GLR November-December 2023
aspect of the Protestant Reformation. Con fusion of the terms is a common miscon ception (pun intended). Michael Sirmons, Austin, TX Leaving Laudy To the Editor: A recent “BTW” item [Sept.-Oct. 2023 issue] reported that billboards have appeared in Florida and Texas sponsored by Massa chusetts with the slogan “Massachusetts for us all,” encouraging red state residents to consider moving to a more welcoming state in New England. The item mentioned that states like Georgia and Arizona might be better places for former red state gays to make an impact. In 2011, after living in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC, my husband and I began our retirement in ultra-gay Wilton Manors, Florida. We enjoyed living in the liberal and LGBT-welcoming Ft. Lauderdale area, but by 2020 we found ourselves donat ing to U.S. Senate and other candidates in Georgia and concluded that Florida was un likely to become a blue, or even a purple, state anytime soon. We moved to Savannah, Georgia. After we left Florida, the increas ingly rabid Governor DeSantis redoubled his abuse of Florida’s large LGBT population in his quest for higher office. Georgia is not yet a gay utopia, but we
have some national sway as Georgia voters and our liberal, quirky, and youthful Savan nah community gives us hope for the future. Some of our Florida gay friends have also begun heading to friendlier locales. Voting with one’s feet sometimes sends the proper message to tyrants. We’re glad TheG&LR continues to connect us to the larger national LGBT community. Dan Layman & Eric Miller, Savannah, GA Keeping up with the CPUSA To the Editor, Regarding your review of Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets in the May-June 2023 issue, Vernon Rosario does a fair and honorable job in reviewing it. However, a few errors crept into his review: The caption on the author photo states that Aptheker “is a noteworthy CPUSA ac tivist in her own right.” “Was” is the correct tense of the verb here. She has not been a Party activist for many decades. [Please note that captions are written by the editor.] Some of Rosario’s statements about Eliz abeth—Betty (not “Betsy”)—Millard are questionable. And I write, by the way, as an intimate friend of hers from the day I met her in 1957 until she died in 2010. He writes: “She continued a lifelong career in Communist-associated publications and in ternationalist women’s groups.” If Betty
joined the CPUSA in 1940 and left it in the mid-50s following the Khrushchev revela tions about Stalin, that adds up to maybe sixteen or seventeen years of Party activism. She did not publish in Party organs after that, nor was she committed to any “interna tionalist women’s group” after that point. A period of under two decades is hardly “life long,” especially if you live to 98! Betty’s 1948 pamphlet was titled “Woman Against Myth,” not “Women Against Myth.” As for the claim that, if anything, the CPUSA became “ more homophobic [e]ven as the USSR was collapsing,” Rosario notes that at the Party’s 1991 National Convention, “it also debated and lifted its six-decade ban on homosexual membership.” That sounds more like a sign of progress than of deeper entrenchment. I don’t say this to defend the CPUSA ’s policy before, during, and for a long time after those years, but logically his state ment doesn’t make sense. Indeed, from the outside I was among the Party’s most persist ent critics on this score. The CPUSA is fully on board now with LGBT struggles, and publishes regularly on this topic, both on its own website and in the pages of its flagship daily online publication People’s World . Sadly, in some circles with a long memory, the odor of its past history still hovers over it. I for one
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