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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 37, No. 10. May 22, 1974

Roger Stalin

Roger Stalin

Dear Roger,

To us homosexuals your editorial "Not so Gay" (April 24, p.3) started off sounding encouraging. You support our movement because we are discriminated against and abused by the law, the police and the "bourgeoia-value-dominated society". And you support us too because our oppression stands as proof that behind the friendly, freedom-loving mask of the bourgeois state lies a brutal face. Excellent! But from the on it's all prejudice and distortion until Engels' bit of sense at the end.

We have heard your line before. It is roughly the party line of the pro-Moscow and Peking Communist Parties. "Gay Liberation is essentially a diversion....We are opposed to the repression of homosexuals on the basis of their being homosexuals....But it is a psychological problem...It's based on all kinds of pressures in the crisis and oppression and exploitation in society with people distorted and so on." That comes from a pamphlet put out by the youth section of the American Communist Party. (Janis Tyner "Build the Youth Front" published YWLL 25c).

First you slate us for devaluing the word 'gay'. We like 'gay' because it has positive connotations unlike "homosexuality" which sounds as if it were a clinical condition like 'claustrophobia'. And we like it because the gay population has used it for over a century as an antidote to 'poofter', 'dyke', 'queer' etc. In your view we 'cheapen' the name of liberation movements. Fighting off the shackles of class, race or imperialism (you left out sexism — a mistake?). We are fighting against the shackles of gay oppression, another of the iniquities spawned by class society. Our struggle for full acceptance as equal human beings with the same rights and dignities accorded others is no less legitimate than similar struggles of other oppressed sectors of humanity.

Your suspicions that our movement is the darling of the liberal bourgeoisie verge on paranoia. McGoven, the arch-representative of that strata refused to include gay rights in his party platform during the last US presidential elections and the liberals in the New York state legislature have, since 1972, consistently refused to pass a bill granting gays their civil rights in housing and employment.

As you say the Young Socialists have taken up the cause of gay liberation. Among all the political groups in the country they alone have given us their full and unconditional support. They correctly see that the struggle of gays for our rights is directed against the capitalist government and bourgeois morality and is in the interests of socialism. Like gay activists the Young Socialists ignore the 'cause' of homosexuality just as they ignore the cause of heterosexuality. As socialists they are scientific and endorse the scientific view that homosexuality occurs quite frequently among infra-human primates and all lower mammals as well as in almost every human society in the past and present. The anthropologist Frank Beach and 'he psychologist Clellan Ford in their book Patters of Sexual Behaviour' (Harper & Bros 1951) conclude that homosexuality is "the product of the fundamental mammalian heritage of general sexual responsiveness as modified under the impact of experience." (op. cit p.263)

So much then tor your theory that homosexuality is a 'disorientation' resulting from the distorted social relations which prevail under capitalism. It is pure fiction. It is also an insult since it assumes we have become disorientated from what is normal and natural i.e. heterosexuality and that we are therefore abnormal and unnatural. Your views, strangely enough, are close not only to those of the Stalinist Communist Parties but also to those of the learned bourgeoisie. The American Psychiatric Association also classifies gayness as a "sexual...disorientation" Could you be specific about the "social relations" which produce homosexuals. How about 'dominant mother', 'fear of the opposite sex', 'arrested development at puberty'?'

You distort our slogan 'Gay is Good' to mean 'the gay life is the good life' Our slogan is aimed to give gays a sense of pride in our orientation in place of the shame and disgust Bourgeois society teaches us to feel, not to convert straights — a pointless effort anyway. Your urge that we 'make the best of it and fight repression' is no more than a rehash of the liberal attitude "the poor dears. I pity them really" with a cheery bit of "keep up the struggle" thrown in.

Gay liberation is a part of the class struggle. The capitalists keep people in line with their sexual morality as well as with their police force and low wages. Sexual repression, as Reich said, is "one of the cardinal ideological means used by the ruling class to subjugate the working population". Gay liberation challenges some important bourgeois myths i.e. that sex is for procreation within marriage, and that sex roles are biologically determined.

As well the essence of official morality, the anti-gay aspect of which is codified in the sodomy and indecency laws, is that it discourages people from making decisions about their own lives. When a sector of oppressed people start asserting their right to determine their own future and demand that the capitalist government grant that right the effect is contagious. It spurs on other sectors of the oppressed to a new combativeness for their own liberation. The development of the gay movement which grew out of and was inspired by the feminist movement bears this out. Since the majority of gays are workers the pride and combativity they develop because of the gay movement will tend to make then active in other areas of the class struggle.

A gay movement will be necessary (after the revolution) to fight oppression hanging over from the capitalist era until we win full equality. The absence of a gay movement in the revolutions which created the workers states in China, Russia. Cuba etc is one reason why gays have it so bad there. Although the Bolsheviks scrapped the Czarist laws against homosexuality within months of taking power Stalin reinstated similar laws in 1934. Myths about homosexuality being "the fascist perversion" and a sign of capitalist degeneration were cultivated and are flourishing to this day. Roger Steele has a 40-year tradition of Stalinist anti-gay libel to back him up.

Drawing by Niels of a man's heading being eaten by an egg out of an egg cup

M.J. McAllister

(Auckland University Gay Liberation)