Leftist Sexual Politics and Homosexuality: A Historical Overview

Historically, socialist and anarchist support for homosexual rights has been at best halfhearted and often entirely absent. Of course, the same is true of
other political tendencies, be they liberal or conservative. Despite
the negative or at best mixed record of virtually all political currents
on the issue of homosexuality, socialism is singled out for particular
attention here because its project was, and is, to fulfil the emancipatory
goal of the Enlightenment: the universal liberation of humankind
from oppressive ideologies and exploitative social structures.
In criticizing the left’s failure to advance the cause of homosexual
emancipation, we aim not to denounce it wholesale but to hold it to
its own high ideals.
In the following, we will offer a brief historical overview of
socialists’ attitudes toward homosexuality, highlighting the contours
and background of their profound ambivalence. ‘‘Socialism’’
is, of course, notoriously a catch-all term, encompassing movements,
parties, and regimes of socialists, Communists, and Social
Democrats as well as utopian socialists and anarchists. This historical
survey does not pretend to be exhaustive and will focus instead
on certain key issues:
1. The public-private dichotomy, central to liberal political
thought, has long been a problem for socialism. Both the utopian
socialists and classical Marxists criticized the public-private
dichotomy, but the latter never advanced beyond this to
develop a political theory of gender and sexuality.
2. The Marxist current of socialism has always differentiated itself
from utopian socialism by claiming to be an objective,
‘‘scientific’’ endeavor, and socialist views on (homo)sexuality
were crucially shaped by Enlightenment thinking about nature
as well as nineteenth-century scientific (biological and medical)
paradigms, particularly Darwinism. Although Marxism as
a social theory recognizes that humans have no fixed nature
and are a product of history, socialists (like liberals and others)
have tended to view gender and sexuality as biological
givens and thus essentially ahistorical.
3. Socialists have repeatedly ascribed homosexuality to the
‘‘class enemy,’’ contrasting the ‘‘manly’’ vigor and putative
purity of the working-class with the emasculated degeneracy
and moral turpitude of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie.
The socialist concept of progress has long envisioned a utopia
in which homosexuality would have no place, indeed would
automatically disappear as an outdated remnant of oppressive
vice and social malaise.
It might be added, finally, that simple opportunism has played an
important historical role in politics. Even those socialist parties and
regimes that endorsed legal reforms concerning homosexuality
proved willing in moments of political need to compromise their
principles by invoking stereotypical images of homosexuality to
smear their opponents.