Gay Liberation's class content

Your editorial on Gay Liberation in Salient No. 8 leaves something (rather a lot, actually) to be desired. First, one or two errors of fact. The Young Socialists have not "influenced" Gay liberation, except to the extent that they're the only socialist group to show any real support for gays. Gay Liberation does not believe or try to "give the illusion" that "the gay life is the good life"; but we're adamant that it is at least one form of "good life". Your comments about our name are dubious. I'd agree mat we're not a Front in any real sense, but in no way have we devalued either the word gay or the concept of liberation. The word "gay" has been used in this sense for 100 years, which I think establishes it as a legitimate meaning. And liberation means freedom from oppression. Gays are oppressed, and to start to compare different forms of oppression, as you are doing (is racism really more oppressive than sexism?) is a meaningless exercise in semantic masturbation.

More serious are your comments that Gay Liberation is lacking in "class content", does nothing to rectify the inequalities of decision making in society, and is the liberation of a group of people whose sexuality is a "disorientation" caused by "social relations under capitalism". Gay Liberation is a struggle against sexism, which is the belief or practice that the sex or sexual orientation of human being gives to some the right to certain privileges, powers, or roles, while denying to others their full potential. Within the context of our society, sexism is primarily manifested through male supremacy and heterosexual chauvinism. Since in the long run sexism benefits certain persons or groups, in the long run it cannot serve all the people, and prevents the forming of a complete social consciousness among straight men — in other words it's a means of maintaining elitist power structures, and hence of maintaining class society. The anti-sexist movements - Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation — have a very definite class content. Particularly as they're well aware that the people most oppressed by sexism are working-class gays and women. The fact that these movements are at present largely middle-class does not invalidate their potential for being true people's movements.

Finally, your comments on homosexuality as something that will disappear in "a planned, socialist economy" are nothing short of fatuous. Do you really believe that a mode of behaviour found in most animals and in all human societies will disappear simply through economic revolution? Your whole argument is based on the middle-class perversion of Freud which states that homosexuality is a sexual malfunctioning caused by adverse family and/or social conditions. If you can't manage to get your information up to date and read some current psychological literature on homosexuality (which views it as a back-firing of the unnecessary repression to which everyone is subject), then you're stuck with your bourgeois prejudices.

That's Ok by us, sweetie, but don't try to pass them off as Marxist analysis.