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LGBT Issues
Multiculturalism vs. human rights?
| Peter Tatchell | August 13, 2009 |
Multiculturalism vs. human rights?
Defending multiculturalism but warning against its excesses
Multiculturalism has many positive benefits. It defends the right to the different, which is a very important and precious human right, especially for those people whose difference has historically resulted in social marginalization and exclusion: including women, black, disabled and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
Symposium on Gays and the Left (Part I)
Summer 2008Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy
Queer Reflections
| by David McReynolds | Summer 2008 |
LET ME USE MY SPACE in part simply as memory, reflections by a homosexual whose sexual orientation, at 78, is academic.
Left-wing Homosexuality: Emancipation, Sexual Liberation, and Identity Politics
| by Jeffrey Escoffier | Summer 2008 |
Socialism without fucking is dull and lifeless.
-- The heroine, WR: The Mysteries of the Organism,
a 1971 film directed by Dusan Makavejev.
Gay Leftie Seeks Straight Friends
| by Martin Duberman | Summer 2008 |
THE PRESENCE ON MANY CAMPUSES of a significant number of liberals ("Of course gay people are entitled to the full rights of citizenship") proved critical in allowing lesbian and gay studies to gain a toehold. But as I kept discovering, unpleasantly, a willingness to grant us basic rights wasn't remotely the equivalent of actually wanting to know about our lives -- let alone of believing that our distinctive perspectives might have anything of importance to say to them.
Can the Left Ignore Gay Liberation?
| by John D'Emilio | Summer 2008 |
THE JESUITS TRAINED ME WELL. My high school speech and debate coach taught me how to speak in complete paragraphs and to construct what he described as a "seamless" argument. Many years later, a close friend and fellow historian used the same word in reference to my historical writing. He described one of my books as a "seamless" narrative. Well, that skill, if I have it, has eluded me as I've tried to compose my contribution to this discussion. So, instead, I offer a series of disconnected, but I hope relevant, observations.
Keeping the Communist Party Straight, 1940s-1980s
| by Bettina Aptheker | Summer 2008 |
GROWING UP IN A COMMUNIST FAMILY and in Communist circles in New York City in the late 1940s and 1950s sexuality of any kind was never discussed, ever, in any context, for any reason. I am not laying claim to any kind of universal experience in saying this; I am only commenting on the absence of discussion in my own experience.
Socialism and Sex
| by H. L. Small | Summer 2008 |
THE GROWTH OF SOCIALISM in the United States has been hampered by the lack of imagination of the leaders of socialist thought. The appeal of the socialist has always been to the future, with a paradisiacal vision of economic plentitude and true democratic freedom. That is -- the level of appeal has been a mixture of economic and social goods and leisure in a milieu of democratic-liberal sentiment. This has been good but not good enough.
On Socialism and Sex: An Introduction
| by Christopher Phelps | Summer 2008 |
PREFATORY NOTE: While researching a book on African-Americans and the anti-Stalinist left in the archives last summer, I stumbled across a striking and long-forgotten document, "Socialism and Sex," in a 1952 discussion bulletin, The Young Socialist. In one page, its author H. L. Small -- almost surely a pseudonym -- provided an elegant, concise exposition on behalf of destigmatizing consensual sexuality between same-sex lovers.
LGBT Political Cul-de-sac: Make a U-Turn
| by Sherry Wolf | Winter 2009 |