Turning to “The Lavender Scare”, we meet some of the same figures who
are featured in “Before Stonewall”. Among them is Frank Kameny, who,
while probably well-known to gay activists, deserves much greater
recognition from the left in general. Like Rosa Parks, he was someone
who stood up to the ruling prejudices of the age. In 1955, she refused
to move to the back of the bus. Just three years later, when his
superiors at the United States Army Map Service grilled him on his
sexual orientation, he told them it was none of their damned business.
Kameny had earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in astronomy and was
well-qualified for the job. In the purge of thousands of employees from
the State Department and other elite agencies, the excuse for their
firing was to protect American security as if getting caught in bed with
someone of the same sex could lead to Soviet kompromat.
After being fired, he fought tooth and nail to get his job back since
his main interest at the outset was in protecting his rights, not
leading a movement. Over time, he understood that “an injury to one is
an injury to all”, as the IWW put it. He began fighting for the right of
all gay people to be employed without respect to what they did in their
bedrooms. His first step was to join the Mattachine Society, whose
timidity was at odds with his increasing militancy. Despite the
temperamental and political disconnect, this was the only way for him to
work with a broader movement at the time.
Even with his lofty academic credentials, he never held a regular job
for the rest of his life and was supported by friends and family. Among
his chief accomplishments was pressuring the American Psychiatric
Association to discontinue treating homosexuality as a mental illness.
Among the people who Kameny defended from being fired was an NSA
employee named Jamie Shoemaker whose linguistic skills were much in
demand. As part of the younger generation of gay men, Shoemaker insisted
on his right to employment. Once his fight was won, the NSA no longer
got involved in witch-hunting gays. (For ultraleftists, it is worth
pointing out that allowing such men and women from a victimizing agency
to be victimized increases the odds of others to suffer the same
fate—speaking dialectically.)
When I joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1967, I soon learned that
gays were banned in this revolutionary organization as well. We were
told that if they were arrested, there was the possibility that they
might be pressured into becoming FBI snitches. We got the same reason
for banning drug usage. To some extent, the ban on drugs made sense
since in Texas, for example, activists might face years in prison if
they got caught with a small amount of marijuana.
After Stonewall, the party began to respond to reality and dropped the
ban on homosexuality (but never on drugs). Soon afterward, it carried
out an infelicitously named “gay probe” to ascertain whether it should
assign forces to work in the gay liberation movement.
It ultimately decided against this since the gay movement did not have
the rock-ribbed proletarian composition of the trade union, Black
liberation or Woman’s liberation movement as if window dressers or
florists demanding the right not to be beaten up or even killed was
“petty bourgeois”. It went so far as to take the position that the
slogan “Gay is Good” was unscientific since it could not be established.
While the SWP represented an extreme form of “workerism” that made class
composition a litmus test, I cannot help but point out that much of the
fretting over “identity” issues on the left today strikes me as having
the same sectarian dynamic. If there is any movement today that falls
into such a category it is the one featured in the documentaries
discussed above. Gay people, especially those who are transgender, do
not fit neatly into the “point of production”, plant-gate schemas of the
Leninist sects of the 1960s and 70s who defined the struggle over job
security and safety as one that could unite the entire working class
rather than “particularistic” identity issues.
However, if you look at the most “Leninist” book of them all—V.I.
Lenin’s “What is to be Done—you will see some penetrating observations
on the plant-gate, point of production mentality. He writes:
Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its relation
to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to all
classes of modern society and to the state as an organised political
force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not
confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that
they must not allow the organisation of economic exposures to become
the predominant part of their activities. We must take up actively
the political education of the working class and the development of
its political consciousness.
So what kind of political education does this mean in practice? Lenin
follows up:
Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not
add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because
Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others
in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event
and in championing every protest against tyranny…It intervenes in
every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in
the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive
as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the
Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a
compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against
‘obscene’ publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental
influence on the election of professors, etc., etc.
/Intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and
political life./That is exactly what is called for today in a struggle
against a government that does not make a distinction between cultural
issues and economic justice. In fact, the exploitation of cultural
issues is intended to divide the working class and make it weaker. Those
who trivialize the right of transgender people as peripheral do not
understand this, least of all the sect that I belonged to in a previous
lifetime. Referring to bathroom usage, the Militant newspaper sounded as
if it was making a Tucker Carlson appearance: “The attempt to force
schools to follow these guidelines also ignores the right to privacy,
especially of women who wish to change clothes or use bathroom
facilities without the presence of males.”
Although “Before Homosexuals” was made years before transgender rights
became a burning issue, one hopes that John Scagliotti can make another
film that will take such research into consideration. Ancient Rome, for
example, had multi-seat bathrooms, where people sat side by side on
benches, without partitions, to do their business. Maybe someday society
will figure out that segregating bathrooms by sex makes about as much
sense as segregating them by race. In an interview with The New Yorker,
York University professor Sheila Cavanagh, the author of “Queering
Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination,” concluded
with this fascinating point:
I suspect that bathrooms in the West will always be changing and
adapting to our ideas about bodies. I don’t think we’ll ever settle
on a “perfect” bathroom. Personally, though, I love bathrooms that
play gently and creatively with gender in ways that prompt us to
think outside narrow and prescriptive gender dichotomies. In
Montreal, there’s a place called the Whisky Café which has, in the
“women’s room,” a standing female urinal. On the wall beside the
urinal there are instructions for use. The invitation to stand can
be liberating.
full: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/gay-liberation-gay-cinema/
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