In the ten years since the launch of Britain's first gay paper, Gay News, the issues of gay rights have been either ignored or misunderstood by the labour movement. Peter Purton argues for gay liberation to be integrated into socialist strategy.
The struggle for the liberation of lesbians and gay men from their oppression has rarely been seen as a fit topic for discussion in the labour movement. If only for this reason, therefore, the publication of the Labour Party National Executive Committee's discussion document, The Rights of Gay Men and Women, is welcome. Gay activists and socialists should press for it to be discussed throughout the labour movement. At the same time, however, the NEC paper contains very serious weaknesses which make it inadequate for its task.
Gay people are oppressed by the law. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act places gay men in a half world between legality and crime which is frequently exploited by the police. Lesbians although not specifically criminalised also suffer severe repression from the state, most noticeably in the denial of custody to lesbian mothers. All gay people suffer discrimination and persecution in some way, whether it be in housing, services, employment or immigration. The Labour Party document takes up these issues strongly and recommends a reduction in the age of consent for males to 16 and the extension of the anti-discrimination laws (Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts) to cover gays.
In this way, the NEC paper follows in a long historical tradition. The German SPD was involved in campaigns for gay rights from the 1890s, based around an attempt to repeal anti-homosexual legislation. The Bolsheviks abolished all such repressive legislation in the Soviet Union after the revolution. Certainly, socialists should concentrate their efforts on such campaigns. But it would be entirely wrong to think the oppression of gays can be ended by a few legal reforms, any more than women were liberated by gaining the vote. This article aims to demonstrate that sexuality is not solely a matter of 'private life' and democratic and human rights. It is rather a question for the working class movement, and needs to be made a part of the revolutionary socialist programme. The Fourth International made an enormous stride forward when it started to incorporate the question of women's liberation into its programme. We will show here that the liberation of lesbians and gay men is an inseparable part of this process.
What is sexuality and why does it matter?
If homosexuality or other forms of sexual expression not conforming to the heterosexual standard were inherited, genetic, biological or medical 'defects' as is often argued, gays would indeed be another disadvantaged and fixed minority whose democratic rights would be defended alike by liberals and socialists, but whose concerns would not be recognised as occupying a central place in the class struggle. However, if one uses the Marxist method pioneered by Engels in his Origin of the Family (although not actually applied by him to homosexuality in that work) one reaches a different conclusion. Sexuality is not predetermined biologically or in any other way. In the process of evolution human beings have developed a capability unknown in the lower animal orders, where sexual activity is limited to periods when the female is able to reproduce. Human sexual activity takes place at any time and is not restricted to the reproductive cycle. Sex and sensuality for their own sake is a significant development in human evolution. At the same time as human beings achieved this liberation, women and men both developed the capacity for pleasurable sexual activity with members of the same sex. Neither female nor male sexual arousal is biologically dependent on the presence of the opposite sex. The specifically reproductive function of sex must therefore also be determined by non-biological factors — namely the form of social organisation and the material forces working in or on it. This has continued to be the case with the development of ever more sophisticated class societies.
The first conclusion is therefore: sexual behaviour and sexual orientation are not in some way laid down for us, they are determined socially and historically and the capacity for non-heterosexual sexual activity is certainly not limited to the 5-10 per cent identified in Kinsey as being predominantly homosexual in the late twentieth century USA.
What then accounts for the different status of homosexuality in different societies? There is a crucial link with the place of women and of reproductive sex. Obviously, the more women have been bound to a reproductive role and their own sexuality denied, the more any forms of non-reproductive or 'deviant' sexual behaviour have been liable to repression. The well-established link between the oppression of women and the class-based organisation of society through the family can thus be extended to include oppression of homosexuality. As we will see, this connection between apparently private questions of sexual preference and the challenge presented to a social order by the struggle for women's and gay liberation has reached a new and potent level in the period of declining capitalism; but a few specific historical examples will serve to show the continuing connection.
It is difficult to make firm statements about unrecorded pre-class societies. But on the basis of the available evidence we can probably state that homosexual activity played a considerable role both in nomadic and in settler-gatherer societies. There is certainly ample evidence of homosexual practices forming a consistent part of religious rites amongst the ancient Hebrews, and their suppression coincided with the development of the Jewish nation. But undoubtedly the best known example is that of Greece.
Homosexual behaviour was both common and accepted in ancient Greece. However, there are significant qualifications which must be made. In this slave-based society, women were banished to a monogamous and purely reproductive role, deprived of civic rights and severely punished for adultery. The sexual freedom of the (free) male was expressed through female prostitution, and through homosexual behaviour which took the form of relationships between adult men and pubescent boys, where the boy was expected to play the passive role which is today demanded of women. There was no such thing as a category of 'the homosexual' because homosexual activity was expected of most men. In these circumstances it is scarcely surprising that we have little evidence of female homosexuality, where women were not considered as having any active sexuality at all. The poetry of Sappho on 6th Century Lesbos is the only clue, and this probably had a religious function which would confirm the restriction of homosexual behaviour to non-reproductive sections of society such as priestly castes.
In feudal society we find the same links. Among the feudal ruling class, where marriage and the family were means to the end of consolidating landed property, emotion became displaced into a ritualised 'courtly romantic love' while for men, including monarchs, homosexual behaviour could be tolerated providing it did not prevent the production of heirs. The free peasant and urban artisan families present a very different picture of a patriarchal family which was however organised around economic production. As a result of their role in this process, women could achieve considerable status and sexual freedom. The potential threat which this posed to the established order is indicated by the long history of the Church's persecution through witch trials of women who stepped outside of the limits within which the feudal class wished to keep them.
It is significant that the flowerings of ruling class homosexuality coincide with the periods of decadence of that class, from Hellenistic Greece through Imperial Rome and Renaissance feudalism to modern imperialism. The contradictions between an obsolete form of family organisation and the developing forces of production have been at the root of these developments. The working class, as the first oppressed class which can become a ruling class, is also therefore the first oppressed class to be concerned with this process.
Sexuality, family and capitalism
The triumph of capitalism brought about gigantic transformations in social organisation which determined the form both of the ruling class and the proletarian family. The consequences of these changes were dramatic and it is only now, in the era of the decadence of imperialism, that the apparently eternal and natural forms of social and sexual organisation established in the nineteenth century are being challenged and broken down. The main features of this process are well documented. The bourgeois family became established with the woman in the role of child-bearer and home-maker, a representative of a natural, emotional sanctuary away from the vicious cut-throat competition of the male capitalist's outside world. The proletariat became organised after the same fashion. The initial incorporation of men, women and children into the workforce in the early burgeoning of the industrial revolution had very nearly destroyed the old family forms, as Marx and Engels vividly described. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, this process was reversed and women began to be expelled from the factories. In addition to important economic reasons, including the slumps which triggered off the age of imperialism, the necessity of establishing a social cohesion and stability was prominent among ruling class anxieties. The working class family which ensued was a reflection of that of the petty bourgeoisie, with women in the role with which we have become familiar and with the working class atomised and divided. At the moment it ceased to be progressive, capitalism achieved a social order among its gravediggers which has played a central part in its continued preservation.
Simultaneously, of course, heterosexuality expressed through individual emotional attachments became of necessity the only 'natural' form of sexual activity. A legal seal was placed on a social and political necessity with the series of laws passed in 1885 in Britain against prostitution and homosexuality, while similar laws were passed at about the same time in Germany and the other developing imperialist powers. Thus, for the first time, the creation of the category of 'the heterosexual' produced its opposite, a homosexual identity which began to take root during the second half of the nineteenth century and laid the basis for the first gay movements, in Britain, Germany and the USA, around the turn of the century.
It has become a common analysis of Marxists and many on the Left that this form of family structure has come to play a central role in the social and economic organisation required by capitalism. What follows is that any struggle by women and gays against the chief agent of their oppression must be seen as a vital component of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism itself.
But it is only part of the story to look at the economic and political functions of the family within capitalism. It has been one of the great strengths of the women's and gay movements to have developed a broader understanding of sexual oppression. In capitalist society women's sexuality is repressed to the point of invisibility. All non-heterosexual sexuality is suppressed by the state, discrimination and a pervasive ideology which condemns 'deviant' sex to a world of degradation, self deception and misery. Lesbian sexuality in particular through its double contradiction of the idea that women have no active sexuality, let alone are capable of sexual and emotional satisfaction without a male, has been either an unspeakable subject or else the object of male violence and pornographic titillation. Just as no country which oppresses another can itself be free, so this repression of 'deviancy' has its reflection in the violence, competitiveness, oppression and anxiety within all sexual relations. As a central part of human life, sexuality pervades all aspects of our existence; and as a corollary of the oppression of homosexuality, all human relations remain alienated under capitalism. So why is it now a matter of urgency that the struggle against sexual oppression be incorporated into the common struggle for socialism?
The social fabric in danger
For a small minority with little social weight (according to liberals, reformists and many others on the Left), gay people have certainly come under a lot of attacks in recent years, ranging from Mary Whitehouse's prosecution of Gay News to Anita Bryant's crusades in the USA, from Ian Paisley's 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign to regular police harassment of gay clubs. This is not of course an accident.
All socialists have absorbed the fact that capitalism is in crisis. All too often, however, this crisis is considered only in its economic aspects. What is left out of the picture is a social crisis of massive proportions. The economic crisis may be the motor, but the social crisis which is geared to it is far too important to be left as a material and ideological weapon — a brake on the class struggle — for the bourgeoisie.
The vast post war boom laid the foundations for this present crisis. The drive for profit had as social consequences the drawing of women in every greater numbers into the workforce, the extension of education and the media, and the encouragement of a youth culture which was itself an important market.
As the Right correctly foresaw, the family and traditional institutions began to come apart at the seams: marriages down, divorces up, more sex for its own sake as better contraception became available, youth on the streets, and so on. The possibility that there were valid alternatives to what had always been presented as natural and eternal was no longer an abstract question. The massive eruption of the women's liberation movement throughout the imperialist countries was the clearest and most obvious development. But it was also from these roots that the new gay movement sprang, following a police raid on a New York gay bar in 1969 which for the first time was resisted by the customers.
For a while it appeared that the demands of these new movements could be absorbed by a capitalism in boom without significant structural changes. Thus it was soon almost respectable to make one's money out of pornography, legitimate to exploit the gay market for clubs, discos and the like, and accepted, if not always acceptable, to indulge in the permissive sexual and cultural practices of the youth. Increasing numbers of people discovered that they were not as 'normal' as they had been brought up to think they were, and because of the gay movement and the gay subculture were able to live their lives as gays, at least in the metropolitan cities.
Of course, what capitalism in boom could try to absorb, capitalism in crisis could in no way afford. Thus the onset of economic recession in the seventies led to an attempt to drive women out of the factories and offices back into the home, the reassertion of their traditional role and the re-establishment of traditional family morality as the ideological prop of this counteroffensive and of social stability. This reversal has not of course been easy. In particular, it has stumbled on the opposition of the women's and the gay movements. The social crisis provoked by the boom was intensified by the slump and the youth rebellions which took off with punk and reached a height in Toxteth and Brixton last summer, demonstrating that the contradictions within a decaying mode of production are now sharper than ever. How is it, then, that gay liberation plays its part in this continuing process, and why is it that the resolution of the crisis in the interests of the working class through the seizure of state power has to involve gay liberation? The petty bourgeois right wing, its economic, political and social power at much greater immediate risk than big capital, has shown clearly through representatives as disparate as Chief Constable Anderton, Mary Whitehouse and the fascists, that it sees gay liberation as a direct threat to the social fabric of capitalism. The workers' movement has yet to grasp the connection.
The challenge
The nuclear family is a central material and ideological prop of the capitalist system. It is the direct agent of the oppression of women, gays and youth. The struggle around sexuality is an integral part of the struggle against the family. It is thus a component of the class struggle. Attacks on homosexuality and homosexuals — attacks in which the working class itself participates — have the effect of strengthening the family. The defeat of such attacks is therefore clearly in the interests of the workers' movement as a whole.
More immediately, attacks on homosexuality directly divide the working class. The late seventies in particular saw a wide range of media-led scare stories which effectively blamed the social crisis on lesbians — for example the witch hunt of Maureen Colquhoun, and the Evening Standard's attacks on artificial insemination for lesbians (AID) — and on gay men. The failure of the labour movement to respond to such attacks contributed to a weakening of the class itself, and left working class anti-gay prejudice not merely unchallenged, but reinforced.
At another level, we have already indicated that the struggle around gay rights has demonstrated through the example of millions of openly gay women and men in the imperialist countries that there are alternatives to the nuclear family. The gay movement with the social and cultural milieu which it has spawned are part of the evidence of 'the old society pregnant with the new'. This is not of course to suggest that these are the alternatives: those living openly gay lives are still caught up in the contradictions of competitive individualism and a hostile outside world which cannot be resolved within capitalism. But the developing breakdown of the old firm sexual categories established in the nineteenth century, indicated by the increasing numbers of people, especially among the youth, who now experiment sexually or define themselves as bisexual, if they admit to any definition at all, is a powerful harbinger.
At the same time, the struggle against sexual oppression is the most effective battering ram against the artificial wall thrown up between those things which are a public concern and those regarded as questions of human nature or psychology. Issues of sexual oppression still produce red faces and downcast gazes in labour movement meetings and the feeling that these things are not 'proper'. The gay and women's movements in their struggles around sexuality are proving that this divide is of benefit only to the ruling class; and that sexual oppression is of as much concern to a miner or a steelworker as it is to a social worker or civil servant; and therefore a fit subject for discussion and action by the workers' movement.
Some strategic conclusions
Lesbians and gay men differ from all other oppressed people in one crucial respect. The vast majority of homosexuals take advantage of the invisibility of their sexuality to remain safely within 'normal' life, at least outwardly. For some men, there is the occasional and risky outlet of encounters in public lavatories (cottaging). For most, there is a lifetime of concealing their true feelings and carrying a burden of shame and misery based on the accepted teaching of school, church, family and society that homosexuality is a sick perversion. It was largely because of the ruling class recognition that blackmail and scandal was bad for their image that the 1967 Act was passed. Revolutionaries have come to understand that an effective fightback against the oppression of women, or of black people, has to be led in the first instance at least by the oppressed themselves. The same is no less true for gays. But for gay people, this involves in the first place the usually very individual decision to 'come out', risking in many cases social ostracism, family rejection, and the serious danger of losing a job, especially for anyone working with young people. For gay women and men to come out and for there to be the chance of a fight against gay oppression, a campaigning and organisationally autonomous gay movement is a prerequisite. It is vital [for the future] of the gay movement — and yet the NEC document gives not a single mention to the movement!
But an autonomous gay movement has also the crucial function of spearheading the struggle for the labour movement to take up the question of gays rights. Some gains have been recorded here. Through the work and pressure of organised groups of gay trade unionists, progress has been made in a number of unions towards the adoption of official pro-gay positions. NALGO for instance has adopted an anti discrimination position, while NUPE came to the defence of victimised member John Saunders. But these instances are still few to weigh against the frequent indifference or even anti-gay policies (for example, the Labour Council in Clwyd which refused to employ gays in any jobs connected with children) of much of the labour movement. It is crucial that the Left in the unions and the Labour Party pushes forward the battle on this issue. There is certainly nothing automatic about the gay movement's orientation to the labour movement, however much socialists within it have fought long and hard for such an approach. Open gays have stepped away from their origins, they are declassé. Unless the labour movement starts to provide a pole of attraction many gays will look elsewhere for their salvation. Elsewhere can mean anything from utopian dreams of a 'gay community' to, for some gay men, a paradoxical and attraction to the machismo of fascism.
In supporting an autonomous gay movement, socialists must also recognise the specific needs of lesbians. The gay movement has been dominated by the concerns of gay men, and has certainly not been immune from sexism. Lesbians have come into activity as part of a general challenge by all women to the oppression of their sexuality. As such, many lesbians have found it more productive and more supportive to abandon mixed gay structures and work through the women's movement. The Labour Party document pays scant attention to these questions. It is necessary to fight for the right of lesbians to organise separately within both the women's and the gay movements to ensure that their specific concerns are voiced.
Just as women's oppression will not vanish with socialist revolution, anti-gay prejudice will also survive the overthrow of capitalism; autonomous movements of the oppressed will still have a major if different function in that period. We cannot predict what form that continuing struggle will take, nor can we predict what form sexual activity and relations will take under socialism. What we have argued is that homosexuality is part of human sexual capacity, that the repression of homosexuality and the oppression of homosexuals are connected with the oppression of women and will disappear along with the liberation of women; and that therefore the victory of socialism must involve gay liberation.
PETER PURTON is a Socialist Challenge supporter and has been active in the gay movement for many years.
References
1 [It is not possible in an article of this length to give] the evidence for all the statements made, or even to deal with a number of major political questions (such as the roles of Stalinism and fascism or the development of the gay movement and of lesbian organisation).
2 The Rights of Gay Men and Women, Labour Party NEC Discussion Document 1981.
3 See The Law and Sexuality, Grass Roots Books, Manchester 1978.
4 Bebel & Bernstein: Homosexuality, (Two articles from Die Neue Zeit), [GMP] Books, n.d.
5 Published as Women's Liberation and Socialism, Pathfinder, London 1979.
6 A Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, 1948; Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, (1953, Illinois). 37 per cent [of] Kinsey's male sample had taken a homosexual encounter to the [point] of orgasm.
7 The best account is K J Dover, Greek Homosexuality, Duckworth 1978.
8 See J Weeks, Coming Out, Quartet 1977 and Sex, Politics & [Society], Longman 1981; Lauritsen & Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, Times Change Press, New York 1974. The [term 'homosexual'] was invented in 1869 and became current in the 1880s.
9 See the figures given by Weeks, Sex etc, p252.
10 Among numbers of pamphlets etc see Gay Workers, NCCL, Gays at Work, Gay Rights at Work Committee, London [1979]; [Being] Positive, Gay Teachers Group, London 1977.