GLR May-June 2023

ESSAY The Skeleton in the Old Left’s Closet V ERNON R OSARIO

H OMOSEXUALITY has long been a political football. Conservatives have accused queer people of all manner of immorality, criminal ity, and treachery. Those on the Left have been equally keen to associate same-sex be havior with upper-class decadence, antirevo lutionary inclinations, and fascism. Marie Antoinette was defamed as a lascivious “tribade” in anti-monarchical porno propaganda. Male “sodomy” was regularly criticized as the decadent privilege of aristocrats. Marx and Engels—like most men of their time—found “pederasts” distasteful, and unwor thy of the same liberationist energies as the proletariat, Black people, and even women. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917, in overturning feudalism and the monarchy, also abol ished the Tsarist criminal code’s antisodomy statute (under the broad principle that “the proletarian state does not intrude into the intimate lives of individual persons”). Some contemporary German socialists, including homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, lobbied for the repeal of the German anti-sodomy law (Paragraph 175). In the 1930s, homophobia became a weapon in the culture sending dissidents and artists to the gulags. Author Maxim Gorky lauded the change, writing in Pravda (23 May 1934) to link homosexuality, the Western petit bourgeoisie, and German fascism: In the land where the proletariat governs courageously and suc cessfully [i.e., the USSR], homosexuality with its corrupting effect on the young is recognized as a social crime punishable under the law. By contrast, in a ‘cultivated land’ of great philosophers, scientists, musicians [i.e., Nazi Germany] it man ifests freely and with impunity. There is already a sarcastic say ing: “Destroy homosexuals—Fascism will disappear.” Quite to the contrary, German fascists were about to exterminate homosexuals. The next month, in the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler began to consolidate power by executing oppo nents under the guise of purging homosexuals—not just from Vernon Rosario is a historian of science and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. He is a child psychiatrist with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. wars for both Right and Left. In 1931, Ger man socialists used homosexual outing as a smear tactic against the Nazis. Anti-sodomy legislation was reintroduced in the Soviet Union in 1933 along with other repressive Stalinist policies (such as the recriminaliza tion of abortion). Male sodomy was made punishable by up to five years of imprison ment (Article 154a), and became grounds for

the military, but from society in general. Hitler went further, lumping homosexuals with Jews and Bolsheviks as dangerous, degenerate revolutionaries to be sent to prison or concentration camps. Thus, both the Right and Left in Europe sought to bol ster manhood, the patriarchal family, and military-industrial power by demonizing homosexuality and purging it from its idealized society. That was a highly abbreviated background on the European origins of the antipathy of the Communist Party, USA ( CPUSA ), toward homosexuals—something that is missing from Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s .The CPUSA was founded in 1919 out of a left-wing split in the Socialist Party. These progressive parties had grown out of earlier labor movements and union organizing linked to international socialist movements of the 19th century. CPUSA helped found the Sharecroppers’ Union in the 1930s and con tinued defending Black civil rights throughout the 20th century. Membership surged in the 1930s with the Great Depression and alarm over fascism in Europe. Communists and socialists found common cause in the Popular Front, part of a global anti-fascist progressive alliance. perverts” from the government. Earlier, at the outset of World War II, psychiatrists had convinced the Selective Service that homosexuals were mentally and morally unfit to serve in the military. This concern only increased with the Cold War. Due to anti-sodomy laws throughout the U.S., gays were also viewed as national security risks: their shameful secret made them vul nerable to Soviet blackmail and recruitment as Red spies. Aptheker points out the tragic irony that CPUSA also purged homosexuals from the Party using the same “enemy within” ra tionale: they were a security risk—but for FBI recruitment and spying on the Left. Aptheker is, for many reasons, an ideal his torian of closeted Communists. She was a “Red Diaper Baby”: both of her parents were lifelong Party members and part of a large contingent of Jewish leftists. Her father, Herbert Aptheker, was a leading Marxist historian and theoretician with seminal publications in African-American history. He became the liter ary executor of socialist intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois—one of the founders of the NAACP . Bettina Aptheker became an official Party member in 1962 and “came out” as a communist at UC– Berkeley when she was a leader in the Free Speech Movement. The Communist Party attracted a wide array of progressives: labor and union or ganizers, garment workers, farm workers, miners, steel workers, artists, and entertain ers. Official membership peaked in the late 1940s, then declined after 1947 during the Cold War. The postwar “Red Scare,” a Com munist witch hunt, was concurrent with a “Lavender Scare”—an attempt to purge “sex

Even after Stonewall, the CPUSA followed the lead of the Soviets in viewing homosexuality as individualistic, petit bourgeois degeneracy.

May–June 2023

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