A historical survey of Marxism and queer life, from the young Soviet Union to Stalinist homophobia.
For decades, common sense dictated that Marxism focused solely on class antagonisms and ignored other forms of oppression, like the oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, many of those claiming the mantle of Marxism, from those in the Stalinist tradition to the social democratic tradition — including even the present-day Democratic Socialists of America — downplayed the importance of special oppression and maintained an economistic strategy that benefited only the upper strata of the working class. But the reactionary positions of Stalinism and social democracy on sexual and gender oppression do not reflect the legacy of Marxism in the slightest, as a look into the history of the revolutionary workers movement shows. Rather, revolutionary socialism in Russia, with the October Revolution, led the way toward a radical change in the material and ideological foundations of LGBTQ+ discrimination. Reactionary deviations occurred when parties and organizations, despite their socialist self-image, abandoned the revolutionary horizon and tried to come to terms with the capitalist world. This historical insight can help us clarify what kind of politics we need for emancipation today with a new onslaught of attacks on the rights of queer people, particularly in the United States, the world’s most advanced capitalist “democracy.”
The Bolshevik Advance
In the second half of the 19th century, a gay scene formed in Russia’s two most important cities, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. It created places for socializing, such as bathhouses; linguistic codes (tetki, which roughly translates as “auntie,” a word that was applied to homosexual men, both by them and others); elements of a dress code; and, at least in private spaces, cross-dressing. As historian Dan Healey describes in his influential work on the history of homosexuality in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, it would be “heterosexist and nationalist chauvinism to claim that in tsarist Russia or in the USSR, this homosexual subculture was imported from abroad or created by Communist misrule.”1
At the same time, same-sex intercourse between men was illegal under the rules of the Orthodox Church. Until 1917, consensual “sodomy” was punishable by exile to Siberia. But the this threat was unevenly realized. The abolition of
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