News and Letters Essay June 1998

The Queer left legacy and Marxist-Humanism

by Jennifer Pen

In a monumental collection of over 800 pages, entitled WE ARE EVERYWHERE: A HISTORICAL SOURCEBOOK OF GAY AND LESBIAN POLITICS (1997), Shane Phelan and Mark Blasius have helped make manifest a queer left legacy. From the French Revolution to the present, they show that les-bi-gay voices have emerged in tandem with revolutionary movements, engaging directly with Marx's thought in their search for a total uprooting of this exploitative society. One of the impressive aspects of this legacy is the universality of les-bi-gay thought, and its consistent connections to other freedom movements.

What would it mean to critically study and develop this thought within a Marxist-Humanist philosophy of revolution? Raya Dunayevskaya, speaking about the Women's Liberation Movement, said that women have been not merely hidden from history, but hidden from philosophy, which means that women were recognized as force, but not as Reason. This compares all too well to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, who have likewise been hidden; in fact, our liberation follows what I call the dialectics of silence and passion. This contradiction between passion and silence can result in both an invisibility as force--though queers have been an unacknowledged part of all freedom movements--and an invisibility in thought.

The thinkers who make up this queer left legacy span 200 years, before and after Stonewall: Edith Simcox, Anna Reuling, Adrienne Rich, Frank Kameny, Bayard Rustin, Monique Wittig, Walt Whitman, Carl Wittman, John d'Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, Alan BŽrubŽ, Charlotte Bunch, Barbara Smith, Gloria Joseph, Guy Hocquengham, Angela Davis, Cheryl Clarke, Merle Woo, Margaret Randall, Martin Duberman, Robin Morgan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mary Daly, Leslie Fienberg, Tony Kushner, Larry Mitchell, the Radicalesbians, and many others. The five thinkers I am going to briefly consider are: Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), Harry Hay (b. 1912), Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Mario Mieli (d. mid 1980s) and Gloria Anzaldœa (b. 1942). Because of the dialectics of passion and silence, these thinkers have not always been aware of each other's work, so finding their common themes necessitates a philosophy of revolution.

The pattern of radical movements opening a space for queers to emerge is consistent: the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists inspired Walt Whitman. Whitman's vision and the Paris Commune moved Edward Carpenter to socialism and solidarity with the working class. Harry Hay was won over to radical action by the longshoremen's strike of 1934 and joined the Communist Party, but by 1949-1953 he found it necessary to leave and build the first radically "homophile" organization, the Mattachine Society. His later work was further inspired by Native American freedom movements. As a Black woman, worker, and mother, Audre Lorde's political thought was shaped by the Rosenberg trial, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Liberation Movement. The New Left and the student movements of the 1960s galvanized the Italian Marxist, Mario Mieli, who was a founding member of the London Gay Liberation Front and the Italian group Fuori!. Poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldœa imbibed the politics of labor and Chicano liberation as well as feminism. All these thinkers had experience as part of mass movements, and in being told not to raise the issue of sexuality within those movements. They had lived this dialectic of passion and silence, even within revolutionary organizations.

GAINING A MIND OF ONE'S OWN

One of the first commonalities in their thought is a critiquing of false naturalisms, and, through that critique, gaining a mind of one's own, entering the journey to self-consciousness. Anzaldœa describes it thus:

"For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I MADE THE CHOICE TO BE QUEER (for others it is genetically inherent). It's an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head. It makes for LOQUER’A, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge--one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our RAZA" (BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA, p. 19).

Anzaldœa sees her queerness as a way to inhabit all her identities, without reifying any of them. Writing 75 years earlier, prior to Stonewall, Carpenter, believing queerness to be biologically determined (he refers to gays and lesbians as "intermediate" persons), also sees philosophic reflection as inherent:

"[W]e can see...the probability of the intermediate man or woman becoming a forward force in human evolution..., not wholly belonging to either of the two great progenitive branches of the human race, his nature would not find complete satisfaction in the activities of either branch, and he would necessarily create a new sphere of some kind for himself. Secondly, finding himself DIFFERENT from the great majority, now an object of contumely and now an object of love and admiration, he would be forced to THINK. His mind turned inwards on himself would be forced to tackle the problem of his own nature, and afterwards the problem of the world and of outer nature. He would become one of the first thinkers, dreamers, discoverers" (INTERMEDIATE TYPES, p. 59).

Both Anzaldœa and Carpenter are suggesting that their sexuality prompted them, and will prompt others, to think about social conventions and false limitations. They did not fear that their sexuality had depleted their revolutionary impulse, but theorized it had added a crucial dimension of critical self-consciousness.

MARX AND GAY LIBERATION

Another commonality in these thinkers is their search for a non-determinist Marx. Harry Hay, as a teacher in the Communist Party, had a thorough but mechanical knowledge of Marx and the dialectic. After Stonewall and his role in founding the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, Hay began writing a theoretical work on gay subjectivity. Here he broke with Marxist dialectics because he (mistakenly) felt it was merely objective, with no room for human subjectivity. Yet he still believed that Marx and Engels's relating of "the principle of the Unity of Opposites and of the Negation of the Negation, to the political struggles of their times were then and are now PRECISELY THOSE EXERCISES BY WHICH THE HUMAN MIND ACQUIRES SKILLS AND DEXTERITIES TO MAKE THE QUALITATIVE LEAP FROM BINARY TO ANALOG THINKING" (RADICALLY GAY, p. 207).

Mario Mieli's book, HOMOSEXUALITY AND LIBERATION: ELEMENTS OF A CRITIQUE, is one of the few full-length theoretical works to unite Marxism and gay liberation. Published in 1977, then translated into English by 1980, the work has fallen into an undeserved obscurity outside of Italy. Mieli was thoroughly disillusioned with the Communist Party of Italy, and followed the works of Herbert Marcuse and the New Left in general:

"The gay movement is fighting to negate the negation of homosexuality, because the diffusion of homoeroticism will qualitatively change our existence and transform mere survival into life...Only the struggle of those who are the historical subjects of the basic antithesis to the male heterosexual Norm can lead to overcoming the present opposition between the two sexes" (pp. 37-38).

Both Mieli and Hay miss the mark of a full dialectic of Absolute Negativity, however. Marx, in a phrase which resonates with lesbian and gay experience, evocatively sees that "new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down" (quoted in Dunayevskaya, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, p. 150). The logic of negating current conditions, within the mediation of revolutionary struggle, must include the transcendence of the constrictions placed on us, in order to create a new human future. Dunayevskaya describes this as the "integrality of second negativity with Marx's Humanism" (Dunayevskaya, PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, pp. 54-55). Hay, still imbued with Stalinist vulgarisms, even when making his organizational break from them, can only see Marx as a determinist, and the dialectic, even of second negativity, as an "exercise."

Similarly, when Mieli is looking for how to "transform mere survival into life" he turns primarily to Marx's 1844 ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS and the GRUNDRISSE. But he shies away from the Absolutes of Hegel and of CAPITAL, preferring to call for a single "total qualitative leap" to a new society (p. 209). Thus, when Mieli seeks to "negate the negation of homosexuality," he rightly valorizes revolutionary gay subjectivity yet stops short of negating the total alienation of capitalism.

Dunayevskaya addresses the role of sexuality in a total uprooting of this society. Noting that our contemporary society is "backward on the whole question" of sexuality, she sees "that we will have to go through a lot of stages of actual experimentation, with people having the right to choose." Stressing that proscriptions won't do --"There is just no way of giving answers from above"--she makes the profound connection between sexuality and Marx's "revolution in permanence": it is "not just a political expression" but an opening to the creation of the new in all human relations (WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION, p. 181).

Whatever his dialectical shortcomings, Mieli's work is prompted by a critique of the Left, similar to, though not as developed as, Dunayevskaya's critique of what she called "post-Marx Marxism." He mocks the "protectors of the Left" (p. 212-213), pointing out that despite their efforts "to extinguish our movement," the queer critique of the Left "is among other things the negation of all male supremacist political rackets" (pp. 213-214; see also Julia Jones's review of Simon Edge's WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, in QUEER NOTIONS II Bulletin, available through NEWS & LETTERS).

EROTIC AS POWER

These thinkers do engage Marx's categories and launch a thorough critique of capitalism. The queer Left saw that sexuality and labor were intimately connected, from the reproduction of the laborer in heterosexuality to the humanist questions: What kind of work should people do? What is the role of the human being as revolutionary, as simultaneously thinker and doer? (PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, p. 76). Audre Lorde pointedly raises this in her famous essay "Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power," when she says that the erotic is not confined to sex and the bedroom, but is a quality of passion that flows through our entire lives. She condemns capitalism when she says:

"The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel" (SISTER/OUTSIDER, p. 55).

Lorde's revulsion at the alienation of labor echoes Marx's observation that "the machine does not free the laborer of work but deprives the work of all interest" (quoted in A 1980s VIEW: THE COAL MINERS' GENERAL STRIKE OF 1949-50 AND THE BIRTH OF MARXIST-HUMANISM IN THE U.S., p. 33). Likewise, her understanding of all of life as humanly embodied and humanly created echoes Marx's philosophic call for revolutionaries to understand the subjectivity of "human sensuous activity (and) practice" ("Theses on Feuerbach," quoted in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, p. 115).

Mieli links the economic and the relational, pointing to: "the fetish, the stereotyped fantasy, the commodity. The coerced sexuality of capital transforms women and men into commodities and fetishes, and yet underneath their masked appearance as zombie and robot, as things, living beings are hidden, and a censored desire is struggling" (pp. 168-169).

BEYOND DIALECTIC OF PASSION AND SILENCE

It is the particular responsibility of queer left thinkers to point out the role that heterosexism plays in maintaining capital's ill logic. But it is here that the problems with this legacy begin to multiply. There is a pull, for instance, toward intuitionism and immediacy. Anzaldœa and Hay have turned to questions of spirituality as primary. For example, Hay speaks of a "socially invisible Arc" between gay men that can "zap into both our eagerly ready bodies TOTAL SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE" which, he speculates, is an "inheritable consciousness" (pp. 257-58). Once the intuitive is so invoked, it becomes an inaccessible fact of individual consciousness, rather than a consciously shared objective development.

It is important to critique these thinkers with an eye to what they bring to the movement of the Idea of Freedom. The fact that the queer left legacy is incomplete provides new opportunities, and a responsibility as exemplified in the queer left's attitude to organization, which can best be characterized as deep distrust. Carpenter makes a fascinating comment that from 1883 "forward I worked definitely along the Socialist line: with a drift, as was natural, towards Anarchism" (ENGLAND'S IDEAL, p. 115). Why did it seem natural, especially at an historic juncture prior to even the reformism that Bernstein imported into established socialist circles? Perhaps because the rigidity, hierarchy and self-importance--not to mention puritanism--of the Left appeared as yet another false naturalism. The fun-house mirror effect of being a closeted gay theorist was a price that these thinkers were unwilling to pay.

But this attitude of distrust can become self-limiting in today's post-Stonewall era rather than self-developing. The queer left critique of post-Marx Marxist organizations is appropriate, but not outside of a thorough consideration of the dialectics of philosophy and organization. While some--from Bayard Rustin's key role in the Civil Rights Movement, to Huey Newton's stated support for the Gay Liberation Movement, to the decentralized forms of ACT-UP--have raised crucial questions concerning les-bi-gay liberation and organization, the task of returning to the high points of these movements and not allowing the needed revolutions to fall short, is ours.

Transcending the dialectics of passion and silence cannot be achieved through assimilation. We have to negate the alienation of capitalism, and negate that negation with the creation of a new human being, embodied and loving other human beings without the fetters of the old order. The thinkers of the queer left legacy have bequeathed a responsibility to us: to bring the fullness of Marx's humanism to bear on queer liberation and, thus, human liberation.

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