[Marxism] Dave Thorstad letter to Socialist Alternative

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Socialist Alternative,

A few comments, offered in a friendly spirit, on Lionel Wright's "Pride
2005: The Stonewall Riots" (Justice, May-June 2005):

    Wright's piece--a summary of gay lib in the United States taken mostly
from Martin Duberman's and John D'Emilio's books) is generally accurate
when it sticks to historical facts, and the two pages it devotes to its
subject are substantial for a paper of twleve pages.  It's the spin and
omissions that strike sour notes. I limit myself to commenting on only a few.

    1. The Stonewall Riots occurred in a Mafia hangout for gay men, drag
queens, and young male hustlers. It may not be pc to recall this detail in
a day when gay men are being virtually erased by lefty academic imposition
of the word "queer" to include virtually everyone, including straight
women, when historically it was used mostly to demonize gay males, and, to
a lesser extent, lesbians.
    2. Like most liberals (and most same-sexers in thrall to the
out-of-control "identity politics" of present-day capitalist society,
whereby same-sexers now seek to integrate and assimilate into an unjust and
heterosupremacist system as junior partners--e.g., "gay marriage," joining
the imperialist military to kill Third World babies in Iraq and elsewhere
for Wall Street, in exchange for some minimal democratic rights and a
lessening of violence and discrimination against gay-identifieds), Wright
adopts the viewpoint and language of the ever-evolving exponents of liberal
identity politics.  The following, for instance:  "People with same-sex
desires have existed throughout history.  What has varied is the way
society has viewed them, and how the people we now describe as LGBT
regarded themselves at different stages."
    This formulation makes me cringe, for these reasons:  (1) Virtually
all people have same-sex (and other-sex) desires, at some point in their
lives.  Throughout history, especially under Judeo-Christianity and the
Anglo-Saxon legal code (both relevant to the US of A), it was never "people
with same-sex desires" who were murdered or marginalized or persecuted or
jailed; it was people who participated in same-sex acts.  Those acts were
(and are) part of the potential arsenal of everyone, not just
gay-identifieds.  (2) Who decided that "the people we [who's that?] now
describe as LGBT people" should be tagged with that moniker?  A few years
ago, it was "GLBT"; now, the "L" has gained first place.  Why is that?  Is
this supposed to reflect some alleged superdiscrimination against
lesbians?  Are lesbians more important than gay men?  Maybe that's why
since the late 1970s (a product of noise making about "lesbian separatism")
lesbians seemingly permanently occupy the first place in the New York City
gay pride march every June.  Eric Bentley once asked me why gay men and
lesbians couldn't alternate in occupying this place. I had no answer,
because the sheer reasonableness of the notion was unacceptable at a time
when lesbian separatism was turning gay men into the enemy.  The solution
to "lesbian invisibility" (the mantra whereby lesbian separatists tried to
muscle their way out of perceived second-class status in the gay/lez
movement of the mid-1970s) would seem more democratic if the front row were
alternated between lesbians one year, gay men the next.  This pc imposition
of the latest alphabet soup acronym was not the result of any discussion or
democratic decision making on the part of same-sexers.  Who on the left, or
among bourgeois democrats, decided that the former alphabet soup acronym
(GLBT) was passe, or perhaps a sign of male chauvinism?  The best that can
be said for GLBT/LGBT/BLGT or any of the other truly silly--and
increasingly long--acronyms is that somebody decided they were more
inclusive than, say, gay and lesbian liberation, or lesbian and gay
liberation.  That is doubtful.  For example, throughout all of Western
history (and not just Western!), the most common form of male homosexuality
has been pederasty, yet nowadays it is taboo to acknowledge what everyone
knows, and the bourgeois gay/lez assimilationists (mostly Democrats and
Republicans, but with active support from some leftists in thrall to
hetdom) even call on the bourgeois state to criminalize sexual love between
older and younger that is every bit as consensual as their own.  For shame.
The only same-sexers who go to jail these days are men who love youths, as
they have since time immemorial. So much for inclusivity. These days
control over gay liberation has slipped from the hands of the oppressed
themselves and is apparently determined by outsiders, whether bourgeois or
leftist. The same old shit all over again.
    3. There were never, in U.S. society, "penalties for homosexuality."
This is sloppy.  Only certain sexual acts were penalized, generally between
two males (as they were under, say, the Nazis).  Homosexuality per se was
never against the law in the United States, or in most Western countries.
    4. Again, the Bolsheviks did not "end the criminalization of gay
people."  The Bolsheviks removed the czarist law penalizing same-sex acts
between males.  This is all explained in some detail in the book I
coauthored with John Lauritsen, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement
(1864-1935).
    5. Wright's criticism of Harry Hay is off the wall and unfair, and
more idealist than historical materialist:  "If the Hay group had stayed
active, it could have offered a pole of attraction for militant LGBT
people.  As it was, the movement was thrown back and a decade was
lost."  This is mistaken and rank idealism.  First, there were no "LBGT
people" in those days (I would argue that there aren't any today either,
and that this is a mere political construct designed to obscure the key
issues, replacing, for instance, sexual liberation for all with a limited,
safely marginalized and minoritized, nonexistent group defined as if it
were a community, when in fact it is more like a marketable
sandwich).  Second, it is a stretch to think that there was a pool of
"militant" such people in the 1950s, at least going beyond the tiny group
of people around Harry who were expelled from Mattachine because of a
leftist background or outlook.  Third, what makes Wright so sure that the
"movement" (it would barely qualify as a "movement" in these initial
stages--though, incidentally, there were earlier efforts to organize
homosexuals, even in the United States, not mentioned by Wright, and again
dealt with in Lauritsen's and my book, and elsewhere) "was thrown back and
a decade lost"?  What bigger pool were these brave activists swimming
in?  In those days, both the main left-wing groups, the Communist Party and
the Socialist Workers Party, condemned homosexuality in terms as bad as any
the bourgeois ruling class had come up with, and the SWP even banned
same-sexers from membership on the identical "national security" grounds
cooked up in the McCarthy period to prevent homosexuals from working in
government jobs.  The criticism of Harry strikes those who, like me,
considered him a friend as outrageous and gratuitous.
    6. Wright may not be responsible for the photo that shows two women
with a sign calling for "Freedom to Marry" with the caption "The fight for
lesbian and gay liberation continues..."  I take issue, however, with the
assumption that aping one of the worst and least successful hetero
institutions, with all the conventionality and conformity that implies (not
to mention the elevation of coupledom to supreme place, as if singles were
merely failed humans, and the grab for special privileges for couples at
the expense of singles, whether gay or straight), has anything to do with
gay liberation.  It is on a par with joining the imperialist military.  The
discrimination against same-sexers may be unfair, but the remedy has more
to do with maintaining the heterosupremacist order of things than it does
with liberation.  This is enough to make me barf.
    Wright's heart is in the right place, but his grasp of his subject
matter leaves quite a bit to be desired. Alas, I fear it reflects the
degenerated pc distortions of the former gay/lez movement in its present
conventional and conservative, not to say reactionary, configuration, which
these days seeks special privileges for some homosexuals at the expense of
other homosexuals, and even goes so far as to beg the bourgeois state to
elevate thought crimes (i.e., misnamed "hate" crimes) to special status.
Neither marriage, nor military warmongering, flag waving, and patriotism,
nor efforts to strengthen the police state through "hate crimes" laws bears
any resemblance whatever to the original impulse toward sexual liberation
of all that grew out of the Stonewall Rebellion.
    One of my favorite early Gay Liberation Front slogans was "Do you
think homosexuals are revolting?  You bet your sweet ass we are!"  But the
gay/lez movement these days bears no resemblance to this spirit of
revolution and revolt.  In some ways, its agenda is truly revolting in the
sense the slogan spoofed.
Yours,
David Thorstad
Former President, Gay Activists Alliance (New York)
Cofounder, Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights (New York)
Cofounder, NAMBLA


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