http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19870403&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=6
By: DOUG IRELAND
07/24/2008
Recovering our hidden gay history has been a critically important
byproduct of the modern gay movement, and in its current Summer 2008
issue, the 46-year-old independent socialist review New Politics has
published a significant discovery that restores to us a lost moment
of our political history - specifically, of the history of gays and the left.
The discovery was made quite accidentally by the historian
Christopher Phelps, a professor of history at Ohio State University
at Mansfield whose books include the critically well-regarded
biography "Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist." While Phelps
was researching a forthcoming book on anti-Stalinist black radicals,
he came across an article by one "H.L. Small" on homosexual
emancipation entitled "Socialism and Sex," which appeared in 1952 in
Young Socialist, the mimeographed bulletin of the youth section of
the Socialist Party, then led by Norman Thomas.
And on further investigation, and after interviewing survivors of
that period, Phelps unearthed the fact that there was an organized
effort within the Socialist Party at that time to have it take a firm
and bold position in favor of the decriminalization of homosexuality
and the end of discrimination against gays and lesbians - an unheard
of political initiative at the time for any political party.
Until now, it has been thought that the roots of modern gay political
activism could be found only in the work of the legendary Harry Hay,
who began organizing homosexuals while he was a member of the
Communist Party. The first gay organization Hay fathered was created
during the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, the former
FDR vice president who that year became the candidate of the
newly-formed, left-wing Progressive Party, initiated and dominated by
the Communists. Bachelors for Wallace was the discreet name Hay gave
to this embryonic group.
And it was in part out of the nucleus he'd recruited for Bachelors
for Wallace that Hay and Rudi Gernreich, who became a well-known
fashion designer in the 1960s and '70s, founded the Mattachine
Society in 1951, the first US "homophile" organization. Gernreich was
an Austrian refugee from the Nazis who brought with him both his
left-wing politics and his knowledge of the early agitation for
homosexual liberation in Germany, led in the first third of the last
century by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.
Gernreich was in the same political orbit as Hay, and indeed the
earliest members of Mattachine were mostly drawn from the Popular
Front culture dominated by the Communist Party.
In order to organize Mattachine, Hay was obliged to leave the
Communist Party. As historian Phelps writes in his essay in New
Politics, "The Communist Party forbade membership to homosexuals on
the grounds that homosexuality was symptomatic of bourgeois
decadence, a perversion, a byproduct of capitalism and fascism. It
also viewed homosexuality, like drug use, as a security risk that
would make individuals susceptible to blackmail or exposure that
would discredit it."
Moreover, Phelps notes, "Although he left the Communist Party, Hay
brought many residues of his Stalinism with him. The Party's habits
of organization, combined with the circumstances of McCarthyism and
anti-gay repression (which demanded at least some modicum of
discretion), led Hay to conceive of Mattachine as a hierarchical
organization led by an inner circle while maintaining the secrecy of
the underground."
In other words, Hay followed a Leninist model of organization.
There was a different political tradition in the Socialist Party and
in its youth arm, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL, commonly
pronounced "Yipsel"). The Yipsels "made no official prohibition
against same-sex desire and had no official ideology against it," as
Phelps records. "No one was ever expelled from the Socialist Party or
its youth group for 'deviancy' or 'bohemianism.'"
This meant that the author of the article on homosexual emancipation
in the Young Socialist, "H.L. Small" - undoubtedly a pseudonym, as
was common in radical publications during the era of McCarthyism to
prevent employer reprisals - "could write freely without fear of
suppression within the left, such as the expulsions gay Communists
experienced... YPSL members in the 1950s were attracted to
libertarian socialism - evincing, for example, a strong interest in
Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German revolutionary who supported the
Russian Revolution but was critical of the early Soviet state for its
ominous consolidation of power."
In his 1952 article, rediscovered by Phelps, "Small" drew on
democratic socialism's libertarian traditions, writing, "The freedom
of the legally of-age adult of both sexes to have sexual relations
with whomever he or she wishes of the same or opposite sex, without
fear of sanction, is an important libertarian principle that is part
of the law in many socialist and semi-socialist countries today,
e.g., in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, etc. It means, to the
individual 'deviant,' that the fear of legal sanction, as well as
illegal repression, blackmail, etc., are forever banished from his
mind. It means an area of operational freedom that will enable the
emancipated individual to work and think more effectively in his
tasks of everyday life. It means the difference between health and
sickness for thousands of people who are non-productive members of
society today... Whether we individually consider it right or wrong,
healthy or unhealthy, to have a large or small vocabulary of
libidinal expression, repression of such expression, or practice
under fear, does not make for a whole, productive individual.
Propaganda aimed toward the homosexual individual should stress his
importance as a political concern, it should point out his right to
what the Declaration of Independence called 'the pursuit of happiness'..."
Phelps deserves added points for recognizing the importance of his
rediscovery of this article because he is not himself gay, although
he has been in the forefront of the fight against anti-gay
discrimination on the campus where he teaches. And, as Phelps writes
in New Politics, the article "Socialism and Sex" "prefigured the
1960s. It urged socialists to understand the genesis of political
commitment and their ultimate goals in a capacious sense,
transcending narrow economic terms. It treated sexuality as a
political issue, comprehending the interrelationship between personal
and public in a manner strikingly similar to the subsequent feminist
position that 'the personal is political.' While the scant
intellectual resources available to a young person exploring such
questions in the early 1950s lent the article a modest temperament,
the document contains in embryonic form the admixture of socialism
and gay liberation that would find more militant, revolutionary
expression in the post-Stonewall explosion of such groups as the Gay
Liberation Front. For all these reasons, 'Socialism and Sex' is a
document of great significance in the larger sexual history of the
political left... It stands as an arresting forerunner of modern gay
civil rights consciousness."
Moreover, in a series of interviews with YPSL and Socialist Party
activists from the 1950s, Phelps discovered that the Party came very
close to adopting a homosexual emancipation plank in its platform at
its 1952 convention. The chairman of YPSL at that time was Vern
Davidson, a UCLA senior who had had several same-sex affairs,
including with other Party members, and who, he told Phelps, "was
instructed by the YPSL to attempt to put a homosexual rights plank
before the platform committee."
Norman Thomas, often called "the grand old man of American
socialism," who had been the Socialist Party's candidate for
president six times and who was widely admired as a man of principle
in progressive circles way beyond the Socialist Party, was
sympathetic when Davidson raised the idea of a homosexual
emancipation plank at the platform committee. As Davidson recalls,
"He said, 'Well, Vern, if the YPSL thinks that's something that we
should consider, I certainly think we should consider it, and I have
nothing against it, but I wish you could draw up something and come
back with it.'"
Davidson told Phelps he tried and tried to draft an appropriate
platform plank but "I just couldn't write anything that seemed to fit
into the platform. So I let it slide by. I had no guidance. We didn't
talk about 'discrimination based on sexual orientation' in those
days. That phrase would never have come to me. And everything was
going fast, we were fighting over the [Korean] war and everything,
and it didn't get done. And I take responsibility. But I believe to
this day, had I been able to do my job, Thomas would have joined me,
and we would have had it back then, in '52."
The fact that there was political discussion of what we now call gay
rights and an effort within the Socialist Party organized enough to
bring the question to the national decision-makers of the party in
the same time frame that Harry Hay and his pro-Communist circle were
giving birth to the Mattachine Society is a chapter of gay history
that until now has never been written.
Hay's semi-clandestine Leninist model for Mattachine eventually
failed. As Phelps writes, "By 1953, a majority of newer members,
hundreds of whom had joined after Mattachine successfully defended a
member in Los Angeles from police entrapment, came to feel
manipulated and sought an open, democratic organization. Hay opposed
them, holding that such a transformation would sacrifice 'all the
idealisms that we held while we were a private organization.'
"This membership rebellion, reflective of widespread distrust of the
initial conspiratorial and top-down structure, coincided with
threatened inquiry by Congressional investigative committees,
prompting Hay and other radical founders to withdraw from Mattachine
in 1953. As its new and more conservative leaders sought
respectability, the Mattachine Society lost many members and pursued
a timid, self-effacing course..."
Phelps' rediscovery of the "Socialism and Sex" article and the
organizational initiatives it reflected give rise to interesting
speculations as to what course the nascent homosexual emancipation
movement might have taken if the Socialist Party had indeed embraced
the cause back then. Eventually, it did become the first US political
party to put forward an openly gay candidate for president when, in
1980, it nominated veteran pacifist organizer David McReynolds as its
candidate.
Phelps' article in New Politics is a must read for anyone interested
in the history of the American gay movement, and it also was the
jumping-off point for a symposium of mini-essays in the magazine on
"Gays and the Left," with fascinating and widely different political
perspectives from McReynolds; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Martin
Duberman, known as the "Father of Gay Studies"; historian John
D'Emilio, the biographer of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and
the founding director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's
Policy Institute; gay theorist Jeffrey Escoffier, author of "American
Homo: Perversity and Community" and other books; and lesbian Bettina
Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of
California/Santa Cruz, who was the daughter of leading Communist
intellectual Herbert Aptheker and herself a former member of the CP
for two decades, and author of "Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red,
Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel."
As it happens, the same issue of New Politics also includes a
hitherto-unpublished poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini and a critique of his cinema.
If you can't find this important Summer 2008 issue of New Politics at
one of the better magazine shops, you may order it for $9 from New
Politics, 155 West 72 Street, Room 402, New York, 10023. The Phelps
article and mini-essays in the symposium on "Gays and the Left" are
also available online at http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/ .
--
Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at
http://direland.typepad.com/
.
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