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Communism and LGBTQ rights

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Through Communism, Communist state and Soviet Union

History

Marxism

Early history

Communist leaders and intellectuals took many different positions on LGBTQ-rights issues. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said very little about sexuality. The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, volume two, is unequivocal on Marx's and Engels' views of homosexuality, stating: "Marx and Engels were personally homophobic, as shown by an acerbic 1869 exchange of letters on Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, a German socialist rival." But Marx and Engels' exchanges about Schweitzer, though acerbic, are exclusively political in nature and never touch upon his supposed homosexuality, which is never even mentioned. While Marx praised Schweitzer's strength and energy, both Marx and Engels considered him to be overly ambitious. Throughout his entire work, no quotation from Marx can be found concerning homosexuality. Engels, for his part, referred to homosexuality three or four times, all of them in mocking terms.

One of the first important politicians to speak out in favour of gay rights in public debates was the German Marxist and co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, August Bebel. Although Bebel personally considered same sex relationships to be "against nature", he was among the signatories of Magnus Hirschfeld's petition from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to overturn Paragraph 175 from the German penal code. The bill brought before the Reichstag in 1898 was supported only by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany led by Bebel. Among other signatories was the Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky.

In 1895, Marxist theorist Eduard Bernstein of the Social Democratic Party of Germany wrote a defense of Oscar Wilde (who had been on trial for homosexual behavior) in Die Neue Zeit, a materialist critique of social attitudes concerning the subject of sexuality. Among other arguments he made, he stated that the characterization of homosexuality as "unnatural" was inappropriate, preferring "not the norm" instead. During the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany joined with the Social Democrats in support of efforts to legalize private homosexual relations between consenting adults.

The situation for LGBTQ rights in the early Russian communist government was somewhat mixed. The Communist Party of Soviet Russia abolished all pre-1917 laws, including those related to sexuality. In 1917, the Soviet government also decriminalised homosexuality, and the subsequent Soviet criminal code in the 1920s left out the criminalization of non-commercial same-sex sexuality between consenting adults in private. The Sexual Revolution in Russia, a 1923 four-page pamphlet written by Grigorii Batkis, noted that Soviet law post-1917 regarded gay sexual practices to be part of normal human sexual behaviour, and did not criminalize them as all matters of sex were a private matter. However, outside the Russian SFSR and Ukrainian SSR, homosexuality remained a criminal offense in certain Soviet republics in the 1920s (particularly the Muslim-dominated Soviet Republics in Central Asia) and Soviet policy was often inconsistent in terms of pursuing homosexual rights and wider legal/social equality for homosexual people. Official Soviet policy on homosexuality in the 1920s also fluctuated: between legal and social tolerance of homosexuals and homosexuality to state attempts to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1933, Article 121 was added to the criminal code of the Soviet Union, which made male homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison with hard labor. The precise reason for Article 121 is in some dispute among historians. The few official government statements made about the law tended to confuse homosexuality with pedophilia and were tied to a belief that homosexuality was practiced only among fascists or the aristocracy. The law remained intact until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; it was repealed in 1993 by the Russian Federation.

LGBTQ people and communist party membership

Gay men were sometimes denied membership or expelled from communist parties across the globe during the 20th century, as most communist parties followed the social precedents set by the USSR; however, this was not always the case in the Western world. Notable LGBT+ members of communist parties include:

  • Karl-Günther Heimsoth (German politician) – member of both the Nazi Party and later the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Continued feeding information to KPD's secret service after the Nazis seized power. Purged during the Night of the Long Knives.
  • Harry Whyte (British Marxist and open critic of the criminalization of homosexuality in the Soviet Union in 1934, infamously dismissed as "an idiot and a degenerate" by Joseph Stalin in response to his letter arguing for the repeal of the law in question) – member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
  • Frida Kahlo (Mexican painter and political and social activist) – member of the Mexican Communist Party.
  • Harry Hay (gay rights activist, labor advocate, Native American civil rights campaigner, Mattachine Society founder, co-founder of LA Gay Liberation Front and supporter of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a pederasty advocacy group) – member of the Communist Party USA.
  • Leslie Feinberg (Transgender and lesbian rights activist, self-described "anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist.") – Member of Workers World Party
  • Mark Ashton (founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and LGBTQ rights advocate) – member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Association of communism with homosexuality by anti-communists

The phrase "Sexual Bolshevism" originated in Weimar Germany in the 1920s by Pastor Ludwig Hoppe of Berlin as a more general term of approbation of licentiousness. When Nazi Germany came into being after the failures of the Weimar government, the Nazis used the term "sexual Bolshevism" to refer to perceived sexual degeneracy, in particular homosexuality.

Association of fascism with homosexuality by communists

In the early 1920s, Western communist party leaders propagated the view that the increase in homosexuality and the open discussion of homosexuality were caused by capitalism "in its death throes". In their view, homosexuality would vanish. After Hitler's seizure of power (the Machtergreifung), Marxist intellectuals correlated fascism with homosexuality.

Events leading to the association of communism with homosexuality

The advance of doctors, psychologists and social workers into the arena of human sexuality during the Weimar era (as well as the feminist movement) threw up a variety of conspiracy theories, especially amongst more conservative aspects of society, regarding communism and homosexuality. Any form of sexual revolution was derided as promiscuity and leading to a rise in sexually transmitted infections. The response of those who opposed "sexual Bolshevism" was to promote eugenics and family values. There are specific events which glbtq.com ("an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture") claims to have contributed to the linkage of communism with homosexuality in the United States as well:

For example, in 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an editor and writer at Time magazine and a former Communist Party member and courier in a Soviet spy ring infiltrating the American government, accused Alger Hiss, head of the Carnegie Endowment, of perjury and, implicitly, of Soviet espionage. The vast media coverage of the scandal hinted that Chambers had a crush on Hiss, establishing a link between Communism and homosexuality. Chambers was only too eager to strengthen this link, declaring to the FBI that his homosexual activities had stopped once he had left the Communist Party. In addition, the 1951 flight to the Soviet Union of gay British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean also helped fuel the association of homosexuality and treason in the public imagination.

Cold War

During the height of the McCarthy era (in the late 1940s and early 1950s), American senator Joseph McCarthy viewed homosexuality and communism as threatening the "American way of life"; in both cases, "association with sickness and disease provided means of legitimating isolation from impressionable young people." Homosexuality was directly linked to security concerns, and more government employees were dismissed because of their sexual orientation than because they were left-wing or communist politically. George Chauncey noted that, "The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America," and homosexuality (and homosexuals) were constantly referred to not only as a disease, but also as an invasion, like the perceived danger of communism.

McCarthy often used accusations of homosexuality as a smear tactic in his anti-communist crusade, often combining the Second Red Scare with the lavender scare. On one occasion, he went so far as to announce to reporters, "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." Some historians have argued that, in linking communism and homosexuality and psychological imbalance, McCarthy was employing guilt-by-association if evidence for communist activity was lacking.

Senator Kenneth Wherry similarly attempted to invoke a connection between homosexuality and anti-nationalism. He said in an interview with Max Lerner that "You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives." Later in that same interview, he drew the line between patriotic Americans and gay men: "But look Lerner, we're both Americans, aren't we? I say, let's get these fellows [closeted gay men in government positions] out of the government."

Connections between gay rights groups and radical leftists were not merely a figment of the imaginations of demagogues. The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups in the United States, was founded by Harry Hay, a former member of the Communist Party USA, who was kicked out of the gay rights group he'd founded for his ties to the party.

Famous ex-communist former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers notably spent his time in the left-wing underground pursuing both homosexual and heterosexual affairs, but he kept his liaisons quiet since his communist associates despised homosexuality. Chambers later monogamously married the pacifist painter Esther Shemitz, working as a journalist and editor.

21st century

Since the mid-1970s, most communist parties in the Western world have begun to adopt homosexual rights as part of their platform. Some communist parties such as the Communist Party of Greece and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have rejected this move. The Communist Party of Greece voted against the Civil Partnerships Bill proposed by Syriza, responding that "with the formation of a socialist-communist society, a new type of partnership will undoubtedly be formed—a relatively stable heterosexual relationship and reproduction". Furthermore, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its leader Gennady Zyuganov supported the Russian gay propaganda law.

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