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LGBT Issues
An Ascending Trajectory?: Ten of the Most Important Social Conflicts in the United States in 2012
| Dan La Botz December 31, 2012 |
[This article was written for a foreign audience, so I have spelled out some things that might otherwise be taken for granted when writing for an American reading public.]
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 THE HISTORIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN homosexuals and the left is complicated, because, as Jeffrey Escoffier reminds us in his overview of various currents -- socialist, left-Freudian, post-1969 gay liberationist -- "there are many different lefts." As we see it, the most important difference within the left has been the one separating an authoritarian, top-down tradition that focuses on social engineering, on the one hand, from a democratic, from below tradition that emphasizes freedom and popular control, on the other.
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. Christopher Phelps certainly opened an interesting chink in the history of the left with his article. It is probably as impossible for those under 40 to grasp what the social landscape was like for homosexuals in 1950 as it is for many young Blacks to believe there was a time when night clubs in Manhattan were segregated, and if you were Black and traveled south of the Mason Dixon line, you had to change to a "colored only" car.
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. I have been teaching an undergraduate history course on the U.S.
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. Although I knew from an early age, and certainly by adolescence, that my primary attractions were to women, I had no language with which to express these feelings, and a firm belief that I was sexually perverted and evil, and absolutely singular in my desires.
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.