Читать книгу Sexuality and Socialism - Sherry Wolf - Страница 8

Introduction

There is a contradiction that pervades the politics and culture of U.S. society regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. On the one hand, top-rated TV shows and Academy Award–winning movies, such as Will and Grace, the L Word, and Milk, portray gays and lesbians in a favorable light. On the other, federal and most state legislation denies equal marriage, workplace, and civil rights protections for sexual minorities. Rates of violence against LGBT people remain alarmingly high, including incidents of murder.¹ Current opinion polls, however, show a marked increase in social acceptance of a wide range of sexual and gender-variant behaviors.² This contradiction is a product of both the emergence in modern capitalism of greater sexual freedom to form sexual identities outside the traditional family and capitalism’s continued need to reinforce gender norms that bolster the “nuclear” family.

This work uses a Marxist worldview to examine this and other historical, political, and theoretical questions of sexual and gender oppression in order to frame an argument for how we can organize for LGBT liberation. Socialism’s founders, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, lived in the Victorian era, many decades before the notion of LGBT liberation took form. They (and other Marxists after them) did, however, provide the theoretical tools necessary to both analyze and wage a successful battle against this and other forms of oppression.

What was the gist of their argument? Homophobic, sexist, racist, nationalist, and other divisions in modern society reflect the interests of the dominant class in society. This class—the ruling class—constitutes a small minority of the population; it therefore must use the institutional and ideological tools at its disposal to divide the mass of the population against itself in order to prevent the majority from uniting and rising in unison to take back what is rightfully theirs. The former slave and Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it aptly when he said of the slaveholders’ strategy against slaves and poor whites, “They divided both to conquer each.”³

The ruling class depends, argued Marx, on promoting ideas that reinforce division and a sense of powerlessness among the exploited. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch,” Marx and Engels noted, “the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”⁴ This holds true also for ideas about social and legal “norms” of sexual behavior under capitalism. Ideological and legal repression and control of sexual behavior in the United States and other industrialized societies, therefore, grow from the needs of the class in power.

However, oppression is not merely ideological but also material. The oppression of immigrants, for example, allows capitalists to super-exploit cheap immigrant labor, which in turn allows them leverage to lower all workers’ wages. As chapter 1 explains, the nuclear family provides an inexpensive way for the ruling class to foist the costs of reproduction, maintenance, and responsibility for disciplining the current and future generations of workers onto the class of the exploited. LGBT people are oppressed because their sexual and gender identities challenge the traditional family upon which capitalism continues to depend.

If we lived in a truly free society in which material and social constraints were removed, people would be neither oppressed nor even defined by their sexual or gender identities. Only then could we begin to see how a liberated human sexuality could evolve and express itself. But in a class society that requires certain behavioral norms to discipline its workforce and ideology to justify the nuclear family, reactionary sexual ideas—including gender norms—are means of stoking division and repressing society as a whole.

Although the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class and social control is concentrated in their institutions—the state, courts, police, etc.—the rest of us are not merely dupes and victims. From growing urbanization and immigration to global warfare, social forces set into motion from above have given rise to material and ideological means for people to drastically alter their intimate lives, as chapters 2 and 3 explain. History shows that time and again, working-class people are capable of breaking out of the legal and social constraints imposed from above to challenge the status quo. While not the first incident of mass upheaval against sexual and gender norms, the Stonewall rebellion in New York City in 1969 marked a turning point for modern lesbians, gays, and bisexuals—and gave rise to the conditions for transgender people to assert their demands and launch their own organizations, as chapter 4 details.

The Stonewall Riots, occuring amid wider social explosions against the racial, imperial, and sexual order of U.S. society, gave expression to radical ideas of sexual liberation. Yet in the decades since there has been a narrowing of the debate and aims of the existing LGBT organizations that jettisoned all talk of liberation in favor of the aim of gradual civil rights reforms. LGBT civil rights were largely pursued within the confines of electoral politics, as chapter 5 examines. The minimalist demands of this era arose from political debates and organizations that viewed sexual freedom in terms of how individuals spoke, dressed, socialized, and consumed goods on the market, a positioning often referred to as lifestyle politics. These ideas reached their apex in the 1990s with the near-disappearance of class struggle in the United States and a steep decline of far left organizations to pose a collective alternative to the isolation and pessimism that characterized individual attempts to challenge LGBT oppression, discussed in chapter 6.

The dominance of biological determinist ideas to explain sexual and gender identities and behaviors in recent years is the topic of chapter 7. In it, I unpack some of the myths and mistaken assumptions using current scientific thinking to take on questions about whether people are “born gay,” the rise of transgender identity, and the medical establishment’s treatment of millions born with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersex people.

I feel as though I’ve experienced political whiplash in the final weeks of completing work on this book. From a seemingly apolitical and quiescent terrain a torrent of political organizing, protest, and healthy debate has arisen in and beyond LGBT circles in the United States. The background to it all is the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the election of the first African-American president in a nation built on Black slavery. A sense of hope and expectation mixes with deep fears about our economic, social, and environmental future.

When I first began to research and write this book, I was hopeful that scholars and activists alike would glean lessons to be debated and put to use in some future struggles. It appears the future is coming at us faster than I had ever anticipated. The electoral defeats of same-sex marriage in California, Florida, and Arizona in November 2008 now appear to be temporary setbacks that have stoked a genuine opposition that is more confrontational and less tepid than in recent years. The youth and spontaneity of the latest explosion of LGBT militancy in response to the defeat of same-sex marriage in California’s Proposition 8 referendum are magnificent. The political outlook and social composition of this rising LGBT movement deserve comment as well. These young (and not so young) fighters are part of the growing army of café baristas with college degrees and itinerant low-wage workers that now populate every city and town of the United States. This newly forming movement is largely pro-labor, anticorporate, and explicitly welcoming non-LGBT folks into the struggle.

New movement activists, students, and socialists organized a gay marriage forum in Chicago on December 11, 2008, one day after the historic victory of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in that city.⁵ Fresh from winning nearly $2 million in severance and vacation pay for the multiracial group of nearly 250 factory workers, Raúl Flores addressed the crowd brilliantly, saying that our struggles are united and we must be too. “Our victory is yours,” he said, “Now we must join with you in your battle for rights and return the solidarity you showed us.”⁶ Goodbye Will and Grace, hello Republic factory workers!

The day before, hundreds of gay protesters rallying for equal marriage rights as part of the national Day Without a Gay initiative linked their march with the Republic workers’ protest outside Bank of America. Trade unionists, immigrant rights activists, and LGBT people rallied together in the most eloquent display of rainbow power Chicago has witnessed in decades. Orlando Sepulveda, a Chilean immigrant, described the day’s action as “a school for struggle.”⁷ Even the name of the LGBT action expressed the cross-pollination of struggles—the historic mass immigrant workers’ marches that hit the streets in 2006 were called A Day Without an Immigrant.

Gus Van Sant’s award-winning biopic of the gay activist elected San Francisco supervisor in 1977, Milk, arrived in theaters in late November 2008, at a crucial teaching moment. The film alludes to a key aspect of the successful gay-labor struggles against Coors beer and the 1978 Briggs Initiative that would have banned gay and lesbian teachers and their allies from “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting”⁸ homosexuality in California’s classrooms. By uniting with Teamsters in the Coors battle and forging lasting alliances with blue- and white-collar workers in the fight against the Briggs Initiative, Harvey Milk, along with tens of thousands of activists, advanced both the fight for gay civil rights and for labor unity.

The interaction between workplace organizing and the fight for LGBT rights has a long history. Harry Hay, the founder of the first U.S. gay organization, the Mattachine Society, got his start as a union organizer in the 1930s and 1940s in New York’s Department Store Workers Union with the International Workers of the World (IWW).⁹ Some of the research that historian Allan Bérubé did on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) in the 1930s and 1940s shows how prior to the emergence of gay rights organizations in the United States, a largely gay and multiracial group of workers led by communists on passenger ships transformed a reactionary union into one that defended gay rights, challenged racism, and won material gains for all their workers until McCarthyite tactics tore the MCS apart in the 1950s.¹⁰ The banner hanging in the hall of the twenty-thousand-strong, Black- and gay-led MCS union read: “Race-baiting, Red-baiting, and Queer-baiting Is Anti-Union.”¹¹ Chapter 8 argues that class unity among LGBT and straight people is both possible and necessary in order to build a world in which we are all sexually liberated. The book concludes with an argument for sexual liberation for all.

A new movement will face serious challenges. The largest national gay rights organizations are sponsored by multibillion-dollar corporations and tied to the don’t-rock-the-boat posture of the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. In the midst of massive layoffs and severe economic crisis some will advocate a go-slow, back-of-the-bus approach for LGBT issues. This can and should be challenged. In addition to social equality and legitimizing LGBT sexuality, the fight for equal marriage rights is for much-needed material benefits—health care, Social Security, inheritance, and the other rights and benefits of marriage that working-class people want and need. In other words, it is part of the class struggle. Also, the same-sex marriage battle lends itself to broader organizing and questions about everything from the origins of LGBT oppression to the history of the movement and the various theoretical and political challenges in understanding and overcoming divisions among us to win liberation.

There are positive indicators regarding social attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Newsweek’s latest national poll numbers show a marked increase in pro-gay attitudes nationally. Not only do 52 percent currently oppose the federal marriage ban (up from 45 percent in 2004), but decisive majorities are for ending all sorts of discrimination against LGBT people—73 percent approve extending health care to gay partners, 86 percent are for equal hospital visitation rights, and so on.¹² These are startlingly good numbers given the equivocation (at best) from politicians and the near-absence for many years of any activist movement until recently. Imagine the impact on consciousness if ordinary working peoples’ opinions were shifting not just on the basis of lived experience alongside the rising ranks of out coworkers, classmates, and family members but also inside organizations and struggles where sexual stereotypes were confidently contested.

There is a groaning hunger among scholars and social justice activists for knowledge and debate about the history, politics, and theory of LGBT liberation. This work makes no pretense about the author’s political leanings. Left-wing historians and scientists such as John D’Emilio, Estelle Freedman, Susan Stryker, and Anne Fausto-Sterling along with many others have shaped and influenced my understanding of LGBT politics and history enormously. As a lesbian Marxist who came of age in the neo–Cold War, AIDS-ravaged 1980s, I am part of the post-Stonewall generation. Many of my peers question the relevance or possibility of organization and struggle. But reality is forcing those alternatives. I would caution readers against narrowing their sights, presuming that LGBT battles will or should necessarily rise independent of wider outrage against expanding wars and a collapsing economy. Sexual minorities, after all, are directly affected by these unfolding catastrophes and our demands can and must be brought into broader battles that will eventually erupt and can be shaped by socialist ideas.

The Chicago example above shows that as a new political era begins to take shape, immigrant and labor groups can and in some places already are calling upon LGBT groups to join with them in organizing a response to the current crises. For those of us too young to have participated in the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and who have lived with the aching suspicion that we may have missed out on the revolution, take heart. In a world that bears a striking resemblance to elements of both the 1960s and 1930s—yet where attitudes about race, women, sexuality, and gender have evolved tremendously—it appears we are in for some heady times of our own.

What’s in a name?

Right from the get-go, I must admit that I cannot use what I perceive as an offensive epithet that was scrawled across my high school locker and spat at me from the mouths of innumerable bigots—the word “queer”—as a positive signifier in a book about the history, politics, and theory of sexual liberation. As a socialist who advocates sexual liberation for all, the modern conundrum of desiring to be all-inclusive and readable means that one must settle on how to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people collectively. I have chosen to largely use LGBT in keeping with many current historians as well as student and labor activists. There are, however, many places in which the words gay or homosexual are used as they are both historically and culturally accurate in those instances. Hopefully, the content of my exposition and arguments will satisfy even those most adamant in their preference for queer.

I think a truce on the issue of LGBT nomenclature is in order. Language is ever evolving in tandem with the wider society we live in, and time along with future struggles will tell what terms emerge from the current babble. I know that many feel quite passionate about this issue; however, after all the Sturm und Drang over this rather narrow question I believe that we ought to move on and respect each others’ linguistic choices. All oppressed people should have the right to call themselves whatever they choose, a right that must also extend to me.

Sherry Wolf

May 2009