Socialism and Gay Liberation: Back to the Future

[dcsmart]

DOUG IRELAND, a veteran radical journalist, is the U.S. correspondent and a columnist for the French political-investigative weekly magazine Bakchich and the International Affairs Editor of Gay City News, New York's largest LGBT weekly newspaper.

IN 1865, WHILE MARX, IN HOLLAND, was playing the Victorian parlor game "Confessions" with his daughter Jenny, when asked for his favorite maxim he replied, "Nihil humani a me alienum puto" or "nothing human is alien to me," a dictum he had lifted from the second century B.C. Carthaginian slave-turned-playwright Terentius (Terence.)

Unfortunately, this admirable and inspiring attitude was never extended by either Marx or Engels to same-sexers. Well before the invention of the word "homosexual" by Karoly Maria Kertbeny in 1869, the correspondence of Marx and Engels is riddled with what we would now characterize as unmistakable homophobia of a vicious character. When the pioneering German homosexual liberationist Karl Ulrichs sent Marx one of his books on the subject, which Marx forwarded to his collaborator, Engels described Ulrichs' platform of homosexual emancipation from criminal laws as "turning smut into history." Marx, in commenting on Karl Boruttau's Gedanken über Gewissens Freiheit (Thoughts on Freedom of Conscience), disparaged the author as "this faggoty prick" (Schwanzschwulen) The homophobia of Marx and Engels has been meticulously documented by Hubert Kennedy of San Francisco State University, Ulrichs' U.S. biographer, in his essay "Johann Baptist von Schweitzer: The Queer Marx Loved to Hate," which is included in the anthology Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left, edited by Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis, and James Steakley (Haworth Press) and is also available online.

Notwithstanding this unfortunate lapse into prejudice by socialism's two most famous names, virtually all of the early important figures who worked for homosexual liberation were socialists. John Addington Symonds, the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness, was a radical socialist; he helped found several "Walt Whitman Societies" in the north of England--the first recorded English groups of gay men founded explicitly to discuss same-sex love--wrote the pro-homosexual A Problem in Greek Ethics, published in 1883, and circulated privately printed essays in defense of homosexuality that were very influential. Edward Carpenter, the libertarian socialist poet and essayist who played a significant role in making possible the birth of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, took up Symonds' homosexual liberationist mantle on the latter's death in 1893, and his 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the gay liberation movements of the 20th century. Oscar Wilde, who wrote The Soul of Man Under Socialism and joined the agitation in favor of clemency for the Haymarket Martyrs, was profoundly influenced by the writings of Ulrichs and adopted his "Uranian" terminology. Wilde and his friends referred in their letters to the campaign for legalization of homosexuality as "the Cause," joining a secret Uranian organization, the Order of Chaeronea, to fight for it (Wilde's position as an important precursor of gay liberation was solidly documented by Neil McKenna's groundbreaking 2003 revisionist biography, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde.) The Order of Chaeronea's founder, George Ives, also thought of himself as a socialist.
Text

FULL ARTICLE
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue46/Ireland46.htm