I wonder what the basis was for the communist party rejecting gays was--since they were militant athiests and dialectical materialists.
http://www.glbtq.com/literature/am_mawriters_left%2C2.html----------------------------SNIP--------------------------
The topic of gay, lesbian, and bisexual "Writers on the Left" in mid-twentieth-century U.S. literature is potentially a large and rich field for inquiry although scholarship still remains in its infancy. Research is complicated by the combined effects of modern anti-communism and homophobia.
In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman documents how homosexuals became special targets of persecution along with leftists during the Cold War years. Thus, many writers learned to obscure both their sexual orientation and their political identity in memoirs, interviews, and autobiographical statements. This habit of mind continued even after the cultural climate of the country liberalized in the 1960s.
The expression "Writers on the Left" derives from Daniel Aaron's famous 1961 book by that name. The category traditionally refers to creative writers and literary critics drawn to Marxist-oriented parties and social movements between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the appearance of a New Left in the early 1960s.
For the most part, such writers were variously associated with Communism, although some important ones, such as the famous gay film critic Parker Tyler (1904-1974) and the bisexual poet John Brooks Wheelwright (1897-1940), were drawn to Trotskyism. The Communist party was officially closed to homosexuals, but many rank and file activists, prominent fellow travelers, and even some national party leaders, such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), had same-sex relationships.
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