GLR May-June 2023

She remained a Party member until 1981. Most importantly, she was a closeted les bian until she met her future wife in 1979. She has a celebrated record of activism and Marxist-feminist scholarship, which she detailed in her 2006 memoir Intimate

gay ban in 1991 and a closing chapter on members still active after the ban was lifted, including Angela Davis. Aptheker and Davis have been friends since child hood. Davis is a philosophy professor and activist icon. Aptheker was active in the

COMMUNISTS IN CLOSETS Queering the History 1930s-1990s by Bettina Aptheker Routledge. 255 pages, $44.95

“Free Angela” campaign during Davis’ murder trial in the early 1970s. Aptheker later published The Morning Breaks (1975), an account of this global campaign and Davis’ eventual acquit tal. Like Aptheker, Davis was once married to a man and came out as a lesbian later in life; however, she has not made sexual ity central to her extensive political activism on race and incar ceration. (Her continued political importance is evidenced by the controversy in Florida over inclusion of her work in the AP African-American Studies curriculum.) Of the four main subjects, activist Harry Hay and playwright Lorraine Hansberry have been extensively researched by others. Hay (1912–2002) was a lifelong progressive activist on many fronts, but openly organizing for gay rights led to his expulsion fromthe CPUSA . Nevertheless, his activism and writings were in spired by his Communist roots. Hansberry (1930–1965) was “closeted” her whole life, tragically dying at age 34 of pancre atic cancer. She corresponded with the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis and contributed (anonymously or under a pseudonym) to mid-century homosexual magazines. She was married to a man, then divorced, and had several women lovers later in life. As with most of the individuals in Aptheker’s work, it is unclear why precisely Hansberry remained discrete about her sexuality: the homophobia of the Communist Party, the Black community, her profession, or American society in general? The other two main characters are perhaps less well known, yet they were leaders in both Communist activism and women’s rights: Eleanor Flexner and Elizabeth Millard. Both were white women who came from well-to-do families. Flexner (1908–1995) was a creative powerhouse. She initially followed in her mother’s footsteps as a playwright, then a drama critic. She joined the CPUSA in the late 1930s and went on to leadership in feminist and anti-racist organizations. She was in a “Boston marriage” with fellow progressive Helen Terry for most of her life. She became disenchanted with the Communist cause and left the CPUSA in 1956. Flexner then ded icated herself to researching and publishing an early work in women’s history: Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959). She followed this with a 1972 biography of pioneering 18th-century English feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. She was stricken by the death of her partner in 1981 and then largely withdrew from theworld. Betsy Millard (1911–2010) joined the anti-fascist Popular Front in the 1930s as a Barnard undergraduate and became a member of the CPUSA in 1940. She continued a lifelong career in Communist-associated publications and internationalist women’s rights groups. Her 1948 pamphlet Women Against Myth is a powerful and prescient Marxist-feminist critique of society. At a time when many Communist leaders still saw women’s rights as a distraction from the battle for workers’ rights, Millard presented women’s rights as a labor issue. She also advocated for a broad platform of progressive causes, in cluding the “rights of the triply-oppressed Negro women”

Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Be came a Feminist Rebel. That work generated much controversy in Marxist and African-American Studies circles for its revela tion that her widely admired father had sexually molested her for almost a decade until she became a teenager. She sets that aside in the present book to credit him for inspiring her pro gressive values and introducing her to the leaders of leftist and Black politics. Nevertheless, she notes his streaks of sexism and homophobia. While he could never quite bring himself to deal with his daughter’s lesbianism, he discretely provided her with hints at the many closeted Communists he knew. It seems like the CPUSA (perhaps like all USA until the 1980s) operated under a policy of closeted discretion: as long as you didn’t explicitly come out, useful members could remain in the Party even while everyone knew you were “that way.” Aptheker credits multiple other historians for having cov ered some of this territory in articles and monographs on leftist politics, union organizing, and queer African-Americans, as well as some detailed biographies of women activists. Four cen tral chapters are dedicated to individuals. These are bookended by chapters providing brief but detailed and moving biographies of dozens of queer Communist Party members: one chapter on closeted (or highly discreet) comrades before the CPUSA lifted its

The author, Bettina Aptheker, is a noteworthy CPUSA activist in her own right. 2022 photo (via Nolan Calisch).

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