In the history of the queer movement, communists have — at times — taken the wrong path. Some organizations and individuals, wrongly, have believed that queer people could not be revolutionary. Some believed queerness was abnormal; others believed that because LGBTQIA2S+ people weren’t respected by the working class, we couldn’t lead it.
This image is from a button produced decades ago by the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of Youth Against War and Fascism. YAWF was the youth group of Workers World Party.
Workers World Party says — unequivocally — that that viewpoint is wrong. We believe that queer and trans people are not only capable of being communists but are capable of leading the proletariat to victory against the bourgeoisie.
As October, “LGBTQ+ History Month,” comes to a close, we want people to know this part of working class history.
For decades, Workers World Party has supported the queer and trans communities. In 1976, Workers World Party published “The Gay Question: A Marxist Appraisal,” now called “The Roots of Gay and Lesbian Oppression: A Marxist View,” by Bob McCubbin. It carefully used the science of Marxism-Leninism to analyze both gayness and the bigoted reaction to it, often called homophobia. The book carefully went over how queer oppression is tied to capitalism in the same way that misogyny is. We know now that queer oppression stems from patriarchal capitalist culture.
The Stonewall Rebellion — which has been called a “riot,” sometimes disparagingly, sometimes proudly — was the first queer rebellion to become well known. There were other rebellions, such as the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco, but the Stonewall Rebellion galvanized what was then called the Gay Liberation Movement. It marked the weariness and anger of the queer community over centuries of oppression, targeting the literal and metaphorical moralizing by the cisgender, heterosexual, bourgeois establishment. It was a rebellion against the New York Police Department’s “Public Morals Division.”
When Stonewall occurred, Workers World Party, having come into existence 10 years prior to the rebellion in 1959, came out in support of this historic queer revolt. At the time, Workers World Party was the only Marxist-Leninist tendency in the U.S. known to support queer people.
In 1970 Black Panther Party Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton gave a historic speech outlining the party’s support for the women’s and gay liberation movements. But at that time WWP and BPP were exceptional for taking that correct position.
WWP demands care and services for People with AIDS
In 1980 a gay man named Ken Horne was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma and Cryptococcus, conditions that simply baffled people until the dots were connected. He would be the first person in the United States to be diagnosed with “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” — later Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. In 1981, when this disease first impacted gay life, Workers World Party demanded support and health care for people with AIDS.
At the time Workers World Party said resolutely that AIDS was a disease that anyone — regardless of race, gender and sexuality — could get. It was not, as bigots claimed, a “gay disease.” The party supported the movement for People living with HIV and AIDS, including the militant group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).
In fact, when there was fear of even touching people who might have AIDS, leading queer and trans comrade Leslie Feinberg embraced HIV-positive activist Bobbi Campbell, an action that seems minor today but meant the world when many people — misled by bigots — were scared to be in the same room as a person living with HIV.
In February 1980, Workers World Party released the pamphlet “Journal of a Transsexual,” written by Feinberg. Comrade Feinberg put forth the important thesis that “masculine” and “feminine” were social constructs and that society often forces trans people to hide who they are or who they want to be. Feinberg said: “I am the way I am. You are the way you are. … In a humane society, the subject would be closed.” But the U.S. was not such a society.
Feinberg was the first Marxist-Leninist to develop an analysis of the transgender question and did so in the name of Workers World Party. In WWP’s pamphlet “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come” and in later full-length books, zie wrote extensively on the subject.
“Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry towards transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies,” was one of the closing paragraphs in “Transgender Liberation.” While some language has changed since the publications of these works and in the time since Feinberg passed away in 2014, the message itself is the same: transphobia is a weapon of the bourgeoisie against the working class, but when our class refuses to allow gender to be a barrier to unity, we can come together to win justice.
Historically and now, Workers World Party has been on the front lines of the LGBTQIA2S+ movement and the movement for people living with HIV and AIDS. While others debated and were indecisive, we were there.
People with HIV are worthy of love and dignity. Transgender and gender non-conforming people are worthy of love and dignity.
WWP believes unequivocally that LGBTQIA2S+ people are not only part of the working class but are a critical part of its revolutionary vanguard.