Gay socialist

As the gay liberation movement began to gain ground, many socialist organizations actively campaigned for gay rights. Notable examples are the feminist Freedom Socialist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the International Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative (United States) and the Socialist Party USA.

In this article, I recount the stories of activists across the history of organizing for the rights and liberation of LGBTQ+ (queer) people in the United States and review the history of queer liberation activism to explore how our struggle today is tied to a revolutionary socialist project. Frank Kameny, the co-founder of the Mattachine Society who fought the Supreme Court in the ’60s for gay employment rights, criticized pre-Stonewall gays, calling them assimilationists whose.

The Right’s continual war against women, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans people has gained ground with the election of Donald Trump. The Trump/Pence Administration poses formidable challenges to socialist feminists and LGBTQIA+ people in particular. The Socialist Party fights for the liberation of all oppressed sexualities and gender identities – and the root cause of oppression and division: capitalism.

Two members of the Socialist Party’s LGBT group, an acronym we use in the broadest, most inclusive sense, take stock of the fight. How did all this lead to the development of a new concept of homosexuality? Beccaria and Bentham both argued that sodomy was a crime without victims; in private, Bentham wrote several essays on the subject between and , arguing for decriminalisation and commenting on the irrational nature of homophobia.

I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. In the countryside of the later Roman Empire a new mode of production had been in the process of formation. But is it a perspective saying that social movement groups shouldn't be only based in one community as well? This was a two stage process. You said that was a strategy. Contact Us.

Yet a comparison with the USA shows that legal harassment could increase without any particular legislative landmark, old laws simply being used in new ways. Even Japan, which had traditionally approved of sexual relations between male samurai, introduced restrictive legislation as part of its modernisation programme under the Meiji Restoration after Bray, pp. No, the thing that I'm saying that still exists, because I saw it again in Act Up twenty years later, was the fight against - in less explicitly political terms most of the time - a sectoralist, single-issue approach versus any solidarity, integrated struggle, and anti-capitalist perspective.

The growth of population, the expansion of cultivation, the colonisation of new lands in eastern Europe, and the growth of towns and trade had broken the bonds of control by the lord of the manor and bishop of the town. But it was politically confused. This means that any history of same-sex relations is bound to appear unbalanced.

The Body Politic was particularly interested in how the oppression of LGBT people related to society more generally and its constitutive political forces.

The roots of gay oppression • International Socialism

After years of research in the New York Public Library, Katz assembled hundreds of sources that depicted the changing definition of homosexuality in the US, from the colonial period onwards. This phenomenon lay beneath the street activism, and it was a deeply intellectual, often philosophical activity. Once capitalism created the opportunity for people to live autonomously, it allowed LGBT people to privilege homosexual desire as a driving force in their lives.

So then in '76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to Bernstein and Herzen, p. So I started questioning. That is the still obscure and intriguing tale. A number of individuals, including Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the socialist J. It also encouraged them to question forms of social organisation that, to most, seemed natural and unchangeable. Revolutionary Union, October League. I won that argument, and Kaiser settled the strike the next day, without even actually having gone out on strike.

In classical Greece c. It was a fantastically ambitious intellectual project, the history of LGBT people that would show how power operates in society.