Gay Movement-a history of gains and setbacks

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San Francisco gays riot arainst right wing violence Nazis carry bust of Magnus Hirschfield before setting il By Henry Phillips Like all important social reform movements based around a single issue, the gay movement has tendency towards a narrowing of its view of history and an exaggeration of its own successes.

Today it would be hard to find 'London underground platform without at least one person wearing a gay liberation badge; and that person is in little danger of arrest or being pushed under a train.

Except in rare cases the odd contemptuous glance and a bit of ribald abuse is the worst thing likely to happen.

Gay News At the same time Gay News , sells 25,000 copies and its contents show a continuing expansion of gay theatre, art, films, pubs, discos, as well as details of gay socialists, gay stamp collectors, gay opera goers and so on.

. The fact that all this still takes the form of a ghettoised social milieu-and within that very often sub-ghettoes of men and women-does not alter the fact that eleven years of struggle on gay rights have produced, especially in North America and Western Europe, very big changes in the position of gay people in society.

The gay movement today is infected with a strong proclivity to view this undoubted progress as part of a linear and irreversible process beginning in 1969 when the gay clients of the Stonewall bar first physically resisted a police bust, and continuing into an indefinite, rosy, future.

This is the perspective for instance of a film which has been widely shown in London in recent months called Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts'.

The director, a rather arrogant: German gay liberationist named Rosa von Praunheim, has now also produced a book of the film just published symptom of the gay movement's internal ghettoisation).

It is a wide-ranging and often vivid documentary film of gay life-demonstrations, social life, political and personal interviews designed to demonstrate the upsurge of the gay movement in the United States.

Ironic As a political 'progressive', von Praunheim adopts a relatively ironic tone towards such things as gay churches, and gay fascists.

But basically his perspective is that anything that is openly gay is good even if some things are better than others. It au sttms to represent an expan- ell nasmi ta asmasngat an nuara sion in the tolerance of capitalist society.

The final peroration of the film's commentary is a plea for tolerance and liberty seen entirely in a bourgeois context and in vocabulary which in the United States might be described as Jeffersonian.

In fact, the bourgeois liberalism of Jefferson the slave-owner on the question of homosexuality consisted in thinking that it should not be punished by death (as it was in the state of Virginia up to 1777) but rather womam, ny cu cast thro the 11 a woman. Curtine TINTO Tne cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least' This is one of the numerous interesting documents collected Oil l together by Jonathan Katz in a large and scholarly book called Gay American History (Avon Books, USA):

The book outlines a long history of legal and mędical repression of homosexuality as well as many instances of homosexual love among the great (Alexander Hamilton, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson) • as well as the common people of American One section of the book is called "Resistance 1859-72". The political importance of the material in this section is not only that it shows that the gay movement began long before Stonewall; but that the very long struggle for gay rights has in the United States, as elsewhere been through cycles of partial gains followed by new waves of repression.

Seen as separate

It would be wrong to draw simplistic conclusions from this experience; a good analytical history of the political fight for gay liberation has yet to be written.

But it is hard to escape the conclusion that part of the reason why so many historical gains have been wiped out-a fact conveniently ignored by the view of history represented by von Praunheim -is that the gay question has so frequently been regarded (both by bourgeois reformers and by socialists) as something quite separate from the transformation of society as a whole.

Of course, gay oppression has sometimes been the result of historical reversions towards barbarism in which all freedoms were crushed-for example fascism and Stalinism.

Reversals

But even within bourgeois democratic society there have been very sharp reversals of the • A particularly interesting casé to understand in this context is that of the Mattachine Society founded in California at the end of the 1940s.

Its main founders were members of the American Communist Party and it is not coincidental that the founding of the Mattachine marks their break with the party. But the break occurred in an extraordinary way.

The Mattachine's main founder was Harry Hay, an intellectual who gave classes in political and music history in the CP and the California Labor Hay gives lengthy interviews both in Army of Lovers and in a moving and humorous documentary consisting of 26 interviews with gay people called Word is Out (made by the Mariposa Film Group in 1977).

But his most revealing -if still very incomplete-interview is printed in Gay American Hay was a victim of McCarthyite repression and was forced to testify before the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1952.

Hay expected (wrongly as it turned out) that he would be questioned on his gay as well as his Communict Partv artivities Because of this he decided that it was best for him to be represented by a different lawyer from his fellow CP members to avoid their being tarred with the brush of homosexuality (and he had a major struggle to find any lawyer willing to take his case).

Ihen, when he decided to devote his whole activity to the question of gay rights through the Mattachine:

"I went to the Communist Party and discussed this 'total call' upon me, recommending to them my expulsion. They rejected 'expulsion' and, in honour of my eighteen years as a member and ten years as a teacher and cultural innovator dropped me as "a security risk but as a life-long friend of the people" (Gay American History, p.622)

• The Stalinists thus adopted the same position on its gay members as the security services of the US capitalist state, which were at the same time conducting one of its periodic anti-gay witch-hunts.

From his statements the position of Hay himself remains unclear. He does not seem to be prepared to criticise the CP's pastion, though he does say "not one single political or pressure group among the liberals, let alone the left wing, lifted either voice or finger to protest the monstrous social and civil injustice" of the US government's anti-gay witch-hunts.

Nor do any of the published interviews with Hay explain how he reconciled his personal position on the gay question with the fact that at about the time he joined the CP Stalin was enacting new anti-gay laws in the Soviet Union and dispatching hundreds of homosexuals to Siberia.

This is a fact which is drawn attention to in another useful book of source material on the history of the gay movementThe Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) by John Lauritsen and David Thorstad (Times Change Press).

This book covers informatively if very briefly many aspects of the history of the struggle for gay liberation in the USA and Britain along with political/biographical sketches of Sir Richard Burton, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and the great pioneer of scientific research on sex Dr. Magnus Hirschfield of the German Institute for Sexual Science (which was suppressed by Hitler in the 1930s).

The authors are especially interested in the relations between the gay movement and socialism. And in this context they concentrate on the German Social Democratic Party's advocacy of gay rights before the First World War and on the situation in Russia after 1917.

(The writings of the revisionist Social Democratic leader Edward Bernstein On Homosexuality have just been published in English by the British and Irish Communist Organisation-a Stalinist group who have added a grotesquely reactionary introduction).

One of the first acts of the revolutionary government of the Bolsheviks was the abolition of all anti-homosexual laws as part of a general policy of "the absolute non-intervention of the state and society into sexual matters so long as no-one is injured, and no-one's interests are encroached upon."

They saw this as the belated implementation of the gains of the bourgeois democratic revolution and their approach was partly guided by the Code Napoleon. fire Repressive laws were stituted by Stalin in 193 remain in force until now.

At the same time a rea ary ideological campaign unleashed by the Sti regime. It is reflected i startling change in the ment of homosexuality i Great Soviet Encyclo quoted by Lauritsen Thorstad.

The entry in the first er of 1930 (and presur written earlier) is based o work of Magnus Hirschfiel of Freud, who both reg as a expression of human : feeling.

When Stalin's henchme purged the Encyclopedi: entry was reduced to the fr ing (1971 edition):

"Homosexuality, perversion consisting in un al attraction to persons ‹ same sex. It occurs in persi both sexes. The penal. st of the USSR, the so countries and even bourgeois states provide fr punishment of homosexua Neither the book by nor that by Lauritsen Thorstad go very far to the writing of a critical h of the gay movement.

But they have both to uncover some of the wealth of material whicl need to be examined in s And they both rep an important correctiv the all-too-common view 1969 was the day when tl movement began and Wi beginning of the ent millennia of gay oppressior Of course, the other c thile mas Pride Week 1980 the I tive to any tendency to that view today is that it law recently uphe "reasonable" the dismiss John Saunders from hi in Scotland; in Iran last the Isiamic regime put to a new group of "drug ac homosexuals and prostit and in Greece the gover has launched a new ar witch-hunt.

These examples all too easily multiplied. show how extremely britt the gains so far made by tr 0017 mavement and en Bay HUVOIC CAL DU point to the grave dang' its growing political dem ation.

And they underline thi for a serious commitme the mass organisations c working class against : oppression.

Revolutionary SOC must be in the forefront fight for that commit For many that will it throwing off a legacy not Bolsheviks but of Stali still common view that i warmth of socialist si homosexuality would melt and problems of sexual o sion would resolve themsel reinand ction• was alinist n the treatn the •pedia and dition mably id and ¡arded atural sexual in had the allowsexual natur›f the ons of atutes cialist some or the lity."

Katz and •wards listory begun h will such a resent re to • that he gay as the of :orrecwards n Gay 3ritish Id as sal of s job week death Idicts, utes", nment iti-gay ld be They tle are ›day's they ers of obilise need nt by ›f the sexual cialists of the ment. nvolve of the n-the ociety • away ppresIves.

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