By the LGBTQIA+ Commission of the American Party of Labor.

An Immediate Origin of Modern Struggle, Existence, and Recognition:

On June 28th, 1970 the very first Pride marches were held in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago to commemorate the one year anniversary of the now famous six day confrontation with police at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. Stonewall Inn was a bar and nightclub popular with LGBTQIA+ people in New York City and was one of the few that would openly serve queer people after a 1966 ruling in New York state that decriminalized serving alcohol to LGBTQIA+ people. However, homosexuality was still considered a crime by New York state law. Police would often arrest or harass LGBTQIA+ people due to their own personal prejudices about gender conforming clothing. This practice tied with the formal outlawing of homosexuality created a culture which allowed police to often raid queer spaces like the Stonewall Inn as they were easy targets for police to fill quotas and few people cared about the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people at the time.

The six day revolt at Stonewall was sparked on the evening of June 28th, 1969 after the police raided Stonewall and, unsurprisingly, used excessive force to detain and arrest many of the people gathered there. After years of raids and victimization at the hands of police the LGBTQIA+ community had finally had enough and began to fight back and struggle for recognition, equality, and liberation. By the morning of June 29th thousands of queer people had entered the streets demanding an end to the oppressive laws and violent police raids. The demonstration lasted for nearly a week and saw much repression and violent attacks from police. It is important to note that every section of the mutli-ethnic and mutli-national LGBTQIA+ community were victims to these raids, and likewise, every section of the multi-ethnic and multi-national LGBTQIA+ community participated in the struggle against them. There has, in the past, been attempts to mitigate the role played by transgender and gender-nonconforming people as well as lesbians and drag queens in the events and aftermath of Stonewall. To let these attempts to mitigate participation and presence does a disservice to the LGBTQIA+ community overall and cannot be allowed to continue.

Since the Stonewall revolt, June 28th, as well as the whole month of June, has been an international time for the recognition of the LGBTQIA+ community and, as a time to feel pride in ourselves and our existence, to honor those who came before us in the struggle for queer rights and continue the fight until total liberation is reached. Pride has its roots in, and is intrinsically tied to, the unapologetic struggle for the recognition and equality of LGBTQIA+ people and communities.

The Communist Movement and the Cause of LGBTQIA+ People:

While the communist and Marxist-Leninist movement has not always had the most progressive stance on LGBTQIA+ communities, there is not a single communist today, worthy of the title, who does not fully uphold the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights and liberation.

Around the world today communists are actively engaged in and sometimes play leading roles in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ liberation. It comes as no surprise that LGBTQIA+ people are predominantly of the working class and the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people is rooted in the oppressive and exploitative system that is capitalism. It is the duty of every communist, of every Marxist-Leninist, to stand with and unite all sections of the working class in the struggle for liberation and socialism. LGBTQIA+ liberation is inseparable from the working class struggle. We in the American Party of Labor are one of many Marxist-Leninist organizations that stand in solidarity with and organize among the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of our international comrades also organize for the rights of LGBTQIA+ workers against social reaction and the domination of the spiritual idealism/pseudo-scientific rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum. The Communist Party of Spain (ML) organizes nationally with the Trans Obrera Sindicalista, a trade union for transgender workers. The Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil platforms gender-nonconforming comrades in the video reports of its news organ, A Verdade and openly celebrates Trans Day of Visibility, and the Communist Party of Labor of the Dominican Republic also programmatically asserts its demands for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The history of LGBTQIA+ rights and the communist movement begins in the year 1898 when August Bebel, a leading member of the German social democratic movement gave the first ever political speech in defense of homosexual rights on the Reichstag floor calling for the removal of German sodomy laws.

The next major step forward was in the aftermath of the Great October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. With the complete overturning and nullification of the Tsarist criminal code homosexuality was decriminalized. Today, many people cite Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code as proof of anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment within the Soviet state. However, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is quoted as saying “that Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality” and Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code was intended to only punish people guilty of abusing children. The Soviet Union, at the time, like much of the rest of the world, shared the view of leading psychologists in which members of the LGBTQIA+ community were believed to have a psycho-sexual disorder. While it is of the utmost importance to understand this view as wholly wrong, it was the official position of science and psychology of the time. What set the Soviet Union apart and ahead of other countries during this time period was that the Soviet Union aimed at ending the “estrangement” faced by members in the LGBTQIA+ community in relation to society, and provided them with various forms of medical care, while other countries criminalized and brutalized queer people. The Soviets, while incorrect about the nature of LGBTQIA+ people, treated them with some sense of dignity, a dignity that was absent in most other countries.

However, this view within socialist countries and the communist movement would not remain stagnant as it did in many capitalist countries. As science and psychology developed and began to recognize the rights and natural existence of LGBTQIA+ people so did socialist states. East Germany decriminalized homosexuality in the 1980s when their Supreme Court decreed that “homosexual people do not stand outside of socialist society.” East Germany was also the first country to openly allow LGBTQIA+ people to serve in its military by issuing that soldiers should “deconstruct traditional moral prejudices against homosexuality.” East Germany also had a remarkable history of allowing sex change surgeries for people who desired them. This profound social change is joined by a long progressive history of queer activism and advocacy in both the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Physicians like Magnus Hirschfeld pioneered techniques of gender reassignment/confirmation surgery for transfeminine people in particular, with a patient at his Institute for Sexual Research, Lili Elbe becoming the first Transgender woman in history to receive a uterus transplant. Hirschfeld was also an early organizer in the gay rights movement that grew to be incredibly organized in Weimar Germany, even if it was heavily influenced by liberal “respectability politics” in its cultural and political campaigns. This Scientific Humanitarian Committee was also supported by the Communist Party of Germany. The LGBTQIA+ movement was an early target for the ascendant Nazi Party as the Brown Shirt gangs burnt down the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Likewise books of biological, cultural and psychological study of homosexuality and gender-nonconforming identity were burnt en masse in the book burnings of the Nazi Party, in particular with the library of the University of Leipzig suffering the loss of its groundbreaking research.

Today, socialist Cuba is a leading force in the world for LGBTQIA+ rights. In 1979, same-sex activity was nationally decriminalized 24 years before the United States. Article 42 of the Cuban Constitution has LGBTQIA+ rights enshrined within it and in 2022 socialist Cuba passed one of the most progressive family codes in history which acknowledges the rights of LGBTQIA+ people and established other advancements for women, children, and the elderly. It should also be noted that since 2008 Resolution 126 was signed into law which allowed for Cubans seeking sexual reassignment/gender confirmation surgery to receive those surgeries provided freely by the Cuban government. Cuba was the first country in Latin America to increase support for transgender and gender-nonconforming people to this level and today socialist Cuba is celebrated for having one of the world’s most inclusive and LGBTQIA+ friendly medical and health programs.

The presentation of the LGBTQIA+ community and its relation to the communist movement of the last century has been distorted by capitalist academia in an effort to slander the communist history of working people and to demoralize the working masses. We must not allow the capitalists to tell us who our enemies are, or what we can and cannot believe or know. At this moment in history, all the progress made by the LGBTQIA+ community has made for itself under liberal capitalist regimes is facing a vicious attack of the reactionary bourgeoisie, our freedom, our culture and our very lives are being attacked with legislation and terrorists of the far-right in alarming intensity. Vile and baseless accusations are launched against LGBTQIA+ people, and in particular the transgender community, in order to justify their policies of popular division and the genocide of queer people. The working class in general, and of course LGBTQIA+ people are not ignorant to this backhanded campaign, not foolish enough to be divided or silent when our very rights and lives are threatened once again with the death throes of a decaying ruling class. If the reactionaries of the USA believe they will succeed where their fascist predecessors failed, they are sorely mistaken. The Marxist-Leninist movement, with the LGBTQIA+ movement firmly supported in our revolutionary solidarity, holds up the banner of Pride, of socialism, to the ending of a society built on division, discrimination and dehumanization. The LGBTQIA+ Commission of the American Party of Labor calls all workers and queer people to struggle and advance our rights, and to remember the meaning of Pride.

Categories: History, LGBTQIA+, Revolutionary History