GLR May-June 2023

sion of rebellions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The leadership of the CPUSA (including Aptheker’s father) continued to support the USSR through the 1980s. Even after Stonewall, CPUSA also followed the lead of Soviets on viewing homosexuality as individualistic, petit-bourgeois degeneracy in compatible with a collectivist proletarian revolution. If anything, Apkteker argues, it became more homophobic. Even as the USSR was collapsing, Aptheker notes, the Party’s general secretary de nounced Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (openness) and Pere stroika (restructuring) at the 1991 National Convention in Cleveland. At the same meeting, it also debated and lifted its six decade ban on homosexual membership. However, it was not until 2005 that CPUSA fully embraced the fight against LGBT op pression under the rationale that the “ultra-right” uses hatred against LGBT people as a wedge issue to divide the working class. Aptheker notes that this change in policy happened without the Party’s acknowledgment of its long history of homophobia and its use of it as a class wedge issue. Portraying homosexual ity as intrinsically bourgeois meant ignoring socio-economically oppressed queer people. Aptheker’s research is extensively drawn from diverse archives, including those of the CPUSA donated to NYU. She had

(class, race, and gender). She closed her essay with an idealized view of Soviet society: After a hundred years of the modern struggle for women’s equality, Soviet women are urged in their magazines to educate themselves and grow, to fulfill their production quotas and thus add to the happiness and well-being of the nation; while judg ing from the number of square feet given over to the subject in every issue of the Ladies Home Journal , the highest ideal of American womanhood is smooth, velvety, kissable hands. However, a decade later, she quit the CPUSA , fed up with its hos tility to feminism and gay rights (according to her niece). Aptheker also suggests that Millard and Flexner, like tens of thou sands of other Party members, resigned in outrage after the pub lication of the “Khrushchev Report.” Nikita Krushchev’s secret address to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences,” revealed Stalin’s campaign of repression, imprisonment, and “annihilation.” (He left out his own involvement in the purges.) Leaked to the press in 1956, the Report led to distress all around the socialist world. However, leaders of CPUSA continued to support the USSR as the bastion of proletarianism and defended Soviet military suppres

George Cecil Ives: Out Poet, Lover of Bosie ARTMEMO

R EBECCA B ATLEY N ways dressed in sober brown, often tweed, suits, his conventional appearance belied both an iron will and a prolific homosexual lifestyle at a time when that was illegal. I came across George Cecil Ives while looking for material about sports at the turn of the 20th century. Ives was a huge fan of cricket and kept meticulous records for nu merous matches in his scrapbooks. He would later become, inadvertently, the first openly gay first-class cricketer when he took to the field himself, not terribly successfully, in 1902. My own interest in cricket is limited at best, but Ives was also a poet and political campaigner. His book Eros’ Throne (1900) is quite remarkable, being full of anger, lust, and outrage at a world that not only con demned his homosexual nature but also en dorsed the brutal treatment of those less fortunate than himself. The poetry is almost unique for the period in making no attempt at all to hide his nature and views. Ives believed that his homosexuality was entirely natural, writing lines such as: “strange that tale of sex division./ Borne down the aged flow of tide,/ Nothing bizarre and capricious/ but by nature has been made” ( Eros’ Throne ). This view point remained as steadfast throughout his life as his love of cricket. One cricket match in particular looms O ONE who saw George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) would have suspected that he was anything remarkable. Al

large in Ives’ story. It took place on June 30, 1892, when Ives watched Vernon Hill of Ox ford smash Cambridge in cricket. Ives took particular note of this match because, that same evening, he attended a dinner at the Au thors’ Club, where he met a flamboyant young man by the name of Oscar Wilde. It’s hard to imagine two men more different than the outgoing Wilde and the understated Ives,

fledgling organization, it’s unclear whether Wilde actually joined or not. Nevertheless Ives wrote on October 26th that he felt that “Wilde’s influence” on what he called “The Cause” “would be considerable.” He would later be outraged at Wilde’s imprisonment. Ives went on to have a brief but passionate affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, and through Douglas he was able to forge many contacts at Oxford and with the leading figures of the age. Whether or not Wilde ever joined “The Cause,” Ives figures prominently in Wilde’s diaries, as they moved in the same circles and often had relationships with the same men. In these diaries, Ives can be seen in cafés and clubs, kissing and debating law with men of talent and influence. He also met with Rad clyffe Hall, whom he disliked intensely. It was all a far cry from his humble childhood. Ives was born in Frankfurt in 1867, the il legitimate son of an English army officer. The identity of his mother is unclear, but he was raised by his paternal grandmother Emma Ives, and there is scarcely a page in his voluminous scrapbooks in which he does n’t mention or refer to her. She was very much the dominant influence on his early life. It was at her suggestion that he began, while attending Magdalene College, Cam bridge, to keep the now famous scrapbooks in which he recorded everything from news paper cuttings about criminal cases to gossip about his lovers. It was while at Cambridge that Ives began to campaign for the decriminalization of ho

but the two would later share a passionate kiss—once Ives had shaved at Wilde’s re quest. By this time, Ives was already heavily involved in the homosexual scene of which Wilde was a part, and he hoped to recruit Wilde to join his campaign for an end to the oppression of male homosexuals, but due to the secrecy that necessarily shrouded Ives’ George Cecil Ives as a cricketer. LGBT+ History.

TheG & LR

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