Sexuality and Socialism

History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation

Sherry Wolf

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608460762
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Sexuality and Socialism is a remarkably accessible analysis of many of the most challenging questions for those concerned with full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

Inside are essays on the roots of LGBT oppression, the construction of sexual and gender identities, the history of the gay movement, and how to unite the oppressed and exploited to win sexual liberation for all. Sherry Wolf analyzes different theories about oppression—including those of Marxism, postmodernism, identity politics, and queer theory—and challenges myths about genes, gender, and sexuality.

" Sexuality and Socialism is the most intelligent and enlightened discussion on sexuality to come from the Left in a long time. No other work that comes to my mind explains the history of sexuality and sexual repression in the United States as comprehensively and compellingly."— Ron Jacobs, Dissident Voice

"Sherry Wolf: Lesbian, Activist, Communist & Badass-ist... spoke to a pre-National Equality March rally. She. Blew. It. Up."— Austin Chronicle

"Sherry speaks with such eloquence and plain common sense that I can't help but want to know more about her ideas and convictions."— Derek Washington, "In the LV" radio host, Director of LGBT Outreach, Clark County Democratic Black Caucus

"The icons of the new generation of activists are people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Lance Black, Judy Shephard, Lt. Daniel Choi (ret.) and Sherry Wolf (author of Sexuality and Socialism )."— Don Gorton, Join the Impact Board Member

"Surprisingly funny, very readable and a fitting tome for a new movement in these troubled times."— Dave Zirin for Progressive 's Best Books of 2009

"'What humans have constructed they can tear down.' This is the powerful insight of this rare book that is at once politically important, theoretically and historically sophisticated, and clearly written. Sexuality and Socialism is enlivened in its engagement with a number of controversies, including those over the alleged biological determination of homosexuality, the myth of Black homophobia, and the consequences of postmodernist theories for the politics of gay liberation. Above all else, Wolf puts forward a cogent defense of the Marxist tradition—long and wrongly reviled as homophobic in itself—as a way to explain how LGBT oppression arose and what we can do to put it to bed."— Dana Cloud, University of Texas at Austin

Sherry Wolf is the associate editor of the International Socialist Review. She was on the executive committee of the National Equality March Oct. 11, 2009 and has written for publications including the Nation, MRZine, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and Socialist Worker and speaks frequently across the country on the struggle for LGBT liberation as well as a wide range of social and economic justice issue.

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 gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Roots of LGBT Oppression
• 2. Repression, Resistance, and War: The Birth of Gay Identity
• 3. The Myth of Marxist Homophobia
• 4. The Birth of Gay Power
• 5. Whatever Happened to Gay Liberation?
• 6. In Defense of Materialism: Postmodernism, ID Politics, and Queer Theory in Perspective
• 7. Biology, Environment, Gender, and Sexual Orientation
• 8. An Injury to One Is an Injury to All
• 9. Sexual Liberation for All!
• Notes
• Selected Readings
• Index
• About the Author