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CHAPTER ONE

The Roots of LGBT Oppression

The oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people hasn’t always existed, and neither have LGBT people as a distinct sector of the population. The oppression of all sexual minorities is one of modern capitalism’s myriad contradictions. Capitalism creates the material conditions for men and women to lead autonomous sexual lives, yet it simultaneously seeks to impose heterosexual norms on society to secure the maintenance of the economic, social, and sexual order.

Famous lesbians such as Melissa Etheridge pack concert venues and out comedian Ellen DeGeneres hosts an Emmy Award–winning syndicated talk show, while homophobic laws defend discrimination on the job and in marriage. LGBT people such as Matthew Shepard are brutally beaten to death by bigots, while public opinion has radically shifted in favor of LGBT civil rights.¹ This apparently contradictory state of affairs in the United States can be explained.

LGBT oppression, like women’s oppression, is tied to the centrality of the nuclear family as one of capitalism’s means to both inculcate gender norms and outsource care for the current and future generations of workers at little cost to the state, as explained in detail below. In addition, the oppression of LGBT people under capitalism, like racism and sexism, serves to divide working-class people from one another, especially in their battles for economic and social justice. While capitalist society attempts to pigeonhole people into certain gender roles and sexual behaviors, socialists reject these limitations. Instead, socialists fight for a world in which sexuality is a purely personal matter, without legal or material restrictions of any sort. The right of self-determination for individuals that socialists uphold must include individuals’ freedom to choose their own sexual behavior, appearance, and erotic preferences.

Sexuality, like many other behaviors, is a fluid—not fixed—phenomenon. Homosexuality exists along a continuum. The modern expression of this can be found among the millions of men and women who identify as LGBT—often identifying themselves differently at different times in their lives. There are not two kinds of people in the world, gay and straight. As far as biologists can tell, there is only one human race with a multiplicity of sexual possibilities that can be either frustrated or liberated, depending on the way human society is organized.

Reams of historical evidence confirm that what we define today as homosexual behavior has existed for at least thousands of years, and it is logical to assume that homosexual acts have been occurring for as long as human beings have walked the Earth. But it took the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century to create the potential for vast numbers of ordinary people to live outside the nuclear family, allowing for modern gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities to be born. Not until the late twentieth century did some gender-variant people begin to identify themselves as transgender, though people who have defied modern Western concepts of gender-appropriate behavior have existed throughout history in many different cultures. The systematic oppression of LGBT people as it is experienced in most contemporary Western societies, therefore, is also a fairly recent phenomenon in human history. This is not to argue, however, that prior to capitalism humans existed in a sexual paradise free of repression or restrictions of any kind. Rather, legal prohibitions and social taboos from antiquity through the precapitalist era existed in many cultures on the basis of sex acts, often denouncing non-procreative sex, without the condemnation or even the conception of sexual identity as an intrinsic or salient aspect of a person’s being.

Contemporary industrial societies created the possibility for men and women to identify themselves and live as gays and lesbians, argues the collection Hidden from History.

What we call “homosexuality” (in the sense of the distinguishing traits of “homosexuals”), for example, was not considered a unified set of acts, much less a set of qualities defining particular persons, in precapitalist societies…. Heterosexuals and homosexuals are involved in social “roles” and attitudes which pertain to a particular society, modern capitalism.²

It was capitalism, in fact, that gave rise to modern individuality and the conditions for people to have intimate lives based on personal desire, a historic break from the power of the feudal church and community that once arranged marriages. Under capitalism, a person’s labor is converted into an individually owned commodity that is bought and sold on the market. Individuals are thrust into competition with each other for work, housing, education, etc., and individual citizens of states are counted in a census and register to vote, or, if they have the means, own property. All of these features of capitalist society establish individuality in ways unthinkable under earlier systems like feudalism, creating the potential for a flourishing of sexual autonomy as well. As Karl Marx put it, “In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc., which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate.”³

Historical evidence suggests that homosexual behavior was successfully integrated in many precapitalist cultures. The most famous example is ancient Greece, where sexual relationships between older men and teenage boys were heralded as one of the highest forms of love. These relationships, however, were encouraged between wealthier, older, and powerful “betters” and their subordinates who were younger, poorer, or conquered. For the early Greeks and Romans, status and power between lovers were central to their conception of same-sex relations and they held starkly different views of those who played the penetrative role in sex and those who were penetrated. Plutarch, the Greek-born historian of the first century explained, “We class those who enjoy the passive part as belonging to the lowest depth of vice and allow them not the least degree of confidence or respect or friendship.”⁴

Many American Indian tribes embraced transvestite men and women, known as berdaches, who adopted the gender roles of the “opposite” sex and are sometimes referred to today as “two-spirited” people. A multiplicity of sexual and gender arrangements existed from tribe to tribe, according to anthropologists. Some male berdaches had sex exclusively with other men, though not other berdaches, while some remained celibate, had partners of both sexes, or had exclusively heterosexual sex.⁵ Gender variance, not sexual preference, defined the berdache, and rather than deriding them for their gender nonconformity, American Indian tribes saw berdaches as valuable members of their society. One Crow elder explains: “We don’t waste people the way white society does. Every person has their gift.”⁶

Even the Roman Catholic Church, until the twelfth century, celebrated love between men. When it ended priestly marriage and enforced chastity, homosexuality was prohibited as well.⁷ However, in these societies, it was homosexual actions that were tolerated, lauded, or pilloried, not an identifiable category of people. Economic and social conditions had not yet developed in ways that allowed for large numbers of people to acknowledge, express, or explore same-sex desire as a central feature of their lives or their identities.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault challenged modern society’s attempts to superimpose its sexual outlook on the ancients. He argues:

The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior…. Were the Greeks bisexual then? Yes, if we mean by this that a Greek [free man] could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored by a boy or a girl…. But if we wish to turn our attention to the way in which they conceived of this dual practice, we need to take note of the fact that they did not recognize two kinds of “desire”…. Their way of thinking, what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for “beautiful” human beings, whatever their sex.⁸

Whereas previous class societies prohibited certain sex acts, the rising capitalist state and its defenders in the fields of medicine, law, and academia stepped in to define and control human sexuality in ways previously unimagined. These nineteenth-century professionals—almost entirely white men—reflected the interests and prejudices of the rising middle class. With economic growth and development came the need for higher levels of education for more kinds of jobs, which extended adolescence and removed teenagers from many occupations, thus reducing social interaction between unrelated adults and children. Medical professionals aiming to legitimize their field pathologized masturbation, while legislators encouraged age-of-consent laws and pressed for higher minimum ages for marriage. Homosexual relations between adults and “innocent minors” were outlawed and juveniles were rendered asexual.⁹ No less a figure than Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry at the turn of the twentieth century, theorized and popularized the “problem of homosexuality” while transforming heterosexuality into “the norm we all know without ever thinking much about it.”¹⁰

Our conceptions about gender roles have changed radically from one society to another and from one historical period to the next. Even our bodies have been radically transformed by our changing material conditions. Modern female athletes such as forty-one-year-old Olympian and mother Dara Torres, whose lean and muscular body is capable of beating professional male and female swimmers half her age, would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Advances in nutrition, training, and civil rights for women created the potential not only for a middle-aged American woman to compete and win three silver medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics but for her androgynous appearance to be accepted and even valorized in the pages of the New York Times.¹¹ In contrast, the earlier onset of puberty among girls in the United States, particularly low-income African-American girls, is thought to be the result of diet, environmental chemicals, inactivity, and other factors that are features of modern industrial society.¹²

Medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women. These intersex individuals, estimated at one birth in every two thousand in the United States alone,¹³ are legally operated on by pediatricians who force traditional norms of genital appearance on newborn infants, often rendering them incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure later in life. The physical reality of intersex people calls into question the fixed notions we are taught to accept about men and women. Intersex people challenge not only society’s construction of gender roles, but compel us to examine the concept that sex itself is constructed, confined, and forced to fit into a tidy male/female binary. It appears that even our physical sex—not just how we comport ourselves—is far more ambiguous and fluid than previously imagined. The imposition of surgery on perfectly healthy infants in order to force their bodies to conform to societal sex norms is a blatant form of state-sanctioned physical abuse. These acts of sexual mutilation must be opposed by everyone who believes that self-determination should include the right of individuals to control and experience pleasure from their own bodies, as well as define themselves as whatever gender they choose.

Socialists argue that what humans have constructed they can also tear down. If the contention of this book is accurate—that capitalist society has transformed how people express themselves sexually yet simultaneously has aimed to restrict human sexuality as a means of social control—then a fundamentally different kind of society, based on human need and not profit, could put an end to modern sexual and gender definitions and limitations. A socialist society must be one in which people are sexually liberated—that is, all would have the freedom to choose whether, how, when, and with whom to engage in whatever sexual gratification they desired so long as no other person were harmed.

The changing family

The roots of homosexual identity and its subsequent repression can be found in the ever-changing role of the family. The family—that supposedly sacrosanct institution exalted by right-wingers and surreally depicted in countless laundry detergent commercials—has changed radically throughout human history. In fact, the family itself has not always existed.

Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, Frederick Engels, employed the anthropological research of Lewis Henry Morgan in his groundbreaking nineteenth-century work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Anthropology was then a new science; nevertheless, Engels’s theoretical conclusions have been substantiated by more recent anthropological research.¹⁴

Engels argued that although modern human beings have existed as a species for more than a hundred thousand years, people only began living in family units in the last several thousand years—when previously egalitarian societies divided into classes. Pre-class human social organization was based on large clans and collective production, distribution, and child-rearing. A division of labor often existed between men and women in pre-class societies, but there is no evidence to suggest that women were systematically oppressed—and in some societies, women were afforded an even higher status than men.¹⁵

Anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock provided detailed studies on early societies, particularly the Montagnais-Naskapi of the Labrador Peninsula, to argue, “With regard to the autonomy of women, nothing in the structure of egalitarian band societies necessitated special deference to men.”¹⁶ Women made decisions alongside men on where and when to move, whether to join or leave a mate, and about the distribution of food—all central to daily life and survival. Even the sexual division of labor is called into question by Leacock and other anthropologists who examined societies in which women did the hunting and men took on roles like child-rearing as often as they performed tasks modern society conceives of as appropriate to their genders.

The oppression of women corresponded with the rise of the first class divisions in society and the creation of the monogamous family unit. Prior to humans’ ability to store food and other goods as a surplus, there was no “wealth” to be hoarded, precluding the possibility of class inequality between different groups of people. Classes arose when human beings found new ways of sustaining a livelihood. New methods of production required that some people were needed to labor, while others needed to be freed from that labor to coordinate the organization of the group and ensure the storage of a surplus for times when crops failed or the group grew in size. As socialist Chris Harman describes, “The ‘leaders’ could begin to turn into ‘rulers,’ into people who came to see their control over resources as in the interests of society as a whole…. For the first time social development encouraged the development of the motive to exploit and oppress others.”¹⁷

Since there was no surplus wealth prior to classes, there was nothing to be passed on from one generation to the next. But with the development of a surplus and classes came the impetus for those who had control over a surplus to hold onto it and pass it to their own children. With the appearance of social classes and the possibility of passing wealth in the form of inheritance from those who had it to their offspring arose the desire for monogamy, at least imposed on women, so that male leaders could ensure the veracity of their own bloodline. The rise of the patriarchal family was a consequence of these changes.

The initial meaning of the word “family” is a far cry from Norman Rockwell’s images of domestic bliss. Early Romans used the term famulus to describe household slaves, and familia to refer to the “total number of slaves belonging to one man.”¹⁸ For the early feudal aristocracy, marriage was an economic, not emotional, relationship—a means to transfer land wealth or to secure peaceful relations between landed estates. Over time, men were increasingly drawn into production and women were increasingly isolated in the role of reproduction, or child-rearing.

Until the rise of capitalism, the peasant family was both a unit of production and reproduction. Peasant women were not only in charge of child-rearing, cooking, and cleaning, but they were also expected to make clothes, churn butter, milk the cows, make beer, spin cloth, etc.; unlike the modern nuclear family, which is purely a reproductive unit. Women were unequal to men and had gender-defined jobs in the feudal family, but with the rise of markets and industry that came to dominate Western societies in the nineteenth century, productive work like brewing and the manufacture of textiles was removed from the realm of the family.

The changing economic structure of society drastically altered attitudes toward both women and sexuality. Imposing monogamy—for women only—afforded the means through which wealthy men’s property could be inherited by children whom the father could be certain were his own. Monogamous marriage, in essence, developed as the agency through which ruling-class men could establish undisputed paternity.¹⁹ As Engels wrote,

The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.²⁰

Among the middle classes and landowning peasants under European feudalism, the patriarchal household dominated. Although landless peasants possessed no wealth of their own, the institution of the family was nevertheless legally established as the norm for all sectors of society. Feudal communities usually arranged marriages between poor peasants. Family life was filled with grinding work for all family members, and childbirth often ended in death for either mother or infant, or both.

In these societies, sexual repression took a form different from what we know today. Severe sanctions were enforced against all sexual behaviors that were non-procreative. In 1533, for example, Britain’s King Henry VIII—whose obsession with producing a male heir led to six marriages—introduced the Buggery Act, which would put men to death for “buggery,” the catchall term of the day for non-procreative sex that was considered a crime against nature.²¹ The act coincided with other laws in the same period punishing “vagabonds,” i.e., peasants forced off the land with nowhere to go. Buggery was included in the Articles of War beginning in the seventeenth century in Britain and was punished the same as mutiny and desertion.

The households of European colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were independent units of both production and reproduction in which all family members worked together on a plot of land to supply virtually all of the family’s needs. In the New England colonies, “solitary living” was forbidden. Servants and apprentices had to live with the households for which they worked, but even without legal constraints, economic survival in colonial times was inconceivable outside the family structure.²²

The need for labor in the colonies fueled efforts by New England churches and courts to outlaw and punish adultery, sodomy, incest, and rape. Extramarital sex by women, who were considered incapable of controlling their passions, was punished more severely than extramarital sex by men. Sodomy could mean either sex between two people of the same gender or any “unnatural” acts such as anal or oral intercourse that couldn’t result in procreation, even between married couples. In a society that prized productivity, to the Puritans sodomy was wasted time. Though officially punishable by death from 1607 to 1740, sodomy was more often punished by lashings. Some cases of “lewd behavior” between women were punished by whippings, though no one was executed for sodomy in the colonies during the eighteenth century, probably due to the legal requirement of proof of penetration and two eyewitnesses.²³ The dominance of the church and the lack of any means to care for children born out of wedlock drove neighbors’ zealous watch over the sexual mores of their community.

As historian Jonathan Ned Katz explains, “The operative contrast in this society was between fruitfulness and barrenness, not between different-sex and same-sex eroticism…. In these colonies, erotic desire for members of a same sex was not construed as deviant because erotic desire for a different sex was not construed as a norm.”²⁴

With the rise of urban centers and industrial production methods in the late-nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America, wage labor became much more common. Compared with farm life, there was an increased separation of home from work so the family became much more exclusively a center for reproduction. Over the decades, the growth of industry created a new kind of family ideal, as a haven from a changing, often hostile world. But the relationship between the family and capitalism was fraught with contradictions from the beginning. John D’Emilio’s groundbreaking essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” uses the historical materialist method developed by Marx and Engels to analyze these contradictions. He writes,

On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for a lesbian and gay male identity to develop. On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia. In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem.²⁵

The capitalist mode of production brought about the rise of an entrepreneurial class—and with it, the notion of personal achievement and individuality as a social ideal. At the same time, the increasing prosperity of a new middle class and the broader accumulation of personal wealth and transferable inheritances demanded strict sexual morality, especially for women. British historian Jeffrey Weeks describes the contradictions of this new family structure: The bourgeois family was “both the privileged location of emotionality and love…and simultaneously an effective policeman of sexual behavior.”²⁶

In contrast to the prosperous middle class, industrial life was literally killing the working class in mid-nineteenth century England. Middle-class men in the rural area of Rutland, England, lived to be fifty-two, while working-class “men” died at the average age of seventeen in industrial centers like Manchester, sixteen in Bethnal Green, and fifteen in Liverpool.²⁷ Textile mill owners employed mostly women and children at far less pay than men for long hours of arduous labor, which led to illness and mortality rates that threatened to cut into owners’ profits.

Frederick Engels described the near-collapse of working-class family life in The Condition of the Working Class in England. He detailed the crowded and filthy conditions in working-class homes and quoted one report by the Ministry of Health: “In Leeds, brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, are found occupying the same sleeping-room with the parents, and consequences occur which humanity shudders to contemplate.”²⁸

A reinvention of the working-class family was urgently needed. Victorian reformers campaigned for changes in factory work and housing, which led to the creation of a “family wage” for men, an amount that was intended to sustain a family and allow women to stay at home to care for their children and clean their homes. This wage rarely did suffice and many working-class women continued to take in sewing and other piecework. Though the adaptation of the middle-class nuclear family to the working class had the impact of trapping working-class women, it also relieved them from exhausting hours of factory work. Children were sent to school, not only to educate them for future jobs, but also to instill in them the discipline of work. Middle-class sexual mores were propagated widely among the working class to drive down the rate of prostitution and the deadly diseases and out-of-wedlock births that were its consequences.

In The Construction of Homosexuality, David Greenberg makes a compelling case for why the rising capitalist order sharpened gender roles and strengthened the ideology of the family.²⁹ The agricultural societies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America required strict obedience in a world of rigorous labor where there was little social mobility. The priorities of the nineteenth-century market, however, drove shifts in what the new society treasured most of all in the male character—competitiveness and a desire for personal achievement. In this environment, emotional expressiveness, a nurturing attitude, and dependence on others translated into weakness and vulnerability. By 1860, men no longer embraced, cried, or kissed other men in public for fear of appearing effeminate.³⁰ As men left the home for employment in factories and offices, women’s role in raising the children and running the household shaped the medical profession’s new gender ideal of women as nurturers and dependent on men for material and social sustenance.

Capitalist society continues to grapple with the contradictions between the privatization of child-rearing and household maintenance and the countervailing forces that tear the family apart. The nuclear family today provides the ruling class with an inexpensive means for the feeding and preservation of the current workforce and the raising and disciplining of the next generation of workers.

The family also serves a sociological function. By training young people to accept traditional sex roles—men are the smart or strong breadwinners, while women are the nurturing companions and child-raisers—families are ideal incubators for rigid sex norms. Homosexual and transgender behaviors present a challenge to this ideological norm. After all, if women can look and act “like men” and men can look and act “like women” and/or if men and women can live in same-sex relationships and each embody attributes conventionally attributed exclusively to men or women, gender and familial norms are thrown into question. The behavior of sexual minorities and gender-benders weakens and even defies these sex and gender roles, thus undermining the attitudes most desirable to the smooth functioning of capitalist society.

Half of all American children live in a single-parent family at some point, and half of all marriages end in divorce. As women in industrialized societies have become thoroughly integrated—though unequally paid—in the workforce, women’s ability to dissolve marriages and live independent of men has strengthened. This has created tensions between the ideology of the family and the reality of people’s lives. Even the contentious abortion battle is an expression of this contradiction: as women have become central to the labor force, abortion is both economically necessary and socially desirable to many. But despite capital’s needs for women workers to have fewer children and to control whether and when to get pregnant, the right wing continues to oppose legal abortion and to bolster ideology that strengthens the nuclear family and the ideal of women as mothers.

The American ruling class today is split on the question of whether to legalize same-sex marriage, because while marriage serves to further legitimize traditional family values, gay marriage would normalize homosexuality and break down gender divisions in the working class. Thus, the Christian right sees no contradiction in heralding family values while depicting the right to same-sex marriage as a harbinger of an end to all that is sacred. George W. Bush’s $1.5 billion marriage initiative to goad poor (heterosexual) women into getting and staying married was also fueled by the ruling class’s desire to offload any responsibility to care for their workers’ children, who have five times the chance of living in poverty and twice the risk of two-parented kids of dropping out of school.³¹

The battle for equal marriage rights—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire are the only U.S. states where same-sex marriage has been legalized³²—is about more than the 1,049 federal rights and benefits that accrue to those who are married. Ruling-class bigots who oppose equal marriage rights understand that this civil rights battle could well open the door to the end of all legal discrimination against gays and lesbians, in the way that the 1947 California Supreme Court decision striking down the ban on interracial marriage in that state opened the way for further struggles. Gay marriage also challenges the traditional notion of what a family is supposed to look like. Its legalization creates an obvious confrontation with the very idea that there is anything natural about the heterosexual nuclear family.

The construction of homosexuality

Modern capitalism created the “social space” for a gay identity to emerge.³³ Industrial and financial centers concentrated people in huge numbers, thereby creating the potential for anonymity that had never before existed in human societies. Having created the possibility for individuals to live apart from their families and to experiment with alternative sexual practices away from the narrowness of rural life, capitalist society then sought to define and repress this new sexual “deviance.” As D’Emilio explains,

As wage labor spread and production became socialized, then, it became possible to release sexuality from the “imperative” to procreate…. In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.³⁴

Industrial capitalism’s hostility to homosexuality is unique in comparison to previous societies’ laws punishing alternative sex practices. Whereas old laws condemned homosexual acts that threatened procreation, new proscriptions were enacted against a small class of people whose behavior set them apart from the majority. As British socialist Noel Halifax puts it, “Under capitalism sexuality was now not a ‘private affair regulated by…traditions and prejudices of the community’ but become ‘a public matter for the state.’”³⁵

Gay and lesbian stigmatization became systematized as the “homosexual type” in the form of a small minority of men and women whose erotic interests in others of the same sex came to the attention of legal and medical authorities in big cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In Britain, laws began to distinguish between bestiality and homosexuality and, for the first time, to punish gay men caught seeking others like themselves in public venues. In 1861, the death penalty for buggery was ended and a sentence of ten years in prison, later amended to two years of hard labor, was enacted because authorities discerned that a sentence less harsh than death was likely to be applied more frequently.

There are some historians who oppose the social constructionist framework and instead argue that homosexuality is part of peoples’ essence and has existed throughout history. This “essentialist” viewpoint contends, “queer desire is congenital and then constituted into a meaningful queer identity in childhood.”³⁶ Chapter 7 will take up the biological determinist claims; however, it’s important here to assert the centrality of economic and social forces in shaping the possibility for the existence of LGBT identities as we understand them today. It is one thing to argue that sex acts between individuals of the same sex have occurred since there were humans, and quite another to assume a suprahistorical homosexual identity.

Social constructionism for Marxists is both materialist and dialectical.³⁷ In other words, it is based upon an understanding of history that sees human beings both as products of the natural world and as able to interact with their natural surroundings; in the course of their actions humans change themselves and the world around them. Several processes developed over time to create the following: 1) the social spaces for same-sex desire to flourish; 2) the formation through repression, resistance, and accommodation of self-identified homosexuals with subcultures of their own; and 3) the legal regulation of these social spaces that authorities defined as “deviant.” Because the development of sexual identity took place over many years as societal shifts enabled it to evolve, there were elements of the later homosexual subculture in the era that preceded the Industrial Revolution. For example, men who had sex with men in what were known as Molly houses in early eighteenth-century London and Paris usually had wives and children and abandoned all effeminate affectations and used quintessentially male mannerisms when they left those houses for work or home. When the Society for the Reformation of Manners worked to close these Molly houses in 1726 and shut down more than twenty, it was part of their campaign against sodomites, prostitutes, and those who didn’t honor the Sabbath—not homosexuals.³⁸

When essentialists like Rictor Norton challenge constructionists they argue that some Renaissance Italian artists and monks were gay men, yet this contention also serves to undermine his case. The economic and social organization of Florentine and monastic life made it possible for some men in these sections of the Old World to express their homosexual desire—precisely the case constructionists argue. Conditions, however, had not yet ripened for many outside of the arts or the monastery to express this desire or for those who did to see themselves or be seen by others as a separate sexual identity, distinct from heterosexuality. As one historian explains, “The homosexual, however, is not simply a ‘sodomite’ who has accidentally stumbled into new capitalist conditions.”³⁹ The process of developing gay, lesbian, or bisexual identities occurred over time, with some elements of the new social relations in the old and vice versa. Without the ability to live autonomously, without society’s efforts to limit the erotic potential of some human beings, and without the development of a subculture of these new social categories, those who engaged in what modern society refers to as gay sex are likely to have remained sodomites.

In Paris and Berlin, medical and legal experts in the 1870s examined a new kind of “degenerate” to determine whether or not these people should be held responsible for their actions. The word “homosexuality” was first coined in 1869 by a German-Hungarian physician named Karl Maria Benkert (he went by the surname Kertbeny after 1847). Benkert wrote an open letter in defiance of the developing illegality of homosexuality in some German states (unification of Germany did not occur until 1871). Benkert argued that homosexuality was “inborn, not acquired” and therefore should not be punished by the state.⁴⁰

Homosexuality as a modern “type” evolved in scientific circles from a “sin against nature” to a mental illness. The first popular study of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis in 1897, put forward the idea that homosexuality was a congenital illness not to be punished, but treated. Nineteenth-century sexologists developed ideas about homosexuality as a form of insanity. One famous theory held that gayness was the result of “urning”—the female mind was trapped in a male body (or vice versa). This widely disseminated theory of sexual “inversion” by Benkert’s colleague and friend, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, referred to homosexuals as a third sex.⁴¹ Ulrichs was the first openly “inverted” man to speak favorably of homosexuality in public forums beginning in the 1860s.

In fact, it took more than two decades after the advent of the “homosexual” before medical doctors began to write about the “heterosexual.” Modern bourgeois ideology assumes that we need not trace the genealogy of heterosexuality because it must be a timeless concept and practice. But just as homosexuality was invented, so too was heterosexuality.

The first recorded instance of the word “heterosexual” dates back to medical journals of the early 1890s. The English publication of the Viennese doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1893 actually introduces heterosexuals not as “normal” sexual beings, but as those with wide-ranging sexual appetites that included non-procreative sexual acts, though not with those of the same sex.⁴² By 1905, the terms heterosexual and homosexual were in wide enough use for Sigmund Freud to employ them to refer to types of people and feelings, not simply sex acts. His sessions with various upper-class patients led him to conclude that homosexuals must be treated for their “fixation” on what he contended was an “immature” stage of their sexual development. Interestingly, Merriam-Webster’s first dictionary entry for homosexuality in 1909 describes it as “morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex,” while heterosexuality wasn’t defined until 1923. ⁴³

As historical materialists who believe that peoples’ behavior and attitudes are shaped by their material surroundings, it follows that socialists are constructionists when it comes to questions of gender and sexuality. In other words, sexuality is a fluid and not fixed behavior, and its various expressions have been historically determined.

Capitalist society depends on the nuclear family and the ideology that justifies it. Among those ideological tenets are reactionary sexual ideas—including gender norms—that not only reinforce the family but also are used to stoke divisions among workers and the oppressed, as well as to control our behavior. Capitalism’s creation—and repression—of sexual identities has produced divisions that have often proved lethal. In a society where people were not oppressed, or even defined, by their sexual identity, people would be able to develop a fully liberated sexuality.