form of oppression is natural, no form of oppression has always existed, all are contrived to suit self-seeking interests.

The alliance between socialism and the gay movement is not without a history. At the time of the Wilde trials in 1895 the only paper in Europe to treat the incident as anything other than a scandal or a source of amusement, was Die Neue Zeit, the journal of the Second International In a long article Eduard Bernstein defended Wilde, criticised capitalist society's hypocritical and irrational sexual morality, and the legal injustice involved, and proclaimed the obligation of the socialist movement to take a stand.

The Social-Democratic leader, August Bebel, led the debate against Germany's anti-homosexual laws in the Reichstag first in 1898, and again in 1907. The Social-Democratic Party's paper, Vorwarts, carried news of the gay educational activities and agitation for law reform that, in fact, proliferated in Germany at that time.

In Russia, the Bolshevik government wiped all legislation against homosexual acts per se in December 1917. They viewed this, along with other moves to extend sexual freedom, as an integral part of the social revolution.

Unfortunately, the gay socialist today has no such good models to look to. Following mass arrests in January 1934, in March of that year the Stalinists introduced a law punishing homosexual acts with up to eight years' imprisonment or Siberian exile, despite the active opposition of old Bolsheviks such as Klara Zetkin. The new official line saw homosexuality as the "product of decadence in the bourgeois sector of society", and for example, the 1952 Soviet Encyclopedia informs us that "homosexuality is an expression of the moral degeneracy of the ruling classes." In Cuba, there is no specific legislation banning gay sex, but an anti-gay policy was adopted at the First National Congress on Education and Culture in 1971, which among other things banned gays from representing Cuba abroad as members of performing groups, envisaged "transferring to other organisations" any gays involved in "artistic and cultural activities", and asked for "severe penalties to be applied to ....depraved repeat offenders" (a policy which, one gathers, has been only too actively carried through). In China there is no law nor policy against homosexuality, y, but this is because, as a gay member of the Socialist Workers' Party in America was informed by the Peking mission to the United Nations, "there is no such thing in China". The S.W.P. member pointed out that some of China's greatest emperors had been openly homosexual, but the diplomat pointed out that that, of course, was before the "liberation".

However, branches of the Fourth International across the world have both given their support and worked within the international gay movement that has been growing since the Stonewall riots of 1969. This is true of the Socialist Workers Parties in America and Australia, the International Marxist Group in Britain, and the Socialist Action League in New Zealand. Such socialist groups recognise and appreciate the particular thrust of the gay movement, and that it has its, special part to play in the general radicalisation. As Lenin said in "What Is To Be Done" : 'Advantage must be taken of every concrete example of oppression for the purpose of agitation...Inasmuch as political oppression affects all sorts of classes in society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in various spheres of life and activity, in industrial life, in civil life, in personal and family life....etc, is it not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of developing the political consciousness of the workers if we do not undertake the organisation of the political exposure of the autocracy in all its aspects?"

The preconditions for full human and civil rights for gays could perhaps only exist under a state based on socialist principles. Many capitalist countries have made concessions to gay people, but not one, for instance, has carried out the wholesale repeal that was enacted by the Bolsheviks in 1917, for so long as sex-roles continue to have an essential economic significance, oppression against gays in some form is likely to persist. Only the concept of socialism can embrace the returning to them of their equality, combined with the encouragement to them, as to other minorities, to work together to secure not just their own, but those interests of the community at large which their particular perceptions may enable them alone to recognise. So, to all my courageous gay sisters and brothers, I say forward to the world intersexual.