Gay Left Collective (ed.): Homosexuality: Power and Politics, Allison & Busby, 1980, £3.95.
Good books on gay politics are few and far between, So although this one was published over a year ago, it still merits a serious review. This book is a collection of seventeen articles by lesbians and gay men; and, for once, lesbian writers and politics are genuinely given equal status, The articles cover a wide range of topics: the history of sexuality, critiques of currents in the gay movement and the left, socialist and feminist morality, the portrayal and involvement of gays in culture and the media, and gay political action, While all the authors are (or were) socialists, there is no consistent line taken on either theoretical or political questions. The book rather presents a compendium of debates and developments on the left of the lesbian/gay movement at the beginning of the 1980s, though slanted away from orthodox Marxism and (even more) from Leninism.
Despite this diversity, certain themes and concerns run through all the contributions. The book might well have been subtitled 'Ten years after'; most of the articles look back at the ideologies and politics with which the gay movement started and criticise them in the light of subsequent political and social developments.
One important area in which this critique is developed is 'morality'. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and to some extent the women's movement in the early 1970s, confronted bourgeois morality by posing demands on individuals in a moralistic way that took little account of their material circumstances. Several of the articles explore, partly on the basis of personal experience, the contradictions of struggling for these political ends as real people in the real world.
While the often naive expectations of the early 1970s are rejected, most of the underlying aims are not. Socialist morality cannot consist of a set of rules; it is impossible for either revolutionary parties or movements of the oppressed to formulate such rules (though of course some elementary points of non-sexist and non-racist behaviour can be laid down). But it is possible and necessary for socialists to struggle, alongside the people with whom we are in daily contact, against the ways in which our 'personal' behaviour oppresses others and leads to our own unhappiness.
A second central theme of the book is the way in which sexual categories and sexual behaviour and desires are not determined biologically but are socially constructed. This is all the more true of the categories of the heterosexual, the lesbian, and the homosexual, which are entirely socially constructed and have only existed since the 19th century. Moreover, over the last ten years these categories have been changing at an unprecedentedly fast rate — the most obvious example being the continuing expansion and 'masculinisation' of the commercial gay male scene discussed in several of these articles. The construction of sexuality also takes place in personal history: Margaret Jackson writes how her experience was not one of disclosing to the world an already existing lesbian identity but of literally becoming a lesbian.
The political implication of this is that the struggle is ultimately not one to liberate a given oppressed group, but to overcome the categorisation of people as gay or heterosexual [illegible] definition in the imperialist countries (overthrowing 'King Sex', as Jeff Weeks puts it). While I agree that this should indeed be our aim, some of the contributions (that by Jeff Weeks in particular) seriously downplay the importance of the specific struggle of gay people for our rights.
Without a gay movement, which has been the product of the creation of gay individuals as a specific category, the struggle for gay liberation and all the broader issues it raises would not have developed, the struggle (at least up to the transition to socialism) must start from a struggle for gay rights and against repression rather than against the regulation and categorisation of sexuality as such, This is argued in this volume by Frank Mort and, implicitly, by Amber Hollibaugh. Any other strategy is utopian and could lead to a return to GLF-style voluntarism or to passivity.
A third related theme is a critique of previous theories of the gay movement, including both GLF ideas and orthodox Marxism, for the spurious coherence that they give to the various mechanisms of repression and regulation of sexuality. Orthodox Marxist approaches are criticised, first, for a functionalist view of ideology as deriving directly from the mode of production and the 'requirements' of accumulation; and secondly, for idealism, in imagining that the ruling class is capable of articulating all aspects of sexuality in a way that serves its interests. This criticism forms one prong of an extended attack by Philip Derbyshire on the ideas of the International Marxist Group on gay liberation (an attack that needs a specific answer elsewhere).
Now it is certainly true that much gay movement writing — both Marxist and non-Marxist — has suffered from this functionalism. I think, however, that the Marxism of Marx, including the much-maligned concept of false consciousness, does not fall into this trap and does not attempt to reduce concrete instances to some 'general' principle or dynamic. Margaret Coulson's article in the book illustrates this very well. Moreover, the alternatives presented here, deriving particularly from Foucault, seem to me themselves to fall into severe and fetishistic functionalism.
More seriously, these alternatives effectively abandon any systematic or theoretical attempt to link the operations of the different institutions structuring sexuality, The political implications of this are not really developed, but seem to lead towards a deeply fragmented politics, radically divided not just into different movements but into different fields and institutions of struggle. A further problem is the silence of all the articles, with one exception, on the labour movement, linked in many cases to an undue pessimism about future prospects.
We do need a much more detailed and specific analysis of the great variety of practices that construct and oppress our sexuality; but we must constantly try to link together our struggles against them both theoretically and practically if we are to progress.