Collective Statement

This is a socialist journal edited by gay men. We have a

two fold aim in producing this magazine. First, we hope
to contribute towards a marxist analysis of homosexual
oppression. Secondly, we want to encourage in the gay
movement an understanding of the links between the struggle against sexual oppression and the struggle for socialism.

The Gay Movement

Our common framework is our experience of the gay
liberation movement. We have all benefited from our
involvement in the movement, particularly from its two
unifying elements: the emphasis on honesty and openness
in our gayness (coming out); and gay pride, with its
combination of solidarity and togetherness. The gay movement that arose in the early 1970s stressed these new
values in opposition both to straight society and to the gay
subculture that had arisen in the interstices of that society,
and which was, in effect, a ghetto defined by straight
values. 'Out of the closets and into the streets' had a real
meaning in challenging gay people's acceptance of heterosexual society's definition of them. But once these new
insights were absorbed the movement lost its coherence.
The counter-culture emphasis which dominated the early
movement stressed personal change as the key to social
change and the elimination of sexism. The emphasis was
on awareness groups, consciousness-raising groups, political
drag, communes and dropping out. But the power structures of society were left completely untouched, and the
lives of the majority of gay people were left completely
unchanged by the sweet smells of incense, inspiration and
home-baked bread. There was no realistic recognition of
the ways in which sexuality is moulded to serve the needs
of society. And, as a result, the G.L.M. was characterized
by extreme fragmentation and/or reformist policies. It is
pointless lamenting the sense of purpose of the early days,
even to try to recreate it. Nostalgia is the enemy of progress. Radical gay analysis must start with the movement
as it is, and for this reason we start with the most public
manifestation of the gay movement ; its press.

The Gay Press

The popular gay press, which includes magazines, periodicals and newspapers, has proliferated in the last five years.
Some understanding of the purpose of this press will go
some way to explaining why we feel the need for a new
journal. The gay press is largely related to, and dependent
on, the expansion of the gay, and largely male, subculture.
This subculture itself has two functions ; it acts primarily,
and with most value, as a focus of identity for gay people
who can within it begin to achieve a community ; but,
secondly, it creates this community within the confines of
capitalist values. Its success depends upon exploiting existing stereotype sexual attitudes and seeks to institutionalize
the gay subculture without making any attempt to challenge either the basic family unit or the sexual roles necessary for its survival.
Parts of the gay press have been concerned solely with
serving a gay market. Such periodicals as Him or Line

Up act as a vehicle for the exchange of goods and services

in that market, devoting a large amount of space to contact ads.
By far the most popular and successful gay newspaper
is Gay News which first appeared three years ago. Its
attempts to raise gay consciousness through a fairly concerted emphasis on civil rights, are, however, circumscribed
by its dependence on the gay commercial market for its
continued existence. The result is that while championing
'gay rights', it nevertheless fails to challenge sexist stereotypes in its advertising and personal contact ads. These
seemingly contradictory aspects of Gay News have the
effect of co-opting a rising gay consciousness into capitalist
values and structures.
At present, gay activists who need the subculture for
community and identity, but reject its values and lack of
political awareness, have no press focus. From 1972-4, the
Gay Marxist journal was an attempt to meet this need by
acting as a forum for discussion of radical gay arguments.
However, the journal had no clear editorial policy or
political base. It accepted articles, not only from marxists
but also from anti-marxists and reactionaries, and it finally
failed through lack of purpose and direction. Our journal
is seeking to meet the needs of radical gays by providing
a forum for discussion. We plan to work within a clearly
expressed collective policy which will be reflected in the
articles selected to be published.

The Collective
As a group of gay men we believe it necessary to work
out a marxist theory of sexuality. As gays, we have each
been forced into examining why heterosexual society
abuses, reviles and persecutes us. Each of us has come to
realize that this oppression is linked with the role of the
family and the subjection of women. These in turn are,
we believe, related to the capitalist system of production.
By working . together, developing our understanding of
capitalism and sharing our experiences of intolerance, we
will attempt to draw the links between the family, the
oppression of women and gay people, and the class structure of society.
The present collective, which has for some time been
meeting regularly, decide for the time being at least, that
we could best explore our sexist attitudes most truthfully,
in an all-male group.

Where We Stand
The women's movement was the first, historically, to
pose the need to confront sexism. Sexism is the discrimination against people on the grounds of their gender or
sexual orientation ; it is the stereotype expectation of what
women and men should be or do. The anti-sexist struggle
was a major part of the early gay liberation movement.
This developed out of the contradictions of a society which
proclaimed the 'sexual revolution' but limited sexual freedom to the young, the pretty, the heterosexual. The early
Gay Liberation Front proclaimed that sexism and the
resulting oppression of women and gays was so endemic

to society that it could only be obliterated by a transformation of society. But this was a statement more on the level
of moral exhortation than of scientific analysis. As a group
we feel the need for a materialist analysis of sexual
oppression and hope that this journal will contribute to
that end.
It seems clear to us that sexism is generated and perpetuated in the family unit. In capitalist society the family
has a two-fold function: economic and ideological.
Firstly, the sharp polarization of male/female roles in
the family, with the male role dominant in production, the
female subordinate in the home or secondary labour
market, serves the economic needs of capitalism. The
system of domestic production, centred in the home, and
integrating all members of the family into it, was replaced
during the early part of the nineteenth century by the
growth of factory production which tore the worker from
the home.
The then existing role differentiation between men and
women sharpened during this early factory period as male
workers became the dominant wage earners and women,
being responsible for child-care in the home, and earning
only half the equivalent male wage when working, were
forced into the roles of housewife, mother and secondary
labourer. Because the factory system made families entirely dependent on wages, the work done by women in the
home, which didn't earn a wage, tended to be seen as
valueless. Similarly, the fact that women earned less as
workers, tended to reinforce their subservient economic
and social position relative to men.
The needs of the factory system were met by this subservient position of women because they provided a pool of
cheap labour that could be drawn on when needed, e.g.,
during periods of economic expansion and easily discarded
when employment shrank. The production of domestic
work, i.e. the raising and care of workers, was ensured
without being a drain on the profits of the workplace.
The present ideological framework of male and female
roles can therefore be seen as a manifestation of the
particular sexual division of labour which arose as a
consequence of the growing dominance of industrial
capital.
Secondly, the family has an ideological role, both in
perpetuating the class position of its members (the female's
class position is always defined by that of her husband) and
in defining the subordination of the woman, economically,
socially and emotionally, to the man. It claims as natural
what has been socially created and moulds the emotions to
serve the sexually created gender expectations. In the process it rejects homosexuals, transvestites, transexuals:
people who do not conform to the social expectations that
are needed to perpetuate the capitalist economy. Whatever
the ideological forms it takes (the religious one of 'sin', the
medical one of 'sickness') ultimately gay oppression is a
result of the demands made on the family by a capitalist
society.

The Way Forward

Sexual oppression cannot be destroyed under the capitalist system, though no doubt local victories may well be
won. It is essential, therefore, for us as gay people, to
begin to link our oppression to the wider system of exploitation and oppression that capitalism operates. But at the
same time, the question of sexuality must he confronted by
the self-defined revolutionary left and by the labour movement generally. Many of them still fail to see sexism as
having a materialist basis ; or they believe that sexual
orientaton is biological and immutable instead of being a
result of social conditioning. Some revolutionary groups
argue that sexism will disappear after the revolution,
accepting its presence now but failing to understand how
it forces gays and women to conform to sexist roles and
consequently prevents us from rejecting the values connected with those roles which are intrinsic to capitalism.
Part of our task in relation to the revolutionary left is to
expand the discussion of sexuality which occurred pre-1914
in the works of Engels, Kollontai and Zetkin. This task
has been taken up and developed in the women's movement which is the main force posing the relationship
between sexism and capitalism.
As revolutionary gays we realize that a socialist revolution can only be made by the working class. It has great
strength but is held in check by a reformist leadership, and
Gay Left 2

fragmented by regional and craft differences. Areas such as

women's and gay oppression have been largely ignored in
the labour movement. We therefore support gay caucuses
in the Trade Unions and rank and file movements. But it
is only in the context of building a revolutionary movement committed to fighting against both sexism and capitalism that there is any real hope of achieving gay liberation.
We do not approach the revolutionary left with a ready
made analysis, nor do we expect to be presented with one.
By developing marxist theory and practice in the ways we
have suggested we can strengthen and enrich the revolutionary tradition. We would agree with Juliet Mitchell
when she wrote in Women's Estate that :
The oppressed consciousness of all groups contributes to
the nature of socialist ideologyif any oppressed awareness is missing from its formation that is its loss.
We intend this journal to contribute to the development
of a broader socialist analysis.

Editorial Note
In the first issue of Gay Left members of the collective
have contributed nearly all the articles. We have attempted
to explore sexual politics from a revolutionary point of
view and hope that in future we will receive a response on
the part of the gay community and particularly from those
members who are socialists.
In one way we feel that this issue has not completely
fulfilled our aims. There are no articles on lesbianism or
female sexuality. We realize that the oppression of gay
people is intrinsically bound together with the oppression
of women, but this first issue inevitably relates to our own
experiences as gay men.
In future issues we would like women, either as individuals or in collectives, to contribute their own articles
to the magazine. Only by these sorts of exchanges can we
all work for an understanding of our position as gay men
and women who are socialists.
We ask for articles, reviews, letters, notes of meetings,
relevant press cuttings, etc. from all gay socialists, men or
women. The only proviso, which we as a collective have
hammered out, is that we will not publish any main articles which directly subvert the editorial policies. That is to
say, we will not publish articles which are anti-Marxist,
anti-socialist, anti-feminist or anti-gay.
Members of the Gay Left collective are:

Keith Birch, Gregg Blachford, Bob Cant, Emmanuel

Cooper, Ross Irwin, R. Kincaid, Angus Suttie, Jeffrey
Weeks, Nigel Young.

Contents
Where Engels Feared to Tread. Jeffrey Weeks
Gays and the Trade Union Movement. Bob Cant
Gays in Cuba. Keith Birch
The Case of John Warburton. Nigel Young
Coming Out Politically. R. Kincaid
CHE in Close Up. Emmanuel Cooper
Gay Workers' Conference. Gregg Blachford
Document. David Widgery
Book Reviews
Guttersnips

Gay Left Collective

Published by Gay Left Collective,
c/o 36a Craven Road, London W2.
Typesetting by Finsbury Park Typesetters Ltd,
London N4.
Printed by SW Litho.

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Where Engels Feared to Tread

By Jeffrey Weeks
A socialist involved in the gay movement has to look two
ways: to the movement itself, which is fragmented,
generally civil rights oriented, and often apolitical (C.H.E.
is 'the biggest club in Europe') ; and to the labour and
socialist movements, which have, over the past fifty years
or so, almost completely ignored sexual matters. On the
reformist wing of the labour movement the struggle for
sexual freedom has been seen as a matter of `individual
conscience' ; amongst the revolutionary groups, where
the issue has been raised at all, it is generally seen as a
'personal' matter, irrelevant to the wider class struggle.
The gay socialist, therefore, has a complex task: on the
one hand, to attempt to convince the socialist groups of the
relevance and significance of the struggle for gay
liberation ; and, on the other, to convince the gay
movement of the necessity of combining the struggle for
sexual freedom with the struggle of the working class for
socialism.
The gay liberation movement of the early 1970s made
two theoretical gains which are worth re-emphasizing :
first, the recognition that 'personal' issues are political,
in the clear sense that personalities, and sexual
personalities, are moulded by social forces ; secondly, that
the struggle for personal liberation can only be successful
by a common involvement of 'all oppressed peoples'.
The trouble with these statements was that they remained
on the level of moral exhortations rather than becoming
analytical tools which needed development ; and as the
movement lost its original utopian clarity, they were
reduced to pious platitudes.
Where Marxism differs from other socialist theories is
in its conviction that capitalist society has produced social
movements which must struggle against capitalism in
order to achieve economic, social and personal justice.
Socialism, therefore, becomes not a blueprint for the
millenium but a necessary product of the struggle of the
working class and oppressed peoples to throw off their
shackles. The last few years or so have shown that many of
the original aims of gay liberation can be achieved this
side of socialism, through the conscious intervention of
gay people themselves, pushing at the slackening bar of,
nineteenth century bourgeois morality. But there is still
no evidence that the root of gay oppression, the sharp
gender expectations enshrined in the family, will he tackled
by a late capitalist society manifestly disintegrating. It is
this awareness that justifies gay socialists campaigning to
draw gays, women and men, into the struggle against
capitalism. But this having been said, the revolutionary
socialist grouplets, with one or two tokenistic exceptions,
have hitherto shown remarkably little interest in taking
up the issue. This is not a failure of 'real' socialists to
take up a 'peripheral' matter. It is a result of a total
inability of revolutionary groups to break out of a long
economistic tradition. It represents, above all, a theoretical
failure to grasp that a ruling class perpetuates itself not
only through the economic and ideological forms of
exploitation and oppression, but also through the
character structures, the emotional formations, of its
members. Certain issues, particularly male/female sexual
relations and characteristics, are implicitly seen as beyond
ti me and history, not subject to historical processes and
social transformation. This misconception is rooted in the
development of Marxist theory, but at the same time it is
the Marxist awareness of historical processes which
provides the key to broaden the theory. This historical
narrowness is particularly obvious in the case of
homosexuality. To remedy it we must begin to cut a
pathway through tangled woods ... where Engels feared
to tread.

Engels et al
The starting point for our exploration must lie in the
works of Marx and Engels, and Engel's Origin of the
Family is the locus classicus for the search. This work
begins with the absolutely essential precondition for a
Marxist analysis, the assumption that the sexual division
of labour, between men and women, and the historical
supremacy of men over women, has a material base, is

rooted in the mode of production. He then makes a second

assumption: that the relationship he sees in the bourgeois
family, with the male's supremacy based on his economic
position in a commodity producing economy, and his
desire to ensure uncontested inheritance of his property,
can be pushed back to the origins of class society. The
overthrow of mother right and the growth of a social
surplus controlled by men coincided with the `world
historic defeat of the female sex'. Whatever the historical
validity of this, a logical deduction follows from it : that
only on the basis of women's full re-introduction into
social labour on equal terms with men will their liberation
be achieved.
`The predominance of the man in marriage,' Engels
wrote, `is simply a consequence of his economic
predominance and will vanish with it automatically.' (1)
' Automatically': behind this simple word are a number
of assumptions which have persisted throughout Marxist
tradition.
1. Firstly, there is a clear assumption of the 'natural',
biological basis of social roles. The sexual division of
labour between men and womenwith the women
primarily responsible for child careis not questioned.
It only assumes oppressive qualities, we must understand
from Engels, with the development of private property,
and he seems to believe that under socialism the family
will embody a traditional division of labour, even though
many of the family's previous functions will be socialised.
2. Secondly, as a corollary of this, there is an inevitable
bias towards heterosexuality. Marx and Engels inherited
from the utopian socialists a classically romantic belief
in the all-embracing nature of true love between men
and women:
`our sex love has a degree of intensity and duration
which make both lovers feel that non possession and
separation are a great, if not the greatest calamity ; to
possess one another they risk high stakes, even life
itself'.(2)
This sex love has been distorted by commodity production,
but will flourish on a higher plane under socialism so that
` monogamy, instead of collapsing, (will) at last become a
reality'.(3)
Homosexuality is consequently abhorred, its expressions
seen as 'gross, unnatural vices'. Its manifestations are
seen as symptoms of the failure of sex love and the
degradation of women, so that, for example, in ancient
Greece:
`this degradation of women was avenged on the men and
degraded them also, till they fell into the abominable
practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and
themselves with the myth of Ganymede'.(4)
It would have been extraordinary in the early 1880s if
Engels had thought otherwise. It reveals, however, a failure
to explore the social and historical determinants of sexual
and emotional behaviour which underlines another key
assumption.
3. Engels seems to believe that sexual oppression can be
directly deduced from economic exploitation, and without
which it would disappear. As a result his outline of the
family is bare and external, bones without flesh. He
assumes that the 'personal' is natural and given, and that
once the constraints of a society dominated by the pursuit
of profit are removed private life would spontaneously
adjust itself to a higher stage of civilisation. There is no
concept, that is, of the need for conscious struggle to
transform inter-personal relations as part of the
transformations necessary for the construction of a
socialist society.
Within the socialist movements of the Second
International (1889 to c1914) Engels work was treated not
as the starting point but as the last word. The key to
women's emancipation was seen as entry into the work
force, so that the women's struggle was related directly to
the class struggle. Women's domestic labour was left
unanalysed, as was the nature of 'personal' life, and
particularly female sexuality. In his conversations with
Clara Zetkin Lenin lashes her for allowing German
women's groups to spend evenings discussing 'sex and
marriage problems': 'I could not believe my ears when
I heard that.(5) It is worth adding that even in 1975, when
a British Trotskyist group seeks to raise the women's issue,
it quotes this very sentence as if it were the height of
wisdom, ignoring the specific context and its general
Gay Left 3

irrelevance to the modern women's movement. (6)

Nevertheless, as a result of this emphasis, questions of sex
were relegated to the arena of 'personal freedom' where
they have remained to this day.

Homosexual Rights
However, although never integrated into Marxist theory,
demands for homosexual law reform were taken up by a
number of socialists in the period c1890 to 1930in
Germany, Britain and the USSR. We must be clear about
the basis on which this was done.
The last couple of decades of the nineteenth century saw
a tightening up on the restrictions against homosexuality
in many leading capitalist countries, and particularly in
Germany and Britain. The notorious Paragraph 175 of
the German penal code, and the 1885 Labouchere
amendment in England had the function of controlling
male homosexual behaviour and of more sharply defining
the acceptable heterosexual male role: as W. T. Stead
said in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial 'the male is
sacrosanct ; the female is fair game'.(7) The result on the
part of liberal reformers, and increasingly on the part of
some homosexuals themselves, was a campaign to change
the law and public opinion. This had two overlapping
aspects: the political campaign to support change in the
penal codes ; and a theoretical attempt to conceptualise
homosexuality. In both respects, Germans were in the
vanguard, with Magnus Hirschfeld as the dominant figure ;
the German gay movement found a more muted response
in England, with individuals such as Edward Carpenter
and Havelock Ellis as the most prominent publicists.
Theoretically the aim was to prove that homosexuality was
not a sin, nor properly a sickness, and therefore ought not
to be a crime. It was seen, in Havelock Ellis's word, as
an anomoly, based on biological variation, while
Hirschfeld (and Carpenter) preferred to see homosexuals
as forming an 'intermediate sex'. The important point to
note is that except on the fringes of the movement no
attempt was made to question existing definitions of
gender roles. On the contrary, the existence of
homosexuals was not used to challenge gender concepts
but to confirm them. The political consequence of this
was to place the debate on the level of civil rights for a
sexual minority who could not help being what they were.
This in turn demanded an orientation to law reform, and
,gaining maximum support for pressure to be brought on
the appropriate legislating bodies. Oscar Wilde had
written:
' Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment
Act would do any good. That is the essential. It is not so
much public opinion as public officials that need
education'.(8)
This sort of approach led to a consistent attempt to
present an ultra-respectable image for gay people.
Hirschfeld admitted that he had played down pederasty
for fear of delaying law reform, and both he and Ellis
in Britain created in their studies a clear image of the
upright and moral character of their male homosexual
subjects. A consequence, of course was to a large extent
the ignoring of lesbianism, which was not subject to legal
penalties, although the subject did become a matter of
public controversy later (e.g. during The Well of
Loneliness case in Britain). Further, because of the
emphasis on law reform efforts had to be made to
maximise cross class support, and hence a real reluctance
to commit the campaign to a clear political position.
Hirschfeld himself was a supporter of the (then) Marxist
Social Democratic Party and his earliest political support
had come from this quarter. Edward Bernstein, before
his revisionist heresies, contributed an important analysis
of the material base of bourgeois sexual hypocrisy in the
wake of the Wilde trial ; and August Bebel, a founder of
the S.D.P., gave his support in the Reichstag to law
reform.(9) He seems to have found Hirschfeld's campaign
too apolitical, in fact, and urged him to go further in
mobilising support in the early 1900s. By 1912 Hirschfeld's
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee came out for a more
consistently political commitment. They issued an
advertisement just before the 1912 election as follows:
' Third Sex : Consider This! In the Reichstag, on May 31,
1905, members of the Centre, the Conservatives, and the
Economic Alliance spoke against you .. but for you
the orators of the Left! Agitate and vote accordingly!'
Gay Left 4

This is posed as a tactical rather than a strategic alliance,

but it reflected a real balance of opinion. The S.D.P.ers
had given consistent support to repeal of Para 175 in the
Reichstag from 1897 onwards, and after the split in the
international workers' movement following the Russian
Revolution, the revolutionary tradition as embodied in the
Communist Party continued to do so, at least till 1930.
In May 1928, in reply to a questionnaire, it stated:
'the CP has taken a stand for the repeal of Para 175 at
every available opportunity.'
However, despite this left wing support, Para 175 was not
repealed, and the campaign to change the law was
eventually swamped in the descent into fascism after 1930.
Seen as a secondary issue, it was never given priority in a
period of economic turmoil.
As in Germany, it was generally the liberals and
socialists who favoured reform of the law in Britain, but
no large scale campaign to change the 1885 Act was to
emerge until the post Wolfenden period in the 1950s. And
although Edward Carpenter, perhaps the most persistent
propagandist of the gay cause at the beginning of the
century, was deeply respected in the labour movement, his
views on homosexuality were treated with indifference.
A dialogue he had with Robert Blatchford, editor of the
socialist paper The Clarion, in the early 1890s illustrates
the problem. Blatchford defended Carpenter, and urged
readers to study his works on women. But when Carpenter
wrote to Blatchford in late 1893 suggesting that he write
on sexual matters, the latter replied:
'I am radical but ... the whole subject is nasty to me.'
And in a further letter he wrote:
' Now, you speak of writing things about sexual matters,
and say that these are subjects which socialists must face.
Perhaps you are right ; but I cannot quite see with you.'
To justify this he put forward arguments which still
enjoy currency :
1. That reform of sexual relations would follow
industrial and economic change.
2. If this is so, then anything which inhibited economic
change would also hinder sexual change. And as sex
reform was unpopular, it would be best not to raise it at
present.
3. 'I think that the accomplishment of the industrial
change will need all our energies and will consume all
the years we are likely to live.' As a result, sex reform will,
'not concern us personally, but can only concern the
next generation."(10)
Blatchford's mechanistic position was not untypical, and
went with an unholy worship of the family and the British
imperial mission ; it rehearses all the common prejudices
still heard on the revolutionary left. Carpenter's views on
sex, convinced as he was of the moral superiority of the
intermediate sex, bearers of a 'cosmic consciousness',
hardly fitted comfortably into British socialism. A more
typical position was that put forward by the Marxist
philosopher, Belfort Bax, who questioned whether,
'morality has anything at all to do with a sexual act,
committed by the mutual consent of two adult
individuals, which is productive of no offspring, and
which on the whole concerns the welfare of nobody but
the parties themselves.'
This is the classically liberal argument for toleration, and
it has been the most typical 'progressive' view on the left.(11)
This was pre-eminently the case in Bolshevik Russia.
Penal restrictions on homosexual acts were removed in
1918 along with the legalisation of abortion and
contraception, the liberalisation of divorce etc. These have
been seen by Wilhelm Reich as the harbingers of sexual
revolution brought in on the wings of the social.(12) But in
actuality it must be doubted whether these legal gains
ever amounted to more than a formal acceptance of the
most advanced bourgeois theories, given the enormous
social backwardness of the Soviet population. Little was
done to positively encourage social acceptance of
homosexuality, and although throughout the 1920s Soviet
laws were regarded as models for the rest of Europe, no
theoretical advances were made. The impact of the
reforms was probably not deeply rooted by the time the
reactionary Stalinist juggernaut overtook them in the
1930s.
To sum up these strands of evidence, it is clear that the
gay question was raised in the ranks of the left,
particularly in Germany, and formal support to legal

equality was often given in varying degrees. But the issue

was never seen as a vital one because it was never posed
as a challenge to orthodox views of gender roles.

Reaction
The question was always seen as one of individual civil
rights, and the civil rights argument is the one that is most
consistently being taken up again in the modern socialist
tendencies as they find it necessary to respond to the gay
liberation movement. But the view that has dominated
Marxist orthodoxy since the 1930s is that of
homosexuality as a bourgeois deviation and decadence.
There are two overlapping sources for this. The first is the
Stalinist counter revolution in the Soviet Union in the
1930s, which subordinated all aspects of personal
freedom to the priorities of production as determined by
a parasitic bureaucracy. The strengthening of the family
was seen as a necessary part of this, and with it went the
revocation of most of the legal gains of the early
revolutionary period. In March 1934 homosexuality again
became a criminal offence in the U.S.S.R.(13) It was
specifically defined as a product of 'decadence in the
bourgeois sector of society' and a 'fascist perversion'.
The apparent rampant homosexuality of the upper
echelons of the Nazi party was used as one element in
justification. In fact, Hirschfeld's books had already been
burnt in Nazi Germany, and almost simultaneously with
Stalin's clamp down the Roehm purge (the 'night of the
long knives') inaugurated a new wave of terror against
German gays. The fascist counter-revolution of the 1930's
took homosexuals as one of its categories of scapegoats.
But because of the central role of Stalinism in the world
communist movement there was no challenge to this sexual
counter-revolution in the various C.P.'s. A belief in
homosexuality as a bourgeois decadence survives in many
of the Stalinist Parties to this day.
The second source is closely intertwined with the first
and stems from a particular interpretation of the psychoanalytical tradition. This sets up a norm of heterosexual
`genital sexuality' as the height of sexual relations, and
homosexuality is seen as a falling from this. The work of
Wilhelm Reich is the locus for much of this attitude.
Juliet Mitchell has shown the way in which his values were
a reaction against the decadence of pre-Nazi Berlin :
With chronic unemployment the mass of the people had
little left to sell but their bodies. It is against this
bourgeois decadence and working class wretchedness that
the moral tone of Reich's sexual theories must be set
his predilection for hetero and healthy sexuality, his wish
for men to be men and women, women.'(14)
Reich was clearly trapped within gender stereotypes, but
his view of heterosexual fucking as the height of sexual
health recurred again in the early counter culture of the
1960s, which, at first at least, was extremely hostile to
gay sexuality. In the case of Reich it came from an
inability to historicise the question of sexuality, which,
following nineteenth century convention he saw as a fixed
quantity of energy. However, in his attemptnot the last
by any meansto synthesise the works of Marx and
Freud he had little guidance in the classical Marxist texts.

Whither?
In the coming period of economic turmoil and class
conflict it is quite possible that Marxist tendencies will
again fail to respond to the questions of so called 'personal
politics' with the seriousness they demand. David
Thorstad's experiences in the American Socialist Workers'
Party (S.W.P.) has shown clearly the limits of even an
apparently 'sympathetic' Trotskyist group. Its policy, he
wrote :
`reduced the gay liberation struggle to a struggle for gay
rights ; it refused to see it as a struggle against the
exclusive heterosexual norm of capitalist society, as a
struggle for a society in which the suppressed homosexual
potential of everybody could be liberated.' (15)
Compared with the refusal of various British socialist
tendencies to contemplate even . a. gay rights position, this
might seem an advance. But a Marxist analysis of sexuality
cannot stand still on outmoded positions, which have
been superseded by the self activity of gay people
themselves. However understandable the narrowness of
Trotskyist groups in particular when seen in the historic
context of capitalist and Stalinist terror, they have a duty

now to realise the potential fullness of Marxist theory.

As Thorstad's article suggests, a Marxist analysis must
begin with an awareness of the function of the bourgeois
family in defining rigid gender roles, and in delimiting the
expression of sexuality. The women's movement and the
gay movement have made considerable theoretical strides
in exploring these areas, but the understanding of sexuality
as such, and its social determinants, is as yet in its infancy.
However, as a document in the S.W.P. controversy made
very clear :
'The ultimate impact and appeal of the gay liberation
movement can only be understood on the basis of the
fact that it involves a struggle not merely for the rights
of a presently constituted minority who are defined as
gay, but for an end to the built in need of capitalist
society to suppress homosexual behaviour in all of its
members.'
It is in such an analysis that we can begin to see the
inter-connection between the 'personal' and the 'political'.
And their merger into a common revolutionary practice
is a task for the immediate, not the post revolutionary
future.

Notes and references

1 F. Engels, quoted in Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the

Family, and Personal Life (A Canadian Dimension
Pamphlet) P 70. This is a very useful study of the
question. A slightly different version of the translation of
this quote can be found in Engels, The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State edited by Eleanor
Burke Leacock (Lawrence and Wishart) P 145. I have
generally used this edition for quotations.
2 Engels, Origins, P 140.
3 Engels, op cit.
4 Ibid P 128.
5 Lenin, On the Emancipation of W omen (Progress
Publishers, Moscow) P 101.
6 See Socialist Press No. 7 (published by the Workers'
Socialist League) May 1, 1975 P 5.
I understand that this quote has also been bandied about
in debates in the International Marxist Group.
7 Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love
( Mayflower Books 1970) P 169.
8 Ibid.
9 The sources for the following information are: John
Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual
Rights Movement (Times Change Press, 1974) ; and the
articles by Jim Steakly in Body Politic Nos 9, 10, 11, on
the early German gay movement.
10 The source of this information is the Edward
Carpenter Collection in Sheffield City Library ; see
particularly the letter from Blatchford to Carpenter
dated 11 Jan 1894.
11 Belfort Bax, Ethics of Socialism, P 126.
12 See W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution.
13 Ibid. See also Zaretsky, op cit P 76.
14 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Allen
Lane 1974), P 141.
15 David Thorstad, 'Gays vs SWP', Gay Liberator No 42.

Gay Left 5

Gays and the Trade Union

Movement
By Bob Cant
The idea of gay work in the Trade Unions seems to many
people absurd and irrelevant. Traditionally, most gays in
this society have accepted the division of life into private
and public, home and work, and they have been only too
keen to conceal their homosexuality from the people they
work with. When the gay movement was at its height
there was a strong spontaneist element in it which tended
to be opposed to work but which, more importantly, saw
the Trade Unions as part of the anti-gay mafia which
included the family, the education system, the media, the
bosses, the police and so on.
Now the situation is somewhat different in that many
more gays are no longer prepared to hide their
homosexuality and the economic situation does not really
allow for the existence of a free-wheeling-peace-and-lovelet's-all-make-love-in-the-streets-mass-gay-movement.
As I see it, most gays who have been influenced by the
movement are working in jobs which they do not wish to
lose ; their social life is likely to be more open and
fulfilling than it would have been several years ago but
they still feel a great deal of unease and/ or oppression
at work about how far it is possible to express their
homosexuality.
It is as an expression of this unease/oppression that
groups of gay workers have been formed in the past two
years. Many of these have been among workers whose
job actually makes their sexuality an issue such as teachers,
social workers, journalists. But there have been other
attempts to form gay groups , among workers whose
sexuality would not seem to be so immediately important
to their jobsuch as printworkers. It is interesting that
those gays whose jobs have a strong ideological role tend
to have formed themselves into groups outside their
unions whereas the others tend to relate much more closely
to their union. No doubt, this is a reflection on the lower
level of union consciousness which exists among the more
middle-class, white-collar workers. But it also raises
questions about the nature of trade unionism.
Many people see trade unions simply as bodies which
negotiate wages with employers. But this is, of course, a
very narrow interpretation and also one which suits the
employers. Increasingly, the union comes to be identified
with the negotiatorsi.e. usually full-time appointed
officialsand the worker adopts an apathetic, passive
attitude to his membership. Revolutionary socialists argue
that the union is much more than this, that the
membership of the union must be actively involved in
decision making, that officials must be regularly elected
and recallable by the members and that the union should
protect the workers in all aspects of their lives.
In the early decades of this century British Trade
Unionists did, on occasions, act to protect their members
and their communities in such a way. The fact that unions
have now declined to the extent where they are seen as
bodies for the negotiation of wages for mostly white,
mostly male, mostly heterosexual workers is just one of
the effects of social democracy on our society. The only
people to benefit from this are the capitalist class.

Nature of Trade Unionism

Let us take the issue of rents, for example. Revolutionary
socialists would argue that this is an issue which is basic
to the living standards of the working class whereas most
Trade Union officials would now argue that it was outside
their realm of interest. But in Glasgow in 1915 the rentstrike there was won only with the vital support of the
trade unions. Many men were away fighting in the First
World War and the resistance to the enormous rent
increases was organized by women led by Mrs. Barbour.
They seemed to be winning when the landlords struck on
a device whereby they could have the increases deducted
from wages. At this point, the workers from the factories
and shipyards came out on strike. The landlords' scheme
crumbled and the Government was forced to introduce a
Rent Restriction Act.
Gay Left 6

Compare this with the attitude of the Trade Unions to

the rent strike in 1972/3 by the tenants of Tower Hill,
Kirkby. When two of the leading strikers were imprisoned
the only unions who took any action were from one paper
factory. The rent strike was defeated through the failure
of local Trade Unions to understand their wider role as
protectors of the working class. They ignored the fact that
unions as the most powerful form of working class
organization have a responsibility to protect less powerful
sections of the same class.
In recent years, however, there have been signs of
change in this attitude among rank and file trade unionists.
In July of last year 1,000 miners from Swansea came
out on strike in support of the nurses' pay claim for they
saw, quite clearly, that failure to increase nurses' wages
would lead to mass resignations and a further deterioration
in standards in the National Health Service.

Women and Blacks

The two groups of workers, however, whose situation is
nearest that of gays are women and blacks. Ten years ago
if anyone had suggested that they should get any special
protection from the unions they would have been laughed
at. ' Women only work for pin money,' and, 'Blacks don't
belong hereso they don't deserve as much as the rest of
us,' are the best of the comments that might have been
made at the time. Basically, both groups were expected
to put up with less money, more tedious and menial work
because of who they were outside their place of work.
Now the situation has changed. Women and blacks are
tired of waiting for action from hostile Trade Union
officials and have begun to take action themselves.
Women workers have long been thought of as not
proper workers. The fact that they became pregnant and
were expected to do housework put them in a weak
positionthey were not able to attend union meetings in
the evening, they were usually on the lower grades, they
were laid off first, maternity leave was seen as a privilege,
the demand for creches was a joke. Since the strike of
women textile workers at Leeds in 1969 there have been
more and more examples of militant action by women.
Most of these recently have been over the implementation
of the Equal Pay Act. Many women began to realize that
employers planned to make use of job evaluation schemes
to create a category of badly-paid jobs which would leave
them as badly off as ever.
The ten week strike in 1974 by the women at Salford
Electrical Instruments in Heywood, Lancs. showed how
well women were prepared to fight. S.E.I. is part of the
massive G.E.C. combineand if other G.E.C. workers,
and especially the male workers at S.E.I., had come out
in their support there is no doubt they would have been
victorious. As it was, Trade Union officials persuaded them
to accept a confused settlement which did little to improve
their position.
In this atmosphere of increasing militancy, the fact that
many union branches and Trades Councils have adopted
the Working Women's Charter (which includes abortion
on demand, maternity leave as a right and free nurseries)
hopefully points to further action by all trade unionists
to win these demands for women.
Black workers have met the same kind of hostile inertia
from Trade Union officials. Two examples of this are the
strike at Imperial Typewriters, Leicester and the Sikh
turbans dispute among Leeds busmen. In both cases, the
Trade Union officials gave little help and did nothing to
prevent a great flare-up of racism among white workers.
Indeed, at Imperials, where the blacks had been prevented
from electing their own shop stewards, the strikers felt
they were being opposed by a united front of management
and Trade Union officials. The fact that the unions have
been allowed to run down in this way so that white
workers do not see blacks as their fellow workers is
tragic. The only solution is an active union with full
participation by all members.
So, we can see from the struggles of blacks and women
that the way ahead in Trade Unions is not an easy one.
1.Their problems can probably be summarized as follows: 1
Hostility from Trade Union officials ;
2. Hostility or apathy from many male workers (in the
case of women) and white workers (in the case of blacks);
3. Exploitation of these confused feelings by the
management to keep their work force divided ;

4. Lack of self-confidence.
Anyone who raises the gay issue in a Trade Union can
expect to meet all these problems and, at least, two
others:
a Accusations of perversioneither jeers every time you
speak or more vicious slanders behind your back.
b Suggestion that one's gayness is not an issue at work.
Women and blacks are paid less because they are women
and blacks, but that is not true of gays. Gays can be found
in all grades of work.
The most important lesson that women and blacks have
learned from their recent struggles is about the nature
of trade unionism. If unions remain as they are, controlled
by a handful of overpaid, appointed bureaucratsthen
they will get nowhere. The workers will remain divided
among themselves and they will continue to be additionally
oppressed. Only where the union is its membership will
these divisions endall decisions must be democratic,
negotiators must be elected, recallable and paid the same
as the average member. Only such a union will fight for
its membershipand that will include its gay membership.
...and Gays?
So what demands do we raise in our
unions and how do we go about it? The National Union of
Journalists (N.U.J.) seems to have gone further than any
other union in that its annual conference at Swansea this
year passed a motion against discrimination on grounds of
sexual orientation. In view of the fact that most of the
country's newspapers are written by members of the N.U.J.
this should augur well for press treatment of stories
concerning homosexuals. Perhaps. The Gay Rights Media
Group points out that the T.U.C. circular no. 100 which is
concerned with equal opportunity in employment and
discrimination, mentions sex, marital status, creed, colour,
race and ethnic origin, but, not sexual orientation. It would
clearly be in the interests of gay trade unionists to
campaign for the inclusion of sexual orientation in this
circularas well as being very educative for their fellow
trade unionists.
However, even if it were included it doesn't mean the
end of problems for the gay trade unionists. In the
S.O.G.A.T. (Society of Graphical and Allied Trades)
Journal for September 1974, John McPhail of Glasgow
wrote of the need to support homosexual law reform in
Scotland where all male homosexual activity is still
criminal. He went on to say, `To my mind, the union has
an obligation for the welfare of its members not just in
their working lives but also in the social sphere. The
problems of the homosexual may not be your problems
but that does not mean they are unimportant. One of your
workmates may be homosexual ; if so, he or she will need
your understandingnot hostility.' A gay printworker is
unlikely to be paid less than other workers because he is
gay but he is entitled not to expect attacks from his fellow
workers. An active union would make sure such attacks
did not happenbecause it would realize the dangers of
dividing one worker from another and it would understand
the tragedy of worker oppressing worker.
Such hostility does exist as any gay worker knows but
this hostility was, for once, expressed in print in Public
Service, the N.A.L.G.O. (National and Local Government
Officers Association) Journal following a letter which gave
details of a self-help homosexual group in N.A.L,G.O.
One member felt that reading the letter was like being
importuned a public lavatory ; another seemed to think
that homosexuals should not be admitted to N.A.L.G.O. ;
and another said sodomy was indirectly responsible for
bombing of property, hi-jacking, murder, and various other
evils, right down to empty churches. If this is the response
that comes to the setting-up of a union gay group, there
can surely be little doubt of the atmosphere in which most
gay people have to work. Most of us don't expect to be
faced with the above kind of hostility but we all know the
hypocrisy and the condescending smiles and the
demoralizing effect they have.
Raising the matter openly in the context of a union is
really the only way to deal with this prejudice at work
but this can only be done if we have a support group
which understands the meaning of the phrase, 'Glad To
Be Gay'. If you have come out then this is the most
important thing to do for other gays in your union. Set
up a gay group which will act as a focus for them and
enable them to withstand the hostility and hypocrisy of
other trade unionists and draw on the support of those
who accept gayness.

The other problem about a 'sexual orientation'

agreement is that it is not specific enough. It is quite easy
for an employer to say that he will not discriminate against
anyone who is gay but in practice to do just that. The
cases of John Warburton and Veronica Pickles are good
examples of that. John Warburton was taunted by his
pupils about being queer so he spoke to them about it and
answered their questions. He was then banned from
teaching in Inner London Education Authority schools
although the leader of I.L.E.A., Ashley Bramall, had said
he would not discriminate against gay teachers. Likewise,
Veronica Pickles, a Buckinghamshire midwife, found
herself withdrawn from an assisted training scheme for
health visitors. Bucks Area Health Authority denied this
was because of her homosexuality but because of the
publicity which her gay activity had involved her in. Both
authorities were quite adamant in their denials of anti-gay
discrimination but both also seemed to expect their gay
employees to keep absolutely silent about their sexual
orientation and even lie about it. So, clearly, any clause
which opposes discrimination must be very specific. Once
again, this depends very much on an active union which
is concerned about the real interests of its members and
not just in passing token resolutions.
Conclusion
The idea of a Gay Workers' Charteralong the lines of the
Working Women's Charterhas been raised recently. This
would provide a focus of specific demands around which
we could organize. This is clearly an excellent plan
although I will be accused of being too cautious when I
say that it seems to me too early to do this.
At the moment, the crucial task is the organization of
gay groups within the unions such as those in N.A.L.G.O.
and N.U.P.E. Only with this kind of support can most
gays hope to come out and win support for our demands
support for victimized gays, a real end to discrimination
at work, support for gay workers harassed by landlords
and the police. Each group should draw up specific
demands as they relate to their situation and the kind of
problems that are likely to arise. This will be particularly
important in the so-called caring professions where people
are expected to support and propagate the ideology of the
ruling class.
The proposal by Alan Clarke of C.H.E. for a union of
professional homosexuals which would then affiliate to the
T.U.C. and raise gay demands is a nonsense. Not only is it
a ghetto approach to politics but it is also the kind of
manoeuvre that eases the passing of token resolutions. It
is only by sheer hard slog in our own unions that we can
achieve anything meaningful. For it is only with a strong
base of support in an active trade union movement that
we will move anywhere. Of course it is only in that
situation that the whole working class can move anywhere.
Our interests are one.
We must not, however, expect everyone to understand it
immediately. Few non-gay trade unionists bothered to
turn up at a lobby in support of the gay teacher, John
Warburton. Presumably they failed to see that the case of
a victimized gay worker is just as significant as the case of
any other victimized worker. If he is re-instated, it is a
victory for all workers ; if he is not, it is a victory for the
bosses. We have a hard task ahead of us to educate the
Trade Union movement but it is only by being part of it
that we can do so.
Gay workers will meet all the hostility and prejudice
and morethat has faced militant women and blacks over
the past few years. There is no point in kidding ourselves
that it will be an easy fightbut there are no easy
alternatives. Our task at the moment is twofold:-1
1.We must build union gay groups to provide confidence
and solidarity to gays and to encourage others to come
out ;
2. We must support the reconstruction of a strong active
Trade Union movement which will defend all its members
wherever and whenever they are attacked.
Acknowledgments to Socialist W orker, Gay News,
Red Rag, Case Con (Gay Issue).

Gay Left 7

Gays in Cuba
By Keith Birch
Gay people who support the cause of revolutionary
socialism are often confronted by other gays with the fact
that in all the countries that have achieved some form of
socialist system, homosexuals are still discriminated
against or even quite harshly persecuted. On the contrary,
I want to stress that socialism does offer a possible solution
to the sexism inherent in our present capitalist society as
well as involving an economic revolution. This is made
clear by the situation in Russia after the 1917 revolution.
Abortion and contraception were legalized and made
available to the masses. Anti-homosexual laws were
removed. The role of the family in a socialist society was
questioned. Both women and gays gained important
advances in these first few years but the growth of the
Stalinist bureaucracy brought all this to a close and in
1934 punitive laws were introduced against homosexuality,
shortly followed by measures against abortion and a
renewed stress on the family unit as the basis of society.
In order to see why the existing socialist(1) countries have
treated gay people so badly, let us take a closer look at one
of the more recent revolutions, that of Cuba, where there
has been rather more publicity about the position of gay
people in society. The Cuban revolution in 1959 was not
just a victory of socialist forces over the exploitation and
repression of the Batista regime but was also a strongly
nationalist reaction to the long period of domination by
the United States. The aim was to build a new society
based on socialist principles, not in the image of the
Soviet Union, but instead taking regard of Cuba's
individual situation and history. The ideal was the creation
of the 'New Socialist Man', free from the contamination
of capitalism and monetary incentives, a model for other
countries to follow.
What then has happened to the gay people of Cuba since
that time? All that the majority of people know are the
stories about work camps for male homosexuals that made
a few headlines in the late 1960s and little else. The two
main questions that concern us, therefore, are how gay
people have actually been treated in the sixteen years of
the revolution and what were the main causes of this state
of affairs.
First of all, an outline of the oppression of gays from the
sketchy information available to us. No actual laws against
homosexuality were enacted by the new Government under
Castro and no official statements were made at that time.
However, unofficially gays were treated as being sick or
criminal but were not thought a major problem as we
would soon disappear with the dawn of the new society.
One of the first acts after the revolution was the clean up
of the cities. This meant the closing down of the brothels
and clubs and the removal of the prostitutes and
homosexuals from the streets, especially in Havana, which
was little more than a playground for American tourists
and a centre for all kinds of crime.
The first hard news of systematic persecution of gay
people came in 1965 when the U.M.A.P. camps (Military
Units for the Aid of Production) were set up. These were
ostensibly places for young men who were not suitable for
the army because of their 'moral outlook' or lack of
commitment to the revolution. In practice they were little
better than concentration camps (a description which Castro
himself used after visiting one in late 1966) occupied by
anti-revolutionaries, thieves and a very large number of
homosexuals who were there for that 'crime' alone. In
1966 several prominent artists, writers and actors were
told to report to these camps and this brought official
protest from the Cuban Writers' and Artists' Union and the
round-up was called off on Castro's orders. The U.M.A.P.
camps were the cause of a very rare event, an international
outcry at the treatment of homosexuals, although it only
really gathered force when gay intellectuals started to be
persecuted, and then the protest largely came from other
artists and intellectuals. However, at the end of 1966
these camps were officially closed but work camps in
various forms continued, as shown by a quote from a
Minister, Risquet, in 1971 when he said that 'loafers
needing re-education should not be sent to institutions for
thieves and homosexuals'(2) . The general attitude was first
Gay Left 8

expressed in 1971 at the First National Congress on

Education and Culture. Gay people were said to be sick
and homosexuality was an unnatural hangover of
bourgeois society, which is the usual communist line, and
it would disappear with the achievement of socialism.
Until that time, homosexuals should be kept out of
positions of influence over young people, in education
and the arts particularly, so as not to infect them. Before
this there had been purges of the more openly gay
teachers, students, soldiers and so on but it was now
carried out with more vigour for a time. Individual gay
people, women and men, workers and soldiers were
publicly exposed, denounced and usually dismissed to
be sent away for re-education. The last few years have
seen rather less activity against homosexuals, although
there have been no official statements of a change in
policy. The immediate future does not hold much hope of
any radical change, but the situation is still open to
influences, both internal and external, so there should not
be complete despair.
Now we come to the causes of the oppression of gays in
a society which was trying for such a radical break with
the past. Firstly, there was the over reaction to the
previous situation in Cuba which suffered from sexual
exploitation, as well as economic, by the United States.
Havana was almost one large brothel, both for women and
men. Gay people were associated with this old society
and its regime in the minds of many people and with the
need to sell one's body in order to stay alive. The
Revolutionary Government thus took a very puritanical
line in sexual matters and gays suffered from this
`clean-up'. Secondly, the sexual culture in Cuba is that of
machismo, the cult of male virility, a latin kind of male
chauvinism. This entails living up to a kind of ultra
masculine ideal, male friendship being prized, but also a
high degree of sexual competition regarding women. In
this atmosphere women had a very inferior status and their
virginity on marriage and faithfulness afterwards was
demanded. Homosexuals in this society were even more
despised than in our own. The revolution has failed to
challenge this area of life to any great extent. A large
amount has been done towards gaining economic equality
for women. Education and many jobs are open to both
sexes and reforms affecting the family, like easier divorce
and widespread birth control facilities, have been
i mplemented. However, the function of the family as the
basic unit of society and the male dominance have not
been questioned as yet very deeply.
We now come to the more overtly economic and political
causes for gay oppression. The struggle for power of the
Cuban Communist Party and others who hoped to model
Cuba along the lines laid down by the Soviet Union,
against those like Castro who wanted a Cuban road to
socialism fitted to its needs and not falling into the
mistakes of Soviet society. Since the revolution this
struggle has been played out against a background of great
economic difficulties due to the U.S. blockade. The
resulting dependence on massive aid from the Soviet Union
has influenced the power of the different factions and thus
the social policies that have been implemented. In the early
1960s the old Communist Party members tried to gain
control of the leadership. They were largely responsible
for the setting up of the U.M.A.P. camps which they used
as a base to attack libertarian tendencies amongst the
intellectuals and the young citing homosexuality as a
reason. However, they lost out in this bid for power and
were themselves purged from the leadership and in 1968
Escalante, their leader, and others were put on trial. Also,
with the failure of the Cuban economy in the late 1960s
to reach the targets hoped for, especially in sugar
production, Cuba became more and more dependent on
Soviet support and followed its line much more closely,
the decree from the Congress of Education and Culture(3)
in 1971 being a symptom of this.
The economic situation and fear of aggression from the
United States meant the need for the people to be unified
and to work together for the continuance of the
revolution and thus no opposition and very little
questioning of the leadership was allowed. As an official
statement said, the people must 'struggle against all forms
of deviation amongst the young'(4) This included influences
of American culture such as drugs and pop music, an
awakening Black Power movement which was quickly

suppressed and the 'counter revolutionary sentiment of

homosexuality'. Gay people in particular became
scapegoats, a group already despised, who could be made
an example of in this period of establishing unity and
social control.
There has been a general failure to democratize the
revolution, for example, no workers' control but instead
administrators appointed by the Government. The
formation of Committees for the defence of the
Revolution as a mass organization of the ordinary people
in a democratic way has been valuable in the housing,
education and health areas but they do not have power
to make decisions of fundamental importance to the
nation and are used as a rubber stamp for decisions
already made higher up and as a means of social control
at a local level. The Cuban situation shows some of the
possible failings of a socialist revolution. It also shows the
need for gay people to take part in the revolutionary
process and to fight for their rights at every level of the
struggle. Revolutionary socialists must realize from the
previous failures the vital part sexism plays in the old
order and unless combatted as part of the revolution, true
socialism will not be achieved.

Notes 1 Conventional usage.

2 Quote from Gramna, official Government
paper 3.9.71.
3 The Declaration is reproduced in Out of the
Closets .
4 Gramna 9.5.71.
Further sources of information
Social Control in Cuba Martin Loney from Politics and
Deviance.
In the Fist of the Revolution Jose Iglesias.
The Cuban Revolution and Gay Liberation Allen Young
from Out of the Closets
Cuba Hugh. Thomas

The Case of John Warburton

By Nigel Young
This article analyses the way in which a group of gay
teachers fought the banning from employment of a
gay teacher in London. In our fight with the local
education authority different people within the gay
teachers' group took up different positions. The
attitudes which arose depended both upon people's
political beliefs and the degree to which we were able
to openly discuss our own gayness and related issues of
sexuality in our work place. I have attempted to show
the confusion and inadequacy of the fight by
highlighting these various factions. I hope that any
further struggle by gays to defend a victimized gay
worker will not make the same mistakes.
In November 1974 John Warburton, a gay teacher, went
on a gay rights demonstration in Trafalgar Square. He was
seen on the demonstration by one of his pupils. On his
return to school the following week he was confronted
by taunts of 'poof' and 'queer' from the girls.
Unable to teach constructively in this atmosphere, he
stopped the lesson. He explained to the girls what being
gay meant to him, and answered their questions. This
situation arose several times over a period of six weeks,
but it was only on the last occasion that the girls' form
mistress heard of the discussion. Horrified by it she
reported the incident to her head teacher who in turn
reported it to the Inner London Education Authority
(ILEA).
Within twenty-four hours John Warburton was brought
before the Authority (his employer) and asked to sign a
piece of paper demanding that he never discuss
homosexuality in the classroom again unless within a

structured sex education programme, and with the full

permission of the head teacher. He felt unable to sign this
additional contract which no other teacher had been asked
to sign. Consequently he was banned from taking any
employment with the ILEA.
The ILEA have always claimed that the banning of
John Warburton was not gay discrimination. They have
always stated that they are not concerned with the private
lives of teachers, and that they employ many known
homosexuals ; even some who have been convicted of
offences. However, when trying to discover why John
was banned, it was difficult for the Authority to decide
upon the central issue.
At first they insisted that he only had to sign the piece
of paper. There was no explanation as to why only he
should be asked to sign this additional contract. There
was also an implication that John's discipline was suspect,
although that was hard to substantiate. John only
discussed homosexuality once with several classes, and a
creative atmosphere was maintained. John was then
accused of campaigning and crusading on behalf of gays.
However, we all know that no one ever campaigns or
crusades on behalf of heterosexual norms and values in
school!
The ILEA eventually decided that the real crime was
John not teaching the subject lesson through all the taunts
about his gayness. The question iswas it an accident
that the ILEA changed its attitude so often? For two
reasons I would say definitely not.
First : by failing to state clearly what their objections
were, they clouded the central issue. This is the right a
gay teacher has to talk about his/her gayness, and the
right to encourage children to critically examine
heterosexual norms and values.
Secondly: by clouding this issue the ILEA have
attempted to confuse the direction of the struggle
involved, which is to obtain the reinstatement of John
Warburton.
In January 1975 I went to a Gay Teachers' Group
meeting convened especially to discuss the ways in which
the fight could be carried on. There were two approaches
to the problem. The first I shall call the liberal approach.
This involved the writing of letters to the ILEA,
telephoning, and getting together a petition.
The Authority must have hoped for this response. They
could write devious, obscure letters in reply to individuals ;
they could happily listen to telephone conversations ; they
could smile politely at the petitioners, and gracefully
acknowledge their views.
The ILEA assumption was correct. Although the
petition was invaluable as a means of spreading
information, and starting discussions on the issue, it
ultimately lacked power. Our energies should have been
directed to making sure our unions circulated a petition.
In political terms it is they who have the necessary power
to force the Authority to change its attitude.
However, to return to the Gay Teachers' Group, we
were using the liberal processes for dissent and discussion,
which doesn't affect the status quo. It is also true to say
that when carrying on this liberal dialogue with the
Authority, our aims were not made clear. We should have
asserted the right of gay teachers to talk about their
gayness, and discuss sexuality openly. If we had won on
this demand, all the other ILEA charades would have
fallen away, and John would have automatically been
reinstated.
The second approach adopted by the Gay Teachers'
Group was socialist in its attitude. A small group of us
decided that although we would support the liberals in the
group, the most important aspect of the struggle was to
raise the issue with our unions. After all, here was a clear
case of victimization, and we would expect our union to
support a worker regardless of union officials' own views
on homosexuality. We also saw it as an opportunity to
raise issues which had never been discussed before at
union meetings.
However, most people in the Gay Teachers' Group
seemed disinterested, not to say hostile towards the union.
' What has the union ever done for us?' was the cry from
the floor. There was a gulf in understanding the politics
involved between socialists and liberals within the group,
and the relationship of these politics to the stand of the
Left on issues of sexuality.
Gay Left 9

Within straight Left groups or trade unions there has

never been much ground for discussions on sexuality.
Thus the anti-union and anti-left cries seemed appropriate
to the callers. But this attitude ignores the development
of the women's movement, and its critique of sexuality
from a Marxist standpoint. It also ignores the attempts
by gay trade unionists to raise similar issues in their
unions ; trade unionists in the past have rarely discussed
the issue. Their sexist attitudes are unrelated to their
socialism or to being a member of a trade union. For the
socialists in the Gay Teachers' Group it was a perfect
opportunity to take the issue of a victimized worker who
in this case was also gay to the unions. The majority of
the Gay Teachers' Group seemed unable to see these
issues, and firmly stuck to letters, phone calls, and
petitions.
John Warburton had already highlighted the politics of
homosexuality when he went on the gay rights
demonstration. Were we in the Gay Teachers' Group only
concerned to get him reinstated without rocking the sexual
apple cart? Let's keep the rosy normal apples on top, and
the rotten gay ones underneath seemed to be the attitude
of some gay teachers.
It was these same teachers who wanted to get John
reinstated, but didn't want to discuss the issues of sexuality
which arose from the case. Those of us in the unions
wanted to broaden the discussion on sexuality and force
other teachers in school to discuss the subject. Thus no
longer would trade unionists and straight teachers be able
to ignore our gayness. We could talk about ourselves as
well as John. It was an ideal platform on which gay trade
unionists could come out.
The draft motion which arose out of these conflicts was
unfortunately unclear in its aim. In it we asked the ILEA
to lift the ban on John Warburton and to give the right to
teachers to discuss all controversial subjects when they
arose. But this obscured our real purpose which was to
enable gay teachers to discuss gay issues openly.
In retrospect, this was a weakness in our motion. It
highlighted our confusion when trying to clarify the
central issues involved. By framing the motion broadly
we allowed people to talk about the issue of freedom of
speecha nebulous liberal concept instead of the issue
with which we were directly concerned. Our aim should
have been to direct the discussion solely to the issue of
gay rights. The motion was further weakened because we
in no way outlined a campaign of action which we wished
the unions to adopt. We had framed a motion with no
teeth.
The response of the rank and file union members to the
motion was excellent. Generally it was passed with very
little opposition. Subsequently the motion was sent to the
executive of the National Union of Teachers.
As I have already stated, one might have expected our
union Executive to have supported a victimized teacher
regardless of its views on the subject of homosexuality.
Their attitude towards the case of John Warburton was
disgusting. They sent him a letter stating that no teacher,
including one who is homosexual, had the right to
`instigate' a discussion on sex. They conveniently forgot
that John did not 'instigate' the discussion, but that it was
done so by his pupils. They also advised John to sign the
piece of paper issued by the ILEA.
The last turn of the screw came when the Executive
claimed that the position of the ILEA in relation to the
discussion of sexual matters in the classroom was union
policy. Not surprisingly no teacher I have spoken to in the
union had ever heard this was the case. Union branches
when also receiving this letter were appalled, and asked
for a clarification of the so called 'policy'.
The response of the Executive of the union was one we
should have expected. They are not likely to support
teachers who become involved in issues which question
the social fabric of society. The Executive is dominated
by head teachers, and they see the prime role of the
educational system to support existing norms and values.
They wish to run schools where these values are
exemplified and upheld.
The Executive represents very much the attitude of
many trade unionists in matters involving sexuality. The
family is still upheld as a positive social asset. Thus the
union Executive was hardly likely to encourage a
discussion of sexism and male chauvinism which
dominates the working class.
Gay Left 10

The prime function of the Gay Teachers' Group should

have been to encourage members to carry the issues to the
union movement. This could have been done by analysing
the relationship between John's case, the oppression of
gays, and workers. Whatever a trade unionist's feelings
on homosexuality, they would at least have to think about
the oppression of gays, and the way it is tied to capitalism.
In schools gay teachers should have centred the
discussion on issues of sexuality which arise out of being
gay. By so doing we would have avoided the irrelevant
issue of freedom of speech. If gay teachers chose the latter
cause to fight on, we could go through the whole incident
without making any personal statement about our own
gayness.
The difficulty with the Gay Teachers' Group was that
many of its members had not come out at school with
other teachers. Some felt it wasn't necessary. In these
circumstances it was hard to see how the Gay Teachers'
Group could isolate the central issue, and bring about a
discussion on sexuality in staff rooms and union branches
where it is unlikely to have been discussed before.
I would like to end by saying that although we made
many mistakes within the Gay Teachers' Group, many of
us learnt a great deal about the local education authority
and the union bureaucracy. For the first time a group of
gays confronted the bureaucracies of our employer and
union. We are still involved in the struggle to get John
Warburton reinstated.
As we progress we are confronting many faceless
bureaucrats, and a lot of teachers and trade unionists
with issues of sexuality. Such confrontations can only help
to destroy the oppression which gays have to suffer in most
work situations.
I feel sure that in any future clash which a gay worker
has with the ILEA, they will think very carefully before
assuming they can ban or dismiss him/her in such a
dictatorial manner. If they do not act justly there will be
a great deal of anger and political opposition from
increasingly politicized gay workers.

Coming Out Politically

By R. Kincaid
It could be said that until recently gay men and women
had no politics which related directly to their sexuality. To
take up any political causecertainly if it required a
public commitmenthomosexual men and women had to
present a front which ignored their own deep feelings
and may even have misrepresented them. Although the
Gay Liberation Movement has brought with it the
possibility for homosexuals to be actively and totally
involved politically in their own right, in reality for most
gay people the situation has not changed. More and more
gays are coming out, but are they coming out politically?
It would seem that they are not. This is an attempt to
understand why and to do this the possible nature of
meaningful political action for gay people must be
considered.
For gays to act politically in their own interests they
must have some concept of their own position in the
community and how their situation relates to the
production of resources needed, or seen to be needed,
by that community. This will help towards an
understanding of their own oppressed situation. It is only
then that an overall policy of action can be formulated.
Gays must not be taken in by the idea that choosing a
political allegiance is a matter of selecting the party with
the 'right' set of principles in the same way as one might
choose a new pair of trousers. The main political parties
in this country represent different coalitions of interests
and do not acknowledge the existence of gays except in a
negative and repressive way. It is to be a different sort
of political platform that gay people should turnone
that recognizes that different groups or classes have
interests that may be conflicting ; one that recognizes the

interests of gay people as a group.

There are two aspects of gay politics to be considered:
the public and the personal. The former is concerned
with a manifesto, with a political platform, with
concerted public action ; the latter is concerned with the
sort of action that can be taken at an individual level that
may throw into high relief the sort of value assumptions
that are generally made about sex roles and, in particular,
about the nature of homosexuality. These two facets of
political action are interconnected. The nature of one
closely affects the nature of the other. A movement
involving a public assertion of existence, of values, the
development of a public attitude, can provide a framework
within which the individual is given greater freedom to
make his own statement.
In our present position it is worth looking at the
influence of the Gay Liberation Movement, the first
manifestation of a public gay movement, in opening up
possibilities for gays, particularly young gays, to develop
a new concept of themselves. The most important
development, historically, was the emergence of GLF in
London in 1970. GLF introduced gay activism and a
radical new approach to the situation of gay people. It is
too easy to forget that before this event the public face of
homosexuality was dominantly middle-class and
self-oppressive and, except for the one central fact of
being gay, tended to be ultra-conformist. GLF was the
antithesis of this sort of gay scene and provided the
opportunity for a different kind of public identity and an
acknowledgement of a gay life-style. Let us consider the
possibilities for political action that it generated.
The effectiveness of GLF arose from the stark contrast
that it presented against the old style. It attempted to
develop its own conventions and let its structure grow in
answer to the needs of the moment rather than be
borrowed from the straight world. It was understood that
to adopt a conventional organization structure would risk
influence from the all-pervasive values associated with
straight organizations. If a chairman is appointed he or
she will tend to look at the only available model of how
`chairmen' behave, that found in the straight world.
Likewise, a `committee' will tend to consider that
'appointment' carries the sort of `rights' given to
conventional committees. Other values creep in and
eventually a complete set of straight values infiltrate the
movement, including those values oppressive to gays.
Though the avoidance of creating an elite set of officers
brought problems with it, the experience of having to
explore new ways of relating and coming to agreement
helped to develop a separate identity for those of us
involved at the beginning of GLF and thus created the
most dynamic aspect of the present movement. For those
of us who took part in this initial phase, it was not
possible to continue to hold conventional views about the
need for an authority structure or about what was
appropriate for public discussion. The constraints which
most of the participants had previously felt about talking
through their own deep feelings disappeared. The need on
the part of everyone at these meetings to heighten their
sensitivity towards the feelings of the others present was
demanding. It was also intellectually stimulating and
exciting. One was aware that a new culture was forming
and being recognized. New words and phrases came into
use: `sexism', 'ego-trip', `putting people down'though
at the time they sounded flip, they contained ideas that
generated much thought and have philosophical
i mplications that extend outside the gay world.
GLF in 1971 and 1972 had many of the features of a
successful gay political movement. But the quality of the
early movement was not sustained and it is worth
considering now why it lost much of its initial promise.
Size had something to do with itit was not possible to
keep up the particular feeling of unity and purpose that
had been such an important part of the early meetings.
There was, too, the `super-gay' syndrome: a tendency on
the part of some to prescribe narrow and arbitrary rules.
Most would agree, however, that the greatest reverse
suffered by GLF at this time was the departure of the
women members from the central movement. The contrast
of before and after this happening emphasizes the initial
contribution made by the women. This event coincided
with a shift towards parochialism where meetings held in
different parts of London or different parts of the

country tended to reflect the personalities of the dominant

gays involved rather than any overriding ethic. There
were exceptions to this and many of these smaller groups
have been successful in their own terms, but a general
criticism of groups at this time was that the social aspects
of coming together became more important than the
political aspects of coming out. It is to another movement
altogether, the women's movement, that we need to look
for some indication of the lines along which a broader
concept of the gay movement could develop.
The public revolt of women to their oppressed role has
a longer history than that of gays. `Women's Lib' has a
clearly defined public image accepted, though grudgingly,
by the media. There are also the `stars'those who are
widely known and who are given the opportunity to put
forward the women's Lib line and who do so frequently
and uncompromisingly. There is more to be said about
the women's movement. It is mentioned here mainly to
emphasize the point that it is much further on the way
to being a full-fledged political movement than the Gay
Liberation Movement.
The GLM only receives general support from gays when
it deals with specific issues such as police harassment or
the lowering of the age limit. In evolving policy on wider
and, perhaps, more important issues the movement is still
in an embryonic phase and it may well be that individual
gays are unable directly to take part in developing a
political platform. It is in this situation that personal
politics become important. A political action, whether it is
taken by an individual in isolation or by a group, must
have relevence outside the individual situation. Gay
oppression can take many forms from simple `putting
down' to severe legal sanctions. In confronting such
situations passively or actively a statement is made that
has political relevance. A gay person should understand,
however, that his own oppression relates to all situations
of oppression, gay or otherwise. It is partly in realizing
this that the individual becomes aware of his political
identity and is able to become involved in the political
action of a group.
It is difficult to make any general statement about the
techniques and strategies of personal politics. An effective
political statement can be made by the individual acting
in such a way that assumptions and values in straight
society are questioned. For example, transvestism may
help to raise awareness of false assumptions made about
sex roles and gender roles.The political effectiveness of
actions such as those involving transvestism depends much
on the timing and the way it is done. There are dangers
here. Such actions create anxiety and embarrassment and,
unless the setting is right, can be counter-productive.
There is also the danger of such actions becoming clichs
or simply an excuse for ego-tripping, but, nevertheless, it
is an effective way of making a political point, especially
if it can be related to wider situations of oppression.
Understanding our relationship with the rest of society
and being able to express this understanding within a group
is part of the process of personal intellectual growth, the
process of 'becoming'. We are all to an extent surrounded
by an intellectual fog generated by other people, by past
groups and their oppressive views of history. The nature
of this fog is to cause us to have a view of reality
determined, or at least affected, by what these other people
want us to see. The process of 'becoming' involves us in
dispersing this fog of false consciousness and being able to
identify the 'substance' of the world we live in and
distinguish it from reifications resulting from situations and
events in the past. Gay men and women share a particular
kind of oppression. If they can jointly learn new ways of
relating in this process of self-liberation, their experience
could benefit others outside their own world. But to get
out of the prison created by other people's interpretations
of reality we must begin to move forward collectively in a
political way. In this context an analysis of our present
roles in society and a conscious political strategy are both
vitally important.

Gay Left 11

CHE in Close-up
By Emmanuel Cooper

Integration rather than rebellion is the message of CHE,

and this reflects the liberal hope that homosexuals will
come to merge imperceptibly into society as it exists now.
Gay pairbonds and marriages, with in-laws welcoming
both partners to dinner, is the suggested norm. It is a
gloomy picture for gays who have developed a critical
awareness of roles learnt in a family situation and who
do not want to ape heterosexual stereotypes and the
relationships which arise from them. In suggesting
integration, CHE is offering no analysis of our position
as gays in society, firmly buries its head in the sand and
refuses to see that it is aiming to integrate us into the
heart of our oppressors.
With a national membership of about 5,000, CHE would
seem to be in a strong position to enact its plans for
integration which follow two major methodslaw reform
by using parliamentary democracy and an education
campaign which tries to ensure that sex education includes
an unbiased account of what homosexuality is by providing
study kits and gay speakers. That law reform and a fair
educational hearing are essential is accepted by most
gays, at whichever end of the political spectrum they sit,
yet even on these issues few new members are recruited
and support from grass roots members is minimal.
Here an analysis of the organization of CHE is useful.
At national level, there is the Executive Council on which
elected members sit for two years ; the E.C. is responsible
for the national 'image' of CHE and attempt to provide
a list of recognized activist speakers who have come out
publicly and are willing to address any meeting and work
openly to further the aims of CHE.
On a regional level CHE consists of many small local
groups, the majority of whose members want an active
social life which pays only lip-service to its CHE
allegiance. In fact, until recently, when a new method of
paying subscriptions was introduced, members of CHE
local groups did not have to be members of the national
organization, and there were members who knew little of
what CHE stood for.
In many ways, the fairly radical Executive Council of
CHE seems divorced from the membership it represents.
E.C. members, all of whom work hard and voluntarily
for CHE, have openly come out as gays and put forward
a positive position of a gay life style quite independent of
traditional heterosexual relationships. CHE organizes
conferences like the one at Sheffield this year, where, for
example, a unique civic reception gives open and official
recognition of the delegates' homosexuality. Yet despite
this lead, few gays seem encouraged to follow.
Why is it then that CHE gives the overwhelming
i mpression that its members want to remain closed and
closetedsafely wrapped-up and cared for in the arms
of a parental E.C.? This point was emphasizzed in a recent
recruitment drive in which CHE was advertized as the
biggest gay club in the country. Basically it is because
CHE accepts society as it is now, and its priorities for
integration are, in order of importance, law reform,
education campaign and 'coming out'.
'Coming out' is something to be admired and hoped for,
but it attracts little importance maybe because it questions
too violently the accepted norms of our society. Here a
distinction must be drawn between individual and
collective effort. The individual, by coming out, performs
little that can be construed as a political act, however much
courage it requires. On the other hand, coming out
collectively, with its defiance of heterosexual values,
could provide a concerted challenge to the structure of
societya structure in which the basic unit of socialization
is a nuclear family which oppresses and excludes gays,
and, unless changed, will continue to do so. Law reform,
though long overdue, will not alter by one jot the feelings
of most gays of inadequacy because they will always be
outside the family unit structured to meet the needs of a
capitalist society.
Local CHE groups also reflect the bureaucratic
Gay Left 12

organization of society. Three or four elected officers

devise and run a mainly social programme for gays who
want to meet outside the commercial scene. Some groups
conduct limited campaignssending speakers to schools,
addressing public meetings and so on, but support from
within the group is often poor. Local groups achieve their
highest success on a social levellarge attendances are
regularly reported for discos, boat trips, parties, coffee
evenings, gay bingo and the like, events which build up a
gay community in which some gays, for the first time,
attend a group which is specifically for gays and in which
they are accepted without question. However, the mere
mention of the word campaign at one of these socials
brings despairing looks to faces which have long ago
decided not to rock the boat, either socially or politically.
No one seeks to question why, in life outside of the gay
community, he feels isolated and forced to conceal his
own homosexuality behind a veneer of heterosexual
pretence. They are unable to relate their oppression to the
same system which oppresses the mass of people. With
such an uncritical rank and file membership, there is
little wonder that CHE advertizes itself as the biggest club
in the country. 'Walk the corridors of power with CHE'
ran one adit omitted to mention that to enter these
corridors you had to take a vow of secrecy.
Not all CHE members feel that either secrecy or lack
of a determination to develop a critical political analysis
is right. Some local groups have attempted to work on a
more libertarian basis by organizing themselves outside
bureaucratic lines. They feel that the nomination of
officers who run the group reflects too closely the
employer-employee situations of a capitalist system, and
have abandoned officers altogether, except for that of
treasurer. They operate through a rotating chairperson
and interest groupsCampaign, Social Newsletter and
Care are typical. The structure is slow and clumsy to
operate and works only on a local level, yet within it a
greater number of members feel able to participate in
the group's activities and at the same time develop the
confidence necessary to reject heterosexual norms.
Of what value is CHE to radical gays? Should we ignore
it, join it or fight against it as a piece of liberal whitewash?
As our only national gay organization, it would be
unrealistic of us to either ignore its existence or the need
for reforms of the present punitive law and an honest
and fair educational programme. We must therefore
accept the value it has by giving it our support and
working for its aims, while at the same time stressing the
li mitations of such reforms and argue at every opportunity
that a fundamental change in society is necessary. CHE
is made up of many lonely and oppressed people whose
needs will only be met when they have fuller understanding
of their present roles in our society.

Report
Gay Workers' Conference
Leeds Polytechnic
10 - 11 May 1975
By Gregg Blachford
After months of hopeful anticipation, I heard a rumour
that the Gay Workers' Conference was actually going to
take place. For details, I checked with Gay News and Gay
Switchboard asking them if they could verify this
information. No, they hadn't heard a word. That was the
first sign that things were going to be rather disorganized
at this Conference. I mean, really, if two of the most
i mportant avenues of gay communication don't know
about it, then who will? As it turned out, a small, very
unrepresentative sample turned up ; mostly from the local
area, mostly from white-collar trade unions, and, mostly
men.

Arriving on Friday night, we met others who assumed,

as we did, that International Marxist Group (I.M.G.)
members had organised this meeting. It had already been
labelled by Red Weekly as 'the most important gay
conference this year'. This feeling was further reinforced
when we saw the supposed organizer of the conference
and well-known member of the I.M.G. sitting in caucus
in the corner of a pub with other I.M.G.'ers. This was
the grouping that was to become so familiar to many of
us by the end of the conference.
The next morning, after sleeping on the floor with ten
beautiful men but, of course, no one touching each other,
we arrived at the delightful Leeds Polytechnic. There were
no signs anywhere to direct us to the meeting rooms. After
much searching, we arrived at the steepest lecture hall
imaginable (just right for intimate and meaningful
discussion) and came across a Red Weekly vendor. More
evidence of the I.M.G. presence?
After lowering ourselves into our seats, we listened to
Martin O'Leary give a half hour talk on `The Law and
Beyond'. It was a clear and concise account of the
i mportance of law reform for gays. He included a
discussion of the false ways out of our oppressed
situation such as those who believe that all we need to do
is to get all gays to come out or all we have to do is
subordinate our concerns to 'some other struggle'. He
refuted both these points, quite correctly, as being the sole
answer.
Britain's crises and growing instability mean that it
cannot afford to be liberal anymore, he also explained. The
worsening situation is indicated by examples such as Jill
Knight, M.P. asking for the removal of homosexuals from
the Social Services, the John Warburton case and the
increased police harassment at Earl's Court. He said that
this conference must discuss how to defend gays from
these attacks and those to come and also how we can
avoid the mistakes of the old British gay movements.
This well-put-together talk that had, though, few
revelations, drew little response and discussion quickly
came around to the inadequacy of this ugly lecture room
(where we couldn't even see the people in the row in front
of us) and to the inadequacy of the publicity which,
generally speaking, only reached the radical gays. It was
suggested that we move to a more pleasant room. This
was agreed but we spent the next twenty minutes standing
in hallways looking for guidance but getting none. It was
suggested that we go for lunch while a room was sought.
So, after only one hour, we were out on the street again.
Enthusiasm was beginning to wane.
Fifty people reassembled in a much more suitable room
after lunch to listen to Ellie Burns, Bradford A.U.E.W.
Shop Steward, talk about her experiences in the W.R.A.F.
several years ago and also the problems of coming out in
the television factory where she now works. It made
fascinating listening and I'm sure we wished we could have
been as brave as she had been in our own work situations.
The main problem seemed to be her isolation. Her trade
union was beginning to tell her to stop going on about her
gayness because they all accepted it and they couldn't see
that anything more had to be done. As well as this, the
local International Socialists' (I.S.) branch had not
responded to the Bradford's G.L.F.'s offer of help.
This led to a most useful discussion of our own personal
experiences with respect to how we dealt with our
homosexuality at work and in our unions. This allowed us
to see our individual problems in a much broader context.
Afterwards, we broke into three workshops that were to
discuss the eternal problem, 'What is to be Done?' After
reassembling, a problem of leadership again arose because
someone needed to bring together the various threads. In
everyone's head was the fear of being called a 'bureaucrat'
or 'on an ego trip' as used to happen in G.L.F. circa 1970.
Finally, a Communist Party comrade from Edinburgh
began to ask if it was generally agreed that there was a
need for some sort of Gay Workers' Charter along the
line of the Working Women's Charter. This was agreed,
but it was not just to be a piece of paper to be passed at
high-level Trade Union conferences. It must be used as a
discussion document by ourselves at branch level. There,
other homosexuals who hadn't come out, might feel much
freer about being open about their homosexuality without
fear of reprisals.

As to what the Charter would have to include, several

suggestions were made. There must be a commitment on
the part of employers and trade unions to end all
discrimination against all gays with respect to hiring and
promotion. At this point, a proposition was put forward
that we could not support anyone's desire for promotion.
But it was pointed out that however much we may object
to people becoming bosses, not all promotions mean one
becomes a member of the management.
Secondly, it must commit the Trade Union Movement
to support homosexual law reform and to the removal of
all laws discriminating against homosexuals. It was
questioned whether this should lead to an elimination of
all ages of consent legislation or not.
Workers should also be educated to help eliminate their
sexist attitudes and anti-gay remarks and viewpoints.
We reached a dilemma over whether to include
transexuals and transvestites at the risk of lessening our
chances of success. Do we preserve our respectability or
be honest to our analysis? This was not resolved, but the
latter was preferred by most. Perhaps `sexual orientation
and style of dress' would cover all possibilities.
That ended the day's work. The night brought a fabulous
and friendly disco. A real feeling of unity was built up and
expressed when we held each other and sang 'United We
Stand, Divided We Fall'. A drunken `het' took the violent
side of these proud feelings when he started a fight which
led to several gays being seriously hurt and having to go
to hospital. This brought everyone right back down with
a thump.
Sunday's session scheduled to start at 10 a.m. eventually
began at 12.15 with about thirty people. We had to sit in
the foyer on the floor and it was obvious that the
scheduled speakers and workshops were just not going to
come off. We were left on our own again to make some
meaning out of all of us coming together from all over
England and Scotland.
The main point to come out of this was that there must
be another conference soon where much more preliminary
work would have to be done. Representatives from as
many trade unions as possible must be contacted as well as
all gay groups in the country. It was felt that a newsletter
would have to be set up to disseminate the information
re the next conference which Leeds G.L.F. agreed to
organize.
I sincerely hope that this newsletter and conference do
come into being as I feel that the trade unions are vital in
our battle to have a less split lifewhere we are 'ordinary'
people during the day and homosexuals at home. It will
also encourage more people to come out which, although
it is definitely not the only answer to homosexual
oppression, will go some way to changing the attitudes of
the people whom we have to work with every day.
A link should also be established more directly with
working class gays who, so far, have been under
represented in gay groups mainly because of most groups'
middle-class emphasis and bias.
Finally, as is stated in the collective statement, the
question of sexuality must be confronted by the labour
movement. I believe that this conference and others like
it will lead to the fulfilment of this aim.

Newsflash!
The first newsletter has been published! Information
regarding the conference, which is now going to be held in
Leeds, is available from: Gay Information Centre,
Gay Working Peoples Collective,
153a Woodhouse Lane,
Leeds 2
Tel 39071 X57
Those interested should also send financial contributions
to that address as money is desperately needed.

Gay Left 13

Document
David Widgery writes:
The following review was written, on request, for the
theoretical journal of the International Socialists'
International Socialism in Autumn 1973.. It was rejected by
Chris Harman, then editor, because 'he had not read the
pamphlet' and supposedly was not in a position to tell me
if I'd got the line wrong. He presumably never did because
the review 'got lost', a euphemism I have experienced
several times on socialist papers when the editor wants to
reject something but has not the courage to say so. At the
ti me the leadership of I.S. were conducting a political
campaign against Don Milligan and the I.S. Gay Group
which was by and large successful. For the record, one of
the leading lights in that campaign was responsible for
the classic line "I.S. does not have a line on what you call
sexism and has not found it a phenomenon which exists
in the working class."
I am glad of this chance to eventually publish the
article: not because of any grand idea of the review's
worth, but because of what the suppression of its fairly
tentative contents reveals about the political context in
which Don Milligan wrote his pamphlet.

The Politics of Homosexuality'

Don Milligan 20p Pluto Press
Homosexuality has been a taboo subject on the Left for
100 years. It's always been somebody else's problem ;
something to do with bourgeois degenerates or Stalinist
spies. Socialists who wanted to go to bed with lovers of
their own sex have done so in great secrecy or simply
become celibate and submerged their sexual longings in
political activity. Although homosexual writers like Edward
Carpenter, active in the Sheffield labour movement early
this century, were very widely read in the movement
(Love's Coming of Age went through twelve editions),
their analysis could never advance beyond a desperate
pleading for their form of love to be tolerated.
Radical homosexual writers who were drawn towards
socialist ideas because of their own experience of the
hypocrisy of capitalism were seldom welcomed. Oscar
Wilde, openly prosecuted in an atmosphere of pre-Boer
War patriotic hysteria was unmentioned by the socialist
press of the day. Walt Whitman, the American left-wing
poet, whose proleterian following in Yorkshire
corresponded and sent money to their hero, was never
able to openly link his homosexuality to his political
feelings, although privately they were inseparable.
Of female homosexuals we know only sneers and silence.
The Left has occasionally included homosexuals
somewhere in its list of oppressed minorities but the
perspective has been reformist and legislative. For example
a warm-hearted article in Socialist Review, commenting on
the Wolfenden Report which made homosexuality legal
between consenting adults, still saw homosexuality as an
evil and perverted form of love, a product of capitalist
society which would be cleansed after-the-Revolution. In
the meantime queers are supposed to keep their heads well
down and wait for more tolerant laws to be passed from
above. And although the Bolsheviks acted to legalize
homosexuality, since 1934 in Russia and in most of the
state-capitalist regimes, especially Cuba, homosexuals have
been singled out for the most vigorous prosecution.
The emergence, out of the political Pandora's Box of
1968, of the Gay Liberation Movement has altered the
whole terms of the discussion. A movement of
homosexuals of an entirely new kind was born in collective
struggle (literally in a fist fight with New York cops
attempting to make arrests in a New York homosexual
bar). They asked not for integration and tolerance but
shouted defiance and challenged heterosexual society to
examine the seamy side of its own 'normality'. A sexual
minority, apparently contained in their own guilt-ridden
ghettoised sub-society, suddenly in the late sixties began
to organize politically and look for radical explanations
Gay Left 14

of their own situation. Seldom has Engel's remark that 'in

the fore of every great revolution the question of free love
is bound to arise' proved truer. The reaction of socialists
has been embarrassed and uncertain. At one extreme the
freak left by giving uncritical support to every whim of
Gay Liberation (and they have been many) in fact took
a liberal and also a rather patronizing attitude.
At the other extreme those socialists who denied that
homosexuals were a 'genuine' minority, and suspect it's all
a middle-class problem anyhow, ended up utilizing
revolutionary phrases to cloak straightforward prejudice
(at the World Youth Festival 1973, for example, socialist
homosexuals were beaten up when they attempted to raise
a G.L.F. banner). Milligan's pamphlet documents quite
clearly how homosexuals are oppressed by law prejudice,
the specific physical attacks made by psychiatrists and
queer-bashers and, most importantly, the personal selfdenial of a life of furtiveness and enforced secrecy. In
reply to those who argue that this oppression has no
relation to the class struggle he quotes the words of the
Bolshevik Central Committee member Alexandra
Kollontai who wrote in 1919 'the problems of sex concern
the largest section of societythey concern the working
class in its daily life.'
It is hard to understand why this vital and urgent subject
is treated with such indifference. The indifference is
unforgiveable. Milligan argues that homosexuals are an
affront to capitalism because they challenge the system's
division of people into small competitive family units of
obedient producers and cons umers house-trained in
obedience and rigid sex-roles. For, like the Women's
Question, any adequate Marxist analysis of homosexuality
is bound to deal with sexuality, child-rearing and
psychology, topics not raised within the Marxist movement
since the late 1920s. These questions are not being raised
again in the working class movement by accident ; it is
inevitable they will be asked once again in new guises as
we transform our revolutionary socialism from the dogma
of the few into the faith of the multitude. Indeed a
modern revolutionary party unable to come to terms with
feminism and the gay movement is storing up trouble
for itself.
The struggle for a Marxist theory of homosexuality will
continue and will only finally be made by working class
homosexuals themselves. As Connolly says it is those who
wear the chains who are most qualified to begin throwing
them off. In the meantime socialist homosexuals are
entitled to expect the active support of their heterosexual
comrades. Socialists who are weak on this question will
undoubtedly show themselves weak on other perhaps
more important questions of principle. For it is not a
question of moralism but one of class solidarity. For a
male worker who sneers at queers, just like one who talks
of niggers and slags, is finally only sneering at himself
and his class.

Review
"Dangerous Deviants . . ."
Who Screws Who? by Frank Pearce and Andy Roberts
Funny Farm Publications 35p
This is an interesting and relevant pamphlet despite its
journalistic title and demands close examination. It has
been sown togetherwith stitches occasionally showing
from two previously published articles, one on the
regulation of sexuality under capitalism, the other on the
role of the media in creating images of homosexuals. Both
together form an attempt to locate attitudes to
homosexuality in the changing needs, economic and
ideological, of British capitalism. This present pamphlet
therefore sets out to demonstrate the social significance of
homosexual oppression.

Before we can start to analyse gayness historically we

must be clear as to our approach. Much of current gay
historiography (or more appropriately, hagiography)
whether intentionally or not, falls within a 'third sex'
tradition. This was the dominant tendency in the early
German and British gay movements at the beginning of
the century and assumes that gay people form a separate,
usually biologically determined group, constant throughout
history and more or less ill-treated and oppressed. It is
inadequate for two reasons: (a) it does nothing to
challenge current social definitions of masculinity and
femininity: rather it fully accepts them, and tries to fit
homosexuals in between. (b) it leads to absurd chauvinistic
conclusionsas if gay liberation was a national liberation
struggleand to reformist politics 'All we want is our
rights.'
Pearce and Roberts start out with a more radical and
useful assumption: that individuals are born with a
fundamentally bisexual constitution, with a sexual
expression which is moulded according to social influences
and social needs. This implies firstly, that homosexuality is
a natural part of everyone's sexual make upand the wide
range of anthropological and sociological evidence about
different people's different sexual norms suports this ; and
secondly, that different cultures endeavour to suppress this
homosexual component, in differing degrees, to conform
to the heterosexual norms that have been socially created.
This implies the concept of social 'role'. The most
commonly recognized roles are those of 'men' and
`women', and their sexual behaviour is expected to
conform to their role expectations: the man active and
aggressive, the female passive and responsive. Mary
McIntosh in the late 1960s developed the concept of a
`homosexual role', present in some cultures and not in
others. In our own culture the male homosexual role is
clearly and sharply defined. It is a deviant role, despised
and punished, and socially defined in order to bolster up
the socially acceptable heterosexual roles. This is a
valuable approach because it explicitly links changing
attitudes to homosexual behaviour to changes in concepts
of socially desirable heterosexual behaviour. In other
words, homosexuals are oppressed in our society because
they pose a threat to the socially sanctioned 'proper'
male / female roles. Attitudes to male homosexuality can
therefore be used as a 'manageable indicator' of attitudes
to changing heterosexual roles ; and conversely, changing
economic and social heterosexual roles can be used as
an analytical tool to help explain new attitudes to
homosexuality.
This is the approach Pearce and Roberts adopt,
theoretically at least. They follow Mary McIntosh in
seeing the emergence of a distinctive male homosexual
role as a product of the early 18th century. It is not
until the late 19th century, however, that it becomes
widely recognized, both by Church and State and by
homosexuals themselves. The 1885 Labouchere
Amendment is a crucial landmark here, for for the first
ti me, it makes all male homosexual acts illegal. And by
sharpening the divide between acceptable and unacceptable
male emotional and sexual behaviour it created an almost
i mpassable barrier, to be crossed only at the risk of
blackmail, notoriety and social ostracism.
The late 19th century sees a consistent attempt to
socially suppress the homosexual component in the male's
sexual make up ; the corollary of this is the emergence of
the concept of the exclusive homosexual, which acts both
as a protection for the heterosexual norm, and by a
dialectical process, as a coherent identity for the
homosexual. It is no accident, therefore, that the period
which sees the harshest oppression of homosexuals sees
also the beginnings of a gay rights movement.
Although Pearce and Roberts suggest these changes they
are less clear in explaining them. They retreat, as many
others have done, to a facile reliance on the JudaoChristian tradition's hostility to homosexuality.
Unfortunately, an explanation which can explain
everything, explains nothing. Christianity is an ideology
which to a certain degree has a life of its own, supported
as it is by highly organised structures and bureaucracies.
But the success of the social purity Evangelical movement
in the 1880s can only be explained by its relevance to
the 1880s, as determined by the needs of the ruling class.

The pamphlet offers a series of impressionistic

connections which do not fully explain this relevance.
The clue again lies in the 1885 Act. For the Act which
outlawed male homosexual behaviour was tagged on to
an apparently unconnected Act to raise the age of consent
for girls to sixteen. This itself was a product of pressure
from the social purity campaign. The connection between
these two apparently unconnected enactments lies in their
function: they both had the effect of controlling sexual
relations outside the family, while strengthening them
within the family. For the age of consent clause which was
centrally related to control of prostitution, like the
homosexual clause, was instrumental in closing the doors
to socially acceptable sex outside the family.
This emphasis on the family must be seen in the context
of sharpening definitions of male and female roles, itself
linked to changes in the economy ; and to the need to
socially integrate sections of the industrial working class
into bourgeois society. This in turn must be set against a
background of increased inter-imperialist competition,
with the growing might of Germany and America ; and
the consequent fear of imperial decline. It is surely
significant that it was precisely in the last decades of the
19th century that the supposed link between homosexuality
and the decline of great civiliations was made explicit by
ideologists of the ruling class.
The family as a 'natural community' was seen as a
haven from the conflicts of class society, as a natural
microcosm of the national community. As Pearce and
Roberts put it:
When the family becomes a universal interpretative
image for the whole of society, homosexuality is
repressed as dangerous because it questions the role
categories.
The increased intervention of the bourgeois state
throughout the 20th century in bolstering the family
through social security, family welfare provisions etchas
provided the material basis for the spontaneous
reproduction of male and female roles. The state has been
able, therefore, to partially withdraw from the direct
regulation of sexual behaviour. But the repeal of the 1885
law relating to male homosexuality did not lead to the
social sanctioning of male homosexual behaviour: it was
merely a rationalization of the status quo, a recognition
of the existence and sexual needs of a deviant minority :
no more. Above all, of course, mere legal changes ignore
the existence of female homosexuality.
This is the most glaring omission in the pamphlet. There
is no proper discussion of the logical corollary of the
19th century worry about male sexuality : the down
grading of female sexuality. Attempts to incorporate
female homosexuals within the scope of the 1885 Act
were dropped in the 1920s explicitly because this would
give publicity to something best left unmentioned and
unknown. Lesbianism is ignored because it poses a
challenge to the social image of women as dependent and
responsive to men. The late 19th century reassertion of
the male role, protected by harsh laws from falling into
homosexual ways, was accompanied by a sharper
definition of the female role, hailed as the mother of
Empire. Though the language and terminology may have
changed, the images are still before us, in a society where
a higher proportion of people get married than ever
before. The greater sexual freedom of the 20th century
is still defined in relation to the family unit, which,
bursting at the seams, still works to present its stifling
role models.
One of the ways these models are perpetuated is through
the press, which by the 1930s had for the first time
become a 'mass media'. The second part of the pamphlet
is less speculative than the first and is a sober and
valuable description of the ways in which the popular
press creates and perpetuates stereotypes of 'deviant'
behaviour ; 'Evil Man' ; 'The Sick Men of Hampstead
Heath' ; 'Twilight Traitors' ; they are all headlines from
popular Sunday newspapers of the liberal 60s. They
should now be like garish nightmares, thankfully in the
past. But of course the assumed moral outrage, the
careful glossing over of facts, the distortion of tone, are
still with us, witness the Sunday People of Spring Bank
Holiday, 1975.
`The vilest men in Britain.' Who are they? Murderers,
Gay Left 15

rapists, property speculators? No! Homosexual

paedophiles. The oppression of sexual minorities still sells
newspapers and still acts as a guardian for the 'righteous'.
A proper understanding of this pamphlet should help us to
understand why: and suggest the relevant political
conclusions to be drawn from that knowledge.

Guttersnips Guttersnips Gut

Readers are invited to contribute their own selections
from the press.

Jeffrey Weeks

Book Review
Forward Steps
Homosexual Oppression and Liberation by
Dennis Altman
Allen Lane 1974 First Published 1971
Dennis Altman set out to identify the many strands of the
gay liberation movement and the success of his work can
be judged by its widespread approval and acceptance
since it was first published four years ago. To take such
a loosely woven movement and link historical and
contemporary threads with the work of gay writers and
activists into a unified and readable account is no mean
achievement. It says much for Altman's tenacity that he
searched out and examined gay liberation in his native
Australia, in the U.S.A. and in Britain.
It is also a book very much of its time, belonging firmly
to the gay liberation movement. Having argued the case
for gay liberation, Altman goes on to look at gay liberation
and the left--toward human liberation. The argument
that liberation from self-oppression must come before any
real political understanding is one which many of us
accept, as we do the argument that our ultimate aim is
human liberation. What is curious, however, is that Altman
gives no analysis of our present situation in society, nor
does he offer any way of achieving 'human liberation'.
He has little time for the traditional left, which has
either dismissed the gay movement, oppressed it or tried
to politicize it by infiltration. Altman goes on to resist
attempts to identify gay liberation with the left. 'Political
movements, all of them attract people who are insecure,
confused, sexually uncertain'. This is a fairly damning
dismissal and one which suggests that it is a convenient
rationale for his own apolitical feelings. If Altman is
referring to traditional party politics in this quote then
it may well he true, but it is a narrow view of politics
which have in any case offered nothing to the oppressed
gay.
Altman offers clearer and more positive aims in other
fields--the need to break down sexual types, for example.
Also, Altman does not accept the liberal view of merely
integrating gays as equal members of society, but rather
wants the full spectrum of sexual feelings to be recognized
and so avoid the polarization of gays and hets. High and
admirable ideals, but without any analysis of the economic
(capitalism) and social (family) basis of our present
society, they remain fairly romantic aims. The liberation
of sexual feelings will come from a change in society,
whose power and responsibility lies with the workers, who
control the means of production.
What is required is someone with the broad sweep
displayed by Altman to outline the methods by which the
liberation of gays and all oppressed peoples may be
achieved. Marxists have had little or nothing to say
directly about the oppression of gaysthey have only
written about the oppression of people in general, hence
the insistence by the traditional left that all will he cured
by the revolution. With our present state of liberation and
our basic mistrust of the bureaucracy the established left
seem to want to set up, we must ourselves examine the
total structure of society in order to understand our
position, and, as gays, work to ensure that the revolution
achieves the aims of sexual and human liberation.
Altman's book is a lucid and convincing account of our
first steps, but in 1975 we want the next steps to be given
equally serious thought.

Emmanuel Cooper

SOME OF our best friends in

these liberated days are,
doubtless, gay. But would
you let a limp-wristed lad
teach Your daughter ? Would
you indeed allow a gay to tell
the kiddies the facts of life ?
Spurred on by the National
Council of Civil Liberties,
which reported this week that
one-third of local authorities
are " . bigoted or confused" in
their attitude to homosexual
teachers, our Dawdle pollster
slower than Galluphas
been at it again, this time
accousting working mums &
others outside the Tesco
supermarket in down town
(and down market) Camden
Town.
How would they feel about
their friendly neighbourhood
school hiring a gay ? And
the kids finding out about it ?
And teacher explaining his
way of life to the little
darlings ? (It's a problem that
has been disturbing the
Inner London Education
Authority of late where just
such an issue arose.) And
how about Communists or
members of the National
Front standing up at the
blackboard to be counted?
Toughest response came
from David and Mary Willes,
a pram-pushing couple with
two pre-school kids. "I'd
smack him in the mouth," said
Dave cheerfully when
presented with the prospect of a
gay teacher explaining his sex
life to the young. He didn't
.
think much of Reds or antiReds in the classroom either.
"Children should he brought
up with their own points of
viewor their parents'," he
added sternly.
Gladys Heath, a stocky, 50
year-old redhead. wasn't
playing. Asked how many children
she had, Gladys snapped back:
" That's a personal question.
Don't ask me anything like.
that. Anything polite, yes.
But not that."
Undeterred, Dawdle turned
to a 32-year-old ex-town
planner with a six-month-old
under her arm. She hadn't
thought the thing through
yet, but she did a lot of
street surveys for pin money
and was delighted to help
out. No objection on the gay
front. In fact, delig hted if
things were explained to teenagers. "They'll run into
queers eventually anyway."
But she'd be mildly annoyed
if political extremists got

AT WHAT point do you climb

off the trendy liberal bus?
When do you ring the bell
and tell the conductor "Thus
far and no further "? For me
it came this week when I read
Michael Parkin's decidedly
cool piece on the . Campaign
for Homosexual Equality conference in Sheffield last weekend. Seems the gay delegates
censured their own organising
committee for not treating
sufficiently seriously the problems of " paedophiles "child
molesters to you and me.
To make sure we hadn't got
it all wrong London Letter
collected the pamphlet
successfully pushed round the
gays' conference by Mr Keith
llose and others from the
Paedophile Information Exchange. Founded in October
1974 this worthy organisation
looks after the interests of
" those men and women who
are sexually and otherwise
attracted to young people
below the age of 17."
To make the point still
stronger their conference
pamphlet carries a picture of
a couple of jolly, innocent 10
year olds on the beach. It's
hard to tell from the text
just how sexual " relationships " with the kids really
are.
But a few discreet
phrases give the clue.
We are talking, apparently
about "mutually pleasurable"
relationships and the recognition of children's "sexuality,"
"the removal from the statute
books of the 'unjust laws
which define mutual and
loving relationships' as
assaults." PIE exists, among
other reasons, to look after
members " in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts
with consenting ' under age'
partners."
In short we are talking
about poor sad perverted
adults who take pleasure in
having it off with children
too young to know what they
are doing and why. People
who need medical treatment
rather than sneering persecution, no doubt. But, above
all, people who need to he
kept away from your kids
and mine. And these are the
people who gained the blessing of the Campaign for
Homosexual Equality. It's
enough to give gays a bad
name.
For good measure those

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Within These Walls...

The Gay World Today
The early gay liberation movement saw a sustained attack
on what we liked to call the 'gay ghetto'. This was seen
both as a state of mind (closeted, narrow, fashion conscious,
objectifying) and as a geographical place (the 'meat-markets'
and 'rip-off joints' of Earls Court and Chelsea). Gay
liberation offered a creative alternative: community instead
of alienation, comradeship instead of isolation, love instead
of competition, the struggle against sexism and ageism
instead of enslavement to commercialism and the latest
fashion. But early gay liberation had only a limited direct
impact on the gay world; its promise of personal liberation
now seemed vapid when compared with the depth of
external prejudice, the persistence of internal barriers, the
strength of our ingrained (and often sexist) emotional
structures, and the need to earn our daily bread. Moreover,
on an external level the gay ghetto was not resistant to
change. The closeted atmosphere of gay bars dissolved into
gold dust as the proprietors realised that they could allow
gays to dance together without the (legal) heavens falling in.
The Gay Sweatshop play 'Mr. X' has a moving scene where
the hero is introduced to the gay ghetto, and presented with
a list of 'don'ts': don't give your true name, don't kiss in
public, don't touch your partner when you're dancing .. .
It is effective because, still, for most of the audience it was
their experience. But to a generation reaching the gay world
now, it must seem like the faint echo of a bad dream. The
gay commercial scene has proved elastic to a fault. If gay
liberation could set up a 'people's disco', so could Tricky
Dicky. If gay liberation could publish gay magazines, so
could Don Busby; bigger and glossier, if rather less liberated.
Gay liberation prized open the crack, but gay commercial
interests rushed to pour in.
The result is that increasingly the gay world is moulded
and defined explicitly by the values of capitalism. As a
group of gay men we need what the gay world can offer.
Friendships, love, sexual contact do not drop out of empty
skies, or confront us daily on the bus into work. They have
to be sought in a world still largely hostile or alien, if in a
more subtle way than previously, to free gay sexuality and
honest and open gay relationships. This is not, of course, to
deny that the gay movement has achieved a better
community than existed before. On the one hand we do
have more open dances and discos, better lighted pubs and
clubs, more accessible cruising areas (how did we manage
without Gay News and the Spartacus Gay Guide?). And on
the other we now have genuine, and growing, gay
community services, which help the isolated and promote
genuine self help and growth of confidence and personal
stability. That's our achievement.
But despite what many say (usually the better off and
glamorous, or the politically naive) the golden age has not
yet started, nor are further improvements under capitalism
inevitable. In the first place, of course, the benefits of
recent changes are unevenly spread, both geographically and
socially. Capitalism, by its anarchic and unplanned nature,

by Gay Left Collective

is incapable of resolving any social question evenly and

smoothly. Secondly, and this is more difficult to grasp, the
changes have occurred often at the expense of any genuine
release from the pressures of a competitive, commercialised
and sexist scene. We have been offered an improved
situation only if we surrender to it completely. The gay
subculture is riven with clashes and illusions. The women
tend to be split off from the men, butch men from fem,
leather queens from drag queens, and so on. Many of these
attitudes are themselves reflections of heterosexual values;
others of the pervasive cash nexus.
In this gay world it is all too easy for people to lose their
individualities, sex becomes the aim of life; individuals
become things.
What we want to do in this article is look at some aspects
of the present male gay world, its history and most common
forms, the impact of the gay movement on it, and then
tentatively look at the way forward. We come up with no
startling suggestions. Mao Tse Tung once said, "to investigate a problem is to solve it". This is certainly the first
step; the rest is up to us and you.
The Subculture
What we have seen in recent years is essentially a massive

growth of a homosexual subculture. A subculture represents

an attempt to provide a group solution to particular
problems within the confines of a given society. In our case
a homosexual subculture attempts to resolve certain of the
problems that a hostile environment dictates for homosexuals. Although homosexuality exists in all societies, it is
only in certain types of culture that it becomes structured
into a distinctive subculture. And it is so structured when
no generally acceptable social outlet is allowed for it. The
subculture thus acts both to provide social intercourse for
the stigmatised; and to segregate the 'deviants' from the
population at large. This dual character seems to have been
common from the first appearance of a male gay subculture
in England in the early 18th century. A writer speaks of the
Mollies club in 1709 which had parties and regular gatherings,
and another writer in 1729 mentions 'Walks and Appartments', picking-up areas, mainly around the Covent Garden
area of London (ironically, or perhaps not, this is where the
G.L.F. started 250 years later!). These clubs and meeting
places are associated with a culture we would now regard as
transvestite and 'effeminate', suggesting it was this initially,
together with the traditional taboos against sodomy
(remember the 'buggers clubs' of post Wolfenden debates?)
which generated most hostility. By the mid 19th century
the subculture becomes a much more defined and recognisable entity. Its development is associated with increasing
hostility to gay sex in society at large and a heightened
homosexual identity, which, in turn, is largely a product of
the redefinition of social roles within the family and society
that is characteristic of the 19th century triumph of
industrial capitalism. Urbanisation in particular allowed
the development of relatively anonymous meeting places,
and made possible a rapid move between the 'normal' and
'deviant' cultures. A young man of the upper classes might
move from schoolboy sex in his public school to casual sex
with guardsmen (a notorious source of rent); to familiarity
with well known cruising areas in London; to cross-class
liaisons with the working class (sometimes rent, sometimes
not), all without sacrificing his well-connected marriage and
social prospects: unless of course he was caught.
The working class was often seen by middle class
romantics as a reservoir of healthy young love, untrammelled
by bourgeois values. A whole tradition of gay radicals from
Whitman, through J.A. Symonds and Edward Carpenter to
E.M. Forster and beyond dreamt of healthy bodies and
rough minds. The reality of working class gay life was
perhaps less romantic. There is some evidence that as the
nuclear family model spread through the class, the pressure
on working class male gays sharply intensified. Young
working class boys pop up in the notorious scandals (e.g.
the messenger boys in the Cleveland St. scandal of 1888,
the rent in the Wilde case); and harsher legal penalties that
followed the 1885 Labouchere amendment ground particularly on the male working class homosexual. These
tendencies recur constantly in the 20th century development of the subculture, up to its apotheosis in the swinging
sixties and seventies. One or two generalisations can be
made.
1 The subculture is overwhelmingly male. There are very
few signs of lesbian clubs before the 1960s, none of female
cruising areas. Individual lesbians there were, and small
lesbian coteries, but no structured 'underground'.
2 It is a part-time subculture. Few live in it all the time; its
nature is defined by the gay's ability to switch from it to
straight society almost invisibly. The cottage (public
lavatory) was thus more than the most common form of
the culture; it was its symbol. It is significant that as we
male gays became more visible in the 70s, so the authorities
find urgent reasons to close down conveniences.
3 It is largely urban; cottage networks exist in almost all
medium sized towns; but it is the large urban centres that
have most clearly defined, complex subcultures.
4 It is a sexual subculture organised essentially around
sexual contacts.
Sex In The Mind
The fragmentation of life into separate parts and particularly the separation of sex from 'life' is not a product of
homosexual characteristics whatever they may be but
a typical example of the way in which capitalism distorts
and fragments relationships. People are encouraged to
define themselves in terms of particular qualities rather
than as whole personalities. When one quality is particularly
prized the lack of that quality becomes an obsession. Black
2

people feel intensely the fact that they are not white,
women feel intensely the fact that they are not men, gay
people feel intensely the fact that they are not heterosexual.
People react in many different ways to the lack of these
prized attributes by despair, by pretending they are
irrelevant, by defiance, by assertion of the qualities which
are not regarded as acceptable and eventually hopefully
by organising themselves.
Gay people until recently have felt their lives are divided
into the 'normal' part and the sexual part. Traditionally, the
sexual part has been hidden, secret. Gays, when they have
not repressed their sexuality altogether, have generally
sought one of these two solutions:1 Since sexuality in our society has been so closely bound
up with supposedly stable, emotional relationships leading
to marriage and family life, some gays have aped that and
tried to find a suitable partner for a pseudo-marriage. This
often turns into an endless search for an ideal person who
does not exist and even if he did exist, would be unlikely
to be recognised in the shadows of a cottage. Disappointment is the norm and is followed by an even more frenzied
search for this ideal partner;
2 Some gays realise the futility of such a search and,
apparently casting aside their emotional needs, exalt their
sexuality into a prime position. They have accepted
society's definition of them in sexual terms and glorify that
aspect of themselves which is socially repugnant. Since
there can be no link between this feature of their lives and
the rest of their lives they must give it some coherence by
perpetually repeating the whole process. The need to pick
up is no longer simply sexual but has become a major
feature of their whole emotional being. It both strengthens
by virtue of its frequency and weakens by virtue of the
fact that it reminds one constantly of one's position outside the norms of bourgeois society.
In both cases the result is a compulsive search which in
fact only accentuates the fragmentation which society
imposes. This does not mean we share the views of those
bourgeois moralists (doctors, psychiatrists, judges) who
attack homosexuals for their 'promiscuity'. There is
nothing 'immoral' in freely choosing and changing partners
for mutually satisfying sex. One of the greatest assets of
being homosexual is that we can more easily free ourselves
from moralistic labelling of sexual behaviour, and we can
begin to explore our sexuality in a way untrammelled by
stereotyped norms. But the point is that often 'promiscuity'
is not an act of liberating sexuality but of tying it to
unrealistic expectations and wants. We have to break away
from a 'compulsiveness' which is imprisoning, without
surrendering to rigid bourgeois norms. This is one of the
deep ambivalences of cottaging.
Cottaging
A recent piece on sexism in the CHE newsletter tartly
warned its male readers that cottaging was NOT an act of
liberation. Of course it is not. And yet it has a basic directness which often puts to shame the more salubrious parts
of the gay scene. It is basically about sex, and in its various
forms, its own intricate codes and uses, it reveals a lot
about gay oppression.
Almost certainly most gay men and quite a lot of others
use cottages (public lavatories) for making sexual contacts.
For many gays cottages are the first introduction to homosexual expression. This is especially so for young people
whose alternative outlets are few, e.g. in small towns.
Outside the cities and large towns, lavatories are often the
only places where gay encounters can be made. There is a
whole unwritten history of gay men's initiation to sex in
public places (perhaps this adds another dimension to W.H.
Auden's phrase about "private faces in public places") and
it will not do to moralistically condemn. Many people use
cottages because they have no choice in the matter as there
is no other available sexual outlet. Others find it difficult to
function in the more public gay scene. This is dictated in
large part by the sexism of the gay world, with its premium
on youth and good looks and money. The more direct
sexuality of the cottage sometimes (not always) transcends
age. For others, again, cottaging offers an alternative for
open avowal of their homosexuality you can have regular
sex with members of the same sex for years, and never
openly admit to yourself your sexual orientation. Here
casual sex of this sort merges into that described by Laud
Humphreys in Tearoom Trade speedy, anonymous sex,
perhaps between married men, who then return to the

comfort of their wives and families.

But cottaging offers not only the possibility of casual
sex in 'public places', but an opportunity to pick up a wide
range of partners, taken back to one of the partner's nearby
flat or bedsitter, for quick mutual satisfaction. Cottaging
thus offers the possibility of sexual contact without
emotional commitment; perhaps for variety within a stable
relationship. On the other hand, out of such casual beginnings many close friendships have developed. Cottaging is
thus a highly ambiguous activity, and for this reason it
often has a strong fantasy element. Many men get
tremendous excitement out of the repetition of the activity
and its varied associations. In a society which has so harshly
oppressed gay sexuality, gays cannot simply condemn all
this. It is a central part of our experience. In the beginning
of the modern gay liberation movement, the use of cottages
was bitterly attacked by militant gays; now it is sniffed at
by respectable elements. But until society deems fit to
allow the open expression of our sexual needs cottaging or
its equivalents (cruising open spaces, etc.) is likely to
survive. It represents above all the ineradicability of gay
sexuality, a sexuality which our society either prefers to
pretend doesn't exist, or strives to channel into respectable
avenues.
Clubs and Pubs
Clubs, pubs, etc., are less ambiguous as meeting places.
They conform more closely to the heterosexual norm of
sexual contact. They demand, probably, a more urgent
need to identify oneself as gay, though this is often not the
case. Their atmosphere, of course, is healthier, cleaner and
cheerier than toilets (but not always!). Chances of police
harassment are less. There is a better chance of meeting on
a social level, of establishing friendships and emotional
commitments. People meet socially and not always for
sexual reasons. Nevertheless, because more identifiable,
clubs and pubs are often, in a paradoxical way, more
contained and more open to social moulding. There is, for
instance, the stress on looking 'good' according to that
place's particular sexual stereotype, e.g. young and dolly
or butch and tough. Competition for your man is rife. Of
course this is again part of the continuum with heterosexual
maleness. But that, surely, is the point. Many of the clubs
and pubs offer useful services. Others are highly exploitative. They feel in a position to be able to ask what they
want and get away with it. Pubs and clubs often charge
exorbitant prices for shabby services and premises and
provide little in return. This is why other countries seem
like El Dorados in comparison with Britain. Some gay
facilities in USA, Canada, Holland actually seem to want
your custom.
Nevertheless, conditions have improved and are likely to
go on improving. What we need to pinpoint are the dangers
as well as the advantages of this happening.
The dichotomy seems then to be between casual sex,
where nothing is defined or determined and a rigidly
defined scene, where everything is more or less open, but
no one is fully satisfied. Neither is finally adequate, for all
the time they work within the narrow confines allowed by
our society.

discriminatory. For example, entrapment methods are used

to entice gays to commit offences so that they may then be
smartly arrested by the 'innocent' policeman. An equally
common example is the patrolling of gay meeting places on
the pretext that in law the blocking of public footpaths is
illegal. Though footpaths outside gay pubs are kept clear,
it is rare to see footpaths outside straight pubs, churches,
chapels or cinemas, etc., so patrolled and cleared. Policemen, in these 'liberal' days make a tremendous public
relations effort to convince the gay community that they
are not against us. They are only against public indecency,
they say. They don't care what you do in private. But
beware of the police when they come bearing gifts. The
reality of oppression is here around us; in Brighton today,
where 15 arrests a week are made to guard public decency;
in your town tomorrow.
Public attitudes are equally ambiguous, as the recent
Gay News survey of public opinion suggested. Stereotypes
of homosexual behaviour (seen as a largely male activity,
associated with effeminacy and mental derangement) are
deeply imbued in the public mind. At best we can expect a
patronising toleration. Generally the public reads in the
press and sees in plays and films the stereotyped ideas that
gays are unhappy paedophiles with suicidal tendencies, and
few people have any opportunity or even interest in seeing
that this is rubbish and that gays can have a fulfilling and
enjoyable life-style -- such evidence directly challenges the
basic belief in the rightness of the family situation.
With such defining and limiting attitudes from the law
and the public in general, it is little wonder that most gays
feel that they can only function in a gay ghetto; this
concept has been adopted by many gays to the point where
the ghetto is seen a: a natural and right part of society. Not
only, however, do many gays operate only as gays inside
the ghetto, but also, after suffering years of oppression and
prejudice, they subconsciously adopt these attitudes and
loathe themselves for being gay. Such gays often see the
ghettos as being sad and boring places, yet cannot operate
outside them hating themselves and yet unable to see, let
alone identify, the cause of their oppression.
Dancing the Gay Lib Blues
Gay Liberation sought to challenge these attitudes, but as
its sun fades in the West, we can begin to see them in a
more objective perspective. The movement, which arose in
the early 1970s, drew many of its original members from
people who were dissatisfied with the gay sub-culture in a
variety of ways those who knew the gay scene who were
sick of it, followers of the counter-culture, radicals and
student activists. Although there were many twists and
turns in the attitude of the Gay Liberation Movement
(GLM) to the gay ghetto, the predominant attitude was

The Subculture Contained

The walls around the subculture/ghetto are invisible; they
are, nevertheless, effective in containing us. Three aspects
can be identified. Firstly, the state, with the main agency
being the officers of law enforcement. Second is the public
whose attitudes are moulded by social, legal, medical and
religious concepts. Third are gays themselves, who internalise the values and prejudices of the oppressor.
The state has partially withdrawn from the regulation of
sexual behaviour over the past decade and has granted a
free space for gay men, over 21, in England and Wales, in
private, to express their desires. But the bourgeois state
still practises active discrimination. Many state jobs are
closed to known homosexuals for example, the diplimatic
service, branches of the civil service, the armed forces, etc.
Except for sex acts which take place between two consenting adults over 21 in private, much other male homosexual
behaviour is classified as criminal. Many popular gay
meeting places are heavily patrolled by the police a
constant reminder that toleration is strictly limited.
Above all, as the major agents of law enforcement, it is
the job of the police to seek out gay 'crimes'. It is, of
course, blatantly untrue that police behaviour is not
3

that of the counter-culture the ghetto was a part of

straight society and must, therefore, be fought. We held
people who were part of it as being responsible for their
own oppression. Cottages, pubs and clubs were put down
as manifestations of self-oppression; casual sex was alright
as long as it wasn't anonymous; the need for relationships
was recognised but monogamy was condemned. The whole
thing was based almost entirely on feelings and any wider
analysis of the reasons for the existence of the ghetto was
lacking. This lack of analysis was inevitably accompanied
by a lack of strategy. Leafletting and demos took place
outside gay pubs (e.g. Gay Pride Week demo through Earl's
Court with shouts of "Come Out" to the gay patrons) and
an atmosphere of confrontation was generated. But, there
was no strategy for alternative social and sexual outlets for
the majority of gays.
For a time the GLM did offer an alternative to the
ghetto for some with meetings, group activities, discos and
dances all enveloped in an atmosphere of openness and
togetherness. This began to develop into a new ghetto due
to the gulf between us and those who we classed as the
'straight' gays. This was compounded when the split
occurred between the women and the men in the movement. The gay women worked with the women's movement
while the gay men became more isolated into the new
ghetto.
After this, much of the serious questioning of gender
roles disappeared. Such discussions became less honest and
more ritualistic. The male gay movement, instead of
challenging and confronting sexism, became increasingly
defensive. The right to be openly gay was seen only as a
great gain which must not be lost; less and less was it seen
as a first small step in a new era of sexual politics. The gay
movement, particularly through offshoot organizations like
Icebreakers, acted as an important support group for people
coming out. But because it had abandoned wider political
objectives it now tended to glorify what already existed.
The slogan "Glad to be Gay" now became much more like
"Whatever is Gay is Good". Coming out no longer involved
rejection of the ghetto but rather an open assertion of one's
membership of it.
The need for a double life was being destroyed. It was
now much more possible to be open about one's homosexuality. The appearance of a gay community newspaper
helped strengthen this trend. The news items about anyone
and anything gay, the interviews with rich and famous gays,
the lists of gay clubs and pubs, the contact ads all helped
confirm the view that one was not just an isolated individual.
One was now part of a community, but one which remained
conservative and largely impenetrable. We could join local
gay groups or gaysocs, if we were students, where we could
openly meet our 'own kind'. The ghetto, in fact, had come
out. Without the ghetto all the new publications and groups
were meaningless. They were simply new cosmetics for the
tired old faces of the ghetto.
The experience of the women has been different inasmuch as their ghetto was smaller and weaker. But it seems
clear that they have become much more integrated into the
women's movement and have developed politically much
more than the men from the GLM. The lack of a strong
political men's movement is, no doubt, one reason for the
re-emergence of ghetto values in the male gay movement.
The pattern, nationally, has been one of radical groups
being replaced by more conservative social groups with
close links to the ghetto. This experience does have many
variations, however, and some places, e.g. Birmingham,
Bradford, have established longer lasting, more radical gay
groups with a wider base in the community which have
attempted to do more than just play sexual bingo. Gay
centres have been established in many cities. Although
these have tried to establish an alternative to the gay
commercial scene, they have appalling financial problems.
This was made-clear most recently when the South London
Gay Centre was refused a Community Aid Grant by the
London Borough of Lambeth.
The emergence of a few nationally known gay leaders
and the continued submergence of the vast majority of gays
brings to mind the experience of the first British Labour
Government in 1924. As Ramsay MacDonald said of it:
"This extraordinary phenomenon of a Labour Government
that has met kings and rulers of the earth, that has
conducted itself with distinction and with dignity; this
Labour Government that has met ambassadors, that has
faced the rulers of Europe in terms of equality; this Labour
4

Government that has sent representatives forth and its

representatives have been held as statesmen ..."
There are now powerful and busy leaders from the gay
ghetto just as there were powerful and busy leaders from
the working class in 1924. But neither group made any
basic challenge at the structure or values of society. The
leaders have been accepted by society but the base from
which they arose remains unaltered except in the smallest
ways.
Cracking the Walls
Elizabeth Wilson recently remarked that we must not
suppose "that by some well-meant effort of will we can
here and now transcend our society and miraculously have
new and unalienated forms of sexual love relationships".
(Red Rag No.10, p.9). The failure of many gay communes
illustrates very clearly the great difficulties of escaping from
capitalist values and of creating viable alternatives. Gay
community services in part try to offer non-commercial
services but even they cannot fully avoid the pervasive
sexist and commercialised values around them. Without
being despairingly deterministic then, we have to record our
belief that genuinely full, non-sexist, equal relationships can
only be rare within capitalist society (for a comment on
this see the review of Fox). They will all the time be subject
to the pull and push of capitalist values.
But this does not mean we can do nothing. Moreover,
some of the steps forward in breaking down existing value
structures have to take account of the existing state of the
gay world. Despite its expansion of late, gay women and
men are still open to oppression and exploitation within
the ghetto, and this is accentuated by the continuing split
for most between the gay scene and work and home. A
discussion in the gay movement of this split and of the
continuing relevance of 'coming out' in combatting it
would be a necessary starting point. It could lead on to a
continuing discussion of the nature and relevance of the gay
scene which would pinpoint the areas of exploitation
which would have to be fought, and underline the areas of
warmth which have to be encourag ed. What is necessary is
that gays should begin to strive for control over their own
lives. This means campaigning around a series of issues
which can unite the gay world. First, the demand for the
removal of all police harassment at gay establishments and
meeting places. A slogan arising from this demand could
be "no crimes without victims". Secondly, we could
express our consumer-strength by not taking bad facilities,
high prices, hostile atmospheres, just because we are gay.
Thirdly, we must demand the right to freedom of access to
facilities, regardless of the way we dress or look. Fourthly,
and most important, we must create and support as far as
we can, alternatives to the commercial scene. The most
important gain of the gay movement over the past two or
three years has been the development of support groups
such as gay teachers, gay social workers, gay trade union
groups, lesbian groups, and the gay community centres,
such as those in South London and Bradford. These
support groups provide a milieu in which gays can explore
the roots of their oppression in direct relationship to their
i mmediate social or work situations, and at the same time
enable women and men to develop awareness and confidence in their own abilities. These growth points are the
platforms from which to launch a concerted attack on the
values and assumptions of a heterosexual society.
But these are only partial steps. As socialists we believe
that the only way to eliminate sexism is by breaking the
economic and social conditions for its existence in
capitalist society. This means, above all, continuing our
dialogue with the socialist and labour movements. It means
us taking seriously the need to struggle against capitalism
and sexism. It means them beginning to recognise, what was
commonplace to the pioneering revolutionary socialists,
that socialism is not merely the transfer of economic power.
That must be only the first step in a constant struggle to
transform all relationships. The socialist movement must
recapture again the buried tradition of seeing socialism as a
whole way of life.
We regard it as vital that this dialogue be continued:
through discussion and study groups, through gay trade
union groups, through gay fractions in the organisations of
the left. We need all the time to develop a better understanding of the links between sexual oppression and the
exploitation of people as workers. A start has been made in
this direction with the Gay Workers Conference held in

Leeds in February 1976. Out of this conference, and similar

moves, should flow an awareness of the need not only to
confront 'straight society', but also the economic structures

which underpin it. Only in this struggle will the true

alternatives to manipulative sexuality and endemic sexism
emerge.*

From Latent To Blatant

A personal account by Angus Suttie

In the beginning there was me, my mother, father, two

brothers and two sisters. I was much the youngest and when
I was one year old my father gave up being a ploughman
to set up his own dairy business. We moved to a little, tight,
narrow, puritan Scottish town, set on a little hill in a valley
surrounded by bigger hills. This was 1947.
The whole family except me and my elder sister who
was eight years older, was involved in helping to start up
and run the business; it must have been especially hard for.
my mother. She not only did housework, cooking four
meals a day for seven people, washing up, laundry, cleaning,
shopping, tending the numerous pets, looking after me,
etc., but she did a day's work, seven days a week, unpaid in
the dairy. This is fact is what most of her life, as long as
I have been alive and before that, has been made up of
two jobs, one in the home and one outside. I spent most
of my time on my own until I started school. I have little
or no memories of my father until I was eleven when I
worked on a milk van with him, but even then I never got
to know him. So my father is a complete unknown to me,
a mystery, a stranger; a figure who was spoken about and
whom I could see and touch, but someone that I had no
real contact with. As my mother spent most of her time
working, I therefore wasn't actually very close to her, but

she was my main source of emotional comfort and it was

she who had the job of bringing me up.
There wasn't an age at which I didn't prefer playing
with dolls or dressing up to playing football or playing
with toy cars and tractors. Gifts of toy guns were left unused. This was punished by ridicule and being called jessie
and cissy and so I would only do these things in secret.
Instead I took to reading a lot which was more acceptable
but still not as good as playing with other boys. As often
as not though I would play with the girls. "Why aren't you
outside?" I was often asked and attempts by my brothers,
who were back from National Service in the army, to
toughen me up by mock fighting and rough games would
end with me in tears and them in laughter.
The attempts to mould me to what was expected of a
boy growing to be a man were as persistent at school as at
home and games in particular became something which I
dreaded. Football was compulsory and for boys such as me
who were not good at it, we were made to feel not only
that we were personally worthless but aberrant and morally
wanting. "You're a waster" I was told once when I had
'forgotten' to bring my football boots "and I hope
you're not returning next year." The effort made to form
me as a male made me realise that certain gestures were

okay if they were done by a man and others were not. So

I consciously watched myself and if I caught myself sitting
with my legs together I would spread them apart; also
crossing my legs at the thighs was more un-male than
stretching them out before me and crossing them at the
ankle; it was also more male when yawning to stretch back
and with one's arms bent and sticking out at the side to
push one's chest forward; when bending down it was male
to bend from the waist, and so on. I became gesture
conscious and practised different ways of walking and
chose one where I swayed slightly from side to side.
Growing up was painful and I sometimes felt like a
jam-pot cover that was being stretched to fit over a jam-pot
that was too big. I often thought of running away or doing
myself an injury just so that my family would accept me as
I was and not keep trying to change me. I never came up
to what was expected of me and what was expected was
that I should be playing football, scraping my knees, rough,
tough and hard enough to fight back. Instead I cried a lot
which I shouldn't have done and took my frustrations
out on the cat. I got on best with the younger of my two
sisters. She would bully me, but she didn't mind me
dressing up and while I played with her toys she played
with mine. So she was the one in the family to whom I
felt closest and apart from my mother, she had most
influence on my earliest years.
It is strange that I who didn't fit the masculine/boy role
that was ascribed to 'me, I who was closer to my mother
than anyone else, should turn against her, but I did. And
I can remember the exact moment when it happened, it
was that sudden. I was coming home from school and was
jumping on another boy's back to make him carry me,
when I saw my mother across the street watching me. She
said hello but a feeling of annoyance, anger and resentment
that she was watching me filled my head and I ran as fast
as I could up the street. I was about eight at the time and
before then we had had what I expect was a usual mother/
son relationship, but after that I would judge her and she
failed. I was jealous of time she spent away from me but
felt stifled and smothered if she bothered too much about
what I was doing. I would be annoyed if she asked too
many questions and resented her intrusion into my life.
I was angry and humiliated if she hit me and I wouldn't sit
on her knee or let her cuddle me. This episode which
marked a change in my relationship with my mother made
a great impression on me and years later I would wake up
having dreamt about it.
Writing this has made me realise that though I have come
through to what I feel is a better relationship with my
mother than ever, the attitudes of my two brothers
towards her and towards women in general appear to be
based on hatred and critical judgement. Their treatment of
women implies that women are to be used for serving them
with comforts and sex and that they ar inferior, by far,
to men. This is particularly true of the elder of my two
brothers and is summed up by something he said. When I
told him that I am gay, he was disgusted and when I added
that there would be gay men working in London Transport
(he works for the buses) he strongly denied that there were
any male homosexuals in L.T. I carried on to say that there
would also be lesbians working in L.T. to which he replied
"Oh, I ken that. All the bloody women are lesbians." These
same attitudes of women's inequality had been in our
parents' relationship. My mother served the family for
years in the home and when the marriage, which has the
home as its centre, broke up, it was my mother who, as the
keeper of the home, bore the blame. One evening after
there had been a row and my father had gone to the pub,
my mother had broken down and cried "I've failed, I've
failed, I've failed, I've failed" over and over again.
So anyway, there I was at ten years old, a spoilt (as I
was often told) introverted boy with an inferiority complex
and a stutter, who got on with the younger of his two
sisters but who got on better with the dog, when something
called sex entered my life. In my family there wasn't much
emotional or physical warmth or tenderness. No one called
anyone names of endearment and we didn't kiss each other
or touch one another in a loving way. And the culture
around us of course was like this. In this emotional/physical
desert, sex was something dirty and to be ashamed of. For
a woman (married of course) the physical visibility of her
pregnancy was an embarrassment and she would have jokes
made about her because everyone could see what she had
been up to.

So when the scoutmaster took me aside tp go over the

scout laws with me and put his hand up my shorts, it was
no wonder that I felt alarm and guilt. I also felt pleasure
and excitement and told the other scouts that the scoutmaster had a cock like a huge sausage. Their reaction
seemed to be one of titillation as well as that it was wrong.
One or two of them called me poof, but I hadn't a clue
what it meant. I at this time hadn't reached puberty yet
and all that was involved was tickling and stroking one
another's genitals, but on every occasion I felt dirty and
guilty, so much so that I left the scouts and joined another
troup. I had received enjoyment from the contact but I
felt no attraction from the scoutmaster and I would think
longingly of some of the other scouts with whom I would
have much preferred a mutually pleasing sexual relationship.
Where I am from, all moral issues were dealt with as a
cleaver deals with meat and to have sex outside marriage
was scandalous. For example in a shop where I worked,
a boy and a girl were sacked after they were discovered
having sex in the stockroom. And to be gay or paedophile
was to be a pariah and delight would be taken in making
one aware of one's outcastness. Living near me was an
elderly, single man who was rumoured to fancy little boys
whether he did or not, I don't know but pre-teenage
boys would throw stones at his door and chant "Pete the
snecker, Pete the snecker". The scoutmaster as long as I
was in the town didn't have his paedophile activities
brought to light, and if he had, as he was married with two
daughters and had quite a high position in the council
administration, it would have meant social ruin. His feelings
of guilt though were shown by the fact that when we went
over the scout laws together, he always left out the law
which says 'A scout is clean in thought, mind and deed'.
This of course had increased my guilt feelings that we were
doing something 'dirty'.
At 15 I felt the pressure to ask girls out but didn't have
the courage or sufficient desire, so when a girl asked me out
my problem was solved and we went to see a film. The fact
that she had asked me out and made it easy for me to get
over the initial step of dating her, made me try to cling to
her as a safe entry to social conformity. However she soon
gave me up and this was the end of attempts at heterosexual
courtship. I did make forays into dance halls frequented by
heterosexuals but stayed pretty much aloof and tried
smoking to keep me interested. From then on I had to do
a balancing act with girls. I tried to keep girls as friends
without actually telling them I wasn't interested in courtship or petting; but as soon as any girl made demands that
the relationship should be on a more regular basis, I ran
scared and avoided her from then on. On only two
occasions have I ended up in bed with a girl, and both times
I was able to avoid fucking with them. The first time by
pretending I was too tired and sleepy and the second time
by saying that I didn't want to take her virginity as she
was too nice a girl and I thought too highly of her. My
attraction to the same sex however took a positive turn
when I had my knee rubbed continuously for half an hour
in a cinema by an older man. It was electrifying and
startling too. I soon discovered that in the next large town
men could be met in toilets or cinemas who enjoyed
touching and wanking off male youths and so from spending
most of my free time at the swimming baths I became a
film freak. Previously masturbation had been my sole
release; with my total lack of sex education and ignorance
I had often been scared that this would lead to impotence.
This seeking for contacts in cinemas and toilets, the only
places I knew where to meet other homosexuals was new
and exciting at first, but later became very unsatisfactory.
However it was my only outlet (and sporadically at that)
until I was 21 (I am now 29), when, living in Ayrshire at
the time, I entered my first gay bar.
It was nerve wracking. I had heard about this bar which
was in Glasgow in an anti-gay joke and it took me a week
of standing in the street, every evening where the bar was,
for me to build up the courage to go in. I was so nervous
and guilty about being gay, and going into this gay bar
seemed to be a public declaration of my gayness, so that
when I had gone there once it became easier to go there
again. It was here that I met a guy with whom I had my
first really pleasant homosexual experience; we had sex in
a bed instead of a toilet. But I had been expecting more
from a gay bar. After all here we were, homosexual men
who were hated and despised, ridiculed and denied a decent
existence, who came to meet one another in this bar, but

instead of a relaxed friendly atmosphere, I found it cold

and chilling. The atmosphere and attitudes of the world
outside were brought into the pub and unless one was in a
group or coterie of gay friends, the situation could lead to
desperation and a feeling of just as great isolation as
outside.
Soon afterwards I left Scotland for London and the
bright lights of Earls Court. I became an habitue of the
Coleherne and learned to function adeptly in this gay bar
in the rituals of picking up and being picked up of
making contact with the eyes and then carrying out a
duologue to find out whether we fancied each other: then
perhaps a tentative question such as "It's crowded in here
tonight, isn't it?" or "Can I buy a drink?" Or else further
communication with the eyes to discover whose place we
could go back to. I went there for two years and mostly
found it quite depressing. However it was my lifeline to
my gayness and I needed it and so tried to adapt to its
conventions as easily as I could. I would equate my enjoyment of the evening with whether I managed to pick up
anyone but most probably if I did, I wouldn't see him
again as I only saw people once and that usually was it
finished. I would look out for someone who would suit me
as a permanent lover a kind of ideal, but of course as I
only saw people once I didn't give that a chance. It was a
vicious treadmill.
I was not heterosexual, I was a homosexual, and a
homosexual is defined by society as someone who has sex
with people of the same sex. So I had sex with gay men
but my emotional relationships were always with heterosexual men. My emotions were split off from my physical
needs. Society told me that I was a queer and a queen and
bent and a poof and a fairy and a faggot and I was despic
able and so I thought everyone like me was also despicable.
So I despised them as I despised myself. It was each gay
for, as in my case, himself. I didn't fit in with heterosexuals
but the homosexual subculture was ridden with their the
heterosexuals view of what we were. And so we gays
were split and fragmented and it was very difficult to break
this pattern and achieve any lasting friendship with other
gay people.
I failed completely to make gay friends because of my
loneliness and frustrations at being gay. I remember I once
said to someone that if there was a pill which would make
me heterosexual I would take it. Because I hated living in
a bedsitter, and hated the dull, repetitious work I was doing;
because there seemed to be no way out of all this, I
attempted suicide. I firstly took care to destroy the copies
of a gay magazine I owned called Jeremy in case my family
should find out that I was gay. The jobs I had had were
mostly unskilled labouring jobs and in them it had become
obvious that I was not the same as the other men. I didn't
have their toughness in speech and gesture, I didn't drink
pints of beer or bet on horses or follow football; I wasn't
interested in cars and I didn't speak about women as bits,
chicks, that, cunt, pussy, piece, talent, etc. In fact I didn't
actually talk about women a great deal. And of course my
'difference' was sometimes hinted at or spoken about. One
man had his three-year-old son run after me to call me
queer. Mostly though I was left on my own. I got on much
better with women in the jobs I had, especially older
women. The younger women I always felt were a threat
as they might see themselves as potential girlfriends.

Review

The Early Homosexual Rights Movement

By John Lauritsen and David Thorstad

Times Change Press, New York, 1974. 91 pages, price 1.00.
This is a very useful book, the first produced in the gay
movement which attempts to outline the general trends of
past struggles for homosexual rights. In an earlier form it
was written as an internal educational document in the
American Socialist Workers Party. Its central involvement
is thus with the connections between socialism and the gay
movement. Its detail can still provide valuable ammunition
in the present struggles of gay socialists.
The book's first concern is to suggest the continuity of
the present gay liberation struggles with those of the past.
The section on 'The Early Homosexual Rights Movement',

Then a short while after my suicide attempt, while I

was crossing the road from The Coleherne to go into The
Boltons I was handed a leaflet about a group which had
just started called the Gay Liberation Front (G.L.F.). So I
went to a meeting. At this time I had been in London for
two years and it is an odd reflection that during this period
I had never heard of the Albany Trust or the Committee
for Homosexual Equality (as it was then called). G.L.F.
challenged and questioned the images and names that
heterosexuals had heaped on us challenged and questioned
the male/female stereotype roles that led to such rigid
definitions and polarisations of sexual tendencies. G.L.F.
questioned the whole male power structure of capitalist
society and challenged the gays in the subculture to come
out. A feeling of gay pride and gay solidarity was
developed. We shouted that gay is good, and that
two four six eight
gay is just as good as straight
three five seven nine
lesbians are mighty fine.
We were encouraged to come out and tell our family and
people at work that we were gay and that it was great.
Discos and dances were set up as alternatives to the subculture. It was a revolution in my life from being secretive,
afraid and guilty to being proud and glad to be gay. Coming
out at work proved to be less of a trauma than I had
thought it would be. Now that I'm a full-time student
still have a feeling of being separate from the other students
because of my gayness, but however, if the other students
do oppress me they will do it knowing that there's a ' poof '
around who's going to answer back. As for my family, my
gayness is an embarrassment and it is a subject which is not
mentioned. They won't acknowledge my gayness in any
other way than that they never now ask if I'm going steady
with a girl or when I'm going to get married. The only
concession is that they ask how Jeff (my boyfriend) is
doing.
And that's it. I've managed to come through the
oppression surrounding us gays, though not unscathed.
I've come through the tight, all-embracing hug of the
ideology of the family, school and the social pressure at
work, in the media and elsewhere, and through the failed
chase for something better in the gay subculture. And I've
come through it to a tenuous hold on to a society which is
still basically anti-gay. But I know that I am lucky and
fortunate that I was in a large city and came in contact
with G.L.F. and people who helped me. Few of the
conditions which I came up against have changed much or
at all. Thousands of gay people live in other parts of these
islands still oppressed, repressed and depressed by the
prevailing culture; in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and Scotland, where homosexuality is yet illegal, in Wales
and England where our rights are minimal. Everywhere the
male ethic is dominant. Gays all over the country live lives
completely untouched by G.L.F. or the 'sexual revolution'
as it is called. And while some gays fight for further rights,
it is necessary too to fight for a basic feeling of gay pride
for our sisters and brothers everywhere. Only with a
feeling of gay pride and solidarity can we go on to challenge
sexual stereotyping and the male-dominated culture which
oppress us.

from 1864 to 1935 is effective in tracing many of the

forgotten campaigns, particularly those waged in Germany
by the pioneering student of homosexuality, Magnus
Hirschfeld (himself known as Aunty Magnesia in the
German gay world) and his followers. The work of the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the struggle against
the notorious anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the
German penal code, the rivalries with the cultural emphasis
of the 'Community of the Special', the eventual establishment of the Institute for Sexual Science, and the World
Congresses for Sex Reform are fascinating stories. They
particularly throw into relief the more muted (if nevertheless still traceable) campaigns in Britain and the USA.
There is a danger, though, of overstressing the elements
of continuity between the past movements and the present.
7

In the first place it ignores the specific forms of oppression

that gave rise to both the early campaigns and the particular
shapes they adopted. The history of the early homosexual
rights movement would make more sense if located in the
threefold development of new legal controls on sexuality
(not just homosexuality); new ideological forms adopted as
the 'medical model' of homosexuality; and the growth of a
relatively complex and recognisably 'modern' type of
subculture.
This threefold development can be traced not only in
Germany but in Britain and the USA and forms the
essential framework for understanding the gay rights
campaigns. Secondly, it is wrong, I think, to underemphasise what was new in the Gay Liberation Movement
that burst on us in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This
obviously grew out of past campaigns in various ways, but
for those who took part in the early movement it was a
qualitative leap: almost it seemed at the time from 'the
realms of necessity to the realms of freedom'. This latter
view was, as it turned out, an illusion, but the 'leap' was
significant enough, and it is still working out its consequences within the gay community.
The differences between the implications of the two
movements can be detected in the section of the book
describing 'Scientific and Theoretical Issues'. What most of
the early theorists attempted to do was find a role for
homosexuality within existing concepts of gender roles and
sexual differentiation. This can be understood clearly
enough when placed in the context of the practical and
'scientific' concerns of the early twentieth century but it is
obviously sharply different from our own preoccupations
with gender roles and the family. And this precisely underlines the advance, both in theory and practice, that has
taken place. The early movement's chief concerns were to
establish the existence of homosexuality, the identity and
role of homosexuals (Inverts', `Uranians ', 'the Intermediate
Sex', or whatever) and the removal of penal sanctions from
it. The central involvement (though not always the day to

day concern) of the present movement is with the causes of

oppression, the pervasiveness of sexism, and the meanings
of the movement against them. The differences can be
summed up in the comparison between 'campaign', the
key word of the early struggles, and 'movement', the key
word of the present phase.
What is significant about the early campaigns is the close
connection with the political left. This says a great deal
about the quality of these early campaigners and about the
left at that time. It was still the bearer, to put it bluntly, of
a concept of socialism which saw it as a whole way of life,
not just a series of economic arrangements. The social
revolution was seen by many of the socialists who
supported homosexual rights as a transformation, not only
of the political but of the personal too. This is an emphasis
that has been almost entirely lost in socialist movements.
This book should thus have a salutary effect on those nongay socialists who read it. But what the section on
'Socialism and the early Gay Movement' also underlines is
the ways in which ideological and pseudo-scientific
definitions of sexuality and gender roles vitiated the
apparent liberalism of even the most sympathetic of
socialists, such as the early Bolsheviks, and paved the way
for the rapid back-tracking from the 1930s, onwards (for
more on this see my Where Engels feared to tread in issue
No 1). Gay socialists could do worse than ponder on the
lessons and implications of this section.
The book ends with notes on a number of pioneers,
including Edward Carpenter, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs , Magnus
Hirschfeld and Walt Whitman. These are sketchy, but often
illuminating. The book, as might be expected, only begins
to scrape the surface. But the soil it reveals is very fertile.
Some interesting crops might yet grow from it.*
Jeffrey Weeks

The book can be obtained from most Left bookshops in

Britain. In London, Compendium, Colletts, Housemans and
Rising Free bookshops stock it..

Gays In Films
by Richard Dyer
Since the gay movement began we have insisted on the
centrality of the media (understood in its widest sense) as a
carrier, reinforcer or shaper of our oppression. Sometimes
we have gone overboard in blaming the mass media they
are only one of the instruments of oppression. More
important, we have tended to condemn images of gayness
in the name of aesthetic concepts and values that are highly
problematic. We've tended to demand that gay characters
and themes be represented according to certain ideas and
ideals about what art is, without seeing that such ideas and
ideals are straight ones, not neutral or transparent but
imbued with a sexual ideology that has anti-gayness as one
of its cornerstones. I want in this article to look at some of
these notions as they apply to films, to argue that what
appear to be 'given' aesthetic principles are, in however
ambiguous a way, also principles of heterosexual hegemony.
1 "Gayness should express itself on film"
Many critics, especially in gay publications, are concerned
with how gayness expresses itself on film. I am thinking
particularly of Jack Babuscio's articles in Gay News (and
let me make it clear right now that what follows is not an
'attack'; Jack's articles raise central issues in the most
widely available non-pornographic forum there is for gays
in this country, and his articles have helped me enormously
in trying to think these issues). Running through all of
these articles is the notion of the 'gay sensibility', which
he defines as
'a creative energy reflecting a consciousness different
from the mainstream, a heightened awareness of certain
human complications of feeling that spring from the
fact of social oppression; in fact, a perception of the
world which is coloured, shaped, directed and defined
by the fact of one's homosexuality.' (GN 82; p.15).
Many of his articles are concerned with the way this
sensibility 'surfaces' in films for example, his pieces on
John Schlesinger (GN 74) and James Dean (GN 79).
8

There is already a problem here with the notion of a gay

sensibility. Jack tends to write as if the very fact of being
oppressed, and of being able to pass because one's stigma
need not show, automatically produces the gay sensibility.
I am certainly happy to acknowledge the fact of the gay
sensibility, but it has to be understood as something that
has been and is produced and practised in history and
culture it is the specific way we (or rather, a relatively
'out' minority) have found of coping with and resisting our
oppression and our peculiar situation as 'invisible' stigmatised people. Oppression does not just 'produce' a subcultural sensibility; it merely provides the conditions in
relation to which oppressed people create their own subculture and attendant sensibility.
A second problem is that it is in fact rather hard for an
individual sensibility to surface in a film. This is partly
because of the sheer numbers of people who work on a
film, in an often fragmented and long-drawn-out
organisation of production; even the director has limited
room for manoeuvre.(1)But it is more importantly because
any artist in any medium whatsoever is working with a
tradition, a set of conventions, that are imbued with
meanings that she or he cannot change, and indeed of
which she or he is most likely not aware. Even if films did
have individual authors (as most 'underground' films do(2)),
it would still not alter the problem. The author may have
any qualities you like; but the cinematic language has
connotations and conventions that escape the author. Take
a film like The Detective, which sets out to be sympathetic,
puts a major star (Frank Sinatra) as a defender of gays and
details some of the forms our oppression (and selfoppression) takes, but cannot all the same help but
reproduce the dominant image of gays the actual
conventions of the film are more powerful than the
intentions of scriptwriter and star. Thus the star's
unassailable heterosexuality and centrality to the action
enforce a narrative function of gay passivity, requiring a

straight to act for us; the bleak view of sexual relations in

American thrillers like this means that gayness is seen as
part of a web of sexual sickness, equated especially with
the hero's wife's nymphomania (i.e. she fancies men other
than him!); the gay scene can only legitimately be shown
at points in the plot relating to crime (why else would
Sinatra be interested?), and so enforces the link between
gayness, deviancy and crime; and the actual visualisation
of the gay scene can find no way round the impression of
the grotesque ( the milieu is sketched in by cutting from
bizarre face to bizarre face, accompanied by snatches of
dialogue lifted out of context, as the protagonist
supposedly looks round and takes in the gay environment;
this is a convention of representing the gay scene
compare similar scenes in The Killing of Sister George,
New Face in Hell, The Naked Civil Servant, etc.).
Nor is this problem confined to commercial cinema.
(Indeed, as Claire Johnson has pointed out(3) , the very
obviousness of the conventions in commercial cinema may
mean that it is easier to manipulate in progressive ways
than the hidden conventions of 'art cinema'). Thus in
contemporary French cinema there is really little to choose
between the lesbian in Emmanuelle, an obvious exploitation film, and those in Les Biches, directed by critically
acclaimed Claude Chabrol, and the feminist film La Fiance
du Pirate ( except that she is actually rather nicer in
Emmanuelle). This is because in every case the film is made
within a straight framework, women seen only in relation
to men, and the lesbianism is there as a facet of the het
world-view. In the case of the first two, the attraction of
lesbianism is evoked the better to assert the superiority of
hetness; in the case of La Fiance du Pirate, the lesbian
seems to represent a 'sick' way of being an independent
woman over against the heroine's independence via
prostitution (which both allows her to revenge herself on
men and gives her enough money to leave the village). In
no case is lesbianism expressing itself.
In this perspective, Jack Babuscio's article on James
Dean is instructive. He argues that Dean's gayness informs
his three screen roles, giving them 'depth', 'warmth' and
'sensitivity'. Thus Giant for instance allowed him to express
'the inability of adolescents to relate to the sexual roles
played out by parents'. Now in terms of how a particular
screen image happened to come about, the role of Dean's
gay sensibility in modifying and shaping it may well have
been crucial, and it is polemically important to say so. But
at the same time one has to see that, as an expression of
gayness, it is deformed. There is never the slighest suggestion in any of his roles that Dean is gay; Plato's 'crush' on
him in Rebel Without a Cause is by no flicker of recognition
reciprocated by him, and there is no other such attachment
in the other two films. At one level of course, Dean, quite
possibly through his gayness, did help launch a way of
being human and male without being particularly
' masculine' (cf. also Montgomery Clift and Anthony
Perkins) and that is a contribution to the struggle against
the sex roles. But this struggle could only be showed at the
expense of the character's gayness he had to be seen as
emphatically heterosexual. Moreover the narrative frameworks of the films implicitly reinforce the heterosexual,
sex-role norms. The point about Dean's roles as roles
(rather than the qualities his performance suggests, which
may well be in contradiction with the roles), is that he is,
in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, the son of, in
the first case, a strong mother, and, in the second, a weak
father. The stress on the 'extraordinary' quality of these
parents (Jo Van Fleet in Eden always photographed in
shadow and with dramatic 'expressionist' techniques of
lighting and camera angle; Jim Backus played for laughs and
pathos in Rebel) implies the properness of the ordinary
parental roles of 'weak' mothers and 'strong' fathers. Dean
of course had a following, and it was undoubtedly linked to
the kind of non-butch image of being a man that he
incarnated; an image that gay men have been in a particularly good position to imagine and define I don't want to
deny his contribution nor its gay roots. But this contribution is, inevitably, at the expense of gayness, and it is
moreover in an artistic form where his roles' function in the
narrative, and the construction of other characters through
performance and filming, contradict the implications of his
image. People may have taken away an image of gentle
sensitive ways of being a man, but they may also have taken
away a sense of neuroticism born of inadequately
performed sex roles. Films, and most art, are usually as
contradictory and open to alternative interpretations as

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

this; and as long as it is a question of inserting gayness into
films as they are, any full, undeformed expression of the
gay sensibility will tend within any film to offer a weak
counterpoint to the reinforcement of heterosexual and
sex-role norms.
2 "Gays as ordinary human beings"
A very common stance of straight critics, and alas many
within the gay movement (for we so easily take over
straight notions without realising how inapplicable they
are to our situation), is that films should show that gay
people are just ordinary human beings. In this line of
thought, highest praise is granted to those films where it is
apparently 'incidental' that the characters and milieu are
gay.
Now it may be true that we are still at the stage where
we need to assert, to others and to ourselves, that we are
part of the human race. But such assumptions assume that
there is no real difference between being gay and being
straight. Yet, from a materialist standpoint, gayness is
different physically, emotionally and socially from hetness.
It is physically different not in the sense of involving
different genetic factors (the equivalent sexist argument for
the facist arguments of behavioural psychology) but in the
sense of being a different physical activity two women in
bed together is not the same as a man and a woman
together or two men. It is different emotionally because it
involves two people who have received broadly the same
socialisation (being both of the same gender) and have thus
formed their personalities in relation to the same pressures
and experiences. It is socially different because it is
oppressed oppression enters into straight relationships of
course, partly through the legacy of puritanism in its various
forms and partly through the oppression within straight
relationships of women by men. But the heterosexual
i mpulse is not of itself condemned (except in extreme
instances) and a space is allowed for it in marriage. We, on
the other hand, have nearly always been condemned even
for having gay desires, and no real social legitimacy (in a
wider sense than mere lack of legal constraints) has ever
been allowed us. I don't wish to imply that we are different
in every way from hets in terms of aspects of our lives
not directly involving relationships, we are, clearly, the
same as hets. Our bodily functions, how we do our work,
our intellectual and creative abilities, all these are in no way
different from straights ... except in so far as they involve
9

relationships. The trouble is of course that they do so

much of life is relationships and even where no physical
sexual expression is given to them the sexual reality of our
lives necessarily informs them.
What this boils down to in terms of films is that if you
are representing sexual and emotional relationships on
screen, it does make a difference whether they are gay or
straight. One will not do as a metaphor for the other,
neither will either do as general metaphors for human
sexuality and relationships. In assessing, for instance, the
kind of power struggles and games portrayed in The Killing
of Sister George, Staircase, The Bitter Tears of Petra von
Kant, The Boys in the Band, one has to decide whether
these are the power games going on in gay relationships
(formed and practised in a situation of oppression) or
whether these are the power games going on in straight
relationships (formed and practised in a situation where
men oppress women) transposed to ostensibly gay characters in order to give the verdict of 'sick' and 'neurotic' to
heterosexual hang-ups by ascribing them to homosexual
people. The films mentioned seem to me to be so lacking in
any sense of the reality of oppression (the social situation
of gayness) and of gay sexuality (the physical activity of
gayness) as to make the second interpretation the more
likely.
A further reason for accepting this interpretation is that
it is a characteristic of some, a minority, gay relationships,
to imitate straight 'marriages'. Thus superficially, seen from
the outside, gay relationships can be reduced to the forms
of conflict of straight ones, whilst at the same time implying that it is the 'tragic' impossibility of gays actually
being married straights that accounts for the conflicts. In
this way, such domestic dramas of 'gay' life are doubly
reassuring for the straight audience they allow it to view
problems of heterosexuality (which psychologically they
no doubt need to) without being shown these problems as
by showing how tragically impossible they are for gays. All
this is confirmed by the way straight critics, presented
with a similar drama involving het people, Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, promptly turned round and asserted,
despite Albee's assurances to the contrary, that it was really
a disguised homosexual play!
3 Realism
Lingering behind much of the criticism of the representation of gays in films is the feeling that it is not real, it does
not show gay people as they really are.
Realism is one of the trickiest terms in the whole critical
vocabulary yet it is endlessly evoked, often with recourse
to synonyms like 'convincing', 'true-to-life', 'plausible' and
so on. What this means is that we require films to present
us with settings, people, events that as closely as possible
resemble day-to-day life, granted a little artistic licence. We
tend not to recognise how conventional realism is, although
one only has to look at the realism of earlier periods
(British 30s documentary, Italian neo-realism, 'Method'
acting) to see both how stylised all realisms actually are
and how each realist style carries all sorts of cultural,
historical connotations with it.
However the problem with realism is not so much our
blindness to the conventionality of the realism of our own
times, but the fact that realism is really only capable of
capturing the surface of life it cannot 'capture' what is
going on inside people's heads nor can it capture the social
forces that determine the surface of life.
In fact it is very hard for 'realism' to do anything but
reproduce dominant ideology. That is in everyday life
objects and appearances have, first, an objective status in
the bio-physical world, and second, a range of potential
significances for us individually, although dominant in that
range is what our culture has taught us to associate with
them. But once objects and appearances are filmed they
can only mean to us what they mean in the film. They are
signs whose only bio-physical status is celluloid. It then
becomes exceedingly difficult for them to mean anything
but what they predominantly mean in culture. Thus to
show gay people 'realistically' on the screen means to show
them in the conventions of the prevailing cinematic
realism; which in turn means to reproduce the ideas and
assumptions about how gays really are which prevail in
society. Whatever its intentions (and the intentions of
realist film-makers are seldom anything but generous), a
'realist' film about gays is unlikely to challenge the
assumptions of most of the audience about what gays are
10

like for whilst we as gays may read the everyday surface

represented (perhaps quite accurately) according to our
sub-cultural understandings, the rest of the audience is
perfectly free to read it according to its dominant cultural
understandings.
Realism can, within its conventions, show the look of
gay life, but it cannot show what it feels and what it means
to gay people, nor can it show the social pressures that act
on gay people and so produce the look of gay life. This I
think is neatly shown up by the film Victim, which is a
mixture of liberal realism and crime thriller. The notion of
oppression comes across in the film certainly, but only
because of the nonrealist elements that is, that it is a
major star (Dirk Bogarde, then a pin-up) who is got at for
being gay and that the thriller narrative clearly assigns
villainy to the blackmailers not the gays ( remembering
that this is the sort of thriller in which there is no moral
ambiguity about who the goodies and the baddies are). On
the other hand, the depiction of gay life is, in the conventions of the time, realistic enough but the conventions of
the time are such that real can only mean the kind of 'sickness' view of homosexuality that the film's title's emphasis
would suggest. Thus whilst it does not reproduce the 'evil'
connotation of gayness, it does reproduce the 'sickness'
connotation that the Wolfenden report was to reveal as the
dominant bourgeois view of us.
4 Stereotypes
No term is more frequent in gay criticism of the cinema
than 'stereotype'. Certainly we are right to be angry about
the succession of pathetic, ridiculous and grotesque figures
that are supposed to be us up there on the screen.
We may define stereotype as a method of onedimensional characterisation that is, constructing a
total character by the very mention of one dimension of
her or his characteristics. Thus to know that a character
is lesbian is immediately to know that she is aggressive,
frustrated, loud-mouthed, big-boned and perverse. All art,
indeed all our thoughts about the world, uses typecasting
but when we label someone a 'grocer' or a 'doctor', we
usually assume that that does not tell us all we need to
know about him (and we usually assume it is a man).
Whereas it is assumed by stereotypes such as the dumb
blonde, the happy nigger, the bull dyke and the camp
queen that we know all we need to.
Thus far we can agree that stereotyping is a Bad Thing.
However behind this notion of stereotypes there lingers
another notion which may be equally undesirable
this is the idea of the "rounded" character, the type
of character-construction practised by nineteenth century
novelists and advocated by theorists such as E.M. Forster.
This is not the 'natural' way of 'depicting people' in art,
but a particular artistic method for constructing protagonists
in a particular narrative tradition. It is a method that has
inscribed in it certain of the dominant values of Western
society above all, individualism, the belief that an
individual is above all important in and for himself, rather
than a belief in the importance of the individual for her or
The Killing of Sister George

his class, community or sisters and brothers. This cardinal

precept of bourgeois ideology as against feudal or socialist
ideology is built right into the notion of the 'rounded
character', who may well feel some pulls of allegiance to
groups with whom she or he identifies, but who is ultimately seen as distinct and separate from the group, and in
many cases, antagonistic to it. Rounded characterisation is
then far from ideal when you need (as we do) expressions
of solidarity, common cause, class consciousness, fraternity
and sorority.
What we need is not the replacement of stereotypes by
rounded gay characters (though it would I think be wrong
to underestimate the temporarily progressive impact of films
which do use rounded characterisation for gay characters;
this breaks the rules it is a surprise to find Peter Finch in
Sunday Bloody Sunday treated with the same trappings of
'roundness' as Glenda Jackson), but rather the development
of positively valued gay types. That is representation of gay
people which, on the one hand, unlike stereotypes proper,
does not function to deny individual differences from the
broad category to which the character belongs. But it, on
the other hand, does not, unlike rounded characters,
function to diminish the sense of a character's belonging
and acting in solidarity with her or his social group.
What the positions just discussed seem to lack is any
concept of the operation of ideology in art. Films are
treated as transparent, neutral, a mere medium, and the
distorted representation of gayness as a correctable,
regrettable fault. As long as the mesh between artistic form
and dominant ideology is ignored, no radical critique of
gays in films can be accomplished.
Where gayness occurs in films it does so as part of
dominant ideology. It is not there to express itself, but
rather to express something about sexuality in general as
understood by hets. Gayness is used to define the parameters of normality, to suggest the thrill and/or terror of

decadence, to embody neurotic sexuality, or to perform

various artisticideological functions that in the end assert
the superiority of heterosexuality. We are wrong to assume
that anti-gayness in films is a mere aberration on the part
of straight society how homosexuality is thought and
felt by hets is part and parcel of the way the culture teaches
them (and us) to think and feel about their heterosexuality.
Anti-gayness is not a discrete ideological system, but part
of the overall sexual ideology of our culture.
This ideology is complicated. There are many inflections
of the het norms, and much of the analysis of images of
gayness has to take this into account. Two examples gayness in the American thriller tradition called 'film noir' (e.g.
The Maltese Falcon, In a Lonely Place, Gilda, and also
arguable later cases such as Gunn and New Face in Hell),
where gayness is part of a web of sexual fear and anxiety
(especially in the form of sexually potent women who
endanger the hero); Victim is one example of a whole series
of British films treating sexual-social issues (such as prostitution, child-molesting, adultery) as 'problems' and 'sickness'. How the gayness is represented derives from the
particular inflection of the ideology of the time.
Moreover, and here we can take hope, ideology is contradictory, ambiguous, full of gaps and fissures. Straight
culture is attracted as well as repelled by gayness, and films
do show the differing pressures of these responses. Gay
culture, although itself formed and deformed in the
shadow of straight culture, does contain oppositional
elements within it gayness always at the very least raises
the spectre of alternatives to the family, the sex-roles, male
dominance. Thus to take an example of an extremely
conventional, bourgeois, 'well-made' film, Summer Wishes,
Winter Dreams, a film in which the very briefly shown gay
characters are presented as performing ballet grotesques.
Not on the face of it a positive assertion of gayness. Yet
the film centres on the rifts and cruelties of a heterosexual
relationship, and, at the end of the picture, the gay relationship, although not shown, is evoked as a positive, happymaking one ( the fact that it is off screen suggests how
hard it is to find images to evoke this). Moreover, the
central character's dilemma is structured in the film (as the
title indicates) in terms of dreams (the nightmare of the
ballet-gay) and wishes (sentimental reconciliation of son
within the family unit). Her anguish is shown to stem not
from realities themselves but from how she thinks realities.
There is thus an undertow to the film which does begin to
raise questions and intuitions about the whole edifice of
marriage, sexual relationships and so on. It is to such undertows that we should look, for they are the most likely
sources of a cinema which undermines heterosexual artistic
hegemony from within and may in the process create a
form of artistic language which comprehends all of human
sexuality and relationships.*
Notes
1 See Ed Buscombe: 'Ideas of authorship' in Screen,
Vol 14, No 3 pp. 75-85 .
2 Gays have been particularly influential in the development of underground cinema; e.g. the work of Kenneth
Anger, Constance Beeson, Jack Smigh, Gregory
Markopoulos.
3 See Claire Johnson: Notes on Women's Cinema, S.E.F. T.,
1973.

A Commune Experience
By Keith Birch
The commune movement was an important aspect of the
alternative society in the early 1970s. Even though the
number of people who actually set up communes together
may have been quite small, the interest in the movement
and its underlying ideology was widespread, especially
amongst the young and middle class idealists.
The relevance of this movement to gay people now may
seem very slight, but in many ways it did question the
structure and functions of the family in modern society
as the women's movement and revolutionary gay people do
today. There were attempts to put into practice many of
the propositions for alternative living structures and
relationships. From analysing the practical failure of the
movement in general and from personal experience of living
in a commune, some of the contradictory aspects and the
incompleteness of the movement's ideological foundations

become apparent.
I was amongst a group of gay people who were all
members of the Gay Liberation Movement in 1971 who
wanted to form a commune. The attraction of living
together in this way for gays had several specific causes.
Gay people are excluded from the family unit or feel
alienated from it in many cases. The socially prescribed
roles of mother, father, etc., are not possible or are forced
onto us and so the nuclear family cannot fulfill our needs.
Therefore, the prospect of a loving extended 'family' is
particularly appealing. A communal situation had the
chance of serving the emotional needs of people who are
made to feel isolated by this society, as many gays are.
This feeling was probably true for most of the commune.
A communal situation encourages the questioning of the
roles that are allotted to us by this society. Ours was, of
11

course, a rather unique group, in that we were all gay men

at the start though later on some women did become
members. Also, there were no children in the commune.
This meant that many problems were not confronted by us.
One of the central concepts of the commune movement,
with which we agreed, was the stress put upon personal
change as being a key factor for wider social changes in the
future; if the whole of society would not change, we were
going to build an alternative society, side by side with it.
The writings of Cooper and Laing were widely read and
approved of. There was much criticism of family life and
the bad effects it had on the individual. Great faith was put
on alternative group structures to produce a better
emotional environment. There was little thought given to
the economic and social background which forces people
into their present circumstances. Economic problems were
only considered in relation to the financial stability of the
commune. If individuals could solve their personal problems
and learn to relate fully with other people, sometime in the
future, society would become a loving utopia.
Our group had been meeting together for some time to
discuss our ideas and to get to know one another. We all
came from very different backgrounds, both in class and
nationality. About the only things we had in common were
being gay and wanting to live in a commune. The first major
problem was to get somewhere for us all to live but
suddenly there was an opportunity for those who wished
to move into a flat and so about seven of us actually took
it up. The first few months were a period of great change
and excitement for us. It was a matter of confronting the
problem of a group of almost total strangers living together
in a very small space. The decision to have a communal
bedroom was forced on us for reasons of space as well as
ideology. New people came along who were interested in
joining and after the first six months we moved to another
flat with some change in membership and a growth in
numbers to about 12. The number of members was to
remain fairly constant until the end, although some people
moved on while others joined us.
Some of the first disagreements had occurred because of
a feeling of domination that some of us felt from those who
seemed to speak most and take the decisions. This initial
problem was resolved when the majority of us moved,
leaving the others behind. It was the first failure that we
had to admit from our original theorising. Our often
repeated belief had been that it was possible for any people
to live together and through the continual interaction,
confrontation and mutual change in character, conflicts
would resolve themselves. However, this was not the case on
this occasion and later ones.
The ideology of the G.L.M. at the time against monogamous couples was carried into our beliefs concerning our
living situation. At the start there were two couples,
though not monogamous, but by the end of the two year
period the number had increased. It could be said that we
entered the group from isolated backgrounds and went
through a living process which gave us the personal confidence (or need) to enter couple relationships. Some felt free
enough to relate to several others in the commune sexually
and most of us had sexual relationships with people outside
the group and visitors. However, the underlying tensions
that wider sexual expression amongst the commune
members ourselves caused, became too great for it to
happen frequently or for too long. The subject was not
often discussed and a satisfactory understanding of our
feelings was never worked out. There was a sense of guilt
about being jealous, so instead of open confrontation,
pressures were put on in more subtle ways. Sexual relationships with people outside the group somehow felt less
threatening and were more open to discussion and so
problems could find some resolution.
House meetings were held regularly at the start in which
we would try to sort out all the general financial and
material problems. There is a joke that people part over
who does the washing-up. When 12 people live together
that chore grows to amazing proportions and it caused
many arguments when people did not make their contribution. Finance was always a problem. Communes, by
their nature, stress the 'living' situation but those in cities,
unless based on some sort of craft production or business,
find it necessary for members to undertake wage labour
outside. At first most of us had full-time jobs but these
were gradually given up in favour of part-time occupations,
cleaning or claiming Social Security in order to give us
freedom and time to spend together. Projects for us all to
12

produce crafts within the commune were often considered

and attempts were made but without success. Differences
arose between those who wanted to move to the country
so the commune could be self-supporting and others who
wanted to remain in London where they felt work within
the G.L.M. and greater social contact more important.
Another feature which affected the way in which the
commune progressed was the fact that we were used by the
G.L.F. office as a place for people, who were on holiday or
in trouble, to stay. The result of this was that we were
always overcrowded (at one point there were 20 people
staying in a flat meant for six). We were confronted with
many people's problems, emotional, legal and others, and
had less time to sort out our own. There were occasional
rip-offs. However, this continuous stream of people
provided us with contacts with the outside. Some became
members of the commune after spending a period of time
to find out whether we were mutually suitable. Also it
served an important role for sexual relationships.
Every member of the commune was expected to pay an
equal share towards the rent bills and kitty for food. This
was agreed after much discussion because the differences in
employment and the level of each person's wages meant
that for some it was easy while for others it could be a
problem. However, it was felt that if everyone contributed,
it would not lead to situations of dependence or ill-feeling
and it would show committment and responsibility towards
the rest. Even so, it did not always work out like this.
For some of the time we did the cooking, shopping and
cleaning by rota with the intention of us all being together
at least for a main communal meal each day. The rota
system did not last as its formality led to inconveniences
and an oppressive feeling to conform, although at times
things became so chaotic that it was returned to for short
periods. We continued to have a communal bedroom until
the last few months, although it seemed to surprise visitors,
as did the fact that the bathroom had no door. It was
recognized that people need to be alone at times and so a
room was set aside for this purpose.
After almost two years the commune began to disintegrate. It is impossible to identify one particular cause;
rather it was through various personal and political
differences combined with feelings of frustration and
emotional exhaustion.
Although I have rather dismissed the relevance of
personal change through communal living as a way of
changing our society, most of us feel that it was a very
i mportant experience and we discovered a great deal about
ourselves, our feelings and hang-ups, etc. We had to
confront things that in other circumstances could have
been avoided and therefore not resolved. In many ways I
believe that I was one of those who gained the most from
living in the commune, particularly in being able to relate
with others and in self-confidence.
Research on other communes, backed up by personal
observations, shows the failure in the vast majority of
cases to bring about equal relationships between the sexes.
What tended to happen was that the women communally
did what has been labelled 'women's' work, bringing up
the children, cooking, cleaning, etc. Some change did
occur because the whole group would be centered on the
home and greater value put upon domestic work and
increased interaction of all members. I visited several
communes in the country where the women looked after
the children, cared for the animals and gardens, made things
to sell and did the cooking and cleaning. The men seemed
to just do a few of the heavier jobs, chop wood, drive and
occasionally play with the children; the rest of the time
they spent smoking dope. Many of the groups broke up in
a fairly short time. Relationships between adults and
children again focussed on the mother/child axis, though
now with a group of women and children. The father may
have been around more but the basic roles did not alter.
There is nothing inherent in the structure of a commune to
bring about changed relationships and except for a few
politically aware groups, most returned to the old patterns
without much thought.
Economically and socially the theories of the movement
were utopian and backward looking, to an age of crafts
and simplicity which was impossible to attain and could
not offer a way out for the masses of people from our
present society. However, it did point to the possibilities
of different bases for relationships which could exist in a
future socialist society, having destroyed the economic and
ideological obstacles presented by the capitalist system.*

Eros And
Civilisation
An Introduction to Marcuse's Essay on Freud

by Ronald L. Peck

Marcuse's 'Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud' is an analysis of

sexual repression in present day technological societies.
Although the emphasis is upon the repressive character of
capitalist societies, it is clear that miracles are not expected
of socialist societies before socialist ideas have been revised
and enlarged to take into account psychoanalytical interpretations of history. In Marcuse's analysis, sexual and
economic repression are understood as part of the same
order of repression and the liberation of one sphere does
not make any sense without the liberation of the other. His
stress on the centrality of sexual liberation perhaps
accounts for the marginal interest in his work expressed by
orthodox Marxist theorists and for its being virtually
ignored by active political groups of the Left. Though
groups have taken up some of the concerns of the Women's
Movement, and marched in solidarity in National Abortion
Campaign rallies, the support has been for women as an
oppressed social group. Sexual liberation as it is understood
by Marcuse, one can't help feeling, would be rejected as
libertine, individualistic, romantically hedonistic. The socioeconomic/sexual divide seems as large now,as it ever was.
Gays on the Left must be particularly aware of this.
Marcuse's work is recommended because it does attempt to
pull things together coherently, to construct a model of
society in which sexual repression is contextualised. A
number of gays, including Dennis Altman, have found Eros
and Civilisation worth grappling with.
Marcuse is not at all concerned with homosexuality as
such; there are only two brief references to homosexuality
in the book, but both are very positive. He has coined a
term which includes homosexuality: "polymorphous
sexuality". What is meant by it is an expansive and receptive
sexuality, freed from the notion of usefulness or "end". He
refers several times to "pre-genital polymorphous sexuality",
a condition obtaining, briefly, in the earliest stages of
infancy, when sexuality is not localised or separated off as
a genital function, when the erotic is larger and less distinct.
As we 'grow up', we grow into a world of sharp differentiations in which sexuality is located in genital contact with
the opposite sex. 'Normal' sexuality becomes procreative
sexuality, narrowed spatially (genitally) and temporally
(between periods of work), leaving most of the body free

to function as an instrument of labour. Against this,

Marcuse asserts (quoting Freud) "the primary context of
sexuality is the function of obtaining pleasure from zones
of the body; this function is only subsequently brought
into the service of that of reproduction." Polymorphous
sexuality survives in maturity tabooed as perversions the
greater their degree of deviation from procreative sexuality.
The perversions posit a threat: "Against a society which
employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions
uphold sexuality as an end in itself ...." Marcuse writes
positively of the "perversions" because they reassert claims
made and denied in early infancy; through their virility
the 'norm' of sexuality as inherently procreative might be
broken. If they are to redefine sexuality as polymorphous,
'the guilt associated with them has also to be broken, or, as
Nietzsche said, reversed. Marcuse paraphrases Nietzsche:
"mankind must come to associate the bad conscience not
with the affirmation but with the denial of the life instincts,
not with the rebellion but with the acceptance of the.
repressive ideals".
Polymorphous sexuality
As I understand Marcuse's notion of polymorphous
sexuality, homosexuality is a part of it; what Marcuse
believes is fundamental is a form of androgyny. Within this
wide definition of sexual possibility, homosexual behaviour
is an immediate and spontaneous and positive element.
Separated off and tabooed in maturity, it is identified as
perverse, and rejected, because unproductive. The perversions, like the arts, are marginal because, in presenting
alternatives to the norm, they are of no use to the society
that operates from the stability of unchanging norms. For
Marcuse, they hint at the possibilities of what he calls the
"Great Refusal". A norm of sexuality that is so defined, so
limited, so adapted to the needs of a consumer society is a
functioning part of that society, a support of it. By implication, homosexuality, as one of the perversions, challenges
that norm. It harbours potential rebellion. By pushing
homosexuals to the edge of society, a vantage point on that
society is unwittingly given us. But most homosexuals take
no advantage of their 'outsideness' to analyse the reasons
for their oppression within the context of the society; they
want nothing more than to reintegrate themselves into that
society, which they believe is capable of reforming itself to
include them. Marcuse himself came to recognise the
apparently infinite capacity of society to absorb potential
rebellion: he writes of it in his 'Political Preface' to the
1966 reprint of Eros and Civilisation (first published in
1955), in his Critique of Pure Tolerance (1967) and in An
Essay On Liberation (1969). "It makes no sense to talk
about liberation to free men . . .", and yet it is that notion
of freedom that has to be exploded, articulated anew and
strengthened against the whitewash of the catchphrase and
the jingle.
But one cannot properly understand and appreciate the
importance Marcuse gives sexual freedom outside his
reconstruction and modification of Freud's model of the
dynamics of civilisation. His starting point is a restatement
of some of Freud's essential propositions. Civilisation
depends upon the permanent repression of the instincts,
which, if relaxed, would pull out the centre and dissolve
civilisation into barbarism. Repression of the instincts
operates under the reality principle, which, through the ego,
mediates between the desires of the instincts (characterised
collectively as the id and safeguarded by the pleasure
principle) and the reality of the external world. Out of the
long dependence of the infant on its parents develops the
superego, which guides the ego to act in accord with
established morality. The repression of the instincts is
necessitated by universal scarcity, which will not be overcome even by the maturest level of civilisation. It is with
Freud's notion of 'eternal' scarcity that Marcuse first takes
issue. For Freud, it was part of the "terrible reality" of
life. For Marcuse, it is part of an organised reality which can
be altered through redistribution. In other words, scarcity
exists in the present only because it is being perpetuated in
the interests of the dominating class. When Freud proposes
that the desires of the instincts must be modified in the face
of a harsh reality, no distinction is made between a
biological/phylogenetic reality and a historical reality. But
it is that distinction that Marcuse argues is critical. Biological
repression is accepted as an essential precondition of
societal relations. Over and above that, at any particular
historical moment, any given society is characterised by the
degree of its "surplus repression"; it is this variable that
13

makes it possible to make comparisons between societies.

Correspondingly, Marcuse also distinguishes between the
reality principle as Freud used the term and the present
historical form of it, the performance principle. Under the
performance principle, all men's activities are measured and
valued accordin g t o their degree of social usefulness.
Performance principle
In its present form as the performance principle, the
reality principle has extended itself so far that the realm of
the pleasure principle has become marginal and ineffective.
Each man's "performance" commits him to between eight
and twelve hours of largely alienated labour each working
day. Upon his performance depends his standard of living.
Production depends upon consumption, consumption on
production, in a cycle maintained by the insatiability of the
demand for consumer goods, transformed into objects of
libido by advertising so saturating as to be unavoidable.
Sexuality is 'useful' insofar as it guarantees the maintenance
of what has become the 'system'; insofar as the body is
reconditioned as an instrument of labour, a certain
"permissiveness" is allowed. What is "socially useful" is
confused with what is "good for society" which in turn is
confused with what is "normal", and these become the
descriptive terms of more and more areas of experience.
Even the hours free from labour are evaluated in terms of
the performance principle:
The individual is not to be left alone. For left to itself,
and supported by a free intelligence aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the
libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against
its ever more extraneous limitations to strive to engulf an
ever larger field of existential relations, thereby exploding
the reality ego and its repressive performances.
Marcuse's point is that the reality principle, as
characterised in the present by the performance principle,
is increasing its control over our lives at the very historical
moment when it could be relaxed. The necessities of life
are no longer scarce; technological development (which
Marcuse does not celebrate but accepts as a fact) has created
sufficient abundance to provide for everyone. But the
"necessities" are no longer clear-cut. In an age of mass
production and consumption, under capitalism particularly,
everything is necessary, and desire for everything
engineered. Satisfaction is always at the stage of catching
up. If it could be generally recognised that the necessities
. of life which truly are necesssary to life involve only a
minimum of labour (and would involve even less if the
alienation of labour were 'completed' by more extensive
automation), then a correlation could be made with the
actual time men and women spend working. The greater
part of production is the generation of "waste" (Marcuse
includes armaments), of unnecessary consumer goods
which have been turned into objects of libido. It is the
organised scarcity of these which maintains the apparatus
of production. Within this coherence, labour time itself is
one of the false necessities. In his contention that the
working class itself is one of the central supports of this
system, Marcuse has alienated himself from most activists
in the labour movement. His insistence on the possibility
of a civilisation based upon minimum necessities of labour
is dismissed as utopian, and it is in the interests of the
ruling class that it should continue to be so dismissed.
Archaic heritage
Through the symbolic parable of the archaic heritage
and the myth of the primal father, Marcuse seeks to explain
fu rther the common defence of the performance principle
in which opposing class interests act unitedly. This most
rejected of Freud's ideas assumed the origin of civilisation
to be marked by the rise to power of the father, whose
monopoly of pleasure was 'justified' to the sons by his
protection, security and love. "The father establishes
domination in his own interest but in doing so he is
justified by his age, by his biological function, and (most of
all) by his success: he creates that 'order' without which the
group would immediately dissolve." But the relation of the
sons to the father is one of ambivalent love-hate, expressed
in the wish to replace and to imitate the father. The father
is killed only to be deified, introducing taboos and
restraints that become the established morality and law.
"The annihilation of his person threatens to annihilate
lasting group life itself and to preserve the prehistoric and
suhhistoric destructive force of the pleasure principle. But
14

the sons want the same thing as the father: they want
lasting satisfaction of their needs. They can obtain this
objective only by repeating, in a new form, the order of
domination which had controlled pleasure and thereby
preserved the group. The father survives as the god ..."
"The function of the father is gradually transferred from
his individual person to his social position, to his image in
the son (conscience), to God, to the various agencies and
agents which teach the son to become a mature and
restrained member of his society."
But there has been an important change in the "classic
form" of the id-ego-superego dynamic as a result of the
growth of paternal institutions. The reality principle used
to be tangibly embodied in individuals fathers, captains,
chiefs but "these personal father-images have gradually
disappeared behind the institutions. With the rationalisation
of the productive apparatus, with the multiplication of
functions, all domination assumes the form of administration. The pain, frustration, impotence of the individual
derive from a highly productive and efficiently functioning
system in which he makes a better living than ever before.
Responsibility for the organisation of his life lies with the
whole, the 'system', the sum total of the institutions that
determine, satisfy and control his needs. The aggressive
i mpulse plunges into a void ..." Increasingly, administration and the law appear as the ultimate guarantors of
liberty. Rebellion appears "as the crime against the whole
of human society and therefore as beyond reward and
beyond redemption", an omnipresent threat that the crime
against the father dare not be repeated. As the 'system'
enlarges its coherence, "the interactions between ego,
superego, and id congeal into automatic reactions" and
consciousness, "increasingly less burdened by autonomy,
tends to be reduced to the task of regulating the coordination of the individual with the whole". The aggressive
instincts are moved against those who do not belong to the
whole; the foe is characterised as omnipresent, justifying
the total mobilisation of society.
Pleasure principle
How shrunken, then, is the scope of the pleasure
principle? Where are the desires of the instincts safeguarded? According to Marcuse, in phantasy. Andre
Breton's Surrealist Manifesto is quoted: "in its refusal to
forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy".
Which becomes also, for Marcuse, the critical function of
art. At this point, one should break away from the delineation of Marcuse's model to return to the importance of the
"perversions" within it, and its relation to the gay left.
In upholding sexuality as an end in itself, the perversions
demonstrate an active opposition to the rule of the
performance principle. The opposition is represented in
mythological archetypes whose images recur through the
ages: Prometheus, the producer, as against Orpheus, the
singer. Orpheus, according to classical mythology, introduced homosexuality to the people of Thrace, rejecting the
"normal Eros" for a "fuller Eros". The age of the performance principle is the age of Prometheus; all evaluation is
in terms of production; all else is marginal. I don't think
that Marcuse is being fanciful when he writes of
"productivity", "The very word came to smack of
repression or its philistine glorification: it connotes the
resentful defamation of rest, indulgence, receptivity the
triumph over the 'lower depths' of the mind and body . . ."
It is not, therefore, the transfer of the productive apparatus
from the control of the ruling class to the control of the
working class at least, not that alone that Marcuse
looks to for a revolutionary 'solution', but a turning away
from the emphasis on production altogether. Through the
liberation of men's time might be created 'mental space'
necessary to reflect upon the necessity to work. The
centrifugal forces of the performance principle, re-enforced
from within and without, have to be loosened. Wherever
possible, space must be created. In fighting for his homosexual rights, the oppressed gay is grinding against the
norms that sustain the system and helping to wear them
down. The gay who parades his sexuality and publically
celebrates his enjoyment of it, who is able to reverse the
feelings of guilt that society plays upon to limit that
enjoyment, is doing much more than fighting the war of
gay liberation; he is upholding the enjoyment of sexuality
for its own sake. He provides a sharp focus. In itself it is not
enough. It's a starting point only. Marcuse's analysis
describes a world of toil being sold, and bought, as paradise

on earth; the reality principle masquerading as the pleasure

principle. If gay liberationists are really to contribute to
the Great Refusal, the struggle must be part of the fight to
recover, and enlarge, the realm of the pleasure principle
and to weaken the control of the reality principle.*
Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse. Available in the
Abacus series published by Sphere Books Ltd. 1972.

Sheffield
Incident

by John Lindsay

The following incident happened at the Sheffield

Conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality,
August 1975. This description and analysis of the event also
points out some general tactical points.
On the Friday evening a large number of the delegates
attended the reception given by the Lord Mayor of
Sheffield. At the end of his opening remarks a woman took
the microphone and said that the waitresses were being
paid somewhat less than the waiters and appealed for a
collection to augment their wages. The Mayor, apparently
disturbed, left the reception at that point. Later in the
evening at the entertainment provided by the City a folk
group from the West Country was singing a collection of
traditional country songs with banter in between. The songs
tended to be of the "boy chases girl, boy catches girl, boy
fucks girl" type, with the banter along the lines of "we
four don't need groupies for we have a big round one who
is good enough for all of us". After the first song there
were a couple of cries of "sexist"; after the first verse of the
second cries of "boy" when "girlfriend" was sung, at which
the group laughed. At the end of the second some people
walked out, during the third there was some intermittent
heckling and by the end of the third quite a number of
people had left although it was difficult to estimate propor-

tions. In the foyer a group of about 25, mainly women,

decided that the performance should be stopped. We went
back into the hall and started barracking, some went on to
the stage and unplugged the microphone and a chaos
situation lasted for about ten minutes. The group attempted
to continue with their singing, being applauded vociferously
by a large number of the people in the hall; attempts to
explain the reason for the intervention were shouted down.
The group left the stage to considerable applause and an
interval was called. After the interval a "big-band" group
played "hits of the past" to a diminishing audience until
the concert and the bar closed.
In the foyer and at the bar discussion continued until
the building closed. At the various venues of the conference
debate waged, and in many ways the tone of the conference
was set. Throughout the weekend the role of women in
CHE and the importance of sexism came under analysis;
from this came debate on the role of CHE in general and on
its structure and administration. The implications of that
one incident need to be analysed in detail both in terms of
their immediate effect, in terms of their effects by the end
of the weekend and in the longer term. The main areas in
which they need to be considered, I suggest, are the
consciousness of the people involved in initiating the
demonstration, the consciousness of the rest of the
delegates, the leadership of CHE and the press/general
public who will gain information only at nth hand. The
questions rising are whether the conflict nature of the
intervention was politically wise, whether there might have
been alternative methods of intervention, whether the show
should have in itself been allowed to continue and whether
we can learn any tactical lessons from the evening?
First of all the alternatives. These could have included
one or two people going onto the stage, asking the group to
stop, and then explaining their objections. Thereafter the
group might or might not have continued singing the same
type of songs, in which case another event would have
occurred. No notice could have been taken, people walking
out when they felt they could take no more. Again it
cannot be determined what would have resulted. Both these
were suggested as "correct" actions by those who said that
the conflict intervention was "incorrect". Now for the
event. I would suggest that it could not be allowed to
continue for two reasons: firstly the content of the songs
was insulting to the women for it presented them as sex
objects whose existence was defined by the satisfaction of
the requirements of men; secondly, the nature of the songs
was insulting to all the gay people who had travelled to
Sheffield to celebrate their homosexuality for it consisted
of the socially dominant stereotype notions of human
relations, reflecting the culture usually available from radio,
television and newspapers, in many ways that culture at its
worst. On the basis of this argument alone the intervention
was "correct" for that performance had to be stopped. The
spokespeople for CHE did not appear to fully grasp this
however, for they suggested that the audience was not
suitable rather than that the "institution" was not suitable.
One said that it was fit for a men's pub but not a CHE
conference and this was so quoted in a local newspaper. The
point of the intervention however is that that sort of
entertainment is not suitable anywhere. This however raises
a very interesting question to which we will have to give a
lot of consideration. If facets of culture are part of the
ideological armoury of the dominant class then is it at times
either "justifiable" or "necessary" to destroy that culture in
order that the emerging class may be released from the
self-oppression which that culture gives rise to?
Now for the analysis. In the immediate instance first.
For the people who took part in initiating the demonstration it was an immediate and unanalysed reaction to an
oppressive situation. That they were capable of acting
together was a demonstration to themselves of their
consciousness and collective power which I suspect gave
them strength; their perception of the reaction gave them
further anger and determination for the rest of the weekend.
For them the incident set the tone of the weekend, defined
the problem and indicated their methodology. (It must be
pointed out that this group did not consist of all the
women at conference, nor did it consist only of women.)
For the rest of the audience puzzlement was the first
reaction for they were being entertained by the civic
authority and did not understand the point of the rumpus.
Their immediate reaction was annoyance that their entertainment was being disturbed and annoyance at the bad
manners of a small group in interrupting the singers who
15

were "only celebrating their heterosexuality after all". The

liberal idea of everybody allowed to do his own thing
appears to be the main identifying feature of this group.
Their applause seems to have arisen from a right of speech
position rather than from positive support for the group.
The antagonism towards the intervenors however was
considerable.
The leadership of CHE appears to have been mainly
concerned with the effect on the civic authorities and the
press, apologising to the group for the disturbance,
explaining to the Lord Mayor and the press although
admitting at the same time that the entertainment had not
been wisely chosen. It has been suggested that they had
already had the opportunity to examine the material and
had selected this particular group, and had already censored
the 'sexist' element from their songs. However as it is
difficult to determine the nature of even the individuals
concerned in the leadership without a complicated analysis,
I shall leave further comment on this group.
The press in Sheffield covered the event remarkably
objectively women reading the report could only have
gained a positive idea, some of the local officials certainly
gained some understanding but whether the incidents in
themselves will have produced any change in individuals, in
the civic authority or in the people cannot be determined.
In the long run it is unlikely. As the Mayor pointed out we
were being welcomed for our money not our gayness.
(Those weren't quite his words but certainly his intent.)
Over the short term (i.e. the remainder of the weekend)
the group involved became the centre for most of the
criticism of the conference as a "male", "tory party type"
event, of the structure of CHE, and generally feelings were
polarised with the group distinctly as one pole. In the main
they felt justified in their actions and used the event as a
practical example of the position of women in CHE, the
nature of sexism and the general organisation of both the
conference and the CHE itself. The group acted on divided
over the weekend into three: those who agreed with the
intervention and who generally came to be identified with
the intervenors; those who agreed about the nature of
sexism but who disagreed with the method of the intervention, mainly taking the position that people should have
left and allowed the songs in an almost empty hall; and
those who were directly antagonistic towards the intervention and the thinking behind it. They saw CHE as a
single undivided body providing a pleasant weekend and
felt the intervention to be a threat "splitting CHE", not
understanding what "this sexism business is all about" with
an articulated misogeny as the other pole. The main
advantage of the incident was that it gave a clear example
of the sort of thing that needed to be talked about
discussion did not have to be theoretical but instead every
debate could be grounded in this practical example and
this came in many ways to dominate the weekend.
For the leadership it showed them that there was a
minority which could not be baffled by supposedly
democratic structuring of procedures, nor by defining
areas of debate, although the militant group was generally
outmanoeuvred during the rest of the conference when it
came to plenary sessions. Until some idea can be gained
however of the nature of the leadership as a group and of
their individual and shared expectations no further analysis
is possible.
For the press and the public it cannot be determined
whether this increased interest or changed opinions. The
National Front and the Ratepayers Association which had

16

threatened intervention did not appear. Possibly to some

extent the stereotype of the limp-wristed handbag was
counterposed but there is no available data. Long term
events, particularly in the experience of the Sheffield group
of CHE, might yield some evidence.
The major question is whether there is any advantage to
he gained from involvement with CHE either for the left as
left, or for gay liberation as a whole? The other questions
are on the role of gay culture and on the tactical issue.
The first group gained the impression over the weekend
that if there was a role for women in CHE it would emerge
after a long struggle, some feeling that CHE was not worth
the effort, others that there was little else. The second
group in some cases threatened to leave or did leave, feeling
that CHE was not what they wanted, the "biggest gay club
in Britain" obviously intended as a cheaper Catacombs
without the police. In some cases however a definite
understanding of sexism developed and a new realisation of
the position of women in society was given. Generally,
nowever, there seems to have been a sense of disappointment
that the euphoria of Malvern (1974) was not recaptured; some
disappointed because no significant progress has been made
in the consciousness of the bulk of the members, others
because the weekend turned out to have something to do
with politics. The bulk of the motions passed were general
and unimplementable although their tenor was far to the
left of the behaviour of the bulk of the members. 100 was
voted for a conference to organise a gay rights movement
in the trade unions for example; a bunch of militant
unionists the delegates did not appear to be. Neither did
they accept in principle that the trade union fight might be
more important to gay liberation than the Houses of
Parliament. It would appear therefore that there is some
advantage to be gained from involvement although it is not
clear what that advantage will be. Certainly much more
work will have to be done in gaining an understanding of
what gay liberation involves, what we can contribute to
CHE and the general question of the relationship between
our homosexuality and our involvement on the left.
Secondly it would appear that there remains a lot to be
done in writing, composing and creating a gay culture for
we cannot oppose a dominant superstructure with nothing,
we cannot take gay pride in shouting down oppressive
songs until we have something else to sing; we cannot fight
Williams' limp wrist or Mary Renault's limp mind until we
have something to put in their place. The beginnings are
there in the Gay Sweatshop possibly, in Tom Robinson's
songs and in some of the pamphlets but if they are then it
is only the beginning and there is no indication that they
will give our gayness the revolutionary perspective we
require. Left-handed heterosexuals society will tolerate,
left-minded gays will not be allowed to write, sing, act,
paint, nor fight unless we prove ourselves strong enough.
Finally on the tactical issue I would suggest that from
all points of the analysis the action was a right action and
our praxis advanced by it. People were given a practical
base for the debate; individuals gained a consciousness
through corporate action; the dangerous enemy within the
gay society was identified in those men who do not understand that being gay makes being male questionable; the
limitations of our understanding of our political role were
highlighted and our lack of sophistication in our analyses
illuminated. The next time an event occurs we should be
able to seize it, the next time an event does not occur we
should be able to create it: the gay left can only benefit
from action.*

Ah,lesbianka!
Notes on a Russian Journey
by Sue Bruley
One measure of the degeneration of the Russian revolution
is the Communist Party's complete reversal on the question
of homosexuality. In 1917 it was abolished as a legal
offence, but by 1934 it had become punishable by up to
eight years in prison. The Bolsheviks renounced the right of
the state to interfere in sexual matters. They abolished all
laws with regard to sexual behaviour except in cases where
consent was absent or injury had occurred. But under
Stalinist dictatorship homosexuality came to be regarded
as a threat to the moral fabric of society. Homosexuals
were counter-revolutionaries, per se, because they
challenged that great institution, the 'Soviet family'. The
implication was even made that men who remained single
could not possibly be good workers and were not, therefore
doing their best to 'build communism'. (1)
When I visited the Soviet Union in August 1975 (2) I was
determined to find out what changes had been made, both
legally and in terms of social attitudes to homosexuality,
since the dark days of Stalinist repression. Fortunately my
task was made easier by the fact that another gay woman
(Gully) was in the same party. She was as inquisitive as I and
was quite willing to 'come out'. We decided to collaborate
and find out as much as we could, even if it meant
embarrassing the other members of the group by asking
very direct questions to the Russians.
Moscow
On one of our evenings in Moscow a visit to the local
'Cultural and Pleasure Centre' was arranged so that we
could meet some members of Kommsomol (Young
Communists). This turned out to be a joint meeting with
two other English speaking groups (one from NUS) of
thirty each. One hundred and twenty of us sat in neat rows
in the theatre part of the centre and were asked to pose
questions to the five members of Kommsomol who sat
facing us with very serious faces. In the S.U. it is a rare
privilege to be allowed to meet foreigners and obviously
only the most trustworthy of party hacks were permitted
to reply to our questions. We quickly became accustomed
to the dreary uniformity and predictability of their
statements.
We were encouraged to ask questions of an informative
nature rather than political questions. As a result our
meetings with Kommsomol members were very dull, with
people asking questions such as 'What is the price of a
haircut in Moscow?' The Russians delighted in answering
such mundane questions and made detailed and lengthy
replies. I tried to inject some debate into the proceedings
by asking for their views on such questions as: the
relationship between the working class, the party and the
state; internationalism etc ., but the only response was one
or two hack phrases such as, 'the people and the party live
in harmony'.
After about 40 minutes of this Gilly and I decided that
the time was right to attempt an intervention on the gay
question. I asked for the microphone, stood up and
announced that I was going to raise the subject of homosexuality. I stated that I was a homosexual and that the
woman sitting next to me was too. An embarrassed silence
suddenly fell on the hall. I took a deep breath and
continued. I described the gay scene in the UK and the
increasing tendency of homosexuals to refuse to hide their
sexual orientation as if it were something to be ashamed
of. I referred to the attitude of the leftgroups and told
them that even the British C.P. now had it's gay caucus
(gasps of horror from the Russians at this point). Finally I
asked them to describe to me the probable life style of a
homosexual in the S.U. and what the attitude of the
authorities would be.
Even after I had finished speaking the audience continued
to stare in my direction. The Russians too remained glazed
and seemed to have an air of disbelief. Eventually one of
them took the initiative and went to the microphone.
He said that no one had ever asked a question of this sort
and that they needed to talk amongst themselves before
replying. After a few minutes one of them pushed another

forward, he squirmed in the other direction. It was obvious

that none of them wanted to bear the responsibility of
having to guess what the appropriate reply should be.
Finally a young man in his early 20s took the microphone
and said in my direction, 'It is a criminal offence.'
I stood up and asked him to explain in more detail and
to state the usual length of prison sentences. He replied
that two years was the normal term. They would say no
more and asked the audience to continue the meeting by
asking questions of a more 'general' nature about Soviet
life.
After the Kommsomol meeting we approached one of
our guides, Olga, in an attempt to obtain more information.
She was quite responsive and promised to contact a 'friend
of a friend' at the university (she was studying English at
Moscow University), whom she thought to be a homosexual. But, as she said, she couldn't be absolutely sure as
no one would ever admit to such a thing in public. In fact,
we discovered, Moscow has a community of homosexuals
who meet in an upstairs bar of a very well known cafe in
Gorky St. (the main shopping area in Moscow). These
gatherings were apparently tolerated by the police,
probably because they do not attempt any sort of political
activity the USSR definitely has no equivalent of GLF.
Gilly and I visited the Cafe Lira and, predictably, found the
scene very closeted. The men at the bar were not in the
least camp, although perhaps they were by Russian
standards we couldn't tell! We couldn't find any women
there at all, but more about lesbians later .
Further discussions with Olga confirmed our suspicion
that conviction on a charge of homosexuality did not
merely result in a two year prison sentence. It was usual to
ensure that the person concerned became as isolated as
possible. If he had been working in a city, his permit (the
USSR has an internal pass system) would be automatically
withdrawn and he would only be offered another job in
some far flung province, which could be up to 200 miles
from the nearest town. Homosexuality meant certain disqualification from political office and even ordinary job
promotion, except perhaps in the arts, where, as in the
West, there is a much greater degree of tolerance.
Leningrad
In Leningrad another meeting with Kommsomol members
was arranged. Our guide assured us that this time it would
be a much more informal social gathering. We arrived at
the Locomotive Club to find four large tables arranged in
a square with beer, lemonade, cakes, sweets and fruit neatly
arranged on white tablecloths. We sat interspersed between
our Russian hosts, whom, the Chairman confidently
informed us, were 'the cream of Soviet youth'.
After the endless speeches of welcome we were left to
converse with our neighbouring Russians. Neither Gilly or
I spoke Russian so we quickly commandeered the services
of the group's interpreter and sat ourselves in front of
three naive looking Soviet women (one of whom was a
member of the Communist Party). Initially we talked
about the position of women in the S.U. They clearly had
the impression that full sexual equality was already a fact.
They could understand the reasons for the women's
movement in the West, but they thought such a thing was
unnecessary in their own country. We asked them about
the availability of contraception. Their reply, to our
amazement, was that they did not know much about it as
they weren't married, so they didn't have any reason to
seek contraceptive facilities.
When we raised the subject of homosexuality , they
couldn't understand what we were talking about. Becoming
very frustrated at their blank faces, I asked the interpreter
to repeat the question using the word 'lesbian' instead of
'homosexual'. 'Ah, lesbianka!' one of them said loudly. We
explained that we were lesbians and that we wanted to
know about lesbians in the USSR. They could not quite
get over the fact that we were completely open about our
homosexuality. They had never knowingly met a lesbian
before (they had learnt the word from a Swedish novel that
was on sale in the city) and were utterly intrigued by the
fact that we did not see it as anything to be ashamed of. It
is interesting to note that, unlike some members of the
British group, they were not openly disgusted by our statement and seemed very happy to continue talking to us,
although they did not have anything to say about lesbians
because the whole subject was a complete mystery to them.
They seemed very puzzled throughout and one said that
she was not aware that sex between two women was
17

possible.
After an hour or so we were shown into another room
and records were played so that we could dance. Our three
Soviet sisters were keen to dance with us and showed no
signs of physical unease. Again, this contrasts strongly with
the behaviour of the other women in the British group who
by this time had become almost paranoid about Gully and
myself. We were amazed to learn from one of the
sympathetic men in our group that the women had been
sleeping with their clothes on and had come to an agreement to stay in pairs at all times. They were apparently
under the impression that one of us would leap on them at
the slightest opportunity!
The evening at the Locomotive Club was a very jovial
occasion. Although obviously the 'Soviet youth' we had
met had been a heavily scrutinized bunch, we still felt that
we had got much closer to the opinions of ordinary
Russians than we had in Moscow. As we were leaving we
noticed that the women had begun clearing the tables
whilst the men were just idly standing by.
Riga
Riga is the capital of Latvia, one of the three Baltic
Republics. As our guides were not familiar with the region
and the language (Latvian is similar to German) the group
was 'handed over' to a woman, Anita, who taught English
at the university. She was an extraordinary Anglophile,
seizing every opportunity to meet English people and talk
to them, as she had never been able to travel to the UK
herself (foreign travel for all citizens of the USSR is an
exceptionally rare privilege).
Anita's husband, Jarnis, who accompanied us on most of
the official programme, was a lawyer. Gilly and myself
jumped at the chance to find out more about the legal
codes concerning homosexuality. He looked it up specially
for us ... yes, the 1934 Act was still in use and homosexuals were regularly sentenced under it. In contrast to
what we had been told in Moscow, he stated that the usual
prison term was five years for adults and eight years if a
male under 18 was involved (this is the legal definition of
pederasty in the S.U.).
We asked why did the law ban male homosexuality and
not mention female homosexuality? He could not understand our question at first. It seemed that for him the very
term 'female homosexuality' was a contradiction. Finally,
he came up with, 'The state thinks that women can't do as
men do in bed, so there is no need for a law against it.'
As we talked to Anita and Jarnis it became clear that they
were in full agreement with these disgusting prison sentences
for homosexuals. They saw the state as having a right to

regulate sexual conduct because homosexuality is, 'an

unnatural practise and must be stamped out' (Anita).
Conclusion
It is sad to report that in the country of the October
Revolution homosexuals are persecuted even more viciously
than they are in the west, but unfortunately this is the case.
The triumph of Stalinism enabled the state to consciously enter the personal sphere and rigidly transform it into
what it regarded as the appropriate form. With this
immensely powerful backing, the status of the family was
elevated and motherhood redefined as a patriotic act. In
the USSR an attack on the family is regarded as an
indirect attack on the state.
Through complete control over economic resources, the
government has ensured, in the crudest possible way, that
any deviation from heterosexual monogamous marriage is
not tolerated. Single people are not even permitted to join
the housing list. Gay people are condemned to spend their
lives in their parental home or to marry and attempt to
mould themselves into heterosexuality, which contradicts
all their feelings and desires.
For lesbians, the situation appears to be similar to that
in western countries oppression by invisibility. The rest
of society merely refuse to acknowledge their existence.
Sexuality is a male phenomena, therefore, women cannot
by definition be sexual with each other. The complete
denial of female sexuality is a tragedy not just for lesbians
but for all women in the USSR. It is a strange kind of
sexual equality if the sexual rights of women are not even
thought to exist.
There is not enough space to analyse the reasons for the
complete negation of all the sexual freedoms won during
the revolutionary period. It does seem necessary, however,
to point out that sexuality and the family are not
autonomous strata in society. The form that they take is
inextricably bound up with the structure of society as a
whole. The promise of a new era of sexual freedom was lost
with the retreat of the revolution. Today, visitors to the
USSR can only witness the high price of that failure.*
Notes
1 For more details see J. Lauritsen & D. Thorstad The
Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935, Times
Change Press. 1974, pp 62-70.
2 We travelled with the 'Educational Interchange Council'.
This is a government sponsored organisation which arranges
visits to East European countries for young working people
(i.e. no students). Three groups of thirty go to the USSR for
two weeks every year.

The Gay Workers' Movement

by Bob Cant and Nigel Young
The Gay Workers' Movement (GWM) could not, at present,
be described as a powerful mass movement. Most of us who
belong to it have come under the influence of the Gay
Liberation Movement (GLM) at some point in the last five
years. Many of us have also been deeply involved in trade
union work. We have often felt, however, that there has
been a great split between the two the fact that we have
come out as gay is often seen as something separate from
our struggle in the workplace. What the GWM must do is to
fuse these two struggles, organize gays at their place of work
and develop an analysis which is applicable to the position
of gay workers. This article will discuss the present state of
the movement, describe and analyse the beginnings that
have been made towards the building of the movement and
suggest strategies for building it further.
One of the phrases which came out of the early Gay
Liberation Front was the "tyranny of structure". A feeling
which summed up the dramatic content of most meetings
where to call for a chairperson or some structure to a
meeting was an invitation to be put down as a male chauvinist, an ego tripper or a power mad freak. However, out of
the anarchy of those meetings arose a situation in which
those who could voice their emotions most loudly dominated the vast majority of us who were unable to raise any
issues we considered important. General meetings with 200
people at them became a private theatre show where
18

individuals harangued others over issues most of us were

ignorant about. Few dared to ask what the meaning of such
new concepts as radical feminism or sexism meant, for fear
of being screamed at as "backward", "closet queen" or any
other convenient put-down. But the structurelessness of the
meetings became a tyranny for most of us and at the same
time were used as emotional platforms by the few.
We have briefly raised the past because the Leeds Gay
Workers Conference in May 1975 (see issue no.1 for a
report) was like a flashback to the halcyon days of the early
GLM, but this time without any willing participants. There
was a general feeling of frustration at Leeds for all the
reasons which the early GLM was put on a pedestal. The
mood of the Leeds conference was such that we wanted
speakers who had something to say on particular issues
confronting gay workers at the time; we wanted people to
chair meetings or take some initiative in small groups; we
wanted to clarify major issues and go away with some sense
of direction in which to place our energies before any future
conference took place. Yet for most of the conference there
was none of this, no one wanted to say, "This conference is
a mess because it lacks direction, it lacks purpose." We were
seemingly trapped by the structurelessness, which in the
early GLM was so highly praised and which certainly did
have some value in experimentation with meetings. It was
not until the last two hours of the conference that someone

had the strength to risk appearing authoritarian and

demanded we structured a meeting around plans for the
year ahead. Out of the discussion which arose was a proposed long term debate for Leeds 1976. The main points
we came away with were:
i) a commitment to hold a better organized conference in
Leeds in 1976.
ii) a proposal to set up a newsletter committee which
would act as a channel for people's ideas. At the same time
the committee would be an information outlet through
which we could be informed of news and views throughout
the country.
iii) we would use the draft gay workers charter as a discussion document rather than as a paper motion being passed
willy nilly at union meetings, a somewhat optimistic
thought anyway!
Back in London, one again felt frustration. Away from
the excitement of the last two hours at Leeds, we were
faced with the reality of no organization within which to
discuss issues confronting Gay Workers. The GWM was
virtually non-existent, and what did exist had no power.
Experience in the Gay Teachers' Group of fighting the
victimization of John Warburton (see issue No.1) taught us
how difficult it was to fight the specific victimization of a
worker who was also gay, let alone raising the hoary spectre
of gay oppression which we saw as a symptom of the
economic system which both exploited us as workers and
oppressed our sexuality.
Out of the frustration which members of the Gay
Teachers' Group felt, arose a meeting in London to clarify
what the aims and direction of the GWM were.
First London meeting
The first London meeting was held in October 1975. By
11 a.m., its advertised starting time, about 10 people were
there, by mid-day the number was 30. At first, one was
irritated by the impromptness of everyone. There seemed
to be a lack of urgency on their part. But on reflection, the
most likely reason for the general impromptness stems from
most gay people's lack of experience of attending working
meetings. After all, the early GLM flourished in a period
when counter-culture philosophies prevailed; to expect
people to be on time for anything was to be classed as
"heavy", "into organizations" or "institutionalized".
Certainly these experiments with structures helped many
gays come to meetings and encouraged them to speak in
small groups. The past, therefore, appeared in London as it
had done in Leeds.
When the London meeting eventually started, we did the
usual thing of sitting in a circle. Someone one day might
explain what is so cohesive about sitting in large circles,
especially when the majority, who turn up late, sit in an
outer circle. Huddled together and taking turns to describe
our union experiences, it soon became clear that there was
no obvious role for gay trade unionists. Two points
emerged strongly. First was that most of us operated in
unions as individual gay members and secondly there was
no contact between one union member and another across
unions. One felt the level of activism was bound to be
depressingly low in such circumstances.
One thing which did become clear from the morning
session was that a large number of people were involved in
struggles over the gay issue in'their own union. Members
of the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and
the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and
Computer Staff (APEX) spoke of their attempts to get their
unions to change their position on the Trades Union
Congress (TUC) Circular 100 and include "sexual
orientation" as one of the grounds on which it was
unacceptable to discriminate. Some groups had been
concerned with getting recognition in their union for the
gay group this included the National Association of Local
Government Officers (NALGO), the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) and
NUPE again. In some cases leading union officials had
expressed some support for those groups but it seemed
clear that they would not do so more openly until
pressured by a number of their branches. The secret
attempts by some members of the Association of Scientific,
Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) in collusion with
full-time officials to set up a group unbeknown to most
other gay members of the union seemed a sure recipe for
confusion. The essence of any such group must be openness
and this was quite distinctly missing. A motion on Gay

Rights submitted to the Civil and Public Servants Association (CPSA) Conference had not been discussed and a
leading official of the union had said that the draft Sexual
Offences Bill was not a trade union issue. Someone spoke
of several instances in the Transport and General Workers
Union (TGWU) where action had been taken or threatened
in support of victimized gay workers. A Scottish member of
the Society of Graphic and Allied Trades (SOGAT) had
written in his union's journal of the discrimination facing
all gay workers, even when they were not being victimized.
Branches of both the National Union of Teachers (NUT)
and the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions
(ATTI) had passed motions calling for the reinstatement of
John Warburton. Although this had met with no positive
response from the leadership of either of these unions and
Warburton had not been reinstated, the debate over his
case had, at least, raised the consciousness of some sections
of these unions.

In the afternoon session 60 people by now we again

sat in a circle and for about two hours people talked about
their personal experiences as gays at work. We had no chair,
we had no cohesion, no direction. Trade unionists we might
have been, disciplined in our approach to the task ahead we
never were. Eventually the meeting was saved from hopeless
confusion by it deciding we needed a chairperson.
In response to the bureaucratic and reformist attitudes
of some of those present, Martin O'Leary of the International Marxist Group made a major contribution to the
meeting. He emphasized the importance of Gay trade
unionists raising a series of demands centered on the
questions of economic exploitation and sexual oppression
over which we should not be prepared to compromise in
order to gain "acceptance" in the trade union movement.
The importance of the speech lay not so much in its
denunciation of reformist tactics, but in its clarification of
some of the knottier problems of gays in relation to the
work place: what were the major issues? How did they
relate to the present economic crisis? What should our
demands be as gay workers? Were these demands incorporated clearly and effectively in the Gay Workers Charter?
Within the speech lay the basis for a more directed, cohesive
second meeting.

19

Lesbians
Another issue which arose in the afternoon session was
the domination of the conference by men. This had arisen
partly because the meeting had not been advertised in the
lesbian movement and partly through the organization of
the conference, which made no attempt to raise the issue of
lesbian workers as central to any struggle against sexism. A
decision was taken at the meeting to get in touch with the
organizing committee of the Working Women's Charter.
Although we realized that the conditions of lesbians at
work were not covered specifically by the charter, it was
the first time in post-war years that women had gathered
together to organize and politicize around a set of demands
worked out by them and specifically for women. We in the
GWM could only learn from those experiences and hopefully utilize them in organization around a Gay Workers
Charter.
Accordingly the second London meeting appeared to
have a unification which the previous meetings so obviously
lacked. Women spoke to us on the development of the
Charter: the organization around it and some of the
difficulties encountered with aspects of it. We were able to
look at the Gay Workers Charter within a new framework
and highlight some of its more obvious weaknesses.
With a refreshing rapidity the meeting centred around
three issues. First, would the Gay Workers Conference
benefit more from a Sexual Rights Charter instead of a Gay
Workers Charter. It could be seen as more closely relating
to gay women and men, or would this be taken as reformist
in relationship to the demands of the Gay Workers Charter,
a step away from the broader struggles of sexual oppression
in relation to work in a capitalist society?
Secondly, had the GWM looked closely enough at the
concept of sexism as it affects people in their families, with
their friends, and at the workplace? Often sexism has been
analysed as it affects us in the roles we play within our
relationships, but rarely is it talked about in a way which
unifies the separate elements of society which makes the
total sum of our lives.
Thirdly, we felt that too often assumptions were made
about working with the Trade Union Movement on the
basis of very little knowledge. What is the function of the
Trade Union Movement in relation to the struggle against
sexism? What is the best means of raising the issue within
our unions?
It became obvious that we would only be able to discuss
all of these issues in a third meeting where three papers
would be presented on sexism in its widest context, a sexual
rights charter and the Trade Union Movement. One felt a
quiet satisfaction that out of all the disorganization, and the
chat which many had put down as "emotional", "apolitical"
etc., we had arrived at a stage where a meeting would be
held to specifically discuss three papers.

20

Combining the personal and the political

What is an essential part of the GWM is the ability of its
meetings to encompass people's personal traits and still
come out with a political framework. The GWM is young, it
is not a hardened straight revolutionary group with welldefined economic issues to struggle over. The GWM is not
even clear over its ideology yet and as Mary McIntosh
commented at one meeting, the function of the gay movement (mostly male) will be to carry on an ideological
debate, to draw gays into an area of thought which will
move away from the idea that being gay is purely a sexual
preference for one's own sex to a position where gay people
will understand that what underpins their sexuality is the
exploitative economic system under which at present we all
must operate. The struggle against sexual oppression must
therefore be centered firmly around the struggle against
economic exploitation.
The need for ideological debate is clear but this can only
really begin in conjunction with the mobilization of more
gay workers particularly those who have not been
involved in the GLM. But the very issue of mobilization is
faced with three difficult problems the isolation of the
gay groups, the lack of much positive support from other
trade unionists and the apparent lack of involvement by
lesbians.
The isolation is exacerbated by the fact that most gay
groups are not even allowed to advertise in their union's
journals. Most existing groups seemed to have found their
members by advertising in Gay News. And people who buy

Gay News are likely to have some kind of consciousness

about their gayness already. The lesbian textile worker
from Slaithwaite or the gay carworker from Linwood are
less likely to buy Gay News. If they could see an ad for the
gay group and an article about homosexuality in their own
union's paper, it would be much easier for them to consider
joining the group. The right to advertise must be one of the
immediate aims of any union gay group.
Joining gay groups would also be easier if people could
meet local contacts. If they could meet someone for a drink
in a pub round the corner they would be much likelier to
see their own gayness as something which was not alien or
unnatural. There is a very strong need for local cross-union
groupings of gay workers. So, for example, if a gay printworker were to become interested in the GWM, even if
there were no other gay printworkers where he lived he
could still be put into contact with other gay workers.

Reproduced from 'Craft'

None of this can really be done only by gay trade
unionists. Some support must be won from other trade
unionists. This may seem impossible but the problems faced
by us, in this respect, are the same as those faced by anyone
who tries to take politics into the union. It involves being
concerned with issues related to aspects of one's life other
than sexuality; nothing is more likely to antagonize people
who are, after all, subject to much abuse for their union
activity more than the feeling that the union is being
used as a bandwagon for some separate cause. It involves
explaining to people who have always separated their
private lives from their lives at work why sexuality is an
issue relevant to trade unions. It involves one constantly
raising the question of sexual politics in conversation at
work e.g. when jokes are made about women, gays or
older people, then one has to explain why you think it is
important not to talk like that. It involves patient, hard
slog combined with a spark of passion and the ability to
choose the right moment. It requires qualities never known
to survive in one isolated person but only in someone
who belongs to a group of like-minded people. The task of
politicization is always hard but it often produces results
when least expected. Imagine how we would all feel if
everyone came out of a comprehensive school when one of
their gay colleagues was victimized or if unloading came to
a halt at London Docks because of a victimized gay worker.
That is what we are working for and it will come if we work
together and work hard.
The third problem is in many ways the most difficult
how does a group of gay men persuade lesbians to work
with them. Many lesbians find gay men as oppressive as
straight men. We, after all, have experienced years of male
conditioning and if we are active in our unions we may
even have strengthened our male characteristics in the
way we argue and so on. We may even find it easier to
connect with straight women their demands, e.g.
nurseries, abortions, are much easier to organize around.
But with lesbianism we find ourselves confronted much
more directly with the deep-rooted nature of sexism in our
society. Gay groups, therefore, that are set up must make

it their primary duty to welcome lesbians. Probably, the

single most important thing that can be done at such
meetings is for gay men to reflect on their style of talking
and to curb the male chauvinist features. Men must also
actually take over in a positive way the kind of tasks that
often fall on women, e.g. minding the creche, baby-sitting
for people who otherwise could not go to evening meetings.
Links with Working Women's Charter groups are fine but,
as men, we must work harder to integrate women into the
GWM. If the movement is allowed to drift into being an allmale movement, then we might be better employed going
to the pictures.
There are enormously difficult political tasks ahead, but
the one thing which makes them possible to contemplate is
the way in which we have begun to come together already.

For, despite the isolation and the lack of much support

from other committed trade unionists, a movement has
already begun to grow. And the success of any campaign,
whether or not it be around a charter, will depend on the
continuation of this coming together. We must form gay
groups in our own unions and, locally, we must form crossunion groups of gay workers. In both cases, we must
operate a positive discrimination in favour of lesbians. With
this double network of solidarity, we can then hope to
build a Gay Workers Movement. In the current economic
situation we should not fool ourselves that it will be easy
but, with the confidence that we gain from the GWM and
its sub-groups, we can soon begin to take the question of
sexuality into the heart of the labour movement.*

21

FASSBINDER'S
A review by Bob Cant

"FOX"

Fassbinder's Fox is a film about the corruptive nature of

capitalism. The fact that the main characters are gay men
does of course make it interesting for gay men but it is not
primarily a film which attempts to Deal With The Problem
Of Homosexuality.
The story is about a gay fairground worker, Fox, who
wins a lottery and comes into contact with a group of rich
fashionable gay men. He begins an affair with one of them,
Eugen, whose father is the owner of a long established print
works. Eugen and his family proceed to exploit Fox until
all his money is finished and then they reject him. The last
shot is of the dead Fox lying in a railway station with an
empty Valium bottle beside him as two youths go through
his clothes. The major theme of the film is the way in
which money corrupts all relationships Eugen exploits
Fox's feelings for him because Fox's money can get him
and his family out of their financial difficulties; Eugen also
debases his relationship with Philip by rejecting him till his
financial problems are solved; in the final scene too there is
the mysterious conversation between Fox's previous lover
and his antique dealer friend about some financial transaction this is never fully explained but simply reinforces
Fassbinder's point that in a bourgeois society all relationships have economic overtones. In many ways one has to see
the film as a fable with Fox as the innocent abroad in an
evil world in the tradition of Bunyan's Pilgrim, Voltaire's
Candide, and Dostoyevsky's Prince Mishkin.
However to treat the film as though it were just a fable
is to underestimate its complexity. There are many scenes
in the film which acknowledge Fassbinder's debt to Hollywood such as the scene by the french windows with the
lace curtains (with all its implications of property and
exclusion) and the conversations in the car (creating an
atmosphere of growing intimacy between two characters).
These scenes are significant not only in a cinematic sense
but also in a sense that they indicate the dependence of
post-war West Germany on USA. This can be further seen
in the bar scene when Fox talks to the two GIs who are
only interested in having drinks bought for them and fucks
supplied for them. We are reminded that West Germany
like most of Western Europe is a neo-colony of American
imperialism. The lack of choice that Fox has in most of his
relationships is as limited as the choice that most Western
22

Europeans have over the economic destiny of the countries

they live in. Lest this be seen as crude European nationalism
the point is further developed in the scenes in Morocco.
Fox, the innocent, and Eugen, the symbol of a European
bourgeoisie dying in the face of American domination, are
only too ready to become the exploiters in relation to a
man from a less developed country. Relationships are more
than just a matter of good individuals and bad individuals
they are a clear reflection of the economic structure of a
society and are no doubt intended here to be seen as an
allegory of such.
Many gay people have seen this film as a put-down of
gays. It is quite true that people who know nothing of gay
life are unlikely to be attracted by the scenes of the gay
ghetto as it is portrayed in the film. But then one must
recognise that the gay ghetto is not a pleasant place and
those who succeed in its jungle-like atmosphere are likely
to be either young and beautiful or just plain rich. The
rather nasty group of people who are Eugen's friends seem
to me to be a fairly accurate picture of one part of the gay
world, claustrophobic and bitchy. Philip's boutique (where
there is no natural light and lots of mirrors) and the antique
shop (encouraging buyers to imitate living in another age
just as the ghetto encourages gays to imitate others' life
styles) portray a world which is self conscious and yet
desperate not to face up to its own reality. As gay people
we have nothing to gain by pretending our lives are heroic
and free from group imposed destructiveness.
Fassbinder does offer some little hope in the bar scenes
where Fox meets his friends from the time before his
lottery win. Their's too is an unreal world with the flower
sellers, the drag and the woman consciously trying to look
like Marlene Dietrich and singing of Shanghai (a city which
no longer exists as it was in the song). But there is some
comradeship the people in that bar are not free from the
pressures of capitalism but they do not forget the need to
help each other and they are even prepared to help Fox
when he moves away from them.
This is an excellent film as damning as Bunuel or
Chabrol with its comments on bourgeois society. But if
anyone wants to see a gay chauvinist film which papers over
the cracks then they should go elsewhere. This is a film that
must be seen with a socialist perspective.*

minority sexual rights. (Specifically, this would mean

refusing to work for a mere lowering of the age of consent,
or a mere handing-over of control of the young, from the
courts to parents.)
May I invite anyone who is concerned in tackling these
issues to contact me as soon as possible.
Roger Moody, 123 Dartmouth Park Hill, London N19.

LETTERS
Dear Gay Left, Dear Gay Left, Dear Gay Left, Dear
The Struggle
Number one excellent, I thought. But, my God, you do
have an uphill battle a task not only of political, but of
psychological education of highly recalcitrant potential
supporters.
Colin McInnes, Hythe, Kent.
Comment on G.L. No 1
I've sold 20 copies of G.L.; mainly to heterosexual politicos
in fact -- at Spare Rib and Hackney Abortion Campaign.
Some people have needed persuading; one woman saw the
price and said 'But it costs the same as Spare Rib and that's
a glossy magazine.' I explained about it being financed out
of your own pockets. No one seemed to mind it being
produced only by men I've sold it about equally to men
and women.
I thought it would have been useful to have carried a
review of Don Milligan's pamphlet that placed the piece in a
historical context; not so much of I.S. anti-gay politics but
of the women's movement and its development of politics
of the family and women's domestic labour. E.g. there's a
bit where Don says the family doesn't have an economic
role in capitalism, only an ideological one. That statement
could be a bit misleading given current socialist feminist
analysis.
Ann Scott, London N16.
Paedophile Politics
Paedophiles, as you briefly mentioned (in No 1), have
begun to organise. Inevitably the organisation at present has
no clear picture of itself or its objectives, and is not even
sufficiently together for the establishment to seek to divide
et imperat. Paedophile politics, such as they are, consist of
wagon-hitching to the mainstream gay movement a
strategy which may embarrass paedophiles as much as it has
already inconvenienced Peter Hain and some members of

C.H.E.

It may well be that what inspires widespread feeling

against child and adolescent lovers is not so much sexism as
ageism. (Boy lovers are often guilty of sexism in my
experience.) Certainly we cannot hope for our liberation,
without actively supporting children's rights, both sexual
and political. But is this fated to be vicarious struggle? Can
an adult objectify sexual relationships with children if the
child cannot objectify his/her own? And how does the male
boy lover really make common cause with the male girl
lover? (How in fact, can a fundamentally gay minority
share the same assumptions as a fundamentally heterosexual
one?) These are difficult questions to answer. Internal
suppression and external oppression are more closely
meshed for the boy lover, than for most other sexual
minorities. Neither 'coming out' in the conventional sense,
nor middle-of-the-road campaigning for acceptance, will
liberate the paedophile. Indeed, I think current strategies
for converting the compact majority are more dangerous
than helpful. What is required is:
1) a very careful analysis of the role we paedophiles play
in bulwarking repression (if all boy lovers in approved
schools and private boarding schools were to strike, how
many would be forced to close?)
2) a building of solidarity in struggle which is woefully
lacking at present (has any paedophile in this country really
fought on behalf of an imprisoned fellow paedophile?) and
3) a revolutionary, perspective on social change and

Question and Comment

I have a question for you, which no doubt will be answered
in future issues of Gay Left. Your statements suggest that
you take a view of 'reform' struggles (civil rights laws,
repeal of sodomy statutes, etc.) that I do not entirely share.
I believe differences over what the gay movement's approach
to struggle on these questions should be must be aired
within the gay movement. There has been a very negative
( mostly in the past) attitude on the part of ultra-leftists
toward struggles for civil rights and law reform. On the
other hand, many reformists speak of such aims and gains
in this field as if it alone would bring about gay liberation
and sexual freedom. Are these two views incompatible? Are
they useful in terms of setting gay liberation strategy? I
think struggle for reform is essential at this stage of the gay
movement. And I think real gains can be (and have been
in the U.S. especially) made in this area real improvements in the legal status of gays can be achieved, a better
self-view among gays fostered, the hypocrisy of the
capitalist system's 'justice' and 'freedom' exposed, and the
vast public reached and touched in terms of our struggle. I
consider 'leftists' (often police agents posing, I am
convinced I doubt that there is a really genuine ultraleftist phenomenon in the gay movement at all) who
belittle these 'reformist' struggles to be a real obstacle in
the effort to bring Marxism to gay people, and a Marxist
outlook to the left groups in the area of sexuality. Moreover, I think struggle for such reforms is revolutionary or
can be if it utilises mass means of struggle, remains
independent of bourgeois class forces (politicians, etc.) and
uses these struggles as a vehicle to
1) bring gay people into active struggle;
2) educate the public, and, yes, raise public consciousness,
through leafletting, publishing of pamphlets, use of the
mass media, street demonstrations, etc. There's nothing at
all wrong with reforms, or struggling for them so long as
they are used to mobilise and educate the masses of gay
people. One other gain from civil rights reforms: gay people
will find that their ability to use the (bourgeois) law against
the bourgeoisie, and against their oppressor, has increased
appreciably. They will be more likely to 'come out' openly
than they will be without legal protections. And, convincing
other gay people to come out is really the first step toward
building a gay liberation movement with mass social impact.
Don't forget: the first gay liberation movement achieved no
lasting gains (unlike the women's movement, which at least,
got the right to vote). Our movement today has already
achieved much more in this area of reforms, and once
achieved, it will be that much harder to revoke them. In
addition, a struggle will be necessary to implement them
and that too will provide a concrete issue around which
the gay movement, and its supporters from other sectors of
society, will be able to mobilise and struggle.
David Thorstad, New York
The only gay socialist?
Congratulations on Issue No 1 of Gay Left I have
witnessed the embourgeoisement of Gay News over the
years, and with it the decline of its ability to be taken
seriously as a radical publication. Examples from the
current issue are too numerous to catalogue; 'Gay Hero
saves President Ford' screams the Page One Daily Expresstype headline; its inside pages include a disgustingly sexist
(I always find that when I leave people I have to destroy
them') interview with the self-opinionated Disco Tex.
I can't be the only gay socialist in London who would
really like to get together as often as possible with other
gay socialists is there anyway you could expand from the
magazine to holding 'Gay Left Readers Meetings'? How
about it?
Geoff Francis, London N16.
The collective reserves the right to shorten letters. All
letters published in this issue have been abbreviated for
reasons of space.
23

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL NOTE

1
Within These Walls ... Gay Left Collective
5
From Latent To Blatant Angus Suttie
7
Book Review Jeffrey Weeks
8
Gays In Films Richard Dyer
11
A Commune Experience Keith Birch
13
Eros and Civilisation Ronald L. Peck
15
Sheffield Incident John Lindsay
17
Ah, lesbianka! Sue Bruley
The Gay Workers Movement Bob Cant and Nigel Young 19
Review of 'Fox' Bob Cant
22
Letters
23
24
Editorial Note

This is our second issue of Gay Left and we plan to bring

out the journal three or four times a year. Response to issue
no 1 has been good with many helpful comments and
suggestions as well as articles. We see Gay Left as a starting
point for discussion and analysis of sexual politics within a
Marxist framework. When reaction indicates this has begun,
we feel part of our aim has been achieved.
In this issue we have increased the number of pages from
16 to 24 and aimed for a more visual presentation. Many
readers thought the first issue looked too 'butch', or was
too heavy to wade through without the pages being broken
up by making it more visually exciting. We still welcome
written or visual contributions. The journal and the gay
socialist movement will grow stronger through this continuing debate concerning the purpose and function of sexism
in a capitalist society. Only by a thorough understanding of
the sexually and economically oppressive nature of
capitalist society can the gay socialist movement work out
strategies for destroying that structure. In order to critically
examine some of the questions raised in issue no 1, we held
a readers' meeting. As this proved a very successful venture,
we are planning to hold another readers' meeting in April/
May. Any comrades interested in attending it please write
for details (with S.A.E.).
Criticism has been made of the cost of Gay Left 30p.
Alas, this is the lowest economic cost we can negotiate on
a small print run (2,000 copies) and only the cost of typesetting and printing is covered in this price. Artwork,
articles and distribution is done by the Gay Left collective
and friends. Comrades who would like to sell a few copies
of Gay Left have only to write to us at 36a Craven Road,
London W2 for details.
We do not yet have the facilities for opening a subscription list. Readers who would like notification of the next
issue can send us a stamped addressed envelope and this
will be sent back to you when issue no 3 is ready all
being well in the summer.*

Members of the Gay Left collective are:

Keith Birch, Gregg Blachford, Bob Cant, Derek Cohen,
Emmanuel Cooper, Randal Kincaid, Ron Peck, Angus
Suttie, Jeffrey Weeks, Nigel Young.

Gay Left Rates

United Kingdom by post
1 9 copies
40p each
over 9 copies
25p each (includes bookshops)
International
1 9 copies
(Airmail)
over 9 copies
(Airmail)
over 9 copies
(Surface)

60p each (International Money Order

only) or $1.50 each (Canadian or
American cheque)
40p each (International Money Order
only) (includes bookstores) or $0.90
each (Canadian or American cheque)
30p each (International Money Order
only) (includes bookstores) or $0.70
each (Canadian or American cheque)

Nighthawks
Between now and the end of May, Four Corner Films, a
film-making collective, will be drawing into its final stages
the shooting script for a narrative film about a gay teacher,
Nighthawks.
The film will describe, amongst other things, a teacher's
coming out at school, a process understood as political as
much as it is personal. It will be largely made with gay
people who will be playing themselves. A good deal of the
content of the film will be arrived at through a process of
discussion and through acting workshops with gays. Anyone
wanting to take part in these should contact me at Four
Corner Films, 113 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London
E2. Suggestions are also welcome, particularly with regard
to locations. The film is scheduled to be shot through June
and July in the London area. Further details available from
the studio address.
Ronald L. Peck
24

Gay Left c/o 36a Craven Road, London W2

Special thanks to Ilrich Shetland and Naurika Lenner

All letters will be assumed to be for publication unless
otherwise stated.
ISSN: 0307-9813

Gay Left No 1
Gays in the Trade Unions, in Cuba, at Conference, at
politics and much more. Copies available: 30p, or 40p by
post from 36A Craven Road, London W2.
Typeset by Caroline MacKechnie.
Printed by SW Litho, London E2.
c Gay Left Collective 1976

Carrying on ...

This issue completes our first year of publication. For us on

the Collective it has been an exciting and a learning year. We
feel we have laid down a ground pattern on which, hopefully,
much can develop. We have tested the water, and found an
audience for a left wing gay journal of discussion. Much, of
course, remains to be done , and there are grey areas which
still need to be explored. We have to constantly define and
re-define our relationship with the gay movement, with
women, and with the left. They are not static relationships
but fluid, and developing. Several articles in this issue take
some of the essential discussions a few steps further. Sue
Bruley has raised important questions which we have talked
about at great length in the Collective and have replied to
individually. Bob Cant's article on International Socialists
raises a multitude of issues in our continuing problematical
relationship with the Left. These themes are also reflected in
other articles in this issue.
What we have to reject is the notion that Gay Left can
attain a sort of Platonic perfection, laying down in its wisdom
the road ahead for gay people. We have been variously seen as
the leadership in embryo of a new gay left movement, as
would-be-philosopher-queens, as elitists, as armchair gays. We
see ourselves rather more truthfully as a small group of
committed socialist gays who have established this journal as
a forum for discussion in the gay movement. We are an open
journal, willing to publish articles and contributions which
relate our own central concern: the relationship between gay
liberation and socialism. We do not consider it our duty to
publish material which does not touch on those themes; there
are other gay papers, and space is scarce. But neither do we
expect total agreement from our readers with all our views
which, like others, are constantly developing and changing.
Constructive criticism is welcome and will gain a response.
We do feel though that those who criticise could do so most
helpfully by directing it to us and by offering _contributions
to the journal. We hope to be able in future to discuss in
detail all articles with contributors before they are published.
Since the journal started there have been early signs of
changes in the attitudes of the socialist left to the gay issue.

The Communist Party now has a special commission preparing

a report, and the International Socialists have formally
adopted a policy of support for gay rights. Both these moves
have been on the level of support for 'gay rights' rather than
any deeper questioning of sexism, but they are small steps
forward. Even the ultra sectarian Workers' Revolutionary
Party's paper, Newsline, sent a reporter to this year's C.H.E.
conference, and the Workers Socialist League published a good
letter on the Gay Workers' Conference. The latter would
have been even more useful as an article but given the history
of the left's treatment of gay liberation it is all too easy to
believe that a vast amount of editorial heart searching went
on before even this modest contribution was finally published.
As we go to press the resignation of the Home Secretary,
Roy Jenkins, is expected as he moves on to greener fields in
Europe. We cannot lament his departure. His is a record of
right-wing labourite policies for the past two decades; a real
enemy of the working class and the Labour Movement. But
many gays will lament his going. In a world where few support
us, his record of supporting gay civil rights and sex reform is
reasonable. He was Home Secretary when both the Homosexual Law Reform and the Abortion Act were pushed through
and earlier he supported reform of the censorship laws. That
we are now aware of his going, and of the self-publicising
activities of the pseudo radical Young Liberals is in itself a
mark of the appalling record of the socialist left on these
issues. As the left now jump on the libertarian bandwagon, it
is worth them remembering that it is their duty not to catch
up with the liberals (who, as someone once said, see both sides
of the question and act accordingly) but to go beyond their
positions towards a socialist critique of the bourgeois norms
and bourgeois reforms. The left in Britain is in crisis and, with
the failure of revolutionary socialism, the threat of fascism
looms ever more threateningly. Fascism is triumphant invariably because of the failure of the left. But in reconstructing itself the left must not ignore the major issues raised by
the sexual liberation movements over the past six years or
so. Socialism and sexual liberation are complementary, and it
is towards the juncture of the two that Gay Left will continue
to work in its second year.*

Divided We Fail
by Nigel Young
The dawn of gay consciousness and the development of the
women's movement has made many of us realize how intricately sexism is in our personal lives and our work
situations. As gay men we have become aware of what are
sexist attitudes and roles, and in our political work we have
attempted to raise the issue of sexism as central to any revolutionary struggle. In this work, however, we are confronted by
a theory and practice which divides the struggle against
capitalism from the battle against sexism. The former is
obviously a priority, but sexism is regarded as a deviation
from the main struggle, a battle to be won after the revolution.
The highly impersonal structures in which we carry out our
political work militates against our raising either the political
or personal implications of sexism.
These two spheres are at the heart of the problem. We need
to analyse the oppressive nature of sexism as defined in our
personal relationships and secondly the relationship of this
type of sexism to exploitative/competitive work situations. We
have the unenviable task of fusing together two agents of
oppression: the controlling and defining nature of heterosexual
norms and values being highlighted in the gay liberation movement whilst conditions at work are of central importance to
unions.
This division was highlighted for me when I raised the gay
issue around the case of John Warburton (see Gay Left No.1)
in my own union. The left in my union branch a highly
politicized one -- were able to see the case as one of obvious
victimization but were unable to relate their analysis to a
broader discussion of gayness in which they might have
explored the relationship between the personal oppression of
a gay teacher and the ensuing political implications. What arose
was a situation in which I was constantly being asked to reaffirm the general nature of oppression in society and from
this commitment gay oppression could be added to the list.
This I feel is a dangerous divide and one which people who are
gay and Marxists working in unions will find it difficult to
avoid. The danger lies in the complete undervaluing of the role
of sexism in society as an oppressive force.
This situation applies equally to the women's issue as
raised by the straight left. It seems perfectly acceptable to
discuss the oppression of women in terms of maternity leave,
bad pay and conditions at work or lack of nursery facilities.
Or take up specific cases of the victimization of women
workers, but at the same time ignore the analysis of personal
relationships which the women's movement has put forward
as a prime agent in their oppression.
For gay men who are Marxists it is unavoidable that the
division between what is considered a personal situation as
opposed to a political one will arise both in their work in
unions and in their contact with the revolutionary left. It is a
tradition of the unions to raise political issues which highlight
exploitation as occurring solely at the point of production.
In these terms it is far easier to exemplify which class is most
oppressed. Consequently what has always been considered to
. be the most valuable work has been organisation in and
around factories. This attitude has spread through unions
regardless of the work situation, so we are constantly fighting
cases of wages, conditions at work and victimization of
workers. These issues are central but as we know through the
dissemination of literature from the women's movement, an
improvement in our material position bears little relationship
to the personal relationships we have and the ways in which
those relationships can be oppressive.
Also, for gay men the division is wider as we have no specific body of literature which analyses the way men oppress each
other and women. The nature of male oppression has been
clearly highlighted by the women's movement. We therefore
have no way inside or outside the traditional political structure within which we can operate to analyse the nature of
personal oppression. However we are able to draw upon the
2 Gay Left

analysis developed in the women's movement and it is from

it that gay men can begin to look at some of the dynamics of
our personal relationships. At the same time we can relate
those dynamics to the work situation where it is not enough
just to 'come out' by telling everyone 'I'm gay,' we must also
question the whole notion of 'masculine' and 'feminine' work
role situations. Put in another way sexism isn't something
which oppresses us only in terms of our personal relationships,
but it also enables society to define work roles which are
equally oppressive.
Kate Millet in Sexual Politics states that one's gender is 'a
status category with political implications'. She then defines
the components of one's sex as being role, status and temperament. Status is the political component, role the sociological
component and temperament the psychological component.
As an extension of this argument I want to analyse the ways
in which gay men fit into these structures. I also wish to look
at the way these categories have been central to my own
relationships.
Status and Role
Politically the status of women in 19th century England was
always defined in a subservient, secondary manner to men.
This position was built upon a whole history of patriarchy
which denied the vote to women and gave married women no
legal rights to property or their children. Women were also
almost totally excluded from educational institutions and were
the subject of much protective, paternal legislation which took
them out of the factories and mines and into the home. Many
developments of the role of women as we know them today
came with the rise of the industrial revolution and the development of the nuclear family. The status of women, therefore,
became firmly linked to their two roles as a cheap pool of
secondary labour, and in terms of their role, as housewives and
mothers. The work of the latter role was considered non
productive labour. Women are supposed to do more boring,
repetitive work than men and are usually paid less for it;
they are also often the servants of men in industry having jobs
such as secretaries, cleaners and tea makers. Behind all this is
the assumption that this is 'feminine' work. And men who do
work in what are considered 'feminine' jobs are thought of as
odd or eccentric or, horror of horrors, even gay! The history
of women and work reads like an equation: woman =
housewife + mother + cheap labour + feminine = slave.
The political implications of this situation are enormous
especially in terms of role definition in work. So many jobs
are specified as being masculine or feminine; women being
typists or teaching young children, men being builders or
engineers. To change this type of sexist stereotyping would
demand those involved in traditional areas of political work
to question deeply what it is about masculinity and femininity
which requires men and women to do jobs considered
acceptable, what is oppressive about these roles, and what our
own attitudes as men would be to doing what was considered
'feminine' work.
Women who try to change their position in society in terms
of their work role often do so in traditional women's work.
Thus they may become head teachers more easily or run
secretarial agencies or start play groups, but would find severe
opposition in trying to break through the male preserves of
building workers, railway drivers or mechanics. The picture
becomes more complicated when one considers the barrage
of propaganda which states that being a mother and housewife are the pinnacles of all women's achievement; these are
the 'natural' preserves of women's role and status in a capitalist
society.
Temperament

As the 'natural' role of women is so closely tied to their being

seen as secondary and inferior to men, it is no accident that
their temperament as defined by men is also seen as weaker
and inferior to men. Women are considered weak, emotional,
sensitive, conformist, jealous. In turn these have been deemed
'feminine' qualities and therefore men should have none of
these attributes. Since Freud raised the hoary spectre of 'penis
envy' no woman can tread the ground of male preserve without

being accused of wanting to have a penis or wanting to be a

man. Although there has been a re-examination of what Freud
had to say concerning women (see Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism) no-one can deny the way which his
theories have had a monumental importance in maintaining
an image of women which totally represses their sexuality
unless it is prescribed 'feminine' behaviour.
Kate Millett's categories apply to the experiences of many
gay men though this must not be confused with the male
radical feminist position of the early 70s which said that men
have only to wear drag in public to know what it is like to he a
woman. The whole socializing processes for men and women
are so different that it is impossible for men to swap those
experiences simply by trying to look like women, but whom
the public perceive as men. It is futile to pretend that men
can know by being radical feminist what it is like to be an
oppressed woman.
The position of gay men in society, like that of women, is
considered a very dismal second to that of straight men. In a
recent legal case a high court judge reminded us that the 1967
Act did not entitle gays to think their lifestyle was an acceptable alternative to heterosexuality. In legal terms the range of
gay behaviour which we are allowed to indulge in would almost
require us to be hermits. Also, as gays, we find it hard to express
the full range of our gayness in our work through fears of losing
our jobs, or being ostracized by our fellow workers. In addition
we do not create nuclear families and we therefore pose a
threat to the conventional socialization patterns.
If we have an awareness of our gayness and reject heterosexual norms and values we will not relate to women as the
dominant partners in a relationship. Neither will we expect
women to be our domestic slaves or child rearers. In relation
to children we would not socialize them in the 'normal'
patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour and the associated roles. We therefore pose an added threat in terms of
our non-willingness to participate in the oppressive machine
which feeds future generations into capitalist society.
Our position in society is much more acceptable to that
society if we do not challenge its norms and values for example
by accepting the role of being straight, by covering up our
gayness, by marrying. Or if we pass for straight by trying to
look more butch than Mr Universe. It is in an appositional
way but precisely in this sphere that the position of gay men
relates closest to that of women. In order to change their
status in society women move away from the 'natural'
preserve of motherhood and domesticity and towards masculine roles, whilst gay men change their status by moving into
the 'normal' sphere of masculine heterosexual roles and also
by the adoption of heterosexual norms and values.
Thus to gain acceptance we are forced into adopting the
same position of women: adopting roles which are considered
masculine. The supposed temperament of gays has almost
been as closely defined as the temperament of women
'feminine' qualities plus weak wrists, lisps, mincing walks,
high voices, etc. Many straight gays put down gays who manifest these 'feminine' qualities as making them appear to be
like women. Thus if we wish to change our temperament for
the 'better' we must behave as though we were straight. In
the gay world there is something slightly superior about being
butch, aggressive, manly. The one is dominant the other
submissive and weak, just as straight men are supposed to
dominate and women are supposed to submit.
However, women are caught in a double bind situation here,
because though it is acceptable to change one's roles and status
in work terms by becoming a worker as well as a mother and
housewife, it is unacceptable to change one's temperament.
Women, we are told, succeed in a man's world because of their
feminine qualities. To adopt a masculine pose invites accusations of being too aggressive, of being like a lesbian. Gay men
must assert what is considered natural for men in order to
cover their gayness and lesbians must be feminine women to
cover theirs. Heterosexuals always find it confusing if gay
women and men fit straight women and men's stereotypes
temperamentally. What they never understand is the confusion
for us in terms of our sexuality, and the contradictions we have
to go through in conforming to heterosexual norms concerning
our temperaments.

The Status of my Relationships

My own relationships have been characterized by the inherent
contradictions which have confronted me concerning my gayness, my femininity, or in the past my desire to pass for straight.
There was also an uneasiness created by my social experience
of gayness with other gays and my political feelings. Although
I felt oppressed by my experiences in the gay world, regardless of the fact that I could operate quite easily in that world,
I could never relate that oppression to my political feelings
that capitalism exploited and oppressed people. I saw my gay
oppression as a feeling of personal inadequacy. These ideas
spread into my relationships through a nagging feeling that
there was something missing. Somewhere in the distance would
be the perfect situation, in the present I always put down my
relationships and consequently ran away from them. I had a
constant thought that somehow my relationships were second
best. This always struck me vividly when I saw heterosexual
couples walking in the street. Fantasy played an important
role here as I was always more envious of beautiful men and
women walking together for they appeared to be able to
express their emotions openly. I assumed that what was missing in my own relationships, an inability to commit my
emotions to anyone, was paramount in theirs. I felt unable to
tell anyone I loved them and found it impossible to deal with
anyone who expressed a positive emotional commitment to
me. With heterosexual couples I automatically assumed that
theirs was a life of bliss, a constant assertion of their feelings
for each other which they were able to accept.
When I was 23, I met a man who I decided to live with.
This was the 'real' thing and before we found a flat I was
desperately excited by the idea of being in love. Of course the
only way to express that feeling known to me then was to
live with someone. However the fantasy did not last long and
after a month of hating living together, of never wanting to be
in the flat, never wanting to see the person, never wanting to
Gay Left 3

accept him for what he was, I could not get out quickly
enough. Yet not for one moment did I question the validity
of wanting a monogamous relationship and neither did I see
that what was stifling and role playing for straights was
exactly what I was copying in my relationships. The end was
just seen as another personal failure.
My Role
At this time I very much played the role of being weak, passive
and coquettish. I always felt unequal to my friends whom I
considered my intellectual superiors, I was treated as the
bright butterfly which is turned to for amusement, but hardly
taken seriously. I played the game excellently of being a pretty
young thing and consequently met people who treated me as
a pretty ornament. This type of role playing in which I
assumed a stereotyped feminine attitude completely distorted
my relationships and my notion of gayness. There was no
sense of equality and the experience of liberation which can
come through an understanding of role playing was also lacking. What 1 had socially learnt I took for being natural and
consequently felt a bitterness about my own stereotype
femininity. I therefore always had to reject my relationships
and felt an increasing sadness as each one ended and another
took the familiar path.
Strangely it was not the advent of the Gay Liberation
Front which began to make me reappraise my attitude towards
the status of my relationships or the roles and temperament
which I expressed within them, but my involvement with
C.H.E. Here I felt I met the grassroots of gay people, a much
wider range than one saw in the gay clubs and pubs, some of
whom sought something in addition to sexual gratification.
Confronted by isolation and oppression far greater than mine,
I began to understand this was not a self-imposed individual
phenomenon, but a socially created situation which had its
roots in capitalist society. At the same time I was beginning
to have a relationship with someone with whom I felt a sense
of equality. I no longer seemed to be indulging myself in the
old roles, nor denigrating the relationship as being second
best. For the first time I was involved in a creative, expanding
relationship. It helped that we had similar political views
and a feeling that sexism represses gay people and makes
them try to ape heterosexual norms and values.
We tried to develop a relationship based upon no specified
roles and at last I found myself not playing any particular
part, and I was certainly not demeaning myself or the relationship. I was accepting all the facets of the relationship for what

4 Gay Left

I perceived them to be. It was this rejection of heterosexual

norms and values norms and values which had been so
central to all my previous relationships which enabled me
to continue this relationship. There have of course been many
contradictions in the relationship. For instance the development of friends on an emotional and physical level outside the
relationship. How does one do this without being competitive
or exploitative? Another problem arises in the creeping
institutionalization of roles over a period of time which can
so easily be internalized and at the same time resented. There
is also pressure from outside to react to situations as a couple.
One has a relationship and suddenly you lose your identity,
your individuality, you become the royal 'we'.
There are no simple answers or ideal solutions to these
problems, however an understanding of the ways in which
our emotions and attitudes are structured certainly helps to
counteract the years of heterosexual conditioning we have
all encountered within the nuclear family.
When I joined the present Gay Left collective, I had therefore a certain sense of personal awareness. In the months the
group met before we ever thought of producing a journal,
I learnt to link this personal discovery with a Marxist analysis
of homosexual oppression which firmly centred that oppression in the heart of capitalist society: it also made me realize
that any socialist revolution must include in its analysis a
thorough understanding of how sexism is endemic to capitalist
society.
This brings me back to the starting point of this article
where I stated that merely tacking on to a revolutionary
programme aspects of sexual oppression was a dangerous
principle and one which we as gays and Marxists must not
accept. Revolutionary theory must relate material exploitation and oppression to the oppressive nature of relationships
encountered by women and gays. We must explore what it
is about role, status and temperament which defines sexuality
not purely as something which represses us in terms of our
personal relationships, but is also used as a method of reinforcing what is considered masculine and feminine work. If
we do not commit ourselves as gay men who are also Marxists
to this struggle, sexism will always be seen as secondary to the
economic analysis of exploitation. The consequences of this
position will be that after a revolution we will continue to
find ourselves struggling against oppressive relationships and
equally oppressive work roles. The combination of these
forces can only reinforce the stereotypes of masculinity and
femininity which are the fodder for sexism.*

Women in Gay Left

An Open Letter to the Collective from Sue Bruley

Whilst supporting the general aims of Gay Left, I am concerned

about your policy towards women joining the collective. This
letter is an attempt to persuade you to adopt a more positive
feminist approach.
When the first issue of GL appeared I thought, frankly, that
your opening line was appalling: "This is a socialist journal
edited by gay men." The announcement came as if you
considered your masculinity as something to be proud of.
Whilst selling GL to feminist friends I noticed that they also
regarded your heading and the opening line to he offensive.
It certainly did not encourage them to contribute to GL.
In the second issue, despite the change of heading, the
same misguided attitude was continued. You pretend to
examine 'The Gay World Today', but then it is made clear that
as far as you are concerned, gay men are the gay world. "What
we want to do in this article is look at some aspects of the
present male gay world ..." And then at the end of the
article you have the cheek to say that we must begin, "campaigning around a series of issues which can unite the gay
world." How can we? We are not even in it!
I know that you will say in reply that as men you could
only write about your experiences in the male part of the gay
world. But by equating the 'male gay world' with the 'gay
world' you are denying the very existence of a lesbian subculture. To have written about both parts of the gay world
would have been a much more complex task and one which is
beyond the scope of the present collective. You have attempted
to resolve the problem by taking a short cut, but in print it
appears as an overtly sexist gesture.
One attempt to justify your position appears in the
collective statement of the first issue when you say, "The present
collective, which has for some time been meeting regularly,
decided for the time being at least, that we could best explore
our sexist attitudes most truthfully, in an all male group."
What you are saying is that the collective acts as a consciousness
raising group and that this would he inhibited if women were
in it. I accept that men do not get many opportunities to do
CR, but this should not be a barrier to women who are
sympathetic with your objectives participating in the editing
and distributing of GL. Surely these two functions can, to
some extent, be separated?
GI. has set itself up as a theoretical journal with extremely
comprehensive objectives. "By working together, developing
our understanding of capitalism and sharing our experiences of
intolerance, we will attempt to draw the links between the
family, the oppression of women and gay people, and the class
structure of society." The fact that you apparently believe that
this can be achieved in an all male group seems to me to he
rather sexist. Inevitably, the experiences that the collective
will rest on for its theoretical statements will be one sided
and partial. As a feminist I am bound to argue that it is arrogant and patronising for a group of men to think that they can
write about the oppression of women in any meaningful
sense. There is not much point in making pious pronouncements about sexism if, in your own situation and everyday
practise, you cope with the problem by trying your hardest to
eliminate women from the scene.
You under-estimate GL's potential as a socialist journal for
the whole of the gay movement because it dismisses female
participation out of hand. I know that you want women to
contribute articles, but as 1 said earlier, your format and
composition does not encourage this. In addition, it is
patronising to decide, a priori, that women would not he
interested. Why can't they decide that for themselves'?
It has been said that GE is a 'closed group' and that
' membership is by invitation only'. But I notice that two new
names appear in the list of members in the second issue. Clearly, your doors are open to some men but firmly closed to all
women. I accept that you have the right to determine your
membership, but I do not accept that sex should be a valid
criteria in making this decision.

Obviously, there are difficulties. The presence of one or

two 'token' women is the greatest danger. But these problems
must be faced and do not, in themselves, constitute an argument against excluding women from the collective.
I agree with you that a socialist, anti-sexist, gay journal
is urgently needed, but I also feel that if GL is to live up to
this promise its editorial opinion must not only be aware of,
but contain within it and reflect, a knowledge of women's
oppression and of female sexual experience.*

Six Members of the Collective reply to Sue Bruley's

Letter
Sue Bruley's letter raises important issues, though not necessarily the ones she so forcibly articulates. But before tackling
the central question, I think we ought to put some of her
comments in a proper context. For instance, the by-line on
the first issue was not a declaration of male pride; it was a
statement of fact. It cannot be classed with the by-line of
another recent gay journal, After Lunch, which declared
itself to be for 'Men who like other men'. That is a declaration of separation; ours was an honest statement of the situation as it was. We decided to state this so that there could be
no possibility of assuming that what we said was anything
more than what we as a small group of people believe about
the gay world, and about socialism. The journal was an
intervention by a small all-male group into current debates
in the gay movement; no more, and no less. Similarly with
our collective article in GL No.2, we made some general
statements about the gay world, gave examples, as we
explicitly said, from the male gay subculture, then concluded with some general statements about tentative steps
forward. Neither justifies the tenor that Sue chooses to see
in them.
Sue Bruley describes in her new pamphlet, Women Awake
(advertised elsewhere in this issue), how she felt the need to
work in an all women's group after years of activity in mixed
groups. This was a valid decision, and we in no way criticise
her for it. But we had this experience very much in mind
when forming the Gay Left collective from a group that had
met for some time. Either as an all-male group, we invited
women to join, which for many feminists like Sue would
smart of tokenism; or we abandoned our own idea of preparing a journal, and merely invited all and sundry to join
( which on previous experience would still have been a predominantly male group): or we continued as an all-male
editorial collective for the moment declaring openly that
that was what we were and working out the consequences
of that.
The first option was out as far as we were concerned. The
second option was not seriously considered, because one of
the experiences that conditioned the working of Gay Left
was the dismal memory of some of us of being connected
with the earlier Gay Marxist. That was a shifting eclectic
group of people, of heterogeneous views, some scarcely
liberal, let alone Marxist. Each issue of the journal was
produced by a different group, with the result that there
was no continuity of policy, standards, production or distribution. We determined to do something different and hopefully better. That left the third option outlined above. It had
the added advantage that in the early stages it would provide
the context where we could examine from our own experiences the specific area of male gay sexuality (and I think
' Within These Walls...' GL No.2 was a useful start, flowing
as it did from intensive discussion of our experiences in the
male subculture).
We decided on a closed collective. This would enable us
to work together with reasonable stability over a long period.
It would give continuity of policy, argument, outlook and
administration. It did not mean that we were not prepared
to accept new members, but they would only be accepted on
the basis of broad agreement. That as such did not, and does
Gay Left 5

not as far as I am concerned, exclude women. The fact is

however that no woman has approached us to join, though
many women have expressed solidarity with our work. I think
it is still right to maintain a closed, relatively small collective.
The only valid alternative would be to dissolve ourselves and
the magazine and call for a new group to start a new journal
along different lines. We are not prepared to do that. Continuing as we are, however, does not mean excluding women as
such. It means giving priority to our own internal cohesion
and development, with or without wome n members. I think
each applicant should be considered on her or his merits.
The issue is an important one, which is why several
members of the collective have given separate replies. There
is no anti-female bias in the journal as Sue Bruley knows well
from personal contact, and the policy line is strongly profeminist. The question at issue is how best we can each
contribute to the goals we all share. The debate which Sue
Bruley's letter initiates will, we hope, clarify the road ahead.
J.W.
The issues raised by Sue Bruley are certainly very important
the apparent exclusion of women from an all-male group
which alleges to be concerned with the question of sexuality.
Some of her criticisms, e.g. the attack on the opening line of
GL No.1, seem to me to be frankly trivial. But the key
question of the all-male nature of the group is by no means
trivial and cannot be answered simply by saying that there
are not many women interested in joining the collective.
The fact remains in our society that our sexuality is
developed in accordance with the needs of the dominant class
in that society. The women's movement has spent some time
exploring the ways in which female sexuality is oppressed and
controlled in this society and to what end. To do this many
of them seem to have spent some time in all-female groups.
Sue does not deny the value of such groups. What she
seems to forget is that male sexuality - although not in the
same way is also oppressed and controlled by the dominant
class forces in our society. If one is Marxist one does not
believe that men are the oppressive agency in society, although
we certainly have more privileges than women. What we have
to do now, as men, is to examine our own sexuality, how it
is developed, what is oppressive about its current social form,
what is positive about that social form. Perhaps one real
criticism that can be made of GL is that we have not yet
begun to do that seriously enough. This it seems to me can
only be done in an all-male group at present. This does not
mean that all-male groups can be justified indefinitely but
they do seem to have an important function now.
B.C.
I consider there to be positive aspects to an all men's group.
Most important we can begin to explore our sexuality in a
way which has been open to women already in closed
women's groups. Through sharing our experiences as gay
men who relate to a subculture which largely excludes
women we can begin to understand what our sexist attitudes
are.
However as a future position - when we have a thorough
understanding of sexism I see no reason why the group
should not include women, if they wish to join.
As an all men's group I feel we are able to talk about the
situation of lesbians or the 'gay world' as long as our statements relate to situations which exist as opposed to those we
feel might exist.
N.Y.
Gay Left is a collective which came about as a men only group,
and has since taken in new male members. We have to consider
whether to make a positive decision to recruit women and
therefore fundamentally change the collective or whether we
continue as we are. As a collective Gay Left produces its
journal and acts as a support and consciousness raising group
for its members. Gay Left journal represents only the collective's views and those of individual contributors. It does not
attempt to represent the views of the whole of gay left people
though it wants to publish their articles.
The different experiences of gay men and women may not
always help one to analyse the other and may in fact impede
the analysis made by a men only or a women only group. Gay
6 Gay Left

Left claims it wants to explore sexual politics and this we

and
started to do in the collective articles in No.1 and No.2
this I see as one of our main purposes. If this is best done by
a group of all men then we continue as we are: if a collective
of men and women would add breadth then we must expand
accordingly.
E.C.
We have stated that the collective is attempting to work out
a marxist analysis of our sexuality and sexism and that we can
best do this at presen t in an all male group. If the group can
progress in this aim I agree in rejecting Sue's proposals at this
stage. Most of the group feel that we would be held back
from fully exploring our sexuality in a mixed group, as women
have found in the past. At our readers' meetings this has
been agreed with and encouraged by most women as being a
very important and urgent need within the movement.
I do not think that we could operate as two groups, one a
GL collective and the other a male CR. However, we should
have more readers meetings in order to have discussions about
the magazine's development and also encourage more contributions to the magazine and discuss them with the people
concerned.
This situation should not be static arid if it is not productive
the present structure of the collective would have to change.
K.B.
Sue Bruley has raised a most important issue. There is no
getting away from the fact that so far Gay Left has been
written mainly by gay men (the important exception is that
of Sue Bruley herself). To an extent this has been accidental
- the group that had the idea and got it going in the first
place all happened to be men. There is no reason why it
should necessarily continue that way and I would welcome
an extension of the representation of gay women's views in
the magazine.
Our aim is to produce a magazine written by gay people
and representing as wide a section of the committed gay left
as possible. But I am not sure that the numbers game -- i.e.
to expand the collective to contain an equal number of
women is the best way to achieve this. It seems somehow
to reinforce rather than get away from the idea of 'difference'.
R.K.

Reproduced from Gladrag Birmingham Gay Liberation Front

Gladrag is the GLF, Birmingham, magazine, price 10p.

A Grim Tale
The I.S. Gay Group 1972-75
by Bob Cant

One of the major problems facing all gay revolutionaries is the

relationship between sexual politics and working class politics.
This journal is just one of many attempts made over the last
few years to fuse these two traditions. In 1972 after the heyday of the Gay Liberation Front many of us who had been
active in G.L.F. joined revolutionary groups such as the
International Socialists or the International Marxist Group in
the belief that we could open a debate around the question of
sexuality in them. I joined I.S. in 1973 hoping that I could do
this and left earlier this year (1976) no longer believing this
was possible.
When I joined I.S. what most impressed me about them was
their approach to the real organisation of the working class.
They were not interested simply in winning elections to
parliament and trade union posts. They saw that the level at
which workers were really mobilized, after all these years of
social democracy, was on the shop floor. In that situation the
real leaders of the working class were not the union bureaucrats but the shop stewards and convenors. This must, therefore, be the starting point for any movement of the working
class towards revolutionary socialism. No other body could
emancipate the working class whether it was the Labour
Party or the Red Army. The emancipation of the working
class was the task of that class itself. It was a clear, honest
approach to class politics which seemed to me to epitomize
all that was best in the tradition of Marxism.
I.S. did not have as good a position on the gay question as
the I.M.G. appeared to, but they were the only group that put
a correct Marxist emphasis on the role of the working class
and therefore, they seemed to be the only group in which it
was worth raising the gay question. The traditions of the
group seemed questioning and undoctrinaire and I was hopeful that these traditions of open, lively debate would be
applied to the question of sexuality.
Homosexuality had first been raised in the group in 1957,
following the publication of the Wolfenden Report, in an
article in Socialist Review in December 1957. In this article
C. Dallas adopted a fairly patronising position towards homosexuality which saw homosexuality itself rather than homosexual oppression as a symptom of a class society. She argued:
"it is only when there is complete equality between the sexes
in all respects, beginning with economic equality and extending
throughout all aspects of life; when psychological development
will be more balanced through freedom from the struggle for
existence we fight today, and people more tolerant; when
submission for gain is unnecessary because the poisoning
effect of the money cancer is absent, that homosexuality
would disappear naturally. If nature then produced an
abnormality which it might do in a small number of cases,
medical treatment would take good care of it." Such a position
is of course, totally un-Marxist but nonetheless it was one held
by many Marxists prior to the rise of women's and gay movements in the late 60s. What became clear to me when I joined
I.S. however was that it was a position still held by many of
my worthy comrades.
The Question Raised
The gay question was next raised in 1972 by Don Milligan, a
long-time member of I.S., then a student in Lancaster. He
submitted a review of the London G.L.F. manifesto to
Socialist Worker, I.S.'s weekly newspaper, in February 1972.
Months passed and only after he circulated copies of his
correspondence with Socialist Worker was the article published
in Socialist Worker No.271, 13th May 1972. He concluded
the article by saying,
"The labour movement must be won over to support of the
G.L.F.'s basic demand - for total acceptance of homosexuality
in women and men as a good and natural way of loving."

But perhaps the most important thing about the article was
that it was written in the first person. Could there be a queer
in I.S.? Would the workers be scared off? They did not appear
to be scared off but the party hacks certainly were.
At the 1973 Annual Conference in March, Milligan proposed a motion on the gay question. It was opposed by the
Executive Committee. They assured the conference that they
were opposed to all homosexual oppression but they could
not accept the Lancaster motion something to do with the
ancient Greeks being homosexual. And so bedazzled by this
argument about a society 3000 years ago, the Conference
agreed to entrust the matter to the E.C. I had just recently
joined I.S. and this seemed to me to be a reasonable way of
handling the question.
Months passed however and the E.C. never seemed to find
the time to deal with the gay question. So in June of that
year a number of gay comrades met in Lancaster to decide
what to do. For two weeks an advertisement appeared in S.W.
for this meeting of the I.S. Gay Discussion Group. But then,
lo and behold, the National Secretary of the day decided it
was unconstitutional for us to advertise. In future, we had to
advertise on the Classified page as the Socialist Gay Group
thereby giving the impression that we had nothing to do with
I.S. Strangely enough, this constitutional rule did not seem
to apply to the I.S. History Group, the I.S. Science Group
and even the I.S. Brass Band.
Enter the Middle Class
There were over a dozen comrades, both women and men, at
the meeting from a wide variety of branches scattered all over
the country, some of whom felt unable to come out in their
branches. But it was a happy, constructive weekend and we
came away from it full of great hopes. Undeterred by the indifference shown by I.S., we laboriously and democratically
produced a document which we submitted to the Internal
Bulletin for publication, in the autumn of 1973. This document attempted to begin to discuss gay oppression in a
Marxist framework. It also raised a number of demands
concerned with discrimination, police harassment, custody of
children, medical treatment, sex education and age of consent.
It was a very modest beginning to a debate on sexual politics.
We waited and waited for it to appear or even for an acknowledgement but still we waited. Meanwhile Don Milligan
had moved to Bradford where he began to set up a G.L.F.
group. The I.S. branch committee there instructed him not
to. It was difficult for us in London to know what was really
going on but it became clear that there were some people in
I.S. who wanted to stamp out gay work altogether. This
should have come as no surprise to us, given I.S.'s then current
position on women which totally ignored questions relating
to the family, housework and sexuality and was only concerned with women at work. Nonetheless, we were surprised at the
underhand repressive way in which these people did act. The
E.C., having ignored our document on gay work, eventually
drew up a hasty, ill-informed statement on the gay question.
This document stated I.S.'s opposition to gay oppression but
made not even an attempt to analyse the politics of sexuality.
It fell into the old Stalinist trap of assuming that all gays are
middle-class, and, therefore, a bit perverted. It was based on
prejudice and gossip and, although it made an attack on
G.L.F. for its political mish-mash of ideas - it did not
mention the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, presumably
because it had never heard of it. It included statements such
as "Socialists who make 'gay work' the main arena of their
political activity tend quickly to exclude any other considerations and elevate the interests of the G.L.F. above that of the
political organisation of which they are nominal members."
What abusive rubbish.
This statement was presented to the October meeting of
the National Committee; one amendment was made; there was
no further discussion and the Document was approved. It
instructed I.S. members to withdraw from work in G.L.F . So
much for the open informed debate I had expected in I.S.
We were not consulted about this although we had submitted a document to the Internal Bulletin. We actually heard
Gay Left 7

about the decision at a meeting of the Women's Sub-Committee. Siri Lowe and Sue Bruley, who were both members , of the
I.S. Gay Group, had been asked by the convenor of the subcommittee to write an article on lesbianism for the I.S.
women's paper, Women's Voice. The three of us went with
copies of the article to the October meeting. It was, of course,
rejected -- too middle-class, although the writers were a
printworker and a student from a working-class family. This
was always to he a favourite line - attacking whatever disagreed with the hack line as being middle-class. The kind of
article they would have been prepared to accept would have
been about a victimized lesbian shop steward. The kind of
courage and support needed for a lesbian to become a shop
steward, let alone join a trade union, was not an issue that
interested these tough cadres.
Siri Lowe then arranged for some of us to meet the F.C.
on October 19 for them to clarity their position. It may seem
facetious to some, but I can still recall the feeling of walking
into that meeting and thinking I had walked into a Hollywood
set of a film about the Russian Revolution. A hunch of hardfaced men dressed in black, sitting round a table pretending to
be Bolsheviks while a woman took notes in shorthand. Or
perhaps I had entered a time-warp and found myself in 1917.
I did not feel as if I was in London in 1973. We got nowhere
at this meeting - one comrade accused us of wanting gay
branches and fractions, an absurd idea (given that gays, as gays,
have no social power) but one which was much used to discredit us. Another spoke of homosexuality as a 'cancerous
growth'.
The Queers Fight Back
So we organised our comrades throughout the country and
seven local branches submitted motions to the N.C. opposing
the document. At the Decemher meeting of the N.C. there was
no change in their position. However, Tony Cliff said that it
was alright for us to be in G.L.F. as long as it was not regarded
as political activity. Presumably, sex with someone of the
same sex was fine as long as you did not talk politics. For a
revolutionary, particularly one of Cliff's experience, to talk
as though one area of your life could be separated from
politics is a nonsense - and a dangerous, conservative nonsense
:it that.
It may surprise many people that we continued to work in
8 Gay Left

I.S. Some, however, such as Milligan, did drop out, increasingly

disillusioned with the Leninist concept of the party. Its insistence on party discipline and concepts of leadership seemed as
oppressive as many of the things we were fighting against.
Those of us who did stay in were greatly encouraged by the
response of rank and file members. Although the leadership
was not listening to us, we seemed to be making an impact in
other places. We spoke at meetings at a number of I.S. branches
and student groups and, generally, we had a very good
response. People did want to know about sexual politics and
they did try to grapple with its difficulties. It was also encouraging to receive so many replies to our Socialist Gay Group
advert. They came from all over the country, mostly from
very isolated people and at one time amounted to as many as
three a week. Most of all this was a very important period
politically - what with the miners' strike, the three day week
and the collapse of the Heath Government. I became branch
secretary for a few weeks at this time. I was surprised that
another comrade had not been elected but I was told by the
district organizer that his name had not been put forward
because he did not have a girl-friend at the time and was
feeling rather unhappy. When I remarked on the fact that I
was not exactly in a stable emotional position myself, the
organizer seemed to find this strange and changed the topic.
The Gay Group's next plan was to widen the issue and
hold a conference on sexism in Birmingham in March 1974.
The aim of this conference was to raise the questions connected with socialism and the struggle for sexual liberation.
We saw it as our contribution to the process of political
education going on within I.S. Steve Smith who was
organizing this was instructed by the National Secretary to
cancel it. He did, however, suggest that the idea of such a
conference could be put to the Women's Sub-Committee or
the Publications and Training Committee. The W.S.C. was

unwilling to sponsor a national conference of this type. The

convenor said she thought regional conferences on such
topics were more useful than national ones which "tend to
attract mainly middle-class audiences and not the people
who are actually building the branches". Why she imagined
that an activist group like 1.S. tolerated lazy, middle-class
members, I am not sure. She went on to suggest that we
raise the issue at branches - not realizing, or ignoring, how
difficult that was when we were not allowed to advertise.
But the reply of the Publications and Training Committee
was particularly interesting. It said that "I.S. does not take
a position on what you describe as 'sexism', and also contrary
to your opinion we have not found the issue to cause any
concern amongst the working class members of I.S." The
ramifications of these statements arc enormous but, of course,
they were in the same mould as Cliff's remarks about gay sex.
Sexuality was not a political issue to them. Their politics
seemed to be economics and militancy, full stop. We were
furious at their mindless bigotry but we knew, without any
doubt, that they were wrong. Their mistake was a hangover
from the Stalinist past which in time would be corrected.
Collapse
The next plan was to get official recognition for the subterranean 1.S: Gay Group. Such an officially recognized group,
we felt, would provide some solidarity for the gay comrades,
most of whom remained very isolated. It would be a starting
point for discussion on gay politics in I.S. in the way that the
West Indian Group was for West Indian politics in 1.S. It was
not to be a ghetto and it is in this aspect of a starting point
that its importance lay. After all, sexual politics should be of
concern to all I.S. members. The July 1974 meeting of the
National Committee was faced with five resolutions from
branches calling for the setting up of such a group. True to
form, it rejected them. At this point, our strength began to
diminish. Morale was low. One comrade in East Anglia
resigned because of the treatment he had received after he
made a pass at another male comrade at a party. 1.S. branches
are not renowned for concerning themselves with the way
women arc treated at their parties. Many comrades disappeared at this time - either not replying to letters or leaving the
organization or deciding not to make an issue of their sexuality.

Steve Smith and I decided to write something for the

Internal Bulletin but because our morale was low it was never
completed. In retrospect, this was a great error because there
were many branches which had heard nothing of our dispute
at all. The whole dispute had been conducted much too much
on the leadership's terms and on the leadership's territory.
By publishing an article in the Internal Bulletin we would
have opened things out much more and perhaps conducted
the debate on a political level, and got rid of the smears and
whispers which had characterized the whole thing. A great
deal of the responsibility for this is mine. I wrote an article
for Socialist Worker in July 1974 and allowed myself to
become obsessed with its publication. Little wonder that I
was obsessed since five months elapsed before it was published.
Over these five months I phoned S.W. on average three times
a week. In the end an article appeared by Laurie Flynn and
myself on the legal oppression of gays. This was fine so far as
it went but because it dealt with the law it totally ignored
lesbianism, and thereby the much deeper questions about the
historical oppression of all sexuality. Despite my insistence,
the word 'gay' was not used once in the entire article. The fact
that that article was not part of a series dealing with questions
of sexuality is an indication of I.S.'s civil rights approach to
this question. In my despair, however, I welcomed a civil rights
approach rather than the heavy-handed techniques of distortion and silence to which I had become accustomed.
Two motions on the gay question were submitted to the
1974 Annual Conference by Lancaster and Tottenham
branches --- but these were defeated without any discussion.
The one motion* to the 1975 Conference was likewise
defeated without any discussion. When we were selecting
delegates in the North London district for the 1975 Conference a comrade asked if these delegates would be prepared
to speak to the motion on sexuality. They refused.
For much of 1975 I believed I was the only gay person
prepared to raise questions of sexual politics. Three things
really kept me in the organization - the first that I.S. seemed
the only group capable of organizing the British working class
on revolutionary lines; the changing position of I.S. on
abortion; and my belief that the organization was still democratic enough to enable a real debate to take place sometime
in the future. But the personal strain was terrific - I was
often moody, irritable and ill. I left when I lost faith in the
organization's ability to function democratically.
Conclusions
Looking back I feel that our greatest mistake was not to
involve the whole membership of I.S. more. We should have
made use of the Internal Bulletin more than we ever did. That
way, the membership throughout the country would have
known what was going on and the leadership would have
found it more difficult to isolate us as they did. But more
significantly, I feel we made a great mistake in concentrating
on the gay question as such rather than sexuality as a whole.
Our strategy made it more difficult for people who were in the
process of coining out since people were identified as either
gay or not gay. It made it easier for people to opt out arguing
that it was up to gays themselves. It also made it easier for a
li mited civil rights approach to be adopted.
What we ought to have done was raise the question of
everyone's gender role. Sexual oppression is not something of
concern only to gays. Everyone is conditioned to follow a
particular role. But these roles are created by historical circumstances and need very serious consideration by Marxists. The
approach taken recently by the London Gay Workers' Group
in drawing up a Sexual Rights Charter for debate in the labour
movement is probably the correct one. I understand that a
new Gay Group has formed since I left I.S. and has successfully put forward demands to the 1976 Annual Conference.
I wish them luck but I will be very surprised if the organization has changed so much that it will support any real gay
work.
There are things which I.S. can be criticized for. The most
basic one was their denial of our right to meet. They would of
course assert that they had never done this and that would
be formally correct. But in real terms they made no allow-

ance for the fact that most gay comrades were isolated and
could only meet each other through the agency of S.W. I
honestly believe they thought we could spot each other on
sight or by some secret sign. That they were not prepared to
consider the importance of gay comrades meeting together is
not surprising given the developments in their politics in the
early 1970s. In correctly putting the central emphasis of their
activity on the working class they often saw workers only as
workers and ignored other aspects of their lives. This is why
they ignored the oppression of women and the role of domestic labour and only struggled around their exploitation as
workers; it is also why for so long they failed to treat seriously
the racist oppression of black workers. Reality for them
seemed to have become contained on the shop-floor. The
ideological divisions within the working class were treated
as though they were so trivial as to be irrelevant. The refusal
to allow us to set up a gay group created difficulties of a kind
that did not exist for women and blacks - because no-one
could tell if a person was gay or not some gay comrades hid
their sexuality and added to their own oppression, courtesy
of I.S. They never recognised any of the problems that a gay
person might have in coming out at work, with his family
or in a political organization. They never recognized any of
the problems that this isolation might create in terms of
relating to people and becoming a socialist.
My second criticism of I.S. is for their failure to acknowledge the validity of sexual politics. Some people claimed that
Engels' Origin of the Family said all that needed to be said.
Apart from the fact that it treated homosexuality as a perversion, it had been written before most developments in
scientific birth control. Women now had, for the first time,
the possibility of a real choice about whether they became
pregnant, about when they became mothers, about whom
they related to. Although the State has denied this choice to
so many women, the possibilities now facing women can
totally transform all their expectations. The spin-off on men
has been enormous and many men, for the first time, are
faced with a whole series of problems about relationships,
housework and childcare that never existed while women
were dependent on them. Women of the Russian Revolution
such as Alexandra Kollantai could not begin to contemplate
the possibilities that face women, today. These technological
changes are given real political importance because of the
existence of a women's movement. One would have thought
that all this might have been worthy of some consideration
by I.S.
The whole concept of a private life has become very important in these hundred years since Engels wrote. This concept
has played an important part in the development of a whole
number of industries --- house-building, women's magazines,
fil ms, cosmetics, household goods and so on. But it seemed
that these links between ideology and developments in the
bourgeois economy were not that important as far as I.S. was
concerned. 'Come the revolution, it'll be alright on the night'
sums up the level of I.S.'s approach to sexual politics. The
strength of the National Abortion Campaign made I.S. alter
this position somewhat in 1975. Suddenly, Cliff was talking
about a woman's right to control her own body being analogous with the workers' right to control the means of production. This was, beyond doubt, a great leap forward but it was
not accompanied by any wider questioning of sexual politics.
However, had it come earlier some of us would still perhaps
be in I.S. By the time it came the weariness and isolation
was too far advanced.
The third criticism of I.S. is the one that has made me most
bitter - and that is the way our political arguments were
distorted. We were accused of being concerned only with
homosexuality -- but if that had been true why would we
have bothered to join a revolutionary working class organization? We demanded a gay group and the rumour went out
that we wanted branches and a fraction. We mentioned
housework and were said to support the reactionary 'Wages
for Housework' campaign. I could not have believed that such
ignorance, bigotry, prejudice and cowardice were possible in
a revolutionary organization.
I feel very sad to have to write these things about I.S.
Gay Left 9

because despite all this they are still the only group in this
country that is even beginning to organize the working class
on revolutionary lines. They revived the Marxist tradition in
this country at a time when Marxism seemed to he either
Stalinist manoeuvring or sectarian Trotskyist splitting. And
these factors are, of course, what make their treatment of
sexual politics so tragic. Were they a bunch of nut-cases or
Stalinist ogres it would matter less. The fact that they embody
much of the best of the working class tradition in this
country does not make one hopeful.
The dilemma I was faced with in 1972 still remains. How
does one raise sexual politics and take part in the organization of the working class along revolutionary lines? To my

knowledge, all the groups that I would regard as revolutionary have, at best, only taken up a civil rights approach to
sexuality. Membership of these groups for any gay person - particularly one without a gay support group - - becomes very
oppressive and warps all of one's political behaviour. On the
other hand, leaving these groups has enormous dangers. One
can develop one's sexual politics but the possibilities of
becoming isolated from the mainstream of left politics are
great. Where do we go from here, comrades?*
* This motion was passed, overwhelmingly, by North London
District.

Was Marx Anti-Gay?

by Randal Kincaid

Almost the very first words written in the first issue of Gay
was the statement that one of the aims of the collective
was to contribute towards 'a marxist analysis of homosexual
oppression'. This stand and the commitment to an analysis of
gay oppression and its relationship to other forms of oppression and exploitation has drawn comments and criticisms.
Some of these should he aired. In this way we can work
towards a further definition of our position at least as it
appears to Inc.
A Letter From California
Craig Hanson, writing to us from California, approved of our
analysis of the gay ghetto in Gay Left No.2, but he also saw an
inherent incompatibility in being both marxist and gay. In this
article I am going to take up his major points and explore
some of the issues he has raised.
In recent years, the letter suggests, there has been a certain
disillusionment among segments of American radical gays
with the idea of marxism being the only ideological framework
in which a person can develop a coherent opposition to the
present form of capitalism. The experiences of American gays
in Cuba and information on the situation of gays in other
'communist' countries have contributed to this but the letter
goes on to suggest that there is an anti-gay element that is
fundamental not only to traditional 'communism' but to
marxism itself. The letter concludes with the tentative suggestion that anarchism may provide a less constricting theoretical
framework for gay activists.
Points of Agreement
First of all it should be said that there are points of agreement
between us and areas of mutual concern. For instance, we both
agree that as gays we wish integration with the larger society,
but not on terms that would diminish our identity and freedom as gays. I particularly liked one part of the passage Craig
Hanson quoted from David Darby's article:"Until straight
men become aware of their own homoerotic selves (the
repression of which produced their present mangled personalities) then gay liberation will be at most a matter of pleading
for tolerance in a straight defined framework.' (1) So neither
of us are interested in a special pleading for gays as a particular minority group but for a wider understanding of the nature
of sexuality itself that encourages a development of homosexual as well as heterosexual feelings. Where we differ is in
our approach towards understanding our identity as gays and
in the nature of the political choices that are open to us.
'Communist' Governments
Much of Craig Hanson's letter was taken up in describing the
situation of gays in Cuba, China, Russia and other 'communist'
countries. Some of this information was new to me, but Gay
Left has already given space to instances of gay oppression in
Cuba (Gay Left No. 1), and in Russia (Gay Left No.2). In this
issue, there is 'A Grim Tale', which highlights the problems of
gay activists within International Socialists. As socialists and
gays we are aware of the attitudes towards us of many people
who call themselves marxists. But do these sexist attitudes,
which arc directed towards women as well as towards gays,
have anything to do with marxism? It seems more likely that
it has more to do with the colonial past of some of these

Left

10 Gay Left

countries and identifying homosexuality as an aspect of

'decadent' capitalism. But the idea of decadence is an example
of the kind of value-laden, non-materialistic term that Marx
was at pains to exclude from his writing, and such attitudes
tend to reflect the chauvinism of emerging nations and a need
to establish an identity that is different and 'better' than that
ascribed to them by former dominant powers.
Although there is no suggestion (at least by Marx) that
there are rigidly defined stages along the road to a 'higher form
of society', situations such as Cuba, China or Russia cannot
be given as text-book examples of the sort of development
that Marx had in mind. For one thing, these societies have not
really experienced the capitalist phase which Marx associated
with a necessary development of productive capacity and a
movement away from traditional customs and beliefs. In
Capital, Marx points to the revolutionary aspects of Modern
Industry, contrasting it with the conservatism of previous
social formations, that not only affects the social conditions
of production but also people's minds:
"The capitalist ... forces the human race to produce for
production's sake: he thus forces the development of productive powers of society and creates those material conditions
which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of
society, a society in which the full and free development of
every individual forms the ruling principle.

"(2)

It would be completely consistent with a marxist analysis

to predict that more 'liberal' attitudes towards homosexuality
would be more likely to exist in advanced capitalist societies
than in countries where, despite a 'communist' revolution,
they were closer to a pre-industrial mode of production.
The Marxist Ethic?
"Because a gay consciousness is inherently incompatible with
the anti-sex puritanism of either capitalist Christianity or Communist Marxism, there can be no Christian Gays, and there
are no Marxist Gays. There are only confused homosexuals
who think they are Christian or Marxist."
Craig Hanson in this passage seems to be suggesting that
Marxists have the same approach to Marx's writing as
Jehovah's Witnesses or other fundamentalist groups have
towards the Bible. In Marx there is no statement of principles.
There are basic assumptions but I am unaware of any state-.
ment about how people should or should not behave in any
of Marx's important works. To deduce 'an anti-sex puritanism'
from the fact that Marx does not mention sex is, I think,
wrong. He does not mention sex because it is outside the
li mits he has drawn. In fact, the conceptual vocabulary to
enable rational discussion of sex did not exist in Marx's time.
Sex and gender inevitably went together and it is only
relatively recently that it has been possible, conceptually, to
separate the two. Marx does, however, link changes in social
relations with structural changes in society and thus provides
a framework for understanding the changing nature of sexual
relations.
Like some other observers of nineteenth century industrial
England Marx was filled with a sense of moral outrage at the
social conditions of the great mass of working people. His

particular approach to understanding this situation was an

attempt to analyse the basic tendencies in capitalism. He
viewed conventional ethics with considerable distrust as he
felt that these values tended to reflect the interests of the
dominant class. Marx's sense of justice revolves around the
individual's rights over his own labour power. Capitalism, as
he defines it, begins when the great mass of people are obliged
to sell their labour power on the market as a commodity. It is
in this situation as it develops that Marx uses value terms
such as 'exploitation' and 'appropriation'. Far from setting up
a universal ethic, Marx establishes a frame of reference within
which it is possible to examine sets of ethical assumptions.
Before Marx there was no non-metaphysical account as to
how and why societies or groups in societies developed
particular social values. Marx extended the possibility of a
materialist explanation to include areas which beforehand
could only be explained in metaphysical or moral terms:
This is not to say that Marx's account is necessarily true, but
it has a logical consistency and can, to some extent, be
tested and refined. It can also be set alongside other accounts
in such a way that rational judgements can be made regarding
relative merits.
Scientism
"A final aspect of Marxism which I feel is counter to our needs
as gay people is their fascination with being scientific. Marxism
developed at a time in which there was still the hope that
science would provide some sort of definitive framework. This
has given rise to what seems to me a tragic aspect of Marxism
- their pseudo-objectivity. The myth has been that somehow
by proper analysis of society one could objectively determine
the proper course of action. This course would be objectively
valid by being scientifically determined and would be ordained
by history."
Craig Hanson is quoting again from David Darby's article.
It is, in my opinion, a valid criticism that could be applied to
many (perhaps most) marxist writers. It is, however, incorrect
if applied to Marx himself in his mature writings. The aim of
Capital is not "to determine a proper course of action". It is
an exercise in analysis and synthesis that people have found
useful in enabling them to make decisions about courses of
action.
The point is taken, however. A sort of dogma has been
created by 'marxists' and 'anti-marxists' and this has often
little to do with what Marx actually wrote. Marx is either used
as an Aunt Sally or a battering ram and consequently the
wrong climate is created for the serious study that his work
requires. I would urge those interested enough to read Capital
(Vol. 1) which is regarded as the synthesis of everything he

wrote. There will be both 'marxists' and 'non-marxists' who

will approach this work with false preconceptions. To dispel
only two of these: revolution is never mentioned in a political
sense and the word 'communism' is never used.
Was Marx Anti-Gay?
Marx was a product of his own environment which was one
that reinforced 'traditional' elements in personal relations.
Craig Hanson suggests he would have considered homosexuality as unnatural. This may be true. Marx lived at a particular
point in time and belonged to a particular society, but he
predicted vast changes in the nature of social relations. A
particularly important concept for attempting to analyse the
changing nature of sexuality is that of Modern Industry.(3) In
Marxist terminology Modern Industry was introduced and
developed under Capitalism but extends beyond it. Unlike precapitalist modes of production where production tended to
reflect traditional, conservative forms, Modern Industry, as
Marx saw it in 1860, tended to be rational and revolutionary as
survival in such a system demanded continual change as competition threw up more rational forms of production. Such
changes reflect changes in social relations and hence changes in
social roles.
A change in social roles implies a movement away from
traditional sexual roles. There is evidence to suggest (see
` Where Engels Fears To Tread', Gay Left No.1) that this was
what was occurring towards the end of the nineteenth century
in industrialized European countries. Although the Victorians
were unequalled in their assertions of the value of traditional
family relations, this in itself might suggest that people were
beginning to be aware that these traditional forms of social and
sexual relations were for the first time being threatened. This
anxiety over homosexuality and prostitution that was such a
feature of this time, was articulated in legislation: an attempt,
no doubt, to shore up the flood gates.
A marxist analysis of sexuality provides a way out of a
situation where values are 'given' and any change in values is
looked upon as 'moral decline' or values being 'eroded'. The
world is changing. What was important before is not necessarily important now. It is perhaps time to attempt to understand the nature of sexuality and sexual roles and to consider
new ways of relating that are more in keeping with our present
world.*
1. David Darby. Article, joint issue 'Fag Rag and Gay
Sunshine', Summer. 1974.
2. Capital Vol.I. ed. Lawrence & Wishart . p.555 .
3. The concept of Modern Industry and the possible consequences for the family and relations between the sexes
see ibid. pp. 454-460.
Gay Left 11

All Worked Up
by Gregg Blachford

In the first two issues of Gay Left, we discussed different

aspects of the Gay Workers' Movement. This article looks at
the events that have occurred and the issues that have surfaced
since our last issue.
The basis on which the Gay Workers' Movement has acted is
on an agreement that any struggle of gay people for an end to
oppression and discrimination must, in the present economic
climate especially, seek a base for action within the organised
labour movement. Discussion must be initiated in and between
the gay and labour movements on how best this can be done.
Many Gay Workers' Collectives have been set up since the
first National Conference in May 1975. The collective in Leeds
committed itself to produce a newsletter to keep us informed
of the activities of others and to assist the organisation of
another Gay Workers' Conference. By the end of that summer,
a nine page newsletter had been produced which included
news on the CHE Conference that had been held in Sheffield,
the Conspiracy Laws, the tentative Gay Workers' Charter and
information on the next Gay Workers' Conference to be held
in Leeds in February 1976. The organisation of the conference
was taken on by the Leeds group with the responsibility for
the newsletter being shifted to another Gay Workers' Collective in Nottingham.
The Nottingham group produced a second newsletter
towards the end of the year. It included useful articles on
some of the practical problems of bringing up the gay question
in one's trade union branch. The events that had occurred in
London were documented along with a list of issues, besides
gay ones, around which gay workers could organise: Working
Women's Charter, unemployment, abortion, sex discrimination,
equal pay, conspiracy laws, etc.
The Second National Conference
The conference began with a bang on Friday, 13th February,
1976 at a reception at the Wellesley Hotel in Leeds. The
Bradford GLF group put on a play called "All Worked Up"
about some of the problems that gay people face at work.
Well, the hotel manager got all worked up himself and called
the police, allegedly because the room was overcrowded. They
came, the play was stopped and everyone was asked to leave.
A confrontation had occurred within an hour of the conference opening! Everyone, though, sat tight and eventually the
police and manager retreated and the play continued. This
created a very good feeling of togetherness which, to a large
extent, was to last through most of the conference.
The next morning, people began wandering into Leeds
Polytechnic to begin the discussions. Registration and accommodation seemed much more organised than last May's
conference. Workshops began on the following areas: Lesbians
and Work, Gays in the Trade Unions, and Cuts in Social
Expenditure. I went to the latter one which had few people
and no leader which resulted in no conversation for a while.
The main question to arise here was whether we should fight
the massive cuts in public expenditure as gay people on our
own or as workers in the larger anti-cuts campaigns already
in existence? Those who had fought as gays had been criticised
by the straight left for bringing sexual politics into an area
where it did not belong. Also, gays have been verbally and
physically abused at larger Trade Union demonstrations, such
as the North West T.U.C. lobby of Parliament in November
1975.
There was a feeling that you had to "prove" yourself as a
good union member before the branch would tolerate you as
gay or allow you to bring up gay issues. But it was stressed
that gays must operate as such in unions as well as working in
autonomous gay groups. We must remember, though, the
many gay people who do not belong to any trade union or
have lost their union membership because of unemployment.
These people are less likely to be protected from the full
effects of the cuts.

12 Gay Left

The workshops continued after lunch with most of the men

in the session on "Gay Workers and the Gay Scene" and the
women continuing their morning workshop on the specific
problems of lesbians in the work situation. It began by looking
at whether lesbians were in a better situation at work vis a vis
other women because they were more independent and less
economically tied to men or whether things were worse for
lesbians because they tended to feel isolated from the other
women who were in different social situations than themselves.
Women on estates and in factories tended to be physically,
mentally and emotionally close but there is a definite line over

which one must not cross or the label of "lesbian" is attached

to one's behaviour. Most women cannot afford to or do not
want to have this label pinned to them so "come-out" or
"upfront" lesbians are isolated and "closet" lesbians continue
to repress their feelings.
Because of the lack of any chairperson, this workshop discussion began to wander and eventually came to be dominated
by the Power of Women (POW) Collective whose entire theme
is a reformist campaign to get wages for housework paid for by
the state. The workshop gradually disintegrated as tea-break
time arrived.
The Working Women's Charter
By 4 p.m., when someone finally dared to call everyone
together, all 75 of us reconvened and started a discussion
around possible amendments to the Working Women's Charter
which has been in existence for two years and has been
adopted by 12 unions at their national conferences and by 33
trades councils throughout Britain. It is a charter of rights for
women with demands relating to both work and home. It has
provided the basis for a campaign around women's social and
economic situations within trade unions, tenants' associations,
etc. But it includes no provision for sexual orientation. The
conference agreed that it should send amendments forward
to the Working Women's Conference to be held in April 1976
at Coventry. The POW Collective again began to turn the
discussion to the "Wages for Housework" campaign and argued
that the W.W.C. does not say anything for those women who
work at home without a wage. Therefore they suggested that
we should put to the W.W.C. Conference that the title of the
charter should be changed to "The Women Wage-Workers
Charter". This motion was defeated. Their domination of the
discussion was pointed out by several angry women who felt
that they were using this conference for their own ends instead
of concentrating on the issue of sexuality at work which was
the theme of the conference. In the end, several women went
off to word amendments to the charter for discussion at a later
point in the day.
The Gay Workers' Charter
The question arose as to what had happened to the Gay Workers' Charter (GWC) and were we to discuss it? The Nottingham Collective answered that they had decided, in organising
this conference, that we were not strong enough as a movement to even begin to take this charter to our branches. We
would find ourselves isolated and depressed perhaps leading
to a lowering of morale. What they suggested should happen
was that our energies should be directed into taking specifically gay issues to our unions which were relevant to our own
particular work situations. Examples would include getting
support in branches of teaching unions for a gay teacher who
was sacked or warned because he or she had discussed homosexuality in the classroom or, more generally, for any gay
worker who had been sacked because of his/her openness
regarding his/her homosexuality. These arguments were
accepted without debate (a result of exhaustion?) and the Gay
Workers' Charter was shelved until an unspecified time in the
future.
The final event of the day was the acceptance of the amendments to the Working Women's Charter proposed by some of
the women. They felt that a separate "sexual freedom for all
women" clause was too general and would be too different
from the other more concrete demands in the Charter. Therefore, they suggested amendments to the existing clauses which
are italicized below:

At the Working Women's Charter Conference held in

Coventry on 10th/11th April 1976, these proposals were
drafted into a revised charter which is to go to the unions that
have accepted it for further amendments and suggestions. Then
at a future Conference, the democratically revised Charter will
he adopted as a whole for further action.
The evening saw us at the Guildford Hotel watching the
General Will Company present their "I Don't Like Apples"
play about the multitude of problems faced by a married
woman who decides to leave her husband and "go it alone".
This was followed by a crowded disco which everyone had
looked forward to and seemed to enjoy. We were so different
from what we were like during the day. Many of us tend to
split our behaviour into "serious, heavy conference-type
actions" and "fun, frivolous and camp actions" at the disco.
But, then again, we are very well rehearsed at this as most of
us still live split lives to one degree or another every day. As
one person commented, perhaps the importance of discos at
conferences reflects the social isolation of gays.
Sunday
The Sunday session was set to start at 10 a.m. but by 11.30
there were only 30 people a perennial problem at two-day
gay conferences. We eventually began by breaking up into
smaller groups to discuss the document prepared by the
Nottingham Gay Workers' Collective on the perspectives and
proposals for the campaign which we would later discuss
together in the large group. Some of the questions raised were:
What are the significant differences between middle class and
working class gays and is it possible to get more working class
gays involved in this campaign?
Should we confine ourselves to developing the consciousness
of a small group of gays or should we concentrate our efforts
on involving many "straight " gays at a more basic level which
might involve a dilution of the struggle?
Can gay groups in unions become too personal, not concentrating on organisation and action?
Should we be campaigning within revolutionary socialist
groups to get them to make political statements about sexuality
and act on them?
The plenary session after lunch was attended by about 55
people which steadily declined as the afternoon crept on. In
fact, some members of the Bradford and Leeds G.L.F. groups
walked out during this session without commenting on their
reasons for doing so.
It has been suggested that the omnipresence of the I.M.G.
(International Marxist Group) put some people off because
they were suspected of opportunism using the emerging Gay
Workers' Movement to their own advantage. Whether this is
true or not is difficult to say but what it does illustrate is the
differing orientations of the different groups and collectives
within the G.W.M. For example, Brixton and Bradford seem
to have a local, anarchist-type approach compared to the more
national orientation of the Nottingham group. Perhaps these
differences may cause splits in the future as the movement
develops.

The Gay Workers' Handbook

It was felt that the most realistic and worthwhile way forward
at this time for the Gay Workers' Movement was if we could
produce a Gay Workers' Handbook that could be used by gay
people to help them raise gay issues at their place of work. The
afternoon was spent organising the production of the handbook. The items that needed to be included were discussed
and individuals and groups volunteered to write a section.
Then we would all come together again on April 4th in London
Point 2: Equal opportunity of entry into occupations, in
promotion and defence of jobs, regardless of sex, marital status to discuss further details.
That ended the second British Gay Workers' Conference. In
or sexual orientation or hours worked.
Point 3: Equal education and training, regardless of sex, marital my view, it was superior to the first conference in that the
status or sexual orientation. Compulsory day release for all and organisation was of a higher standard (food, agenda, entertainment, accommodation, etc.), there was a more unified idea as
the opportunity for all women for further training.
Point 5: The removal of all legal and bureaucratic impediments to what direction the movement should take and finally,
concrete things emerged from the conference, that is, the
to equality, regardless of sex, marital status or sexual orientation, e.g. with regard to tenancies, mortgages, pension schemes, proposed amendments to the Working Women's Charter and
definite plans for the production of a Gay Workers' Handbook.
taxation, passports, custody and care of children, social
Hopefully, the spirit of this conference would not die
security payments, hire purchase agreements.
Gay Left 13

i mmediately at its end and that people actually would go back

and write the pieces that they offered to do. For the most part ,
as it turned out, people did fulfil their obligations. The meeting on April 4th at the South London Gay Community Centre
was well attended (about 35 people) and we spent most of
the time discussing the articles that had been submitted.
But, first, it was necessary to further clarify exactly at
whom this handbook is aimed. It was decided that the best
target would be gays at work who would, in most cases, be
unpoliticised and who would feel that they wanted to come
out at work but did not know how to go about it. As little
jargon as possible must be used and there should be no presumption about the amount of previous knowledge that the
readers have about the present gay political scene.
One of the issues that arose concerned the personal
experiences of gay people at work. One person's experience (a
public school Londoner) raised a lot of controversy as the
writer was not at all aware of the political implications of his
homosexuality and he did not see his gayness at work as at all
problematic. Were we looking only for certain types of
experiences that fitted into our analysis? Were we only going
to take manual workers' experiences as valid? Is there a
'typical' experience? General agreement was reached on the
idea that we must not edit any contributions we get or take
out the sections that some of us may not agree with. They
must be accepted or rejected as a whole. Many more offers
came to write about coming out at work and variety, it was
felt, was necessary in this section of the handbook so as many
readers as possible could find some experience with which to
identify.
Birmingham G.L.F. organised the latest meeting to discuss
the organisation of the handbook held on the weekend of _

5th/6th June 1976. Numbers were way down -- only seven

attended from outside Birmingham but more articles were discussed as well as methods of production. Nottingham Gay
Workers' Collective has taken on the responsibility for the
editing and production of the handbook with assistance from
others on working weekends in Nottingham in July. Hopefully
by Gay Left No.4 we will be able to report that the handbook
has been completed.
Problems
At all of these meetings there has been a feeling of togetherness
despite the disagreements and it seems as if something is
actually going to be published. The Gay Workers' Movement
seems to progress fastest when there is something around
which to organise. But we must not become over-confident.
We are small in numbers with little evidence of growth, isolated at work and often at home as well. We lack much widespread support. In fact, often other gays are totally against us
and we are ignored by most of the revolutionary left. But
despite this, it is vital for us to develop a situation where it is
possible for more and more gays to come out at their place of
work. This process is an important factor in generating selfrespect and ending the lies, hypocrisy and deceptions that
most gay people have to live. It also has the function of
challenging traditional gender roles by bringing others to question the sexist nature of society. At least they will be compelled to realise that an alternative lifestyle is both possible and
acceptable. Perhaps they will even be challenged into thinking
about their own sexuality.
Gay Left can play a role as a documentor of the on-going
events that occur in the Gay Workers' Movement. We will
watch and record what goes on as well as individually continuing to work within the movement.*

Gay Community Centres

Beyond the fence is the sky

Beyond the role is the individual
Beyond isolation is community
Slowly, Gay Community Centres are being started by gay
people seeking to form non-commercial meeting places where
gay women and men can feel completely free to express
themselves through dress, discussions or discos and generally
enjoy the company of each other. Most are established in
houses scheduled for demolition and redevelopment and are
set up with the most meagre financial resources and not
without protests from some local inhabitants. Centres usually
organize regular weekly meetings and are open regular hours.
14 Gay Left

The addresses of UK centres are given below. We apologise

for any centres not included and would like to hear from
them.
London
Current details from Gay Switchboard: 01-837 7324.
North London (Finsbury Park) Gay Centre for women and
men. London N4. (check address). Wed. evening meeting.
Tues. GLF open eves. and weekend.
West London Gay Centre, "The Point" at the corner of
Tavistock Crescent and Portobello Road.
South London Gay Community Centre, 78 Railton Road,
Brixton SE24. Tel: 01-274 7921.

East London Gay Centre, 19 Redmans Road, El. Tel: 01790 2454.
Edinburgh
S.M.G., 15 Broadley Terrace, Edinburgh
Most centres are for women and men, often local women's
centres have gay women's meetings. Check Switchboards or
Women's Workshop, 38 Earlham Street, London WCI. Tel:
01-836 6081 for details.

Centres in other towns and cities are hopefully being set up.
Phone Switchboards for details:
Bristol: 0272-712621 (8-10.30pm)
Manchester: 061-273 3725 (7-9.30pm)
Brighton: 0273 27878 (8-10pm)
West Midland: 021-449 8312 (7-10pm)
Oxford 0865-45301 (7-9 p.m.)
Glasgow: 041-204 1292 (7- 9pm)
Dublin: 0001-764240 (ThursFri 7.30-9.30pm, Sat 3-6pm)

Gays and Class

Notes on Gays and Class, by Richard Dyer

One of the good things about the film 'Fox' is that it has
made people talk about the question of gays and class. But is
the film's basic point -- that gay subculture is a mirror of
straight culture, simply reproducing its class divisions and
exploitation really true? I would like to suggest and it
really can only be suggestion, because we simply do not know
enough in hard facts about the lives of most gay people - that
(i) the class cultures are to a certain extent reproduced in gay
subcultures; (ii) but the larger part of the gay culture is male
bourgeois; (iii) but that it is male and bourgeois in a far from
si mple way. Let me take each of these points in turn.
(i) The gay scene in Birmingham, where I live, can be broken
down in social class terms. The four pubs and two clubs can
be divided into the posh and the common, the smart and the
rough. The small towns of industrial Lancashire (e.g. Blackburn, Preston, Bolton, Wigan) where there is a small
bourgeoisie, have distinctively working class gay pubs, as have
parts of South London and the East End. Equally, there are
gay clubs in London and Manchester almost as exclusive as
the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall.
How far does this pattern, and its extremes, extend over
the country as a whole? I cannot say for sure, but my guess
is -- not very far. It seems to me that whilst there are
different class emphases from pub to pub, club to club, the
distinctions are far more blurred than has so far been
suggested. The actual class position of the clientele of a
particular place may not tally with the vague class tone of
that club -- you get for instance the middle class gay
'slumming' in 'rough' pubs, and the working class gay
escaping the 'masculinity' of his class background amidst the
chi-chi of a club.
The ritualised forms of promiscuity -- cottaging, baths,
trolling are of interest here, for they seem to be further
'outside' of class, participated in fairly equally by all classes
(and races). By reducing all interchange to the sexual,
promiscuity strips them of class connotations. If class does
operate here, it does so not in terms of differentiation of
locale (though there are opera-trolling and expensive Turkish
baths ...), but in terms of the sexual fantasies people from
one class (or race) have about people from the other.
(ii) There is then some class differentiation within gay culture
- yet I feel the tone that dominates is male and middle class.
Of course, gay activity is no less widespread in one class than
any other (as far as I can make out) but the way it is sociallyculturally patterned seems to show a greater influence of
male, middle class norms. (Especially where, as in the majority
of cases, there is only one pub.)
This becomes more evident if one goes beyond pubs and
clubs to include the gay movement (C.H.E., G.L.F., etc.) and
gay publications (Gay News, Sappho, Playguy ). It is interesting
to note how right from the start gay magazines aiming at
providing more than just porn (Timm, Spartacus, Jeremy) all
just took it for granted that the readership would be interested
in high fashion, the Arts, cookery and foreign travel. Now
obviously there are reasons in addition to class why these
magazines (and their successors) should have assumed that
these were the things to sandwich between the pix fashion
and cookery are 'feminine' and so fit many gay men's sense of
themselves as 'feminine'; the arts are supposedly traditionally
tolerant to gayness and besides provide (especially ballet and

films) voyeur's bonuses; foreign travel represented a chance to

escape prying eyes in the pursuit of love and sex. Yet despite
that, fashion, art, cookery (as hobby rather than necessity)
and foreign travel (until recently) are indelibly middle class
interests. I can't really demonstrate it, but I also feel that the
way they were written about, the particular taste that
governs the dress and decor concerns, is also essentially middle
class. (One way of putting that is to say that gay men have
more 'taste --- providing you remember that 'taste' is not an
absolute, but rather a set of criteria largely established by the
class that dominates a society.)
I do not think all this is because the straight middle class
is more 'liberal' or 'tolerant' than the working class. Endless
discussions with gay people about their backgrounds suggests
that acceptance and tolerance are equally to be found (or
not) in both working class and middle class contexts. The
explanation has more to do with the fact that gay culture has
hitherto always developed in the relatively anonymous setting
of city or town centres, away from gay people's immediate
neighbourhood and family, away from the group activities of
one's peers. Yet neighbourhood and group affiliations are far
more typical of working class culture than the individuated,
mobile, adaptive life styles of the middle class. This means that
it was easier for middle class men to establish a gay culture in
their own image, into which working class men would make
an at times very awkward and difficult entry.
Of course participation in the development of this was
even more difficult for gay women, who, brought up as
'women', had to negotiate the isolation of domesticity. It is
interesting however to note that the only really working class
gay pub that I know in Birmingham is a lesbian pub (it's in
West Bromwich actually); and that the lesbian scene in general
is far more working class in tone than the gay male scene. It is
of course smaller, because most women still have to shake free
the career of being a family-person, but where it does occur
it does seem to be more 'working class', perhaps as a combination of (a) the fact that most lesbians have to be working
people (that is, going out and doing paid work, not staying in
and doing unpaid work); (b) the traditional collectivity of
working class women's 'street culture', which establishes the
possibility of cultural patterns of interaction more effectively
than the double isolation (class and family) of middle class
women; (c) maybe the identification of 'butchness' with
working class style (and the converse identification of the
middle class with effeminacy). This being the only available
model of not being 'feminine' in the culture as a whole.
(iii) Yet if gay culture is predominantly male and bourgeois,
that does not mean that it is simply so. Aspects of gay culture
can be seen as, implicitly, ambiguously, inflections of the
dominant culture that may even run counter to it.
First, the fact that it is gay is already counter to the
dominant culture, by which it is oppressed ( Fox is notably
short on the specificity of gay oppression). Second, gay culture
does offer the experience of group identity (instead of
magnificent individualism), something which the gay movement has been able sometimes to develop into powerful
feelings of solidarity and collectivity. Third, camp, however
much it can be used against us as stereotype, does also
contain elements of send-up, exaggeration of straight roles,
awareness of the artifice of social forms that pass for 'natural'
Gay Left 15

in the straight world. Four, many of the forms of gay

relationships - the succession of brief affaires, cottaging, the
relaxed sexual exchanges at conferences - run directly
counter to the compulsive monogamy of straight society
(though here again we have to be aware of the ambiguities -promiscuity has always been kind of OK for men; 'permissiveness' is one of the biggest new markets of recent years for an
ailing capitalism; the notion of 'responsibility' enshrined in
monogamy has a lot to be said for it, but is not always transferred to shorter-term contacts).
It is the contradictoriness of our situation, especially when
you try to think it in class terms, that makes it both very
difficult to think about, and also encouraging. A contradiction
always implies a looser, more open situation, a situation in
which struggle is still possible. The success of the gay movement
weakens the hold of bourgeois-patriarchal norms on the culture
as a whole. At the same time there are enough features of the
gay culture which could unite with the more positive features

Of working class culture. (A major problem in the latter is

the importance of the family as a place to live [rather than as
'lineage' ] ; and where I have met husband-and-wife role
playing gay couples they have been working class and/or
lesbian.) From the outside some such new creation seems to
be part of the project of community centres developing not
just as centres for gay people but as gay centres inextricably
located in specific wider working class communities. The aim
of a far closer involvement in the union movement - meaning
both raising gay issues through the unions, but also raising
gayness in the work place (as heterosexuality is endlessly) is another such project. Another may be working against
fascism in genuinely working class, multi-racial organisations.
In all cases, sisterhood and brotherhood, camp, responsible
promiscuity, have a role to play. That is a difficult practice about it we need, as someone once said, pessimism of the
intellect but -- and how - optimism of the will.*

Foxed

A Critique of 'Fox' by Andrew Britton

It was very illuminating - if disconcerting - to see Bob Cant's
review of Fox appearing in the same issue of Gay Left (No.2)
as Richard Dyer's admirable analysis of Gays in Films. On page
ten, in discussing, amongst other works, The Bitter Tears of
Petra Von Kant - also by Fassbinder - Mr Dyer seems to me
to have said very pointedly what also needs to be said about
Fox: the film tries to suggest that gay relationships can be
taken as a valid metaphor for the exploitativeness of bourgeoiscapitalist society as a whole. I found the film offensive in the
extreme; and since it is possible, apparently, for a popular
audience - let alone a gay socialist - to read it as a "damning"
indictment of the bourgeoisie, I feel it is important to raise
one or two points in reply.
1. There is no mention in the article of the reception of the
fil m in the bourgeois press. David Robinson's remarks in the
Times, to the effect that the chronicle of exploitation is all the
more convincing for being set in a "homosexual milieu", and
that it represents an "honest" and ,"realistic" picture of gay
relationships, are typical of what has been the general emphasis.
This would seem to suggest both that a concern "With The
Problem Of Homosexuality", as Mr Cant puts it, is rather
more central to the film - and to its reception by the audience
- than he tries to imply; and that its supposed subversion of
bourgeois assumptions is rather less so.
2. The film's German title, Faustrecht der Freiheit (literally,
Fist-Right of Freedom), carries connotations of 'the survival
of the fittest', which, indeed, is the English title provided by
Peter Cowie in his International Film Guide for 1976. Clearly,
Social Darwinism has been crucial for capitalist ideology, and
a film concerned with its ramifications within institutions and
personal relationships might be interesting and valuable. What
is objectionable in Fox is that the notion is introduced not as
an ideological category, but as the inevitable order of the
reality depicted. In other words, the ideology is reinforced. A
Fate motif is introduced in the opening scenes in the fairground (consider the obtrusive emphasis on the deserted Big
Wheel, revolving inexorably like the Wheel of Fortune), in
the dialogue ("That's Fate!"), and in the device of the lottery,
on which the plot turns. One can, perhaps, attribute part of
the film's critical success to this carefully contrived impression
of 'tragic' necessity. Insofar as Fox portrays 'the homosexual
predicament', and reinforces deep-rooted preconceptions about
it, it allows the spectator to sit back and think, "God! What
awful lives they lead!" Insofar as it permits identification with
the 'dumb loser', and enforces the generalisation that "That is
how things are in this world", it encourages acquiescence in
the movement of the narrative and, ultimately, in the status
quo. The spectator can leave the cinema filled with an ennobling compassion for a despised and rather pathetic minority
group, and a complacent conviction of his own, and everybody else's, helplessness. Fox is, in fact, the least ideologically
subversive of films.
16 Gay Left

Mr Cant talks about Fox's "lack of choice", in a context

which implies that there is a direct analogy between choice in
immediate personal relationships and our lack of control "over
the economic destiny of the countries" we live in. This is a
fatuous equation; it is difficult to see how any individual
movement towards self-determination, or any radical political
action could begin, or even be conceived, if it were true. It is
deeply significant that there is not the slightest mention of
Gay Liberation in the film, not a glimpse of a character, gay
or straight, who either wants or knows how to break out of the
repressive environment. The only characters who are permitted
any degree of distance from the central action either observe
it in a spirit compounded of self-interest and resignation (Uncle
Max, Eugen's father) or are provided with sterile, bitter tirades
of disgust and self-disgust (Fox's sister). The film concludes
that one is "inside the whale", in Orwell's phrase, and one can't
do anything about it. The "lack of choice", the 'downhill-allthe way' structure, in which everything goes wrong with
somewhat facile regularity, depends upon the deliberate
choice of an ineffectual protagonist, whose defeat is inscribed
from the start. The Merchant of Four Seasons, another Fassbinder film, works in the same way, and in both cases there

is an attempt to immerse the spectator in the process of disintegration.

3. Bob Cant suggests that Fox is "about the corruptive nature
of capitalism", and that the film is seriously concerned with
the economic determination of human relationships. This
formula seems to me objectionable on several counts. Unless
one is willing to accept that 'filthy lucre' is a subversive
concept, and that 'people with money tend to be unpleasant'
is a significant judgement on"the pressures of capitalism", it
is difficult to point to any coherent, serious awareness of the
"economic structure of a society". Bourgeois audiences find
no difficulty in accepting the proposition that "money
corrupts all relationships", and the victimisation of the loser
by rapacious hangers-on has become a staple narrative-structure
precisely because it so emphatically confirms complacency,
allowing us to feel outraged by a collection of vultures who
are very definitely not us.
If the film were really concerned with the perversion of
human relationships under capitalism as that is reflected in
the lives of a particular group of people (in this case, homosexuals -- and if that is not the concern, then the use of gayness is superfluous) one would require (a) an exploration of
what it means to be gay in a working class environment, and
how this differs from what it means to be gay in an upper
middle class environment. As it is, Fox-as-proletarian does not
exist in the film beyond such qualities as bad table manners
and the bourgeois myth that sees the proletarian hero as
slightly (or, as here, exceptionally) stupid, gullibly generous,
emotionally sincere (as opposed to the affectation and superficiality of the bourgeoisie -- consider Fugen's "We're not
starry-eyed lovers anymore") and sexually potent, in a
modern variation on the 'close-to-the-earth' syndrome. The
class theme is, in fact, only trivially present, and the film's
central conflict would remain if Fox were an aristocratic gay
visitor from Mars. Mr Cant does seem aware of this at some
level, since he can talk at one point about relationships being
"more than just a matter of good individuals and bad indivi- duals", and at another about the fable of "the innocent abroad
in an evil world", without any acknowledgement that there
might be some contradiction between the two. (b) An
exploration of why and how the bourgeois gays depicted have
come to acquiesce in the institutions of the society which
oppresses them. As it is, there is no sense whatever in the film
that gayness and bourgeois ideology are in any way incompatible. Indeed, as the action progresses, and the bourgeois gays
whom Fox has met at the beginning appear one by one in
positions of exploitative power, any distinction between
victimisation by predatory homosexuals and victimisation by
a predatory bourgeoisie becomes so blurred that we are left
with, at least, the impression of an alliance for mutual benefit.
It clearly needs to be said that although gay relationships may
become exploitative under capitalism, as any relationships
may, the attempt to elide the two is pernicious. (c) A sense of
gay oppression. There is nothing in Fox to show that gayness
is subject to ideological, social or legal constraints. Why no
awareness of the economic and ideological factors which
determine the existence of, say, the gay bar? Why no mention
of the social stereotyping which associates gayness with
interior decorating and sultry boutiques? Why is gayness taken
as paradigmatic of "a world which is self-conscious and yet
desperate not to face up to its own reality"? I quite agree with
Mr Cant about the symbolism of boutique and antique-shop,
but that symbolism has nothing essentially to do with gayness
at all. Instead of exploring gay life-styles in terms of their
various, complex determinants, Fassbinder presents them as a
kind of existential metaphor, an image (deprived of any
ideological context) of 'exploitativeness' which perpetuates
every received idea about homosexuality its squalor, its
ephemerality ("one affair after another"), its triviality, its
decadence (the scene with the singer, an imitation-Dietrich
backed by an enormous photograph of a naked muscleman),
its inhumanity. Unlike Mr Cant, I feel that the inhabitants of
the bar are consistently portrayed as callous, petty and
malicious, and I found the use of the plump flower-seller's
attempted seduction of Fox to arouse an automatic response
of revulsion from the grotesque quite intolerable. Once all the

stereotypes and the finality of 'the predicament' have been

affirmed, the spectator can he invited to feel pity. One can
point to a comparable procedure in The Tenderness of Wolves
( which Fassbinder produced), where, after all the fuss and
bother about the activities of the murder reflecting the
viciousness of capitalist society (a theme which, again, is
not significantly there in the film, but which has earned it
considerable praise including that of Gay News), we come
back, through the use of Bach's "Have mercy, Lord, on me"
for the opening and closing titles, to the real business of 'grief
for sin' and the pitiable pervert. Fassbinder seems to me, in
fact, the archetypal watered-down radical, whose extraordinary current popularity with bourgeois critics can be
associated with the opportunity his films provide for
becoming aware of, and condemning, sonic of the more
obvious unpleasantnesses of the middle class without having
too many basic assumptions disturbed in the process. The
recurrent tone of rather frigid irony, shading at times into
the misanthropic, is admirably suited to this purpose, as to
the enrolment of the spectator in a stable position from which
the inevitability of the action can be observed.
4. Many of the film's targets are reassuringly non-controversial, and curiously anachronistic. Elegant table manners, a
familiarity with French cuisine, cultural philistinism and the
"family tradition" of Chateauneuf de Pape are easy, comfortable foes, from which we can dissociate ourselves without
difficulty and to gauge the thinness of Fassbinder's conception, one has only to place these scenes beside, say, the
Christmas scenes in All That Heaven Allows a film made in
Hollywood in 1955 by Douglas Sirk, for whom Fassbinder is
always declaring his admiration, but who is completely
without Fassbinder's rather glib fatalism (consider, as an
example of it, the way in which Fox and Fugen come across
their Arab pick-up in 'The Meeting-Place of the Dead'). In
Sirk's film, the insidiousness of the oppression of bourgeois
good manners is felt and conveyed with a subtlety and insight
besides which the meal scenes in Fox seem dismally obvious
and crude.
5. Bob Cant implies that there is no alternative to "gay
chauvinism" on the one hand and the "fairly accurate picture
of one part of the gay world" which he claims Fox to be on
the other. One can readily agree that "the gay ghetto is not
a pleasant place", that it is inadvisable to pretend that our
lives are "heroic" (do we pretend that?) and that we, like
everyone else, are subject to social and ideological determination in various ways, some of which are beyond our immediate control. This is not the same thing as saying that we
should countenance a film such as Fox, whose unawareness
of ideology is quite staggering, and which attempts, in a most
si mplistic and destructive way, to appropriate what it calls
'the gay world' as an all-purpose metaphor for a rotten
civilisation. There seems to be a widely-held belief
attributable, presumably, to fear of a charge of "gay
chauvinism" - that we should commend and applaud every
"exposure" of the "jungle-like atmosphere" (Mr Cant's fine
phrase), which we, more than any other class of people, are
thought to breathe. "Chauvinism" is now, of course, a loaded
word, and probably, in the present context, an inappropriate
one, if all that is meant is a degree of enthusiasm for Gay
Liberation which various bourgeois/liberal observers feel to
be 'excessive'. I think that "proper pride" is admirable, and
sorely needed, especially at the present time. On the other
hand, a clear, honest, coherent portrayal of the ways in
which gay relationships are repressed, perverted, curtailed in
bourgeois-capitalist society might be equally admirable. This
is not what Fox is. Its version of homosexuality degrades us
all, and should be roundly denounced.*

Gay Left 17

To have not or not to have

Sexual Offences. Evidence to the Criminal Law
Committee. NCCL Report 1976, 20p

Review by Emmanuel Cooper

The myth of the 'permissive' society is one commonly put

forward in direct contradiction to known facts - Antony
Grey's description 'repressive society' is more accurate. The
NCCL Report deals with the main areas where law limits sexual
freedom or puts them into separate categories with moral
overtones and emotive criteria - areas which very much outline
society's attitudes to sex and sexual freedom. Main headings of
the report are: age of consent, rape, homosexuality, homosexual and heterosexual offences, importuning, prostitution,
incest, paedophilia, privacy and transvestites all of which
are examined in a straightforward, clear way which cuts
through cant and prejudice and reveals the law for what it is
biased and moralistic.
The Report quickly gets to the main areas of disagreement
and weakness in the present situation where 'sex crimes' are
given a separate and emotionally charged category. It also
points out offences against the status quo of what is or is
not allowed in terms of sexual relationships and illustrates
the different extent of punishments meted out for 'acceptable'
and unacceptable offences. For instance, a man molesting a
girl will get a far less serious sentence than a man 'molesting'
a boy.
The recommendations the Report puts forward can
generally be accepted without reservation for they eliminate
discrimination and attempt to diffuse some present moral
attitudes. Moreover the recommendations could easily be
incorporated within the present legal code.
The central point of the report -- the age at which young
people can consent and how valid this criterion is for determining crime, is the nettle that is not grasped. This may be
for practical reasons that it would involve a discussion
rather than merely legislative suggestions, but while the
Report's reformist approach can be welcomed as a short term
measure, it misses the opportunity to suggest that a radical
rethink of our whole attitude to our sexuality is the only real
solution.
Consent is very much a legal term with definitions that
can do little to help, insisting as the law does that age is the
main criterion for giving or withholding consent. While discussion concentrates on age it will always be tangential to the
subject. The Report's suggestion that there should be different
ages for different activities and 'partial' consent for some
offences highlights the problems involved, for it accepts that
criteria relating to consent based on age. Surely debate about
consent must be allied to whether hurt or harm has been
sustained, for any young person cannot, in any legal sense,
consent, yet they can be willing to enjoy sexual activity. It
must also be accepted that, in many cases, sexual interest
does not start at puberty or pre-puberty, which is roughly
the present age used by the law (for historical reasons) and the
.NCCL, but sexuality is an ongoing, developing state that
does not necessarily involve anal, oral or vaginal contact.
Expressions of sexuality are not confined to specific sorts of
contact between people.
Consent allied with age implies that the individual must
have a full understanding of the situation and the ability and
strength to decline as well as accept; therefore the question
must be asked whether consent, in these terms, is a meaningful concept in a society where men dominate women and the
whole of society dominates children to the extent that they
have no legal rights at all. Under these circumstances does a
child have the authority to consent or say 'no'? Children
explore their own sexuality, in spite of forbidding adults,
through play and fantasy situations, but how far can this be
explored and developed with older partners? In relationships
with older people it must be recognised that children have a
sexuality to express and, if no physical damage has been
18 Gay Left

sustained, are unlikely to be hurt by any sexual encounter.

However, if such cases are brought to the attention of disapproving adults or the law, then immeasurable damage can
be done to the child 'damaged goods', 'spoilt', 'used',
etc. Where there is cause to suspect that force or pressure
has been used then each case must he treated an an individual
basis with informal enquiries. No legal 'consent' definition
will be of much help. More useful, perhaps, is the concept
of harm.
A very relevant example is incest which in our patriarchal
society cannot be seen as an objective activity which can or
cannot be consented to. With the full weight of society
behind the father, how far does his daughter feel able to
resist his sexual demands? With our present state of awareness and knowledge and inbuilt social taboos, these are
extremely important questions. The Report's answer is to
say that there should be no sex under ten, but this just
will not do. Consent is a concept that cannot easily or readily
be applied to the innocent and inexperienced of any age;
fixing an arbitrary age of consent is to put emphasis where
none should be and to suggest physical and emotional
changes which just do not occur. Victims of sexual assault
of any age should have full legal protection.
What we have to return to time and time again is an
examination of contemporary attitudes to our sexuality and
to the rights, or the lack of them, we give children and young
people. At present the law upholds society's taboos and
moral codes and punishes transgressors. Sex starts at sixteen
(for most), at 21 for others. Until there is a gender revolution backed by a full awareness of the range of our sexuality,
we will have to use the law as best we can. The NCCL
Report is right in saying the law should not uphold moral
codes and is clear in putting forward arguments and suggestions for reforms. The Report's recommendations are
necessarily defined by the present laws surrounding sex. What
is absent from the Report is any indication or analysis
showing the ways those laws have shaped people's attitudes
towards sex and their developing awareness of sexuality.
Much of the rationale behind the laws relating to sexual
behaviour are rooted in people's repression and their
ignorance about developing sexuality and failure to see its
fullest expression as something enjoyable rather than
functional. Without this critique there seems little likelihood
that demands for radical changes in the law will be implemented.*

WORKING HARD

Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture, Vold,

No.1, Jan. 1976

Review by Jeffrey Weeks

Working Papers is a continuation of G.L.P.: A Journal of

Sexual Politics, a magazine published during 1974 and 1975
in Sydney, Australia. G.L.P. in turn was a development of the
earlier Gay Liberation Press, a magazine that grew out of the
fragmentation of the early Australian gay liberation movement. In that trajectory we can learn a great deal about the
development of homosexual politics over the past few years,
and in particular we can see a growth from the simple pieties
of the earlier days, to the problematical theoretical issues
of the present.
G.L.P. was distinguished by a lively eclecticism. Its articles
covered a wide, and often interesting range of subjects, from
sodomy in the early settlements to Denis Altman's latest
reflections on the modern movement. That eclecticism was, as
the editors recognised, both its distinguishing element, and its
bugbear. As a result, the editorial collective has made a turn
towards Theory and that Theory, as any reader of some
modern French Marxist philosophers will recognise, has a
capital T.

My feelings on reading the articles were mixed. The enterprise in itself is an essential one, and one in which Gay Left
has every sympathy: to explore the ways in which sexual and
cultural norms are internalised and perpetuated within a
particular form of society (social formation). One of the outstanding unexplored problems in Marxist theory is precisely
this one: of how the social relations of capitalist society are
reproduced and perpetuated. It is appropriate therefore that
-the first issue of the journal should concern itself with one of
the major modern texts in this field, Julet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Mitchell's book is a courageous
attempt to recover Freud from his detractors, particularly
many feminists who see him as the arch male chauvinist and
to discover the core of his scientific effort, and his relevance
to a theory of female oppression in a capitalist and patriarchal
society. In the process she describes how the biological determinism, which is often seen as the heart of Freudianism, is
really a discardable husk. An interview with Mitchell in the
. Working Papers brings this out very well. As she says, Freud's
"work is just permeated with the sort of ideologies of the

Capitalism, the Family and Personal Relationships by

Eli Zaretsky, Pluto Press, 1.00

Review by Bob Cant

It is widely recognized that the women's movement has
opened up whole areas of political debate long ignored by the
traditional left. The debt that people, such as this collective,
owe to the women's movement is enormous. That debt is also
recognized by Zaretsky and indeed without their contribution,
books such as this which attempt to fuse the politics of the
personal with Marxism would not have been possible.
Zaretsky begins his discussion by referring to the issues
raised by three feminists, in particular Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell. Millett and Firestone are
especially concerned with male supremacy and while they both
see themselves as socialists, socialism is for them an economic
matter. Firestone is probably best known for her exposition of
a radical feminist theory which saw the family as the primary
area of oppression within society. Followers of this have been
involved in the setting up of many communes and feminist
groups, often of a radical lesbian nature. Such has been their
attitude to men that they have often become obsessed with
personal solutions at the expense of any wider political movement.
It is with Mitchell that Zaretsky's sympathies are strongest
and he draws attention to her statement: 'We should ask the
feminist questions, but try to come up with some Marxist
answers.' Developing her theories, he shows how historically
the family had functions of production of food and shelter,

biological sciences from which he had to come. In that sense,

I think, we have to read back that biological phraseology into
the non-biological concepts which he was actually trying to
develop."
But as Mitchell would be the first to admit, her book states
the problem rather than satisfactorily resolves it, and there is
still a gap where the real theoretical exploration of sexuality
and particularly gay sexuality should be. Working Papers begins
on this assumption. The articles in it range from a "Marxist
Critique" of Psychoanalysis and Feminism to a study of
"Patriarchy" and "A Theory of Reading."
In this latter are some rich examples of the defects of a
certain approach: "The object of this text is to explore the
idea of Reading. I use Reading instead of 'reading' in order to
differentiate between reading as a theoretical activity and
reading as a descriptive term of the type 'She is reading' and
'Bill is reading a newspaper'." The articles are, inevitably, of
mixed quality; the best are those that advertise themselves as
"tentative" rather than conclusive. An obsession with the
Theory of theory can lead to a sort of paralysis of the mind
and the will, which is why I welcome the political conclusions
that appear at the end of the "Marxist Critique" of Mitchell's
book. "Its significance is that it attempts to integrate Freudian
theory into an understanding of women's oppression. Its
danger is that it isolates the feminist struggle from the class
struggle."
I think that this conclusion is misleading, given Mitchell's
own declared ambition, but it at least keeps alive a concept
of the union between theory and practice, which many of the
other articles strive to lose. Nevertheless, the themes they
adumbrate are central ones, and Gay Left hopes to explore
them further in future issues. In the meantime, we can
welcome the most recent metamorphosis of this journal,
while regretting its occasional obscurity, and hope to engage
in debate with it in the coming months.*
Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture
Box 83 Wentworth Building, 174 City Road, Darlington 2008,
Australia.
Subscriptions $6.00 for 4 issues ($A7.50 overseas by surface
mail); libraries and institutions $15.00. Single copies from the
publishers $1.00 plus postage.
Copies can be obtained in London from Compendium Bookshop, Camden High Street, London NW1, price 1.00.

sexuality, reproduction as well as the material production

that has now been socialized in factories, etc. The effect of
the split between socialized production and the other functions
of the family has been to obscure the economic role of the
family and so generate a number of further splits between
men and women, between public and personal.
These splits ensured that (pre-capitalist) male supremacy
was absorbed into the capitalist system. Male supremacy
existed not only in the family but was reinforced by its links
with material production. The remaining functions of the
family were assigned to the woman and since they did not
directly produce surplus value were soon less highly regarded
than the functions carried out by the man.
Increasingly, too, the area of the family has been seen as
'life'. People have seen this as something they have the right to
control. A whole new subjectivity has arisen from the emergence of a proletarian family which allegedly can satisfy the
need for 'happiness, love and individual freedom'. The tensions
and the contradictions of this split-life have played a part in
the development of bourgeois psychology which has usually
failed to relate this personal inner world to the public outer
world.
The traditional Left has not really grappled with this split.
Zaretsky argues that both the Russian and Chinese revolutions have taken the Engels line that a new form of production
would draw women into industry and thereby liberate them
from their backward role in the family. The American C.P .
(like so many other groups nearer home) has taken the line
that such personal matters are petit-bourgeois and diversionary.
Gay Left 19

But Zaretsky finishes on a more optimistic note and sees

the emergence of the new left, the women's movement and
the black movement as signs that the old promises of the left
are being challenged in a way that will result in a richer socialist movement which is not only concerned with overt wage
labour. He takes his argument further and says, 'The potential
point of contact between Marxism and psychoanalysis lies in
a conception of the family and of personal life as concrete
social institutions, integral to and shaped by the prevailing
mode of production.' And it is clear that this is the area that
anti-sexist revolutionaries must be looking to now. The
women's movement has done a great deal to draw our attention to the nature of domestic labour and its function in the
economy and ideology of a capitalist society. What we should

A PERMANENT DIVORCE
A Lasting Relationship: Homosexuals and Society
by Jeremy Seabrook, Allen Lane, 1976, 4.50

Review by Jeffrey Weeks

The title of Jeremy Seabrook's latest book, despite its

calculated ambiguity, suggests clearly enough the themes.
First, there is a suggestion of the inextricable involvement
of homosexuals - often against their will
in and with their
society (hence the sub-title). Second, and ironically, there
is the hope, usually unfulfilled by the characters portrayed
in this book (ostensibly a documentary, but half a novelmanque), of a 'lasting relationship', a permanent and
supportive pair-bond that will follow the contours of the
heterosexual relationships that many gays still prefer, or ape.
What the hook reveals, however, is the real divorce of most
of the gay people described here , , from their society. And
unfortunately also it often suggests the divorce of the author
from his subject matter. Many of the portraitures are onesided and caricatured, and one of the unfortunate victims has
already written to Gay News stating that Jeremy Seabrook
shall never cross his threshold again. Other characters in this
work might rue the day they met Mr Seabrook.
Jeremy Seabrook's basic thesis is close enough to Gay Left's
own concerns to make the book deserve a reading, but there
are real differences between us. His argument, baldly stated,
is that as soon as gay people (by which he means homosexual
males -- women only make guest appearancesin the book)
become visible, they become exploitable. Indeed, he goes
further than this; he argues that in their subcultural history,
with its avid consumerism, obsession with immediate satisfaction and aping of aristocratic style, gay men are actual prototypes of consumerist man. 'Consumerism' is Mr Seabrook's
enemy. The culture of poverty has become the culture of
consumerism; the supportive working class home has become
the anonymous housing estate; the web of communal values
20 Gay Left

be doing now is working around the functions of the family

described by Mitchell and Zaretsky as 'sexuality'. This question
remains as problematic as ever. The part it plays in character
formation, its relationship to other, more clearly understood
roles --- these are all questions that come to mind. They are
questions that Zaretsky doesn't begin to answer -- and in some
cases hardly raises. He does, however, provide an excellent
contemporary analysis of the family and personal relations as
a starting point for debate. It is a debate in which gay men
have a particularly important part to play along with the
women's movement and the rest of the left in a way that has
not always been true. Our analysis of our experience of the
socialization of sexuality can only strengthen this attempt to
fuse the personal and the political within a Marxist framework.*

has become the nexus of greed. This picture of capitalist

society (ignoring class exploitation, the inextricable linking
of production and consumption that Marx describes, the real
contradictions of advanced capitalism) provides the theoretical
framework of the hook. The method of presentation is a
bizarre mixture of impressionistic petit point portraiture,
based on recorded interviews, and editorial comments made
in rich socialogese. The form of the hook is a series of short
chapters, recording people
from Bill Wexford, 62, to Raoul
Schwartz, 30, to Mark Moynihan, 24; places - Amsterdam,
Hampstead Heath; and events - a gay party, a meeting of a
G.L. F. group, a west London disco; with a brief Postscript
in which Jeremy Seabrook abandons his 'I am a Camera' (or
in this case a tape recorder) approach and comes out as gay.
The trouble with the book is that it is selective, and
selective in a way which underlines Seabrook's gloomy philosophy. Surely, one thinks, the gay world cannot be as unreservedly dreary as the book suggests. And of course we know
that it is not. Mr Seabrook has interviewed diligently but has
left out of his transcripts the hits that would round out a
person or a situation. This comes out particularly in the
section on 'An Evening in Windermere Avenue'. In this wouldbe elegant dinner party Brian, Alan, Simon and Roddy dine
comfortably, bitch sweetly, reveal their fears, obsessions,
weaknesses -- it seems like a scene from a novel in progress.
It comes as a shock, therefore, to realise at the end that the
author was there, listening to every. word, and surely participating in it. Scarcely a word of his conversation comes
through. And the omission of the thinking makes one doubt
the whole. It makes us think: perhaps he has cut out everything else that he does not regard as relevant. And what is
relevant? Well, all that supports his thesis: that the gay world
is dreary, commercial, and above all infinitely absorbable.
Consumerism for Jeremy Seabrook is more than an
economic relationship. It is a moral (or immoral) system,
a miasma that envelopes and chokes the individual. There is

no way out: we struggle for our rights (in CHE, GLF or

whatever) and immediately find that our successes turn to
ashes; they are only the successes that consumerism allows
us. We are all puppets of fate, passive before the never ending
circularity of hopes lit, and hopes extinguished. The result
is a panegyric of anguish and pain, an urn of burnt out
aspirations and beliefs.
The common ground between Seabrook and Gay Left lies
in our shared awareness of the fragility of our freedom in a
capitalist society. But after that we part company. For Mr
Seabrook seems to believe that nothing is worth struggling
for, nothing worthwhile can be achieved; we win only to lose.
This perfumed despair is the negation of political action. To
counter this position, of course, is not to fall into the opposite
trap of believing that all we have to do to change our situation is to will it (the evangelical 'upward gaze'). Political
struggle can only begin with the situation as it is, and that
means recognising the unevenness of the changes that have
taken part between classes, in geographical area and the
ambiguities of the gay movement, the subculture, etc. If we
look at these we get neither unbounded hope nor spiralling
despair. We get a sense of what has been achieved, a feeling of
what still needs to be done, and of some of the ways in which
we can begin to do them.
This book, despite its ambitions, provides no way forward.*

Women Awake, The Experience of Consciousness

Raising

Come Clean.
`Saturday Night at the Baths'

Review by Bob Cant

The final credit of this film is one of 'special thanks to Professor Gregory Batcock just because'. And this final note of
coyness is not untypical of a film which fails to come to grips
with its subject.
Doubtless, many readers are already well aware of the story
of the film given the massive coverage it has received in some
parts of the bourgeois press. A gay film must be news! A piano
player from Montana, Michael, comes to New York with his
girlfriend, Tracy, in search of work. He is employed at the
Continental Baths, a famous gay meeting place apparently
frequented largely by beautiful young men who do not work.
He is befriended by the manager of the baths, Scotti. As they
become closer, Michael finds Scotti's interest in him more than
he can handle. Despite a few setbacks, all ends well and the
two get off together. Tracy is rather upset but the film ends
with the two, apparently reconciled, going home together. And
this ending is, of course, a terrible cop-out. Do Michael and
Scotti continue to have an affair? Does Tracy leave Michael or
does she smile bravely through it all? Does Scotti get screwed
up by being 'the guy Michael once laid'? There are all kinds of
possible developments which the film never considers. It may
be valid to leave the subject in the air but these problems were
never even considered by the film. It's amazingly bland
approach so reminiscent of 'Love Story' and other sugary crap,
leaves one wondering what the problem is. If a guy can change
within a week from seeing homosexuality as 'abnormal' to
being a practising bisexual then really there's not much to
worry about.
The film has been said to be in praise of bisexuality but, if
that is so, it fails to present its case very clearly. The two love
scenes, both straight and gay, are filmed sympathetically
although only the gay one blacks out in the middle. But there
is only one real discussion which begins to consider the nature
of sexism and poses questions about the nature of normality.
Something as complex as bisexuality which terrifies so many
people, which is seen by some as a cop-out needs more subtle
handling than it receives in this film.
What this film is really in praise of is one section of male
gay life in Manhattan. Women only seem to appear in the film
for tokenistic reasons why any woman, gay or not, would
want to go to the Continental Baths is a mystery. Tracy, the
only woman with a major part in the film, is treated in much
the same way as Sidney Poitier was in his earlier films in the
1950s 'a bit different but really just like one of the boys'.
The fact, too, that most of the men in the film seemed not to
work or to work only very few hours may be an accurate
reflection of the social reality of Manhattan gays but is
certainly far from the reality of most gays who are caught in a
trap of a life divided between our work and our gayness.
There are some good scenes in this film such as the football match between hets and gays and the marvellously
decadent atmosphere of the Saturday night gig at the baths.
And Don Scotti, in the role of Scotti, is superb. And, on the
whole, I suppose one is glad that this film has been made at
all. But the fact that such a bland little film can be seen as a
breakthrough shows what a long way we still have to go.*

by Sue Bruley

This is a personalised account of one woman's disillusionment

with the straight left, her decision to join a Consciousness
Raising group and all that followed. It is the first detailed
account of the workings of a British CR group. At the end
there is an attempt to evaluate the contribution of CR on
the women's liberation movement as a whole.
Price 25p (send 33p to cover p& p)
Orders to Sue Bruley, 38 Hillfield Ave., London N8. (After
Nov '76, to 38d Clapham Rd, London SW8.)
Bulk rates available on request. Also available in left/feminist

bookshops

Gay Left 21

LETTERS

Gay Left c/o 36a Craven Road, London W2

Letters are welcomed for publication and all letters received
will be assumed to be for publication unless otherwise stated.
The Collective reserves the right to shorten letters unless
contributors state otherwise.

From: GLH - PQ. Groupe de liberation homosexuals

tendance politique et quotidien. Paris.
We saw the first issue of Gay Left ( Autumn 1975) and we
were very pleased to see that we seem to have a lot of ideas in
common, especially the key point of the centrality of the fight
for sexual liberation to the general struggle of all oppressed
peoples for their liberation from the exploitation and
repression of the capitalist system. Thus, in a fairly brief
although probably not very concise way, we herein reply
trying to specify the areas of agreement we find in relation
to your collective statement.
In the space of a small letter it's not possible to elaborate
a historical account of the homosexual movements in France
we're now in the process of doing this since we believe that
at this moment the junction of radical homosexuals and
revolutionary Marxism is of essential importance and will
provide the basis of the future mass revolutionary trend but
it is fairly true to say that the French, as always, were more
highly politicised than their English counterparts who
continually emphasised reformist law amendments which at
best enabled the heightening of a certain sort of diffuse gay
political consciousness, but which at worst deviated the debate
along a totally false and misleading, and we believe ultimately
irresponsible path towards the total recuperation and integration of the homosexual, thus not only by-passing but also
conveniently camouflaging any profound political analysis,
any consideration of the tactical and political advantages
offered by a homosexual Marxist analysis.
As in England, French revolutionary groups have seldom
been prepared to consider the sexual question in a significant,
critical and political manner. Naturally, the revolutionary
wing of the women's movement has galvanized this discussion,
and so in a general way the women's struggle has achieved
official recognition as a worthwhile element in the class
struggle. In France, though to a much lesser extent than in
England, homosexuals and women have often come together
as natural allies in different struggles, but up to this time
there has been no really clear formulation of this solidarity,
it being frequently regarded as a phenomenon which automatically justifies itself thus occasionally the demands of
women have often grudgingly been viewed as partially valuable
to homosexuals, by extension of the idea of those 'sexually
not quite all there'. It is evident to us, however, that this
nexus, often unconscious, is of vital importance in the
elaboration of our political platform, and the time is now
ripe for the correct theorization of a global Marxist analysis
which roots itself in the dialectic of masculine-feminine
opposition.
Integral to an analysis of this sort is the need for a social
and psychological analysis of the internalization of the binary
opposition upon which exploitation depends, and especially
of the specific relationship, established by the women's
movement, of power/phallocratism, which places the homosexual male in a fundamental contradiction if one follows the
bourgeois psychoanalysists, even if only at a symbollic/
phantasmatic level, in that the phallus is the focus of pleasure
in a genital society. For if in our personal practice we perpetuate oppression, re-establishing in the bed the very roles which
in theory we fight against, problems arise. But most essentially
we start with a questioning of the fundamental theses. Thus,
our name, "politique et quotidien" the recognition that
the personal is political.
We recruit only on the basis of anti-capitalist homosexuals,
and will denounce those bourgeois homosexuals who are just
as much the enemy as the bourgeoisie. We fight with women,
with the workers against reformism wherever it is to be
found, and as revolutionary homosexuals we will make public
22 Gay Left

appearances in support of free abortion, against unemployment, against fascism, etc.

Until now we've had brief mentions in the press of the
extreme-left (far more widely read here than in England)
and we are in contact with a dozen or so newspapers, and have
contributed many articles to reviews, etc. Needless to say,
certain of our members are in revolutionary organizations, but
G.L.H. (P.Q.) is unaligned with any of the established groups,
whilst we inevitably subscribe to the general politics of
certain ones.
We hope that this letter heralds a long and fruitful
relationship.
Bises Rouges et Fraternelles
Poncin, B.P. 631, 75160 Paris, Cedex 04.
GAYS AND THE LEFT
I was interested to discover ( Gay Left No.1) that gay militants
in Britain have the same difficulties relating to the left as we
in Canada experience. All the left groupings here either ignore
the 'gay question' or use it opportunistically: whenever they
feel they have to make an impact within the gay movement.
For example, the Revolutionary Marxist Group (sister
organisation of the I.M.G.) occasionally covers gay struggles in
their press, but when they fielded candidates in the recent
B.C. election they made no mention of the gay struggle whatsoever in their widely distributed election materials. When
this was brought up at one of their public meetings by several
gay activists, they justified it by saying it was forgotten. They
also forgot to send a candidate to an all candidates' meeting
sponsored by a gay group, although at least one left group
was there as well as social democrats and liberals. This in the
face of a major struggle against the major Vancouver paper
which refuses to take an advertisement from the Gay Alliance
Towards Equality (GATE). The R.M.G. will come and
demonstrate with us, but when it comes to exposing the
struggle of gay people to the workers at election time it is
consistently forgotten. Is it an 'issue' the workers will not
understand? Or are we an 'issue' too hot to handle? They
don't say!
Brian Caines, Vancouver
INTELLIGENCE AND INSIGHT
Congratulations on both issues 1 and 2. It's good (and encouraging) to see a paper approaching the gay movement with
intelligence and insight. How about future articles on Gay
Teenagers and Gays in a Consumer Society?
John Gill, London, SE15
Gay Left Collective welcomes articles long or short -- from
all readers.
ORGANIZING IN TRADE UNIONS
I am writing for advice on how I should go about raising the
question of gay rights with my own Trade Union. I belong
to a relatively new organization which goes under the title
of Association of Professional Scientists and Technologists
(APST). I am a scientist by training but now work as a
managing editor for a large group of science journals. The
organisation I work for is a so-called Learned Society and
since I've come out at work I've had no hassle on that score.
Unfortunately we have very few members within the
organization but I see that as a relatively irrelevant matter
since I do have the ear of one of the full time officials of the
Union. What I want to avoid is letting things go off at halfcock; in other words, I'd value some advice as to how I go
about setting the situation up for discussion.
Ed Smith, 48 Rosemont Road, Richmond, Surrey
Bob Cant and Nigel Young reply: The gay TU groups which
haye been most successful seem initially to have got their
membership through gay publications and particularly Gay
News rather than through union publications. Perhaps a
letter to Gay News might produce another gay scientist or two.
Once you've got this nucleus of people, who've probably
already come out to a certain extent if they read Gay News,
then you can start raising the question in your union. One

approach is to write a collective letter just to make contact

with other gay members. A number of signatures is obviously
better than one. Another approach is to write an article
about discriminaton gays experience at work. A few examples
of victimization make some people take it seriously, but I can
hardly imagine a John Warburton type situation in your job.
What is probably more important and harder is to write about
the sexist and male chauvinist attitudes that we have to put up
with.
I wish you luck with your full time official but it's much more
important to win support from other rank and file members - by,
say, passing anti-discrimination motions at meetings. Women's
groups are often very helpful with this kind of of activity. It is
important to get open support from people who are not gay to prevent
the development of a ghetto mentality and the feeling that "it's all
their problem". It also of course makes makes it easier for people
who are confused to raise the question of their sexuality.
GAY RESEARCH GROUP
The above group has been established to gather information on
the availability of materials (magazines, books, press cuttings,
posters, pamphlets, etc.) on all aspects of homosexuality.
Such documentation will prove of immense value to a wide
range of researchers in the field. In addition, we are also
hoping to provide a pool of information about undergraduate,
postgraduate and general research being developed in this
field.
We would be very grateful if any readers possessing such
information or material would contact us, at 13 Endsleigh
Street, London WCI (c/o The British Sociological Association).
Gay Research Group

In our last issue there was an announcement about the film

Nighthawks which is about and by gay people. Finance had
been expected from the British Film Institute but at their
final meeting it was refused.

Ron Peck now writes:

The British Film Institute's Production Board Selection Panel
never issued any collective statement as to why the application
for a grant to make Nighthawks was ever turned down. No
criteria for selection have ever been made public and therefore
it is unuseful to say, simply, that the application failed to meet
those criteria. Unofficially, it was suggested that the expense
of the project (of any full-length project) would not help the
WORKING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
application in a year when the Production Board was under
Some questions about gay liberation organization keep jumppressure both from applications (there were rumoured to be
ing up in my life over the last ten years I have been
200) and when inflation meant that the annual grant from the
developing politically within the socialist movement and am
government would have to be substantially increased just to
now working with a M.L. (Marxist-Leninist) organization in
keep up with rising costs. The original application was for
preparation for forming and building a party. But as a gay I
22,000, to make a 2-hour film in 16mm colour. Of course, the
find many contradictions such as in Cuba, China and
BFI is not the only body giving out money to independent
Russia concerning sexuality and how do we build for
fil m making, although it is almost the only one now that the
the revolution.
Greater London Arts Association has had its film budget axed
Class being the primary contradiction, the need to build
altogether this year. The problem is that the BFI is the only
and strengthen working class consciousness is vital to build
grant-giving
body with sufficient funds to cover the cost of a
a proletariate revolution so, is there any strategies,
full-length narrative film.
experiences, etc. of gay revolutionaries working in plants and
For those of us working on Nighthawks, there were very
factories doing workplace organizing and integrating the
few options once the BFI had made its decision: one was to
cultural/superstructure aspects of sexuality into their work
abandon the project altogether and try to work out a very
that you know of?
small-scale project that could be done for about 1,000;
The need to bring with us the cultural aspects into organianother was to try to raise the money from donations from
zing is very important - but not primary for we must keep
members of the "gay community"; the last was to try to set
politics in command and that we will not recruit each and
every person personally into the movement is reality, but that the film up as a commercial production.
The first option was never taken very seriously. Not because
'
people will join the revolutionary forces because of politics
we had any contempt for the notion of a short film rather
not to join a 'groovy-goodvibes community' social unity
than a long one, but because the kind of time-and-space scale
is not strong enough to wage a revolutionary war alone but
of Nighthawks required length -- it had been conceived from
those aspects are also important but secondary.
the beginning as a film of episodes strung out over a period of
L. Kelly, Minnesota
five months.
The second option is still an option. An article appeared in
Gay News briefly explaining the financial situation of the
production. Some contributions were made and these were a
great help. They were supplemented by contributions from
friends and from gay men working in the arts who were
interested in the project. In all, about 900 has been raised;
And most of it has been spent on the material costs of the
past five months, covering the costs of postage, telephone,
sound and videotape, stills film stock, paper, photocopying,
etc. It does not include wages: the four men working full-time
on the production are all "unemployed" and surviving on
social security payments.
It is just possible that a more concentrated drive to raise
money through donation could raise another thousand pounds,
but, set against the present budget for the film, 36,000, it
could not even cover the cost of the filmstock. What it has
Gay Left 23

covered and does cover is the running cost of production,

of keeping the option of the project open. An immense
amount of work has already been done on the script, which
a dozen people have worked on. Most of the characters have
been cast and locations been found.
The third option is the only realistic one left to realise the
film as we want to realise it. We have done all of the "right"
things: we have approached distributors and lined up possible
distribution patterns in Britain, the USA and Australia; we
have had the budget checked by producers and members of
the film union (ACTT); and we have researched the success of
past films with gay subject-matter. Of necessity, we have had
to project a movie "product" with a "gay angle", for these are
the only terms of negotiation in commercial film production.
Fortunately, we can play the game with detachment, even
amusement, since it is a question of representing the project
a thousand different ways to a thousand potential backers, but
at no point losing touch with the project as we have conceived
it.
We are still fighting the financial battle, submitting an
application now to the National Film Finance Corporation,
whose interest is in profitability (the NFFC is part of the
Board of Trade). We have already raised 4,000 of free
facilities. But, without "stars" (the actors in the film are all
gay men and women holding down 'ordinary' employments),
it is not easy.
In the meantime, the various drafts of the script remain
open texts for anyone interested in the project to drop into
the studio and read and comment upon and comments are
taken seriously and discussed whenever the group goes through
the script. We are still aiming to have the film ready for
screening in April at the National Film Theatre's season of
fil ms representing homosexuality. If anyone can help us get
there, contact us at
Four Corner Films, 113 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London
E2. (01-981 4243).

LESBIAN LEFT

Lesbian Left is a newly formed grouping of lesbian feminists

who are socialist in outlook. By means of collective discussion

and action, we aim to examine and deepen socialist theory as
it relates to us as women and lesbians. In examining, discussing
and clarifying these questions we hope to counter the inadequacies of existing theory and so contribute to the ongoing
debates and struggles, both by our personal presences and by
i theoretical contribution. Sexuality, lesbianism and personal
'life have traditionally been seen by the left as matters simply
of personal concern at an individual level rather than integral
to political struggle. We recognise that the revolutionary
process for change must extend in all aspects of our lives,
fusing the personal with the political. The group is hoping to
produce a clearer and more comprehensive statement of our
aims in the near future.
Any woman interested in finding out more about the group
should contact us through the Women's Liberation Workshop
in Earlham Street, WC1. Tel: 01-836 6081. At present we are
meeting at 7.30pm every third Thursday at this address.

ICEBREAKERS ICEBREAKERS ICEBREAKERS

ICEBREAKERS needs more Icebreakers.
If you are gay, think coming out is important, and want to
help isolated gay people, write to us at BM/Gaylib, London
'WC1V 6XX. Women and teenagers especially needed.

LEFTovers
Contributions to Gay Left

Contributions, written or visual (cartoons, strips, etc.) are

invited from readers. Articles can be any length and preferably
should be typed with double spacing on one side of the paper.
All contributions will be discussed by the Collective and
contributors may be invited to come and discuss their ideas
with us.

With help from Friends

Special thanks from Gay Left Collective to Ilric Shetland for

help with illustrations and layout. Also to sellers of the
journal. It would be very helpful if readers would be prepared
to sell copies of Gay Left to friends, this would help with the
difficult task of distribution. Just write to Gay Left, 36a
Craven Road, London W2, for details.

Readers Meeting -- Tues. Nov 2 7 - 9 p.m.

Gay Left Collective have held two readers meetings which

brought a large and enthusiastic response at the second

meeting over 40 readers attended, bringing much useful
discussion and comment. The next readers meeting will be
held at the London School of Economics, Houghton Street,
London WC2. Full details with Gay Switchboard, tel: 01837 7324.

Gay Left Rates

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GAY LEFT BACK NUMBER

No.1
Gays in the Trade Unions, in Cuba, at Conference.
Copies 40p each by post from 36a Craven Road, London W2.

Contents
Carrying On ...
... ... ...
Divided We Fail
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Women in Gay Left ...
...
A Grim Tale ...
...
...
Was Marx Anti-Gay?
...
All Worked Up
...
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Gay Community Centres ...
Notes on Gays and Class ...
Foxed A Critique of Fox
Reviews ...
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Letters ...
...
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... .

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... 1
... 2
... 5
... 7
... 10
... 12
... 14
... 15
... 16
... 18
... 22

Members of the Gay Left collective are:

Keith Birch, Gregg Blachford, Bob Cant, Derek Cohen,

Emmanuel Cooper, Randal Kincaid, Ron Peck, Angus
Suttie, Jeffrey Weeks, Nigel Young.

Gay Left Collective 1976

Typeset by Caroline MacKechnie.
Printed by SW Litho, London E2.
24 Gay Left

ISSN: 0307-9813

Love, Sex and Maleness

In the latter part of the 19th Century Friederich Engels
noted the 'curious fact ... a phenomenon common to all
times of great agitation, that the traditional bonds of
sexual relations, like all fetters, are shaken off'. We are
living in a time of 'great agitation' and many of the sexual
chains that once enwrapped us like swaddling clothes are
relaxing, giving many of us the opportunity to breathe a
little more freely. The much touted 'sexual revolution' of
the boom years after World War II saw a partial redefinition
of sexuality, with the family firmly supported by the apparatus of the Welfare State, with women ideologically and
economically subordinated within a consumer oriented
capitalism but with the technology of birth control spreading -- unevenly, but still spreading and allowing women to
begin to assume control of their own fertility, the state
began to relax its grip of sexuality, and opened up a 'free
space'.
The 1960s saw a series of measures which 'liberalised' (a
key word) attitudes towards a number of 'deviant' forms of
sexual behaviour. Abortion was not legalised, but within
certain narrowly defined limits (limits now being even more
closely defined with the connivance of some Labour MPs)
it was decriminalised. Similarly male homosexuality was not
made legal, but you could now do it if you were over 21,
in private, in England and Wales. These were concessions,
liberalisations not liberation, but they opened the sluices.
The women's movement and the gay liberation movement,
simultaneously products and challenges to the sexual liberalism of the 1960s, are a result.
But despite all the changes that have taken place,
no challenge has been made to conventional gender role
stereotypes. Homosexuality has expanded its free space
within existing conceptions and behaviour patterns. Some
of the fringes are now tinted a faint pink. Some straight
men wear earrings in their left (and right) ears just like
some gay men. But essentially, images of maleness, ideologies of masculinity, remain unchallenged. Male homosexuals, no less than women, gay or straight, have to define
themselves in relationship to their stereotypes, either by
outright acceptance of male stereotypes or by challenge
and criticism. For a male homosexual has to find an identity both in terms of a sexuality which is still only partially
condoned, and in terms of a male gender identity which
carries with it strong ideological presumptions about how
a man should behave, socially and sexually.
Gay Left over the past few months has in group discussions been attempting to locate the problems. This
collective article is not a programme for action but an
agenda for debate. It concentrates on 'maleness' both
because the writers are men and because this is an area that
has been almost ignored. In the early part of the century
the sex psychologist Havelock Ellis commented that male
sexuality was not a problem, because it was direct and
forceful. It was female sexuality that needed to be explored. Today we can no longer say that with his sublime certainty. The challenges posed by the women's movement
and the gay movement have opened up a new area for men
to debate -- the question of their own 'masculinity', social
and sexual.
Patriarchy
The first division of labour, as Engels noted, was between
the sexes. This was probably based on a simple biological
fact: that women bore children, and men did not. Engels
and most theorists, even on the left, have almost to the
present erected upon this a massive ideological framework,
based on a form of biological determinism: the belief that
the social characteristics of the male and the female are inherent, physiologically predetermined, 'natural'. This view
was as true of Engels as of Herbert Spencer, of Havelock
Ellis as of the most conservative psychologist. What recent
2 Gay Left

by the Gay Left Collective

studies (as summed up in Ann Oakley's Sex, Gender and

Society), not to say the practice of the gay and women's
movement, have suggested is an alternative approach: a
more materialist and potentially socialist approach. Gender,
the social characteristics we define as masculine or feminine, is a cultural creation. Conceptions of masculinity and
femininity, of motherhood and fatherhood, have varied
enormously in different cultures. In our own they are
highly articulated, ideologically fixed, and economically
and socially buttressed. But they are, nonetheless, historical creations.
Patriarchy has taken various forms in different societies
and has now been largely moulded to meet the specific
needs of capitalism, though some inevitable contradictions
remain. Under capitalism certain gender characteristics are
spotlighted those which are seen as central to the functioning and continuation of the system. For instance ideologies of motherhood and theories of maternal deprivation
serve to narrowly define a woman's role. Bourgeois ideology and the socialisation process strive to make all gender
characteristics appear natural. Men have the dominant role
in the production of commodities and the characteristics
which are seen as central to the needs of capitalism have
become 'male' ones, market relations imply competition,
aggression and extreme individualism, qualities that are
defined as 'male'. These same characteristics and actions
extend into sexuality. Men are expected to dominate. Men
are considered to have a sexual drive while women are expected to have more emotional needs. Men take the initiative in sexual encounters. Men need to prove themselves
through repeated sexual activity. Men learn to compete
with one another for women. Men are socialised to be
sexual predators.
Sex
An ideology that explains behaviour in terms of naturalness or instincts implies that behaviour or attitudes or ways
of doing things are unchanging and permanent. Therefore,
we are told that any attempt to change 'natural' behaviour
through conscious collective behaviour is futile. We believe
that many forms of our behaviour are not natural but
learned through a complicated process of interaction with
other groups and individuals who, themselves, take as given
a set of beliefs designed to preserve the status quo.
At no point is the belief in the natural and universal
human more entrenched than in the study of sexuality. In
studying the sexual there has been an overwhelming concern with the power of biology and nature. We would like
to challenge this belief by the concept of sexualisation. At
its simplest, it describes the process by which an individual
comes to learn about sex and sexuality. We want to investigate the meanings that are attached to sex organs and to
sexual conduct.
Two or more people cannot have sex together unless
they recognise that the physical acts that they perform are
sexual and that they are performing a 'sexual act'. The
social meaning given to the physical acts stimulate biological events, not the other way around. For example, being
examined by a nurse in a VD clinic or by a gynaecologist or
practising mouth-to-mouth resuscitation all involve physical
activities similar to those that take place in sex. But the
social situation and the people concerned do not define it
as sexual and, therefore, no excitement occurs.
This process of sexualisation occurs throughout our
lives in all the areas where the more general socialisation
takes place: the family, friends and peers, school and the
mass media. The crucial point is that sexualisation revolves
around the general socialising process whereby girls learn to
be feminine and boys masculine. But the linkage is not
automatic; otherwise there could never be such a thing as
a homosexual. The socialisation process is strong but the

multifaced possibilities of sexualisation are even stronger.

The Process Of Becoming Sexual
Young children experiment with many different kinds of
behaviour whenever it is physically possible for them to
do so. They do not differentiate their behaviour into
sexual and non-sexual categories because they have not
learned what those terms mean. Children play with their
own or other children's penises, vaginas or anuses as casually as they play with their toes, a toy bear or the cat.
Pleasure is the criterion which dictates their actions. But
the child does not operate in a vacuum. Parents or guardians will react in different ways to the child's behaviour
using their own adult experience and attach their own meanings of it to the child's behaviour. Certain acts and forms
of behaviour will be described as sexual by the adult not
because of the child's sense of experience, but because
of the meanings attached to those acts by adult observers
whose only available language is that of adult sexual
experience.
Parents or adults react so that the child learns what acts
are sexual and what acts are not. This can be a very subtle
process or a harsh one according to the type of 'discipline'
preferred by the adult. Punishments can take many forms
and will be incurred by the child if it enters into the realm
of what the adult considers to be 'improper' behaviour.
Children soon learn that certain types of behaviour with
regard to their own and other children's genitals are very
different from other types of behaviour that may get little
or no reaction. For example, when a boy touches his penis,
the adult will often impute to the child motivations that
are generally associated with adult masturbation, but
which to the child is not a sexual activity in the adult
sense, but merely a diffusely pleasurable activity, like many
others. As the children grow up, they may not stop masturbating, but they will certainly learn to restrict that activity
to certain times and places. Most sexual activity will he restricted by a strong sense of guilt. Punishment and the instilling of guilt are important ways of teaching a child
what is sexually permissable and what is not. The imposition of guilt and the creation of taboos reinforce each
other.

success are also linked up with the fear that he may become
a homosexual. Parents often see the development of this in
their sons as a stigma that reflects back to them.
The heterosexual ideal is further reinforced by the boy's
peers. All of us are judged by friends according to how
neatly we fit into the gender stereotype of our sex. Even
adolescent boys who enter into homosexual behaviour will
be seen to reinforce ideals of proper male behaviour, for
example in mutual masturbation over the pictures in Play-

boy.

Sex Education
Men are often assumed to know instinctively about sex,
especially how to 'do it'. Not only is this an expectation we
have of ourselves and other men, but something women
expect of us as well. Sex education rarely discusses technique. If men are supposed to know it all then there is little
need for men to be taught. Contained in sex education
material is an assumption that the man must have an
orgasm. As a person whose role is defined in terms of
achievement and production, a man will look for achievement and production in his sex life. The ejaculate is a
product; it is a sign, like the experiencing of an orgasm,
that the man has achieved something. In the face of these
sorts of gratifications being sought by men from sex it is
little wonder that sex-education material limits itself to
describing sex acts that are male orgasmic and potentially
fertile.
Talking About Sex
As men our sexual prowess is an assumed part of our identity. In competing with other men we will use a form of

The Learning Of Heterosexuality

As well as learning what constitutes sexual behaviour, does
a child also learn who and what to find sexually attractive
and desirable? We believe that, to a large degree, we learn
our sexual orientation which, in our society means to learn
how to be heterosexual. We are not born with heterosexual,
homosexual or bisexual drives but with the potential of experiencing physical pleasure, finding many different people,
activities, things exciting, all of which at times may be
orgasmic. We reject the theory which states that the innate
sexuality of humans leads them automatically to express it
with the oppsite sex, so that anything other than this means
that the non-conforming individual is abnormal.
The family, as a basic unit of social life, is founded on
the heterosexual couple. History, literature, art and the mass
media all are based on the normality of heterosexuality.
There are few references to any other forms of sexual behaviour. The few that are, are couched in terms of sin, madness, sickness, immature development or deviancy.
The family monitors very carefully the personalities,
interests and behaviour patterns of their sons and daughters.
The presence of 'sissie' characteristics in a boy is viewed
much more seriously than the 'tomboy' activities of girls
a sissie being a much more contemptuous and derisory
label than tomboy. Many aspects of 'masculinity' are synonymous with the personal elements necessary to succeed
within capitalism so if a boy lacks in these traits his future
success is potentially jeopardised. So subtle and sometimes
not so subtle hints are thrown his way: 'Surely you wouldn't
want to grow up to be a sissie?' The expression of feminine
characteristics runs counter to male supremacy, the family
and fundamental values of capitalism. Fears for the boy's
3 Gay Left

language to boost our maleness. Our conversations with

other men are likely to be totally based around asserting
our competence and these communcations will always be
couched in slang. Moreover the only words in this vocabulary are assertive or descriptive of parts of people's bodies.
We cannot talk to other men about our sexual weaknesses. Firstly this is because men are taught to compete
with each other not to show weakness. Secondly the male
slang vocabulary does not contain words for what many
men feel to be problems. There is no slang word for premature ejaculation for example. Men use slang to degrade
other people or assert themselves by boasting about their
sexual prowess but cannot speak with one another on a
factual basis about their weaknesses.
There are other reasons why men talk about sex in the
way they do. In our society sex is seen as a private intimate matter between two people. Personal sex experiences
are not openly talked about. We are unlikely to have heard
our parents talk about sex. Children asking about sex are
likely to be greeted with embarrassed silences. In some
ways sex has become like work, a routine part of our lives,
our service to the state, and talking about it is a nonessential. If people did talk honestly about their
personal sexual experiences they may develop new ideas,
may discover that sex need not be the way we were taught.
In the sense that talking about anything spreads information and increases the level of knowledge of the people,
talking about sex may divert people from the 'normal'
method of sex, procreative 'work' sex.
Homosexuality and Maleness
Attitudes to homosexuality are set within this general
framework. The different cultural histories of lesbians and
male homosexuals are built around gender divisions. Gay
men are socialised from birth as men. The conflicts and
guilt in many of our lives stem from the fact that our
homosexuality is in conflict with our gender assumptions.
Our learnt 'maleness' is carried into our social behaviour
with women as well as our sexual with other men. The
problems raised by this are whether we maintain the basic
characteristics of heterosexual maleness or recognise that
the contradictions caused by our sexuality mean that our
masculine conditioning is fundamentally questioned and
changed.
Homosexual Maleness
The growing awareness of our homosexuality leads to
enormous conflicts. For those who accept some part of
their gay selves, social pressures and the desire to fit within the heterosexual framework mean that many gay men
view their homosexuality as simply a matter of sexual preference, concerning what is done in bed, with little or no
relevance to the rest of our lives. In towns and cities it is
easier for gay men to express themselves purely in a sexual
way through the gay subculture. The open expression of a
gay lifestyle at home, at work, and in public has little social
legitimacy and meets with strong prohibitions both social
and legal.
Sexual And Emotional Divisions
The effect of these prohibitions is to make most gay men
split their gay life from other parts of their lives. Such
splitting is not strange to men for we are all conditioned to

4 Gay Left

Perhaps one day . .

divide our lives into different compartments. But there is a

particular intensity surrounding the split in gay men's lives
by virtue of the fact that some compartments are socially
acceptable and others are not. The nature of the split varies
from person to person and whilst some are crushed by it
others negotiate livable compromises with it.
Some men lead lives which are apparently totally
straight they may be married, ogle over page 3 in The
Sun and so on but every so often they will go in search
of gay sex perhaps in a cottage or in Hampstead Heath or
some other fairly anonymous place. For some it will simply
be a pleasant experience but for others it will be a torment
which dominates the rest of their lives. Another group of
gay men live out the split in a different way they have
two circles of acquaintances, one gay, one straight. The gay
acquaintances are never given a phone number at work and
the straight acquaintances are never asked to do anything
socially at the weekends. The two worlds are quite exclusive. Another group are those whose lifestyle is openly
gay but yet separate their sexual activity from their emotional relationships. Their gayness is publicly integrated into
the rest of their lives, they write letters as openly declared
gays to The Times and Socialist Worker, they form close
friendships with gays and straights but that stability is
absent from their sexual relationships. Most of these are
casual and although they may be affectionate, they remain
separate.
The split takes many other forms than these and, in
itself, is not necessarily harmful. The harm lies in the fact
that it is imposed and, therefore, restricts all our potential
for relating to others. The restrictions on the way we can
assert our gay identity make it difficult not to have great
expectations about sexual activity which make it either very
aggressive or perceived to be a failure of some kind. Male
conditioning provides a model for the values and expectations of gay men. It also has a strong competitive element
and puts a strong emphasis on genital sex and fucking.
Sexual activity is then seen in terms of the number of
orgasms, time spent on it, the size of erection and so on.
Lack of erection is a major humiliating disaster if sexual
performance is the sole basis of our gay identity. Not only
do we feel a sexual failure but the whole of our life seems
less than satisfactory. Often when the so-called 'sexual
problem' is explored clinically it is discussed in terms of
inadequacy or deviancy, or both, and thus the whole
syndrome is reinforced.
The concept of 'potency' is the result of the imposed
' masculine' role which concentrates on genital centred
sex, orgasm and the whole performance ethic which surrounds it.
In discussing in the collective what we thought our
own sexual hang-ups were, we quickly realised that there
was no easy definition of even what 'having sex' constituted. No one felt it had to relate to fucking or genital
centred sex and there was no consensus that orgasm was
necessary. At the same time we discovered that many of
us had similar fears about maintaining erection, nonorgasm and the whole nature of the sexual performance
syndrome. For all of us it was a positive experience to find
that our fears and doubts were not individual nor exceptional. This individualising of a 'problem' is encouraged in

conventional psychiatric approaches to the question of

sexual performance and being a man.
As long as gay men continue to view 'masculinity' and
sexual role playing as being prime aspects of their personality, they are likely to substantially restrict the development of an identity which is free from bourgeois divisions
between masculine and feminine.
Sexual Objectification
Because the sexual aspect of our gayness is so strongly emphasised we are likely to view other men as sex objects. In
the gay subculture there are often distinct hierarchies of
sexual idolatory. For example active, butch men are often
seen as the most desirable. Initial appearance and style are
excessively important as the goal is largely that of sexual
contact.
Gay men can meet each other for mainly sexual reasons
in pubs, clubs, sauna baths and 'cottages'. Choices may be
even further narrowed by men responding to specific sexual
signals such as leather and denim, coloured hankies, keys
and earrings. The framework of these ways of meeting is
highly structured and reflects many elements of capitalist
society and male role playing. For example, competitiveness is rife in terms of looks, age, money and style; whilst
another element, aggression, is also a useful attribute in
making particular sexual sorties.
In this kind of situation sexual objectification brings out
some of the worst aspects of male conditioning. The turnover of people as commodities, sexual objects to be discarded when used, is very high. We are confronted by the competitive nature of capitalism coupled with the manly role
of aggression but it does not wear the camouflage that is
built around the supposedly 'natural' predatoriness of
heterosexual men in their relationships to women.
Relationships
Human beings need contact with each other. This is obviously true of the productive work that they engage in
and it is just as true of other parts of their lives. People
relate to one another in many different ways, whether
through sexual, emotional, physical or intellectual contact.
Despite the so-called sexual revolution of recent years, a
stable monogamous relationship is still seen as the right
place for most sexual contact to happen. Just as there are
pressures on heterosexual women and men to form loving
stable relationships (acceptable outside marriage nowadays)
so for gay people there is a pressure to form comparable
relationships with others, despite the remaining taboos
against homosexuality. Relationships between gay men
tend to fluctuate between casual sex and more sustained
relations ranging from a short while to many years.
It is in the areas of short term sexual relationships that
we can identify what is most male in gay men's attitudes
to sex. We do not deny that for many of us short term
sexual encounters are stimulating and pleasurable. However, frequent sex and sexual objectification have always
been the prerogative of men in bourgeois society, and as
gay men we are part of this syndrome. For a man to like
sex and pursue it with many partners is considered a sign
of virility while for a woman to do the same is to invite the
label of nymphomaniac.
Another reflection of gay men's attitudes towards sex

I'll have the strength ..

and relationships is the question of 'ending' as opposed to

'change' in both short term and long term relationships.
Because men are encouraged to see their lives as a series of
tasks which are completed in themselves (ie boyhood
manhood worker family man careerist managing
director ) so they view relationships in a more rigid manner
than women. Gay men seem to end relationships more
rapidly when they do not fulfil their expectations and to
start up new ones with equal rapidity. Change is a process
of growth and development which is absent from this
pattern.
For many gay men casual sex always remains important,
even when relationships and friendships have been established with other gay men. This is partly because of the
male attitude towards separating things, partly because of
the identity-giving nature of casual sex and partly because
of the sheer pleasure involved.
Long Term Relationships
Long term relationships may develop from sexual encounters and, as with heterosexual women and men, they are
centred on a wider series of shared interests. Three main
areas in gay male relationships show the influence of heterosexual norms and values. The first is role playing which
structures gay men's attitudes. Within gay relationships,
role playing can occur as in heterosexual ones, with one
person taking on 'feminine' roles and the other 'masculine'.
The second aspect is that of monogamy and faithfulness.
With heterosexual men and women sex outside is someti mes allowed as long as it is not publicised and only
happens occasionally. With gay men involved in long term
relationships a similar situation arises whereby it is often
permissible to have casual sex and go to cottages and go
to saunas. Each partner is allowed to be sexually promiscuous as long as he is emotionally monogamous. The
third aspect is centred around buying or sharing property
such as a house. This becomes a symbol of a shared possession. For example through the home people are able to
relate to the couple and it is an important expression of
their relationship.
Many aspects of gay male relationships reflect their
heterosexual counterparts but it is too deterministic to say
that they are total reflections. We have a much greater area
of freedom for our relationships to develop outside the confines of these roles. The possibility exists in relationships
between people of the same sex of a questioning of such
'natural' roles. For example, there is more likelihood of a
greater degree of economic equality and independence.
Long term relationships provide a centre to life and way
of living which enables many of us to stand back from the
constant seeking of one night stands. We realise that for
many men the gay commercial scene is totally unacceptable
and the only way they can relate to people is in terms of
long standing relationships which place sex in the perspective of a loving relationship.
Romantic Love And Emotions
Some gay men place greater emphasis on their emotional
rather than sexual needs. They may take part in as much
casual sex as anyone else but pickups are seen not just as
sexual partners but as potential affairs and lovers. Gay
coupling does not have as strong a materialist base as
heterosexual coupling. But our emotional structuring,

5 Gay Left

buttressed by a powerful ideology, is so strong that many

of us come to believe that such a relationship is the only
way to find 'real personal fulfilment'. The concept of
romantic love is given great importance in our society and
is closely tied to the way our emotional needs have been
moulded. Ideas can become real, material forces. The reification of the concept of romantic love has made it an
integral part of our socialised emotions and needs. It is
the foundation on which many couple relationships are
built and gay people are as likely to experience it as anyone
else. After one or two meetings people will be talking about
themselves as an affair or couple and the relationship is
likely to be very intense. Feelings are powerful, expectations
are high and the strain on both people is great. Some relationships may become long-lasting and mutually supportive but often they are destroyed by the weight of their own
expectations and the search begins once again.
Romantic love can be very real, it is not a mere fantasy.
The frequency with which these romantic feelings occur
arises out of its ideological strength and the way relationships are defined in our society. Given that our sexual and
emotional needs as gay men are so repressed and hidden it
is hardly surprising that they become distorted and that
we behave in a frenetic way when there seems any possibility of these needs being met.
Many gay men believe that if we set up one to one
relationships modelled on bourgeois, heterosexual assumptions about monogamy, emotions and romance, we will
succeed. Our needs and desires will be satisfied and we will
be content. The fact that so often we fail is seen as a personal failure or a gay failure. Experiences of relationships rarely
measure up to our expectations because of the distortions
created by a capitalist patriarchal society of all relationships
and the very formation of the expectations themselves. Relationships become deformed by feelings of jealousy, possession, competitiveness, insecurity and inadequacy which are
not individual failings but are bound up within the whole
socio-sexual structure.
On Myths And Maleness
How do we as gay socialist men deal with love, sex and
maleness in a society which has so many built-in preconceptions of our gender roles and sexuality? The three
major areas of relationships with friends, with lovers
and with women all pose different aspects of the same
problem. As well as looking at relationships, we must, as
men, continually question our attitudes, assumptions and
expressions of our maleness. We need consciously to avoid
using it either in group situations or in our day to day or
personal relationships.
The question of relationships with lovers and with
friends is one of the major problems we must confront
although there is a limit to what small groups or individuals
can achieve, for we cannot isolate ourselves. In this period
of sexual flux, we have greater freedom to choose our
sexual lives, but in the absence of received and acceptable
guidelines the state of flux can lead to insecurity, a new
form of isolation, uncharted problems. In this situation
new prescriptions can be as imprisoning as the old mores.
Earlier we stressed the importance of what are usually
described as casual affairs because they are so demeaned.
We need to counterbalance the strong ideological pull

to no longer play at being a man

6 Gay Left

(common even in the gay world) which asserts that only

long lasting relationships can validate homosexual love.
But none of us deny or demean the needs of individuals
to build up relationships of whatever types they find fulfilling and conducive to their individual needs. Nor are
we unaware of the dangers of exclusivity.
Out of the women's movement and the gay liberation
movement have come some of the ideas which have guided
and no doubt will continue to guide us in confronting our
uncertainties. The most important of these is our awareness
of sexism.
A recognition of the concept has not, of course, prevented its continued existence, even among gay liberationist men. We have been socialised as men and often display a
form of sexism where it is important to assert our masculinity in relationship to women as well as to gay men. One
of the prime aspects of the oppression of women is their
portrayal as a 'feminine' sex object ready to fall at the feet
of any man. Men express their masculinity in terms of
domination and initiative over women and many women
feel that gay men can oppress women by this same open
expression of masculinity even when it is directed towards
other men. We have, too, the social advantage that all men
have by the very fact of being men, whatever our sexuality.
Our position towards women at work and socially is often
the same as that of heterosexual men. We learn quickly to
be forceful and dominant.
Sexism must be confronted in all our relationships as
well as in our political activity, in comradeship with
socialist feminist women. We cannot culturally de-man
ourselves; nor should we deny the validity of our own
love for our own sex; but we can reject the rigid stereotypes that imprison us as men and distort our attitudes
towards both women and men.
Building up a gay subculture in which we can construct
a gay identity free of rigid stereotyping, in which we can
relate to other gays without, for example, the overriding
limits of the commercial gay scene or the formality of a
CHE group is an important step. Interest groups, gay
caucuses in unions, gay centres and so on are positive moves
in this direction.
In the end we come back to the problematic relationship
suggested by our title: love, sex and maleness. Having rejected utopia now, new prescriptions and an unlikely demanning, there are only short term perspectives. A commitment, firstly, to a continuing exploration, in a scientific
manner, of the material roots of maleness and, secondly, to
building our own lives and all our relationships on a basis of
trust, openness, flexibility and respect for human sensibilities and feelings. If love and sex are problematic notions to
describe and write about, they are even more difficult relationships to live. But whatever their final meaning, we
feel committed to exploring them; in theory, but above all
in the way we live our lives. The use of terms like exploring, building trust, suggest the basis of what we can do.
That must be, ultimately, to participate in an ideological
offensive which not only questions traditional bourgeois
notions of sex, love and gender, but also their bastard offspring, in the post-permissive and would-be liberated society
in which we live.

Reprinted by permission from

Outcome.

Come All You Gay Women,

Come All You Gay Men
"Come all you gay women,
Come all you gay men,
Come Together,
Stand together,
And each other's rights defend."
The rallying call to solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood,
comradeship, has been a vital unifying force in the gay
liberation movement. If the early GLF left a quantifiable
legacy it was in the twin themes of coming out, and coming
together. "We speak for ourselves," as Jack Babuscio's
book proclaims, the collective open-ness is the source of
our collective strength. And this collectivity, as the whole
ideology of gay liberation has proclaimed, is across and not
along gender lines. Gay women and gay men must stand
together, not only to defend their rights (a spurious notion,
anyway, as we have precious few 'rights') but to fight a
.common enemy in sexism. Sexism, the stereotyped
assumptions about an individual's gender-based social and
sexual behaviour that bourgeois society structures, reinforces and perpetuates (though always in ever changing,
alluringly clad, guises) is at the heart of the oppression of
female and male homosexuality, and the source of the
glorification of heterosexual norms.
But the rally call to solidarity is always posed as an
ought; it is a categoric imperative, not an empirical reality.
Gay men and gay women rarely stand together, and even
along the fractures of the gender divide there is precious
little male or female solidarity. Juliet Mitchell and Ann
Oakley in their editorial introduction to The Rights and
Wrongs of Women i mply that in the women's movement
the rhetorical evocation of 'sisterhood' has exhausted its
historic role. Its
"implications were not thought out and it seems to us
now to mark both an absence of any real unity beneath
it and to ignore the highly problematic relationships
that in itself it implies."
Such a casual dismissal of what many women have gained
from the movement has produced a whirlwind of criticism;
quite rightly, in many ways. But I am left with an uneasy
feeling, as a male outsider, that there might be an element
of truth in it, because I can sense a similar unease in my
attitude to the gay movement. When one of its institutions
such as Gay News is attacked, my consciousness of the
need for common endeavour is enhanced. But when I read
other gay papers, or hear of yet another gay Giro group
my heart sinks into a grey twilight; another world, another
people.
Solidarity, in other words, is not something to be proclaimed; it is something that has to be struggled for. It is a
vital ingredient for our success, but it can also be the
source of illusions which can hinder our cause, becoming,
if we are not careful, a mirage whose pursuit can be at the
expense of any real and lasting achievement.
Specifically, I want to offer two personal judgements;
firstly that the call to solidarity, especially between men
and women in the gay movement (which I regard as
essential in the struggle against sexism, and a potential
source of strength and growth for both men and women)
has not been based on any real consideration of the basic,
and often different needs of gay women and men. And
secondly, that our willingness to embrace an ideology of
solidarity has prevented us from actually working out a
means of achieving it. And to he even more specific, I
believe the existing organisations of the (predominantly
male) gay world are a positive hindrance to its achievement.

by Jeffrey Weeks

Two Worlds
Gay men and women have worked together throughout the
history of the homosexual movement. Radclyffe Hall and
Una Troubridge, the most famous lesbians of the inter-war
period, were in close touch with the (mainly homosexual)
sex reformers of the 1920s and 1930s; and during the
1950s and 1960s lesbians like Charlotte Wolff gave their
support to the Homosexual Law Reform Society and the
Albany Trust, whose main constituency was bound to be
male. Indeed, the Campaign of the HLRS and law change
of the 1960s probably gave as much stimulus to lesbian
self organisation as to male homosexuals. Lesbian groups
such as the Minorities Research Group, Arena Three, and
Kenric, developed in the 1960s partly out of the new
atmosphere created by the post-Wolfenden reform
activities. Similarly, in the early days of GLF, gay women
worked with gay men, though the women were invariably
in a minority of perhaps 1 to 5. A similar alliance can be
seen today in CHE.
But there were always acute tensions. When the women
walked out of the London GLF in 1972 to set up an
autonomous organisation, they gave three reasons: the
drain on their energy caused by the endless fight against the
men's sexism; the unradical nature of GLF politics
generally; and the need to provide a "viable alternative to
the exploitative 'straight' gay ghetto". These reasons
encapsulate the whole problem, and pinpoint the real
difficulties of collaboration. The male gay organisations
have been essentially instrumental in political thrust; the
HLRS of the 1960s was designed to change the law; the
Campaign for Homosexual Equality, despite the proliferation of other aims, intends to do the same. Most of the
lesbian organisations on the other hand have been primarily
explicitly social. Kenric was founded in the 1960s specifically because a group of lesbians were dissatisfied with the
abandonment by the Minorities Research Group of its
social meetings. And Sappho, the largest lesbian organisation
today, is primarily social in its impact, the magazine of
that name being chiefly a grassroots contact keeper rather
than a vehicle of political propaganda.
Boy meets Boy ...
There is an obvious and central reason for the difficulty
in forming a united gay movement. Gay men essentially
want to meet other gay men, gay women other gay
women. This is not a simple chauvinism but a basic
problem. Gay people, by definition, need emotional and
sexual contact with their own sex. This does not mean, as
the old theory that homosexual men are basically
misogynists would suggest, that cross-gender relationships
are difficult or impossible, but it does mean that they
cannot carry the same emotional current.
The reasons for this are not simply sexual. Beyond it is
the whole cultural weight and baggage which defines us
differently as men and women. The authors of the
important book, Sexual Conduct, John Gagnon and William
Simon remind us that
"the patterns of overt sexual behaviour on the part of
homosexual females tend to resemble closely those of
heterosexual females and to differ radically from the
sexual patterns of both heterosexual and homosexual
males".
This is not surprising given the massive socialisation process
we all undergo. Our sexuality revolves around our gender
identity. But it is more than just an individual socialisation
7 Gay Left

which affects overt social and sexual behaviour. There is also

the central problem of the different social positions of
men and women in a patriarchal society. It is no accident
that the male homosexual identity developed earlier than
the lesbian, nor that the male gay subculture is massive
and varied compared to the female. Male homosexuals in
their sexual and social characteristics express traditional
male characteristics. The phenomenon of male cruising is
after all a direct parallel of the traditional and ideologically
approved form of the male taking the sexual initiative. The
middle class males yearning for liaisons with working class
youths (J A Symonds, the Uranian poets of the turn of the
century, E M Forster, J R Ackerely, Christopher Isherwood) is a resounding echo of the 19th century male
reality of easy sexual contact with working class girls
(often servants).
This means that the social needs of male and female
homosexuals are different. Where a male gay liberationist
sounds against the commercial gay world and yearns for a
better community it is a political protest against an
existing reality. When a gay woman talks of building a
community, she is talking basically of building from
scratch (except for isolated outposts of commercialism
such as The Gateways in London). The struggle of lesbians
for an autonomous identity is that much harder because
they are brought up as women in a male-dominated society.
Not only the ideology of sex, but the material reality of
most women's lives still perpetuates a subordinate
position for most women, and the effort needed to break
away can be searing (even as compared to men, hard
enough as their struggle for identity can be). When
Charlotte Wolff was examining the lesbian organisations
in the late 1960s she noted the high degree of discretion:
"Almost all of them spoke to me of their terror of
being recognised as lesbians and of the subterfuges they
had to make in order to hide the fact."
This reflected the real, felt absence, of a viable, socially
accepted or recognised identity. That the situation has
changed at all is largely a result of the gay liberation and
women's movement, especially of the latter. For a general
movement to challenge the subordinate social position of
women inevitably brings to the fore questions of sexuality,
and not surprisingly many lesbians find that they can work
most easily in the women's movement rather than in the
gay movement. Working in the women's movement does not
remove the problem; lesbians still feel the necessity to
organise autonomously around their specific areas of
concern. But the women's movement provides an arena,
and a political dynamic, which potentially unites the social
and the sexual, the material and the ideological. The gay
movement itself has failed to do this.
Contradictions
The truth is that lesbians and gay men have found it very
difficult to work together continuously in gay organisations.
This was true of G LF and it is true of the Campaign for
Homosexual Equality. CHE has two constant strands,
evident since its foundation in 1969; first, to take up the
banner of law reform; second, to expound the social
8 Gay Left

facilities of gay people (crystallised in the scheme for

Esquire Clubs in the early 1970s). Neither (given the male
dominance in the social bias of CHE) had much to offer
women. Many women, indeed, felt deeply alienated in
CHE; that they stayed at all is an index of the absence of
any lesbian alternative rather than of positive feeling.
Sappho called the 1975 Sheffield Conference "an example
of the oppression of lesbians within the gay movement".
There was no creche, no organisational provision for a
women's caucus, little interest in women's motions. After
the Malvern and Sheffield annual conferences in 1974 and
1975, where anti-sexist talk was much to the fore, there
was a token integration of women into the top structures
of CHE. Five women sat on the EC, 1975- 6. But by 1977
only one remained: the rest had left, through alienation,
boredom, exhaustion, or political disagreement. Beyond
this was the question which was rarely posed, let alone
confronted by CHE: of what, in the short term, the men
and women had in common in a single organisation like the
campaign. If CHE aimed to be an umbrella organisation,
then there was obvious room for a variety of groups,
male and female, social and political, cultural and activist,
beneath its generous shade. But if it was a unitary organisation, as it claimed to be, then it had to forge aims that
united and involved its membership. CHE attempted this
-- with its sex education campaign (a bureaucratic disaster),
its youth activities, its (usually late and ineffective) support
of particular cases, its slowly developing trade union work.
All of these were essential, but by their nature they were
low key and specialist campaigns, and not often very
successfully executed. CHE was becoming a way of life for
many of its leaders, a round of essential meetings, key
committees, vital minorities, efficient paper chases -- and
no political zap.
The only campaign that promised to arouse national
attention was over law reform: and that was of little
direct interest to women. At the 1976 annual conference
in Southampton out of some 700 people present, under 50
were women. The barriers to the integration of women in
CHE remained enormous.
New Starts
It seems to me that we have to start with the gay world as
it is, and not as it ought to be. That implies, firstly, building
on the diversity of the gay movement by encouraging its
inherent creativity. We should support groups, whether they
be all women, mixed, or all men, in pursuing their specific
interests and concerns, as long as they are inherently
committed to the basic anti-sexist attitudes of gay liberation. I fail to see what is inherently sexist in a group of
men working together on a topic of specific concern to
themselves (say cottaging, male sexuality) and I believe it
to be wrong for creative possibilities to be stamped on
because they do not conform to abstract slogans. Secondly,
though, it is possible to maximise the areas where men and
women can work together: in befriending activities, in
political discussions, in trade union campaigns, in socialist
gay groups, in functional or professional groups. The
i mportant task is to work out forms for activity which
conform to the precise needs of that activity.

Thirdly, all this pinpoints the sheer inadequacy of the

Campaign for Homosexual Equality as an organisation: a
massive apparatus of paper and committees erected on an
apolitical base. What is needed is an organisation which
can fulfil the useful functions of CHE: linking a series of
local groups which can satisfy a lot of specifically social
needs, with a number of special campaigns in a national
organisation, without an overweighted structure. This
could be done best, I believe, in an organisation which is
specifically a federation of campaigns and groups rather
than a unitary organisation. The national organisation
would coordinate and publicise a series of task forces: on
the law, on lesbianism, social facilities, employment,
befriending, etc., but the essential initiative, the basic
dynamic would flow from these campaigns themselves.
The grassroots would have an opportunity to grow, while
the centre would be energised.

based on a creative diversity.

The gay movement would then have a two tier structure
best adjusted to its present potentialities; a creative,
radical, flexible, grassroots movement, and a national outlet
which could concentrate on the issues which unite rather
than divide. The result would not be a panacea. But it
might ensure a more secure unity, based on differentiation
and specialisation in the first place. but working towards
a more secure sense of solidarity ultimately. Only in this
way shall we really be able to "stand together and each
other's rights defend".

Fourthly, as a step towards this, a national convention

should be called to establish an organisation to replace
CHE. Its organisation would be the last act a generous act
of hari-kiri by CHE. The new movement growing on its
embers would be explicitly anti-sexist; would invite the
affiliation of women's groups, and of anti-sexist groups on
the socialist left. But its prime function would be to provide
a focus for unity in thought and defence in a gay movement

Communists Comment
In Autumn of 1976 the Communist Party of Great Britain
produced an important statement on the oppression of
homosexuals following a decision of their annual conference. Nigel Young of Gay Left interviews Sarah Benton
and Bea Campbell, both members of the CPGB on some
of the major related questions confronting the CP today.
The views expressed are, of course, the personal views of
the two women and not necessarily official party policy.
How did the Statement arise and what were the processes
involved in the Party which led to the formulation and
production of the Statement?
Bea: At the last Party Congress in the autumn of 1975,
there were several gay resolutions from branches up and
down the country and there were several attempts to get
these included in the main resolutions. The executive of
the Communist Party knew of the existence of the gay
movement and that's as far as it went. In fact, it was the
first attempt by gays in the Party, at that level, to commit
the Party to a positive position on homosexuality. There
was a real problem because it had never been aired -- it had
never been discussed, and communists were bound to have
fairly predictable sorts of attitudes, just like the left has got
its predictable attitudes to women unless feminism confronts it.
So there was this very formal reference to homosexuality
in the main resolution which completely dissatisfied the
gays who were there, who, in fact, were the only people
who voted against the main resolution. The resolutions
were not rejected but there was an acknowledgment that
it wouldn't have made any sense to say 'Oh, yes, we'll
support homosexuals', never having discussed the subject.
So those resolutions were referred back to the new executive which was going to have discussions and try to work
something out. The Party's national organiser worked
together with a group of gays in the Party to prepare a
possible policy statement.
Sarah: There was also a general sense among gays that being
a gay in the CP would involve some people having political

rationalisations for an anti-gay attitude that there wouldn't

be anywhere else. It was, therefore, imperative for gays to
be enabled to come out in the Party as well as the Party
having an appropriate stance for a revolutionary organisation.
Will the Statement he discussed widely in the Party?
Bea: Yes because you now have the means for a big discussion in the Party. I heard, for example, that there were
Party miners who read the statement and really thought
they ought to talk about it and I thought that was great
because that was the very root of the heavy men who one
would imagine would be most defensive about stereotype
masculinity, who would be very dismissive of homosexuality as an issue ... that they actually moved to sort
it out amongst themselves is very positive. It is a question
of process ... a process has been undertaken in the Party
which is going to radially alter a lot of people's relationships, not just their attitude but their relationship to the
issue of homosexuality.
The gay movement has existed in this country since the
late 60s. Why has the gay question become an issue in the
CP only over the last two years?
Sarah: One reason is that people realised that you can
actually use the constitutional processes of the Party to get
a policy through, and I think it was realised that you could
actually get a policy on gays if you worked through the
procedures, ie putting up the resolution and demand to be
discussed.
Do you think the socialist feminist movement affected
the consciousness of gay people in the CP?
Bea: The Party has demonstrated that it's prepared to argue
fairly contentious things out and it has done that with
feminism -- there has been a kind of uproar, in some
respects, for quite a long time and I think that was very
constructive for all sorts of other people who felt they'd
got a beef about something. Instead of assuming that the
Party was monolithic, it did enable people to see that the
organisation was open and perceptive about the possibilities
9 Gay Left

of being changed.
Sarah: I also think that it's not just that gay people's
political consciousness has changed as a result of their
experiences of the gay movement which leads them to
ask different questions about how you change things. It
is also, because the times have changed, because 1976/
1977 is the period of crisis, repression and depression, and
for anyone to operate politically is more difficult. There's
more fear and tension and conservatism around that
actually means that you have to think of different ways
of being political. Had anybody in 1970 believed, and I'm
not saying a lot of gay liberation people did, but had
people in 1970 believed that small groups and spontaneity
would effect a lot of changes, you certainly couldn't
believe that in 1976 because of things being much tighter
and much harder and demanding a different way of acting
politically for it to be effective.

Sarah: Strangely the question of the family has hardly

been raised in discussion and it has actually been, to a
greater extent, about sexuality as such and notions about
what is natural about masculinity and femininity. The
controversy has also been, while there is a crisis on, can we
afford to indulge ourselves in this sort of area.

Why did the Statement emphasise law reform and not deal
with the whole spectrum of sexuality?
Bea: There's no way that the statement could have been
representative of what it was known would be broadly
agreed in the Party if it would enter into arguments about
the politics of sexuality. That has to happen but I think
that can only happen by the issue being raised in a way
that makes it accessible to the majority of the Party members and actually makes them then feel 'yes, they're responsible' for supporting a positive policy for homosexuality and
affirming homosexual rights.
However the Statement did begin to talk about the
politics of sexism ... it tried to situate it in a sexual politics
so it's not as if the only thing people got delivered were
demands to change the law and give civil liberties ... the
point is the Statement is only the introduction to the argument; it's an entry into a whole new discussion about the
nature of sexual politics.
Sarah: Given that the existing Statement is already very
controversial then it wouldn't have helped us to have
something that would have been totally incomprehensible
for some of the members, who find it very difficult to get
their minds around the possibility that one can question the
naturalness and the rightness and the communist morality
of heterosexual intercourse.
There's a certain puritanism which is very strong on the
British left generally, which associates a strong family and
straightforward sex with a man and wife, with communist
morality. Bourgeois morality is seen as living in sin, promiscuity. Sexual athletics and bourgeois morality is not seen
as good family structure ... it isn't seen as a good solid
working class unit.
How compatible is the Statement with the CP line on the
family?
Bea: Up until contemporary feminism hit the CP its
attitude to the family was completely conventional. When
feminism engaged in the Party, that immediately began to
change. First of all the Party quite explicitly supported
women's liberation. Some branches again agreed on national
resolutions in the last London district congress last autumn.
What was actually written was by no means a conventional
attitude to the family ... it was based on the assumption
that the family is a political institution and serves political
purposes. It's not a natural law of human organisation. It
was seen as an institution which oppresses women and,
furthermore, it's something which is open to political
change.
I mean people are now being expected to change the
way they live in the family, so, I think that the kind of
conventional image of the cloth-capped Communist Party
which believes in defending the family and defending
bourgeois morality doesn't really stand up, given that the
CP has really been affected to its marrow by the new
sexual politics and has actually written that into its policy
statements -- that doesn't mean that it's not divided because it is.
10 Gay Left

The Statement suggests the CP has made a move away

from crude economism. How is this affecting the CP and
what are the feelings of those members who are essentially
economistic?
Bea: I think there's a ruling consciousness about what a
revolutionary Party ought to be struggling over. At the same
ti me, an anti-economistic position was saying that trade
union demands ought to include more than wages and it's
clear as you get set on that road, that your criticism of
economism becomes much more comprehensive. We are
now beginning to have a sense of just how comprehensive
that criticism has got to be. We're not just saying there's a
broader spectrum of demands that we can make and areas
in which we can struggle, but we're also saying that the way
in which we struggle, the whole issue of self-determination,
the whole issue of how people are beginning to represent a
socialist alternative within the context of a capitalist life,
and all kinds of complicated arguments around the politics
of control is extremely important too.
The point I'm trying to make is that, as that issue or
as that sense of a commitment to anti-economism becomes
more sophisticated, it becomes clear that our initial concept of it was fantastically limited, so what we feel our
politics have got to represent is only tentatively understood
at the moment. What the shape of revolutionary politics
would be, the revolutionary movement would be, is still
only very tentatively understood. So, certainly a gay politic could be situated as part of an anti-economistic tendency.
Well, that was part of the question, the other part was to
do with the membership of the CP .. .

Bea: I think it has to be understood historically that the

Party's come out of a period of feeling completely besieged and in my view, out of a period where it was politically often very impoverished and certainly theoretically
i mpoverished. Now the Party is being renewed in a way
that won't just guarantee its survival but will actually
change it and that involves all sorts of battles.
There are those who believe that what you do if you
are a revolutionary, is you make demands of the state and
you make demands of an employer and that one day those
demands will become so intolerable and your mass support
will be so substantial that the kind of machinery that exists
will be shoved into ruin and from there we take over, right.
At the same time there's a very different sense growing out
of a different experience which has to do with, not the
politics of cataclysm, as some people have put it, but in the
way in which people have got to become different now, in
order to struggle for something which is something totally
different. That represents an otherness in the quality of
life, and that means that socialism isn't just more of the
same but something which goes beyond economism.
But I still think that's a very tentative business and I
think on the left it's quite interesting there's all sorts
of comings and goings on it -- people whose politics were
initially feminist, let's say, get confronted with the cuts
and capitalists crises and lose confidence in their feminism
and become unable to relate it to that kind of political
spectrum. Consequently they will adopt a kind of crude
economistic position in respect of those issues.
What does the Stalinist wing of the Party think of the
Statement?

Bea: Firstly, you have to define what the Stalinist

element is. In the main, it's a solidly working-class part of
the Party which is called Stalinist because it's got a particular view of the Soviet Union. It also has a position that supports the Soviet invasion and the Russian invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Now there are Stalinists in the Party who actually have
realised a position which is very comprehensive criticism of
where the leadership is going which is particularly vociferous about the Party's attempts to criticise anti-democratic
aspects of life in the Socialist countries. They also have a
much more comprehensive critique than that. Now that
position isn't one that would necessarily be shared by the
bulk of what would be called Stalinists in the Party, who
are called Stalinists only by virtue of the fact that they
think that the CIA was about to take over Czechoslovakia
and it was therefore politically correct that the Russians
moved in.
This last point is quite important because it means that
the actual practice in struggle of a lot of people who would
be called Stalinists in the Party isn't related to a general
theoretical position which, by any stretch of the imagination, could really be called Stalinist. However, some of the
really solid opposition to that statement has come from
people who are Stalinists, and in the main, they're Stalinists who've got a very comprehensive Stalinist position, and
who are theoretically and definitely self-confessed Stalinists.

I think the definition Bea was using was actually larger

and I think it's about a certain working-class tradition
which sees as the ideal of socialism, the absence of unemployment, the provision of cheap housing, the provision
of social services, the provision of free medical care, the
end of certain sorts of discrimination, hostility to American
imperialism and in their terms an accessible popular culture.
In these terms they think that's what's going on in the
Soviet Union. That makes other issues like intellectual
freedom to them seem less important because one particular notion of socialism has not only been partially achieved
but has got to be defended. In that sense, that was a very
broad way in which we were talking about a certain proSoviet Union position.
There's also a very strong feeling in the Party because of
the fifties that you can be critical of the Soviet Union but
not in public because you don't give the bourgeois enemy a
chance to knock it over the head.
I think there are also those people who wouldn't necessarily say that Stalin was particularly nice, indeed in private
they might think he was rather awful, they're the people
who want to say 'look, why are you discussing sex at the
time when we've got too many unemployed'. They would
therefore associate the discussion of sex with middle-class
politics because we seem to be unconcerned with the
material problems of life. We seem not to be worried about
what it means to be unemployed or what it means to have
cuts in social services.
In terms of the particular question and the position of
Stalinists in the Party, I think that's very clear in terms of
the Public Statements. Now you might think the Public
Statements of the CP are still too much having to address
themselves to a Stalinist opposition but the Stalinists are
in opposition, that's the salient point there and they are in
no way determining the position of the Party. I think that
what's happened in the short time I've been in the Party is
that feminist socialists and allies of feminist socialists in the
Party, in terms of a particular political tendency, it's not
just feminism, have grown much stronger because they are
in tune with the political developments on the left in
Britain in a way that Stalinists aren't or don't want to be
because those politics are seen as 'bourgeois' by Stalinists.
Why have so many socialist feminists joined the CP in the
last year or so?

Sarah: Well, for me, as a socialist . . . there was never any

question whether I should belong to a political party so,
having decided, at the end of the sixties, that I thought
that one couldn't be effective in a certain sort of politics,
which I wanted to be effective in, without belonging to a
party, that was never a question. The question was always
which party. The reason I ended up in the CP was not in
fact to do with my feminism, although had the Party been
clearly anti-feminist, then I wouldn't have joined. But I
didn't join it primarily because I thought what a wonderful
position it has on women, but much more because it seemed
to me to have a workable relationship with the Labour
Movement.

Your definition of a Stalinist seems to me quite narrow.

Wouldn't Stalinists give support to Russian development
from the late 20's to the present day which would make
them anti the Statement and opposed to people who supported the Statement.

Sarah: I think Bea's definition is actually a very broad

one. There can be very few people in the Party who would
say that the methods that were used under Stalin were
actually the best that could obtain during that period. I
mean, no person is going to say that Stalin was wonderful.
But what committed Stalinists would say was that given a
situation, there was no alternative to what Stalin did, and
the number of people who would say that straightforwardly
is very small in the Party.
11 Gay Left

Why haven't these socialist feminists joined the Socialist

Workers' Party or the International Marxist Group when
they have well organised women's sections within their
organisations?
Sarah: Most socialist feminists I know joined for a variety
of reasons and I think that in itself is a reason. The Party
is big enough to incorporate people who want to be engaged in a wide variety of activities, which I find, if you're
in a smaller group, you're either an industrial militant or
you're out there selling the newspaper. The CP I think is big
enough in size and big enough in cultural dimension to
allow people with a variety of particular interests to be
active. This, and the lack of dogmatism within the Party
means that it's possible for socialist feminists to join, given
the pre-condition that the Party wasn't anti-feminist and
given that we all knew a number of feminists in the Party.
Do you think then this does mean that there are less
demands made upon individuals who join the CP? I mean,
you can join the CP and in fact do very little conventional
political work .. .
Bea: No, I used to think that that might be the case but
now I think two things about the lack of dogmatism. One is
that often people will receive that as just the CP being
wishy-washy and without direction. What they don't see is
that the CP is wide open for all sorts of changes. Now the
ways that they're argued about is very tough, and it's not
wishy-washy, and there are all sorts of levels of sophistication theoretically, but the fact is that those arguments do
range within the Party.
There ' s another dimension to that which is that the
Party does have a long history and there's a sense in which
it's embedded in a working-class movement in a way that
none of the other revolutionary organisations actually are,
and, its composition is therefore quite explicitly and much
more in that working-class movement. It's also got a growing constituency of intellectuals, a growing constituency of
militant women ... it's branching into other areas of
politics. That means there are many areas and ways in
which you can work in the CP.
I think the really important thing is that the CP is in
the process of renewing itself, having gone through some
really bad times. The Party is answerable for its own
history in a way that the other organisations aren't. At the
same time it is drawing on constituencies that weren't
present in the early sixties or the late fifties. For example,
groups of women within the CP fought very hard for a
feminist position and won a feminist position which nobody else in the revolutionary left actually got. Consequently, socialist feminists identified with communist
women in a way that, despite whatever anti-communism
they felt, prompted all sorts of questions in their minds.
Therefore irrespective of what they felt about the CP,
there was no way that they could deny that our motivations vis-a-vis feminism was feminism. It wasn't moving
in on the women's movement with an agreed line worked
out by a lot of men.

Sarah: I think there is shared a growing sense which is

beginning to develop of what the new political party
working in a bourgeois democracy has got to be ... and
understanding that neither the mass Labour Party nor the
old Bolshevik style Communist Party is actually really appropriate in the struggle against capitalism. It's got to be a
political party which not only is working towards creating
a sense of a socialism, but one in which people's day to day
lives is a creative and personally enabling and consciousness
raising procedure, so that being in the Party is actually
something from which one personally gains strength. By
being in the Party you are able to work in it and not be
suffocated by it.

a Party that produces a statement on homosexuality, that

half his workmates would think was pie-eyed ... of course
there isn't. Organisations don't do things like that they
don't commit themselves to unpopular, uncomfortable
issues just because they think they're going to recruit a few
people from gay liberation.
Sarah: I think you can use the term opportunist of an
organisation that, if an organisation's political practice consisted of supporting the most prestigious campaign of the
day, and that was all its politics consisted of, then I think
you can say it's opportunistic, but I don't think you can
otherwise. I think parties are often caught in a difficult
position because if it doesn't support certain campaigns
everyone says 'why are you so reactionary?' and if you do
'why are you so opportunistic and support it?'.
Is the CPGB a revolutionary or reformist party?
Bea: Well, the CP believes that capitalism has to be
destroyed it doesn't believe that we the people will experience liberation within capitalism it wants to destroy
the system hopefully it will destroy the system or other
people will destroy the system. In that sense of course it's
revolutionary and in that sense, despite anybody's criticism
about the alleged rampant sell-out by the CP or the creeping
reformism of the CP, the fact is it's committed to that
position so there is no way that I think it's legitimate to say
that the Party isn't revolutionary. What's happened in
Russia doesn't make the CP in Britain not a revolutionary
party. What's happened in the conduct of all sorts of
Labour Movement struggles, the defeats, the comings and
goings doesn't make it an organisation that sells out the
masses.
Sarah: I also think they're terms that actually mean comparatively little because I think the way that they're used
is a technicist description which is describing the particular
technique with which you think change is going to be
effected, ie are you going to be prepared to take up arms
and violence which tells you absolutely nothing about the
sort of society you're going to have afterwards. I think,
therefore, the argument about revolutionary or reformist,
is people basically saying 'we're committed to this particular technique of change, this particular model of change'.
What you have to do is evolve the model of change which
is going to be most effective in terms of getting the sort of
society you want with the sort of people you want in it, ie
people who are able to take control over their lives and be
creative, etc, and having a band of dedicated revolutionaries
who can take over the state seems to me to say nothing.
Bea: There are some revolutionary parties and organisations
who can't accept that the working-class have constructed
forms which have long traditions and their sole practice
in those organisations is to say 'they're wrong, this doesn't
make sense, the structure's inappropriate, it's inherently
bad'. In other words, those organisations can't actually
understand historically why these forms have developed
the way that they have, what uses they serve, what their
li mits are and what their uses are. In a sense they're misunderstanding of something which is fundamental about
how the people struggle, learn, and why people create the
particular organisational forms that they do.

Is the CP being opportunistic by jumping on the gay

bandwagon?

Now, I think that's both a strength and a weakness in the

CP's relationship to working-class organisations and I think
that the CP understands it, empathises with it, more than
anybody else on the left . . . it's of the working-class in a
way that the rest of the left actually isn't. Too often it's
been determined by those structures and the ideologies that
prevail in that it has not been able to distance itself, at times,
from what the limits of those institutions and forms are. But
then, given that acknowledgment, there's a movement by the
CP itself which is criticising itself for that failure, and it's beginning to re-assess what the limits of traditional organisations have been.

Bea: Ask yourself, does a miner in Durham . . . is there

any lesson for him, any kudos for him to be a member of

What is the CP's attitude towards sexual repression in

Russia and Cuba?

12 Gay Left

and a duty to say something about it, but I think you can't
unless there is a reason foi passing public judgment.
I mean, at what point in time do you publish on the
front page of your newspaper a public criticism of another
CP. When it comes up and you have a policy on it you do,
but you don't put a statement on the front page of the
Morning Star saying the Soviet Union represses homosexuals
and we condemn them.
Bea: But it's worth saying that when and if the British
movement on homosexuals actually says 'look, we've got
case histories of', and that includes people in the CP
when they are able to say 'look, this person's actually been
put in camp because he or she is a homosexual and we want
to have a campaign about it', then there's an imperative for
revolutionary organisations to engage in that. But that's
never happened and I think an initiative like that could
only come from contingents that really feel deeply offended by it, and in the case of homosexuality it's going to be
homosexuals themselves.
Why do you feel the Statement is important and more than
just a Statement?
Bea: I think it's important because it will change the life
of homosexuals in the CP. It actually means that they're in
a situation in which their right to be homosexual is affirmed
by the Party. Now you might think that's not very important in terms of whether life as lived in Stockport in the CP
is going to get transformed or not. But I bet that it qualitatively alters life in the CP for a lot of homosexuals and
that's really important.

Sarah: It disagrees with it. It's interesting that whenever

feminists visit socialist countries they always ask about
sexual repression. Apparently we're getting a bit of a reputation for always asking them about sex. But, interestingly,
I've heard three of the senior men in the Party who've been
to Cuba, all of whom have on their own asked about hornosexuality, ie they've felt concerned enough to ask. I think
they were told, 'no, gays are not put into concentration
camps, they don't have their balls cut off, but yes, homosexuality is unnatural'.
In what areas is the CPGB critical of Russia?
Sarah: I think the problem here is when and why a British
CP ever pass comment on another CP policy because you
have to say why does it pass comment at all. You can't go
around the world saying 'I think your CP is wrong because
it's not as good as ours'.
The reason why the British CP has come out with very '
direct statements about the lack of civil liberties for certain
people has been when it's become a news issue, and in
Czechoslovakia it's been even more direct about that. Now
if there were a news issue of a homosexual person being
known to be oppressed then the CP would have a reason

It's also very important that the Party takes such an

unusual step. It doesn't go about constructing these policies all over the place on things it's never thought about
before. It's important too because it's implicitly rejecting
the argument that, when we've got capitalism in ruins and
in a crisis whose got the right to talk about homosexuality.
It's implicitly saying, just by the fact that it's made the
Statement 'well, we do and there's an imperative'.
Sarah: It's also important, I think, because of the question about relationships between a movement and the
Party. The gay movement will finally discover a political
party making a statement about homosexuality which is
more radical than a lot of gays are prepared to state. I
think that brings into focus the question, what is a movement and what is a party. I think this means that certain
gays will ask themselves questions about political parties
which would have been completely irrelevant before. If
all the political parties you knew were all anti-homosexual
then the possibility of your involvement with a political
party would have been absolutely nil unless you were going
to be very secretive about it for it not to be important.
Whereas I think now that question has been brought up as
a valid one for discussion in the way that it wasn't a valid
one before the Statement.

13 Gay Left

Five And A Half

by Bob Cant
Coming out is probably the key unifying feature of the gay
movement. Everyone- from gay Trotskyists to gay
Conservatives-seems to be agreed on the point that all gays
should break out of the closet and declare themselves. The
last two issues of Gay Left have contained discussions of
coming out experiences by two members of the collective.
They wrote of the earlier oppression they suffered at home,
it school, in the ghetto and so on and explained the factors
which had led them to come out. But, of course, it doesn't end
there. The fairy story ending ('As our eyes met across
the crowded bar of the Boltons, we knew ... ') is as false
is any other fairy story ending. For the society that we live
in is still much as it was before-what was a revolutionary
upheaval for the gay who came out is of little or no importance to most of the other 50 million people on this
island.
Gayness is now talked about in intelligent ways but no
major inroads have been made into society's assumptions of
what is normal. We ourselves still struggle with these deeply
rooted assumptions. Society still seldom allows gay parents
to keep their children. Wearing a gay badge to work where
I might offend customers and therefore cause the collapse
of the pound is held by the law to be fair ground for dismissal. So how do we manage with the new more subtle
form of oppression-'Some of my best friends are gay but
the children/Arabs/appointment committee aren't so broadminded'- not forgetting 'I used to be bi myself but it freaked my girl out too much'- and then, of course, 'I met such a
lovely gay couple from Milton Keynes at the local church
and they've really got it together-perhaps you should meet
them.' All of which makes my wrist about as limp as a steel
girder.
I am a 32 year old teacher, a socialist, and not involved
in a relationship. What I intend to do is discuss how I've
handled the last five and a half years, some of my relationships and friendships, the problems of activity on the left
and also the constant strain of feeling yourself a political
message.
After New York
The thing that forced me into coming out was New York. I
was visiting a gay friend in the summer of 1971 and found
that I was taken for gay. Everyone I met regarded coming
out as so obviously right that discretion or pretence would
have been really stupid. None of them was particularly
political in a traditional sense but their gay identity was
something they were political about in a way I had never
encountered before. I was only there a few weeks but when
I returned to London I had no choice but to join the Gay
Liberation Front. There I met all kinds of women and men
engaged in a real debate about their liberation from sexual
stereotyping and committed to activity towards that end.
My personal problem disappeared and I saw that my sexual
identity was oppressed by the society I lived in. With the
support of this movement I began to feel I could make my
own decisions.
I had long had vague socialist sympathies which took the

14 Gay Left

form of campaigning for Labour at election times, wearing

anti-apartheid badges and arguing in pubs. I had taught in
Tanzania for two years and that made me understand the
desperate poverty of the Third World and the meaning of
i mperialism. But all of this had been very inarticulate and
disparate, the sexual politics of GLF helped bring it all
together. Previously, my socialism had consisted of supporting someone else's activity and moaning helplessly when
that came to nothing. Through GLF not only did I come to
see that all oppression was one-that all oppression was part
of the ideological support of the exploiting class, but I also
began to understand the importance of self-emancipation.
All the law reforms in the world would not free gays-or
blacks or the working-class until we began to free ourselves. No one else could come out for me. The only agency
for the removal of any oppressive force had to be the
oppressed people themselves. I later began to realise it was
more complex than that but by coming out I had thrown
off so much terror that self-emancipation then seemed the
only thing that mattered. I was on the way to becoming
a revolutionary socialist.
My life then had such unity it now seems unreal. The
sexual, the emotional, the political aspects of my life all
flowed together. I came out with all my friends and
although I lost a couple in the process it was hard for
people to reject someone who was so happy even although
they might have been a bit confused about sexual politics.
A chronic illness I suffer from which is caused by anxiety
vanished for these months. It was really all so wonderful
that a cynic would have said it couldn't last. It didn't last.
One problem was that I had forgotten who I had been
for the previous 26 years--I was a Scottish history graduate,
brought up in an isolated, restrained atmosphere with the
expectation that I would marry a woman I loved and have
children. Such deeply rooted expectations were unlikely to
disappear overnight. I had occasonal pangs of regret about
the children I would never have but there seemed no problem about the lasting one-to-one relationship. Now it
would be with a man instead of a woman.
But the whole ideology of GLF was against possessive
relationships and although I could speak intensely no doubt
about the need for free, growing relationships operating on
many levels that was far from what I felt. When I began a
relationship with the most beautiful man in the world after
meeting him at GLF I thought I was in heaven. Everyone
and everything else of importance to me was nearly
abandoned. I would have gone to the other side of the
world for him. It was the kind of relationship that most
heterosexuals have when they're about 15. And there I was
-27, with a whole set of adult experiences behind merunning through the long grass, so to speak. When it ended,
after a month, I was desolate. I thought there was nothing
left to live for-but I went back to the friends I had forgotten and soon even developed a warm lasting friendship
with the man himself. So eager had I been for this total,
all-embracing monogamous relationship that I had not
seen the affair for what it was and I had put at risk both
that relationship itself and many of my other friendships.
Grim Days

This confusion between new ideas and old assumntions con-

tinued to take its toll and by the summer of 1972 I was

leading for a crack-up just as London GLF was disintegrating. I think it would not be wrong to suggest that the
reasons for these two processes were very similar. My own
involvement with the movement was based very much on
feelingsto be with other people who had also experienced
all these years of hiding and lying and who were also experiencing a release from that was very exhilarating. To feel
sure of one's own sexuality and to explore and develop it
along with other like-minded people was a fantastic high. It
was a high too for most people in GLFbut one with great
dangers. The explosive nature of the movement meant that
we were news-worthy materialand therefore it was quite
easy to believe that whatever we did, because it was covered
by the media, was important in itself. Style took over and
content was often forgotten. It was much easier to say,
'Right on, man' than struggle with the implications of the
new liberation.
Splits soon began to occur. Many gay women, with the
experience of a much more developed women's movement
behind them, felt that GLF was male-dominated and as
oppressive to women as any group in society. There was a
lot in what they said and when they left we were confused
and unable, as a movement, to develop something from
their criticisms. The attitude to gay Marxists is a fairly good
example of the paralysis that had hit the movement. Marxist
attempts to analyse gay oppression, and liberation were
denounced as 'male'. No more needed to be said than that
the use of the new anti-sexist four letter word was enough.
It was a denunciation that arose from guilt about women
and it spread lethargy.
More and more people drifted back to the straight gay
scene and most of us stagnated. People then appeared in
our midst who regarded this stagnation as a virtue and
warned about the dangers of going too far. We ducked the
issue and the movement became a network of social groups.
Coming out after 1972 was quite different from what it
had been before. Instead of being part of a movement that
helped you develop politically, you joined the group that
you were interested in (Gay Fencers, Gay Bridge Players or
whatever) and pursued your interest with new gay friends.
There's nothing wrong in this but it now became less likely
that any wider consciousness would developyou came
out as gay but nothing else changed.
I found myself at this time in a very difficult position
I was half a couple with only a handful of acquaintances. I
found it difficult to make gay friends because there was too
much sex in the air; and I found it difficult to make straight
friends because they seemed oppressive. The man I lived
with was a chubby, bearded South American upper middle
class drop-out. We were together for about 18 months. We
exercised our traditional male rights to be sexually promiscuous but otherwise we were faithful to each other. In
fact, we had both broken very little from our male conditioning. Although we were fascinated by GLF ideas we
still saw them as ideas rather than guides to live by. We
both began more and more to go off on our own when it
suited us but we became very jealous when the other one
did so. We developed different interests toohe moved
towards mysticism and I towards socialism. So we had
different groups of friends which was another cause for
jealousy. Had there still been a gay movement it might have
been possible for us to work out another way of relating to
each other. But in our isolation, we were afraid to do this
and the relationship froze. It was like a historic shrine that
we bowed down to every night.
Better Days
Consecutive bouts of hepatitis were the kiss of death for
the relationship and we parted in the spring of '73. I have
never felt so low as I did at this time and had a fellow
socialist at work not asked me to live at his house I could
easily have jumped down the Victoria line. For two years
I lived with three other adults and a child and it was here
that I learned to trust people again. There didn't seem to

be any need to prove myselfI felt accepted for who I was,

depressed or not. And, through this acceptance I managed
to work towards some kind of self-respect and thus towards
the potential of loving others.
The child was particularly important inasmuch as he
seemed to like me most of the time. I had hesitated to be
friendly with children since I had come out because a bit of
me was still afraid of being accused of being a child
molester. I have never been sexually interested in children
but the public image of gays as child molesters was so
strong that I wanted to ensure beyond any doubt that it
was not part of my image. So I had kept clear of children
as much as I could. My relationship with this particular
child made me see the absurdity of my position and I was
soon able to relax with him and in turn with other people.
He played a great part in helping me destroy my own selfoppressive image.
No-one else in the house, however, was gay and I was
eager to make contact with other gay lefties. I had joined
a Gay Marxist Group late in 1972 but it was never a very
warm group. I stayed in it because there seemed to be
nothing else. After about nine months another Trotskyisttype joined and I felt happier in the group. However, I have
no doubt that my own Scottish reserve made it difficult for
other people to approach me.
By the spring of 1974 things were definitely much
better. I lived in a friendly house, I could now make
relationships on a number of levels, I belonged and contributed to several different groups. My involvement in
groups has been particularly important to my whole
development. The GMG, IS, Gay Teachers Group and
the Rank and File group of my union have all helped give
. me confidence to argue my case, intervene in politics
generally and just live as a human being who is not totally
paranoid.
These groups have also helped me to cope at work. The
department I work in has a reputation for progressive education and liberal attitudes towards relationships. But gayness was not part of their world and for about two years it
was an unmentionable topic to most people. This silence
was very oppressive to me but looking back I can see that
more of it was caused by ignorance than by hostility.
People eventually began to ask questions and make friendly
jokes about gayness. Then I felt secure enough to become,
first, chairperson and now secretary of my union branch.
The strains of being both the only out gay at work and one
of the leading militants are potentially dangerous but have
not proved unmanageable so far. But when I am low I feel
isolated at work because I'm gay, and isolated in the gay
movement because I'm a militant trade unionist.
Being a gay teacher is also difficult in the classroom
situation. Gayness doesn't often come up but when it does
I probably sound more like a liberal straight than a gay. I
have come out with some students individually but coming
out in a classroom situation is just another strain I have not
yet felt able to take.
But these groups, however important they may be to
me, are still tiny and only of significance to a small number
of people. Despite recent statements by the CP and IS it is
still the case that much of the left does not take sexism
seriously. Many individuals on the left can pay lip-service,
like all good hacks, to the need to struggle against sexism
but they usually have a reason why they themselves don't
become involved now. I would remind them of the following passage in Lenin's 'What Is To Be Done?'.

`And inasmuch as this [the Tsarist] oppression affects the

most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests
itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity, industrial, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc, etc, is
it not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of
developing the political consciousness of the workers if we
do not undertake the organisation of the political exposure
of the autocracy in all its aspects?'

The women's movement and the gay movement have begun

15 Gay Left

to raise fundamental questions of sexism but there has been

little response, as yet, from socialist straight men. I realise
that many of them are actually terrified of having to explore
their own sexuality with other men, but if they, as socialists,
are interested in the creation of a new society then they
must do this. Otherwise, it becomes much harder for any of
us to escape from the roles we have been given by bourgeois
ideology and so to work towards a new consciousness of
gender and new un-oppressive ways of living together.
Couples, etc
Important as the gay movement has been for helping me
to understand my position, to shake off many fears and to
integrate my public politics with my personal politics it
would be wrong to suggest that it has 'solved all my problems'. So-called personal problems are not like the measles
something that bothers you for a time but goes away. As
children we all learned how to relate to other people.
These learned patterns develop and are reinforced as we
grow up-- by our peers, by school, by advertising, by the
media and so on. But we also shape these patterns to a
certain extent ourselvesby our emotional needs, our
sexual needs, our political will. One can be in a constant
state of struggle trying to control one's own ways of relating
as opposed to meeting the demands of conformity. This
struggle is particularly likely in anyone who has been influenced by the women's and gay movements.
The struggle comes to the fore when I go anywhere in the
gay ghetto. The atmosphere there is predatory--speaking to
someone is the prelude to a pick-up. The whole scene is
based on instant attractiveness and the ability to sell oneself.
Failure to do so can leave one feeling totally dejected even
although you can see through the whole thing. Success
doesn't always lead to total joy either. There's nothing
worse than being in bed with a pig of a man in Putney at
3.30. He wants you to go, you want to go but can't afford
a taxi and don't intend to spend the night walking back to
N. London. You lie there detesting each other, swearing
you'll never do this again. He might actually be quite a nice
person but because the gay scene defines people primarily
as sexual objects that's the way you tend to relate to
people you meet on it. Some people have told me that I
have too many expectations about these experiences and
that I should just see them as sexual encounters and no
more. But although I can do this it seldom brings any kind
of satisfaction because it seems to preclude the possibility
of any other contact. Despite the expansion of the London
gay scene in the last few years, I still prefer to meet my
sexual partners in an atmosphere that is not that of a meat
market.
All the men I have been involved with I have met
through some part of the gay movement-GLF , Gay
Teachers Group and so on. The fact that there was a

common interest, as well as sexual interest helped me see

the person in quite a different way. And if I have any
choice, I prefer things to develop that wayfor the sexual
interest to grow along with everything else.
No doubt this was partly why the two people I was most
involved with recently were a woman and a straight man.
Because of circumstances it was possible to develop reationships with both these people gradually and at our own
pace. All three of us are committed Marxists of varying
kinds, and we met in a milieu where there is less concern
than usual about conventional relationships. What is
attractive to me about both these people is the way in
which they seem to combine what are traditionally called
male and female qualitiesthey are both assertive and
vulnerable. In both cases there was no obvious leader--we
tried to mould the relationships on our own terms. There
were no norms at all for us to follow, or so it seemed. But
to think we could create these gender-free relationships in
isolation was, of course, an illusion. The labels that we had
as gay man, straight woman, straight man were too strong
for us to break altogether. We had all adopted the roles
that presumably suited us best in this society. To break out
of them in a particular situation like this would have meant
that we were, in fact, taking on new roles and thereby
throwing ourselves adrift. So we do all remain good friends
and feel a lot of warmth towards one another.
It is, in fact, nearly four years now since I had a sexual/
emotional relationship with a man which lasted longer than
about two months. There are general reasons one can give
about the great strain on all gay relationships but, to a
certain extent, that's avoiding the particular reasons that
apply to me. I feel that I suffer from enormous and unreal
expectations about most things --politics, relationships,
my own abilities. I am usually disappointed- and, therefore,
become highly defensive. This defensiveness can make me
seem distant and sometimes frightening. My political commitments have not made things easy. It is very isolated to
be a gay person in the traditional left. I found it particularly
difficult in IS and my continued trade union activity also
exhausts me and reduces the chances of meeting other gays.
Even in one's social life on the straight left, when one is
supposed to be more relaxed, the solitary gay still has to
live out a political message. It's a big problem for all political gays (and it ought to be a problem worthy of consideration by all socialists) and the chances of making a
relationship are few.
I think it is important to ask myself why I should still
want a relationship with one other person, as I do. I no
longer have expectations about fulfilling myself through
someone else; I don't see life without a spouse as being in
itself barren. However, none of us can manage on our own
we all need contact with other people and that contact
enriches all our lives. And it is certainly the case that my
living has been much more creative because of the
emotional contact I have with friends. But these friendships
stop short of long term sexual contact. I feel as if there is
usually a divide between the people with whom I have
sexual contact and those with whom I have emotional
contact.
1 am aware that searching for more integration can lead
one into a couple situation but as things are I feel my life is
fragmented and I am prepared to risk the threat of coupledom. These are the pressures that drive all too many
heterosexuals into marriages and pseudo-marriages although
they may have begun their relationships in experimental
and non-exclusive ways. Stable emotional/sexual relationships would, hopefully, give my life a security it lacks at
present. (I have no ideological objection to more than one
such relationship at a time but the demands of work and
politics make such plurality unlikely.) In addition such a
stable relationship would enable us to have some interest
in and respect for each other's past. That, in turn, creates
more respect for the present and makes the relationship
still more creative. But I must stress that I would not want
under any circumstances such a relationship to be totally

16 Gay Left

exclusive. Other contacts remain important for themselves.

And exclusivity also leads to its own destruction for no
two people can ever meet all the other's needs indefinitely.
One aspect of my life to which I can see no solution
relates to children. I spent over three years living in houses
where there were children but now I find myself living
alone. The contact with the children was very creative and
I still enjoy seeing them. I'm not interested in having my
own children because that implies a relationship with a
woman which I now feel I can never have. But I would like
to take part in bringing some children up. I don't mean just
baby-sitting now and again, remembering birthdays and
going to the zoo; I mean sharing real responsibility for
children being reliable about them, being bored by them,
cleaning up their shit as well as all the fun. There are two

main obstacles to this one is the way in which houses

are built so that it is difficult for a number of adults to live
under the same roof with a number of children; the other
is the ideology of the couple which makes many biological
parents unwilling and unable to fully trust anyone outside
the nuclear family unit.
This article doesn't really have an end. It would be false
to work up to a theoretical definition and/or a rallying cry
to the masses. In fact, it can't have an end unless the search
and the struggle have ended. And they go on. All that I can
really say is that although it is difficult to be out as gay,
although the political strains are great, although emotional
security is hard to come by, it is still infinitely more
preferable to struggle with your own destiny than to
remain in the closet. I remain, beyond any doubt, glad to
be gay.

Lesbians aren't oppressed by

the law...?
by Margaret Coulson

When Louise Boychuck was sacked for wearing a Lesbians

Ignite badge at work she appealed to an industrial tribunal
against unfair dismissal. Her employer claimed that Louise
was 'displaying a wording at our place of business which is
distasteful to others and which could be injurious to our
best interests if observed by clients, whose good will results
in the earning of large amounts of overseas currencies beneficial to our country.' The tribunal supported the employers and Louise Boychuck lost her case and her job.
(Spare Rib 54, January 1977)
(Gay News 110, January 1977)

A man brutally killed his wife and was sentenced to 30

months imprisonment for man(?)slaughter. On appeal he
was released from gaol because, the judge said, he had
been subjected to 'enormous provocation' his wife had
boasted to him about her relationship with another woman.
(Gay News 85, December 1 975)
In the first case in which a lesbian has won custody of her
children the appeal court judges condemned her 'obsessive
involvement in herself and in the feminist cause' and made
it clear that they were allowing her custody only because
the children's father could not provide a home for them
and the children would otherwise have been taken into
local authority care.
(Guardian, 12th November 1976)
(Spare Rib 54, January 1977)
and the law doesn't oppress lesbians ...
Well it's true that English law hasn't labelled lesbians as
criminal. Lesbians weren't included in the 1885 criminal
law amendment act because Queen Victoria's repressed
sexual consciousness excluded the possibility of women
loving women. And presumably masses of other women at
the time shared that repressed view seeing their own
sexuality only in terms of submission, male satisfaction and
childbearing. Another attempt to add lesbians to the law
condemning male homosexuality failed in 1921.
In a patriarchal society outlawing lesbianism as such has
been generally unnecessary and even undesirable in the
sense that it could give publicity to a possibility which,
like Victoria, most women might never have allowed themselves to dream of.
In Nazi Germany, for example, the national socialists
combined a vicious policy of persecution and extermination of male homosexuals with an almost total silence in
relation to lesbians. To the Nazis 'What mattered was man,
the warrior and begetter of children. In the blinkered view
of these reactionary sexual theorists woman, being subordinate to man, could not decline her role as begetter of
the species. Being equipped for motherhood by nature

even a lesbian could and must bear children at the behest

of her spouse. Lesbianism presented no practical reproductive problems of any consequence and that was what
counted.' ( H P Bleuch: Strength Through Joy - Sex And
Society In Nazi Germany, p 284). Where women are economically and ideologically subordinate to men, laws
criminalising lesbianism are superfluous. For one thing, it's
always assumed, especially by 'experts' (like A Storr in
Sexual Deviation, p 70 or R Pearsall in The Worm In The
Bud, p 284) that the 'problem' is much rarer than male
homosexuality. Phyllis Chessler indicates some of the
reasons why this appears to be the case: 'Lesbianism has
not been as legally punished as homosexuality. However it has
been "punished" by being completely legislated out of the
realm of possibility for most women ... Women are more
totally repressed, both sexually and economically, and are
therefore more sexually timid (with either women or men)
as well as more economically powerless than either homosexual or heterosexual men. In one sense it is more difficult for women to become and to survive as lesbians than
it is for men to survive as homosexuals. For example, men
either don't need -- or don't think they need --- women
for economic survival. Most women need and think they
need men in order to survive economically as well as
psychologically.' ( Women And Madness, p 187)
Economic inequalities between men and women help to
sustain this repression. Just to take the most obvious economic factor of earning power: women's average earnings
were still not much more than half of men's average earnings in 1976. Complete personal independence from men
and an average standard of living are virtually incompatible
for most women in this society at the present time and
especially for those who have children to support. Besides
the social/psychological barriers to independence are still
enormous. Dominant social definitions and self images of
women are still of women in (subordinate) relation to men:
daughters, wives, mothers, sex objects. (For example,
most people see the title Ms not as a replacement for Miss
and Mrs but as a euphemism to cover the embarrassment of
unmarried or no longer married women).
John Berger discusses one aspect of this: 'The social
presence of women is different in kind from that of a
man ... Men are and women appear. Men look at women.
Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines
not only most relations between men and women but also
the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of
woman in herself is male: the surveyed female.' ( Ways of
Seeing). A man unrelated to a woman is still a man but
what is a woman without reference to a man: as Phyllis
Chessler has said the possibility of avoiding or breaking
17 Gay Left

out of the conditioning which produces `women's social

presence' is 'legislated out' for most women.
And we should not delude ourselves that the ideas behind
the Nazi's silence about lesbianism are not alive in our
society now. The dominant stereotype of male sexuality
which is proclaimed and institutionalised stresses the
active, aggressive and once roused uncontrollable character
of man's sexual 'urges'. Woman as the sexual complement
to man is stereotyped as the passive or responsive dependent partner, available to be used or aroused but not to
initiate, and not to say no. According to this view a woman
without a man might as well be asexual. Rape is one
logical conclusion of this particular polarisation of male
and female sexuality and the concept of monogamous
marriage in which rape is impossible because the wife must
always be sexually available to her husband is another. The
message in either case is that women, whatever their stated
desires or preferences can be taken sexually by men illegally
in rape, legally in marriage. (Challenging these stereotypes
is always seen as damaging, especially to men; thus recently
psychiatrists have been very ready to blame 'aggressive'
women's liberationists for sexual impotence in men.)

family amongst others. For example, family law is committed to the maintenance of the heterosexual monogamous family unit as the basic unit within society. It
thus proclaims the normality and necessity of heterosexuality, preserves the subordination of women and
children within the family and helps to ensure that
those outside it shall suffer poverty, loneliness, insecurity,
social ostracisation (not only gay people, but single
parents, the elderly etc). Laws on pornography and
obscenity are used to define and re-define a repressive
sexual morality. Laws limiting access to abortion help
to maintain the 'moral' tie between sex and reproduction
and deny women's rights to control their own fertility
and sexuality.
Of course the law isn't oppressive by itself but because
it serves the economic-political system and as such helps
to keep us, more or less, in our oppressed places. Often we
may not notice how the law is operating against us until we
knock against the boundaries of its assumptions. Lesbian
mothers fighting for the custody of their children discover
that the 'welfare of the child' which is supposed to be the
paramount consideration in deciding custody is defined not
in terms of who will give the child the most love and support
but in terms of where s/he will be provided with the most
'normal' environment.
And yet the idea that lesbians aren't oppressed by the
law (because not defined as criminal) is widely accepted
in the gay movement. This seems to derive in part at least,
from the conservative view of law which reformist gay
organisations have adopted and the simplistic criticisms
which have been made of reformism from the left of the
gay movement. In effect, CHE seems to accept the reactionary 'commonsense' view of law which runs roughly as
follows: The law is a more or less neutral institution in
society which protects the honest and upright majority .
from the criminal and corrupt minority the national 'us'
from muggers and murderers, from bombers and bank
robbers, from shop lifters and sexual maniacs ... Of course
sometimes the law draws the line between the good `us'
and the bad 'them' in the wrong place. For example in the
past it hasn't always been very fair to women or to immigrants especially black people ... And the law still discriminated against homosexual men. But if we could shift
the line between criminal and non-criminal so that homosexual men had parity with heterosexual men then the main
barrier to homosexual equality would be removed.

These ideas about women's sexual vulnerability and

dependency combined with the holy trinity of marriage,
monogamy, maternity as the source of status and fulfilment for women in society have made it difficult for
lesbians to identify themselves with pride either to themselves or to others. Before the re-emergence of the current
women's movement and gay movement lesbians could see
themselves as 'unfeminine' beings trapped in female bodies
(like Radcliffe Hall's noble Stephen Gordon in The Well Of
Loneliness) or as women who couldn't make it through to
full heterosexual feminine 'maturity' or as odd unexplained
exceptions to some feminine rule. Those of us who have
come out within the orbit of the women's and gay movements or who have been able to re-define ourselves with
their support may be able, usually, to assert that and feel
that that has some truth for us. But that degree of male
irrelevance and female autonomy is still a long way from
most women and from most lesbians amongst them even
now. Lesbians are still being oppressed, almost to invisibility, even when they are not directly being attacked by
the law. Nevertheless, lesbians are oppressed by the law.
The examples quoted at the beginning of this article
show some of the direct attacks which the law is making
on lesbians as wives, mothers, workers. In addition the
law oppresses us indirectly continuously and inevitably
because it reflects and protects the relationships of the
existing social order those of a capitalist patriarchal
society. Thus it defends profit, god, the queen and the
18 Gay Left

Thus oppressive law is seen primarily in terms of the

Sexual Offences Act and thus mainly seems to be relevant
to men. Critics of reformism have tended not to challenge
this very clearly. For example Don Milligan making the
valid point that for the gay movement to centre its activity
on law reform mistakenly implies that the law causes gay
oppression, goes on to the amazing statement that 'gay
women are not oppressed by any laws' (Politics of Homosexuality, p 11). Apart from telling us that reform of the
Sexual Offences Act is not enough this criticism does nothing
to illuminate the connection between law and the total
system which oppresses us. CHE's reformism (though it
might reflect the immediate interests of an elite of wealthy
mysogynist male homosexuals) doesn't offer a sensible
strategy even in relation to the law. Because it believes in
the essential 'neutrality' of the law it can't even explain
why new legal issues arise besides the central question of
reform of the sexual offences act support for the
custody claims of homosexual parents, perhaps, or opposition to Mary Whitehouse's use of the Blasphemy Laws
against Gay News.
We need to make more sense of the law than that. Our
understanding of the law must recognise that the law often
oppresses us through the institutions and assumptions
which it defends as well as through the direct attacks which
it makes on our sex and our sexuality. We need to examine
the ways in which the law relates to the economic social
and psychological constraints which confine women to
'their place' and be aware of the way in which that relation-

ship shifts. As the women's movement develops and as it has

questioned and confronted more aspects of the subordination of women to men, the assumption of female dependency, we find that the law is used both to tame and crush
us. The Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act are both
heralded as victories by a government which at the same
time allows rising unemployment, inflation, cuts into social
and educational and health services, all of which add to the
insecurities and burdens of women as paid workers and
housewives.
As the economic crisis grinds on the pressures against
women's independence - from church and state, in defence
of the family and traditional morality have grown clearer;
the abortion lobby has become more powerful and a second
anti-abortion bill is before parliament. As the women's movement has developed, as some lesbians have been more able to
come out so criticism from judges, psychiatrists and other
representatives of 'public order' have become more articulate. In the present situation the question of how to cam-

Film Review
At last a film we can call our own?
SEBASTIANE
Directed by Derek Jarman
There's an ad on the Tube showing a chicly dressed woman
holding a Virginia Slim cigarette; the caption reads, "We've
come a long way, baby, at last a cigarette we can call our
own." The implicit message is that the women's movement
existed only to gain women the freedom to consume
another set of products; freedom is the power to exercise
choice as a consumer of commodities. As with women so
with gay men: our liberation is seen to consist in the power
to consume our own products. Sebastiane is just such a
commodity, on sale to the gay male public: if we are free
to go to our own films, discos, pubs, etc., what more do we
want?
But it is a measure of our continued exploitation and
oppression that such a bad film as Sebastiane should receive
adulatory reviews from the straight and gay press and should
be a huge box office success at the Gate Cinema, and it is
a measure too of the continuing ineffectiveness of the gay
movement that Jarman's banal analysis of the connections
between sexual repression, mysticism and violence should
be applauded as courageous.
The film opens in Diocletian's court where decadence
abounds in the shape of Lindsay Kemp and assorted
exotically dressed actors, and our first sight of Sebastian
is as he falls from favour for objecting to the death of a
slave (because he has become a Christian). Already two
pervasive faults of the movie are apparent: the Latin
dialogue, translated in subtitles, is intensely distracting and
intensely limiting in that it throws all the weight of
meaning on to the visual images, and those images are far
too weak to take it. Derivative from Fellili and gay porn
they lack authentic sensuality and become high kitsch.
The subsequent tale of Severus' unrequited passion for
Sebastian, and of the latter's masochistic relationship to his
god thus becomes an unfolding of cliche image after cliche
i mage.
Sebastian showers, adored both by Severus and the
camera; two lovers romp in slow motion in a rock pool;
Severus' spleen is expressed by him stabbing an apple or
petulantly smashing up his room, etc. Even the violence
is prettified: Julian's mutilation becomes a parody of the
Pieta, and Sebastian's murder is shot in slow motion with
all the langorous fascination with death that Peckinpah
has shown.
Throughout the film Jarman is hopelessly caught
between trying to evoke a fantasy of stereotypically good-

paign on legal issues in the context of challenging our oppression as women and as lesbians is a crucial one. The
more individual we get as feminists in campaigns such
as those on abortion, rape, lesbians' rights to custody,
battered women, equal pay, nurseries and many others, the
more sensitive we have to become to the need to combine
i mmediate help with long term aims, pressure for legal and
administrative reform with the development of our own
understanding and strength; we have to resist the pressures
to play down less 'popular' causes (such as abortion, lesbian
rights) in order to establish greater influence, and still trying to move outwards to reach more women. It all seems
i mmensely complicated. But for women, and above all for
lesbians, there isn't a simple path, there isn't a reformist
option, in the struggle for our liberation. But that in itself
won't protect us from the traps of reformism.
Reprinted with permission from Outcome.
Outcome is produced by Lancaster University GaySoc on
behalf of the Northwest Gay Liberation Campaign of
NUS.
looking men in exotic surrounds to titilate his audience,
and the attempting to give some intellectual body to his
meditation on sex and violence. He succeeds in doing
neither. We can neither wank successfully nor are we
provoked by his disarmingly trite conclusion that sexual
repression leads to violence. Yes, but how does repression
lead to violence? Without an examination of the mediations
of sexuality and power, without a sense of the reality of
the characters Jarman focuses on, we cannot make the
connection meaningful. Sebastian is a self-indulgent ascetic,
Severus a raging inferno of dammed passion, Max a sadistic
clown, Julian a sycophantic sidekick, all are two dimensional and ripped from context. Why Sebastian should become
a masochistic ascetic in search of mystical union, whilst
Julian, also a Christian, is a boring yes-man is unclear. Why
Antony and Adrian get it on, and what the implications
of their sexual relation are, all that is left unexplored.
The film purports to tackle avowedly difficult themes,
and does nothing of the sort; its maxim is that "to fuck is
good, and not to fuck makes you fucked up" but surely
more needs to be said than this vulgar Reichian homily.
The film is thus dishonest, and in so far as Jarman has not
reflected on the scarcity of movies that deal with gayness
and the whole problematic of sexual oppression and
liberation, other than to make a fast buck out of that
scarcity, he has made a reactionary movie contributing to
the absorption of the sexual liberation movement into
capitalism, contributing indeed to the continuing repressive
desublimation of sexuality under capitalism.
There is still a need for films that explore the area that
Jarman so resolutely skates round, as indeed there is still
a need for films that deal explicitly with the situation now
of gay men and women. Possibly the very success of
Sebastiane might make it easier for gay film-makers to
produce those films. My fear is that Sebastiane will serve as
a model for a whole train of gay exploitation movies that
will do nothing for the cause of sexual liberation. If that
were to be the case then Jarman would bear a great deal
of the responsibility.

Phil Derbyshire

19 Gay Left

Movement In Straight Circles

by Patrick Hughes and Teresa Savage

The Darwinian revolution in biology proposed to place

' man' firmly in a material reality. But the ways in which
Darwinism was perceived were mediated by the dominant
bourgeois ideology, so that 'science' came in to legitimate
the socially created differences between men and women,
and gave them an apparently biological justification. As a
result homosexuals were excluded as aberrant, 'unnatural'
Patrick Hughes and Teresa Savage explore the implications
of this for the gay person and an outline of an alternative
gender-free form of relating is proposed.
Definitions of "Man"
With the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Man
was placed firmly in the realms of biology, and man-as-aspecies, defined through anatomical and physiological
characteristics, replaced man-as-an-abstract-notion, a
concept easily divorced from material reality. We are
interested in the Darwinian concept of man-as-a-species
because it is used to provide the 'scientific' basis on which
to impose a model of 'normal' sexuality and, furthermore,
to ascribe the status of 'normal' to heterosexuality. However, as a basis of sexual ideology, and as a way of
understanding the relationship between man and the rest
of the world, the concept of man-as-a-species has only
limited value, as does the whole science of taxonomy from
which it is derived. This is because the crux of the idea of
evolution is the notion of an ever-changing world, and yet
taxonomy, because of the limitations of its conceptual
base, can only try to freeze that process of change, take a
slice out of it and say "Here is the world." Further,
taxonomy deals only in majorities and thus, by its existence,
militates against the recognition of any new species "Since these aberrations are a minority, they are exceptions
to the still-standing rule."
Thus the existing notion of the species is retained, and
exceptions are defined as such through their being
negations of one or more of the definitive characteristics of
that species. This practice of transforming biological
phenomena into god-given laws, of labelling transient
characteristics as self-evident truths, is used in a social
sense too, in re-affirming 'natural' behaviour, 'normal'
development, etc. In this way, by divorcing even the
concept of man-as-a-species from the material world in
which that species is continuing to develop, one is, in fact,
still using an abstract notion of man as an unchanging
species characterised, finally, by some definitive 'nature' or
'essence'. In this way, real definite changes can be depicted
as almost irrelevant to the unchanging nature of humanity,
and all human progress is reduced to nought.
Hence, when we see man-as-a-species discussed, it is, in
fact, man-as-we-know-him that is meant, that is, contemporary man hence the use of a plethora of sub-species which
are used to separate contemporary man from our evolutionary ancestors. However, contemporary man is not just a
title relating to a particular archaeological epoch - it is
more urgent than that, because the way man is described is
a reflection of the way his nature is seen in different types
of society, since there are other criteria circumscribing
' man' (e.g. creativity, idealism) besides the biological ones.
These criteria vary as ideologies vary over time, since
ideologies mediate the human experience of itself in the
world.
In Christian countries, it has always been thought that at
least part of that human nature consists of "free will" the
idea that each individual's actions are performed free of
any compulsion, and it is on this basis that Christianity has
held individuals to be accountable to God for their actions.
Freud, however, opposed this particular morality with the
notion of the unconscious, a dark and mysterious force
turning people's motives into echoes of their history and
20 Gay Left

depicting their actions as reflections of their world. No

longer was it possible to blithely talk of 'human nature'
without relating it to the material world, and thus we
moved away from a static conception of man, running like
a vein through history, and moved towards a recognition
that there is a continuing relationship between men and
their world. This relationship is expressed in the fact that
man's first historical act was the production of material
life (food, drink, clothing, habitation, etc.), and human
consciousness in this situation was merely of the immediate
sensual environment, i.e. only limited connections exist
with other persons and things.
It is the satisfaction of these first historical needs, an
action leading to the emergence of new needs, which
(together with increased population and productivity)
brought about the development of consciousness from its
sensuous state. This led Marx to propose in his German

Ideology that man is, in fact, the sum of the productive

forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, and
since the multitude of productive forces available determines the nature of society, the history of humanity must
always be seen in relation to the history of industry and
exchange or, as Sartre put it, "... man is the product of
his product". 1 He also says that "Man's essence is his
existence" 2 - in other words, man's categorical quality
is his ability to manipulate and modify his world: we are
what we do, and our actions are expressions of ourselves.
Ideology and Sexuality
Before examining the way a particular ideology (that of the
bourgeoisie) mediates one part of our experience of ourselves - our sexuality - and presents it as being within
species-prescriptive limits, let us look at the general issue
of the way different ideologies hold sway at different times,
and thus how the different interpretations of man-as-aspecies come and go. Marx suggested that ideology has its
roots in the division of labour, in that once a division into
physical and mental labour occurs, then human consciousness can be thought of as something other than consciousness of existing practice - ideas of 'pure' or 'abstract'
thought arise, e.g. 'pure' philosophy, 'pure' mathematics,
etc. Once this separation between thought and action has
been made, it is possible to talk of different ideas holding
sway at different times without relating those ideas to the
material conditions of those times.
Marx describes ideology being dragged in the wake of .
the ruling classes: "The ruling ideas are nothing more than
the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships expressed as ideas;
hence of the ideas which make one class the ruling one,
therefore the ideas of its dominance." 3 Those dominant
ideas imply different self-constructs, and thus different
interpretations of human nature. To take Marx's examples:
`honour', 'loyalty' etc. which were dominant in the rule of
the aristocracy, speak of a society in which the self is seen
in terms of others, i.e. one's sense of self is derived from
the types of relationships that one has with one's contemporaries, rather than being derived from reflection, introspection, etc. In the society ruled by an aristocracy, one
finds only a limited degree of social and geographical
mobility, i.e. individuals were described (and thus 'man' in
general was defined) through social categories, rather than
through individual personality, and through the values
associated with those categories - people were described
according to their class, race, family, etc., and were valued
according to the values associated with their feudal society
- honour, loyalty, etc.
The growth of private capital heralded the eventual rule
of the bourgeoisie, with their ruling, ideology of 'freedom'
and 'equality' etc. - ideas which had to be more general
than those of the aristocracy, in order that they should be
able to subsume the hitherto ruling ideas in the interests of
the new ruling class. Freedom and equality speak of a
society in which people's lives are lived in a situation other
than the suffocating conditions of home-bound feudalism;
a society with greater social and geographical mobility,
enabling individuals to be characterised in terms other than
those which spoke of their position and heritage in a static
community - in terms, thus, of themselves, rather than
their context. A corollary of this individual-orientated
ideology was a morality in which 'others' were less significant than previously, and in which each person was
responsible primarily to themselves for their actions
(although still strictly within the Christian tradition, of
course). Thus the proletariat, as it emerged, was a class
characterised not only by its lack of property but also by
the new way in which its members were conceptualised -as individuals.
It is against this explicitly class-based background that
the ideologies leading to the various interpretations of
'human nature' must be seen, whether in the form of the
abstract 'Man', or in the scientific form of 'Man-as-a-species '.

Rooted in this scientific context, heterosexuality assumes

the status of an inviolable biological law rather than simply
the norm of a particular society, with the result that
deviation from it is seen as a betrayal of the genes of manas-a-species, as 'unnatural'. Accordingly, anyone who is
not heterosexual is to that extent looked upon as inhuman.
This is a real example of the way our concept of 'man' is
a reflection of a particular ideology, in that a particular
sexual orientation is described as unnatural whereas another,
e.g. celibacy, is not; an example whose tangibility is the
day-to-day experience of being homosexual in a heterosexual world.
The conclusion we draw from this is that the concept of
such a genetic aberration is only as strong as the dominant
(bourgeois) ideology, since the idea of such an aberration
is dependent on that ideology which denies that man is
continuing to develop, and wishes to freeze man's development at a point which serves its interests. Thus acceptance
or rejection of certain phenomena as 'unnatural' can be
seen as a power struggle - the power of bourgeois ideology
to control the way people perceive and interpret their
world, as opposed to the power of an emerging proletarian
ideology with which to combat that control.
That abstract-sounding 'Darwinian model' presents itself
to us in a very practical way, through such statements as
"I relate differently to men than I do to women." That
statement shows how we place our social relations within a
biological framework, and let biological characteristics be
the determinants of those relations. This is not to deny
that the way we see both women and men is the result of
them being presented to us in terns of certain stereotypes;
to do so would be to deny that sexism exists at all, in any
form. All we are saying is that biological differences,
although mediated by societal and ideological definitions,
are allowed to become the basis of social relations, whereby
men and women are treated differently regardless of what
they are socially. In this way, although sex differences may
be biological facts, their expression is something which
varies with societal expectations. If one is relating to people
on this biological basis, then the notion of choosing the
gender with which one relates sexually is implicit and so the
implication of unisexuality (homosexual or heterosexual) is
inescapable.
We can see how Darwinism, founded on the idea that
species adapt themselves to their environment, can only be
useful in justifying the status quo if it is presented as a
path of development which results in a species which is the
most perfectly adapted to its environment - the crown of
creation. We are suggesting that 'man', far from being such
a climax, is a species capable of continuing its development,
not just in line with biological laws, but also in a dialectical
relation with a social world which man creates.
The alternative to such a biological basis to relationships
is a social basis, in which one endeavours to relate equally
to both genders. In view of our earlier comments about the
social nature of gender definition, we cannot stress that
word 'endeavour' too strongly - to relate in any depth to
members of one's own gender means overcoming, amongst
other things, the massive walls of competition which form
part of bourgeois sexual roles. We cannot completely
remove these walls, nor can we rid ourselves of the genderspecific behaviour which we, and millions before us, have
been taught to believe is inherent - is, in fact, what
constitutes 'us'.
We are, therefore, presented with two competing models
of sexual expression: one that says that people are unisexual
(either homosexual or heterosexual), and one that says that
people are capable of being bisexual, but with the homosexual element repressed in some and the heterosexual
element repressed in others. In the present period of rejection of sexual stereotypes and archetypes, when we are
fighting against the objectification of our relationships by
the petrifying hand of capital, we need alternative models
of relating to each other, towards which we can strive while
21 Gay Left

acknowledging that such ideological alternatives cannot be

attained within an alien ideology; that their complete
attainment needs a corresponding change in ideology.
The relevance of this assertion can be seen in the fact
that although the overt expression of their sexuality by gays
questions the raison d'etre of the nuclear family and
monogamy, and opens the door to alternative ways of
living together, gays rarely take up these alternatives. More
often than not, homosexual relationships slavishly imitate
heterosexual ones, e.g. the classic 'butch-femme' relationship. The 'social' model of relationships implies a situation
where individuals aren't ascribed a permanent sexual status,
i.e. homosexual or heterosexual, but in which these can be
seen as different modes of sexuality, to be expressed by the
individual according to their needs, and which includes, of
course, the possibility of expressing both simultaneously.
Within each mode, we would envisage differences in the
ways in which people relate to each other, according to the
degree of compatibility and according to the needs that
they are satisfying.
The move towards such bisexual pluralism (i.e. the
possibility of relating to as many people, of whatever sex,
as one wishes, at whatever degree of involvement one
desires) from unisexual monogamy poses the same problems
for both homosexuals and heterosexuals: organisational
alternatives to the nuclear family; 'jealousy' and the
commodity basis of sexual relationships; individual isolation
in situations creating insecurity dependence; and the
special problems of oppressed groups, e.g. gays and women.
We believe that the task of the revolutionary in this prerevolutionary period is to provide a political model of
sexuality under capitalism which tackles the sexual ideology which makes bisexual plurality so difficult to attain,
while taking account of the particular oppression of gays,
the repression of straight, and the socio-economic-sexual
oppression of women, and we hope that this article is
providing an approach to that model. Part of the process
of developing such a model is challenging the existing
notions of sexuality, which gays can do every time they
overtly express their own sexuality.

Lonely, frustrated Sexual Politicians

Challenging the gender-specific ideology which underpins
existing notions can, for gays more than straights, have selfdestructive effects, stemming, we believe, from the
isolation of being gay. Firstly, we mean far more than just
the inevitable social isolation, although this is in no way to
underestimate it. Although the range of social situations
explicitly open to gays is increasing, it must be emphasised
that, as things stand, for a gay person to have a 'social' life
takes a positive effort to involve themselves in specific
situations, whereas straights exist and operate in .those same
situations as part of their on-going identification with their
22 Gay Left

society. They do not feel that sense of sexual separation,

although they may feel a reaction against the commercial
exploitation and objectification of their sexuality. Straight
people can only feel that sense of sexual separation in
explicitly gay situations.
The second aspect of gay isolation has to do with one's
sense of being (ontology). Inasmuch as we live in an
explicitly heterosexually-orientated society, our selfconstructs tend towards that type of model, a fact underlying gay sexual guilt. We are not suggesting that heterosexuality is the only basis on which people in a
heterosexually-orientated society can build self-constructs
the sheer existence of self-proclaimed gays belies such an
idea. What we are saying is that the process of constructing
a sense of self is much more difficult if you are gay because
you do not have the continual self-affirming mechanisms
that heterosexual self-constructs do (advertising, child-care
legislation and housing policy are three examples that
spring to mind). So, as part of their socio-sexual isolation,
gays have to develop a sense of ontological security, as
have straights, but they do so without the massive,
continual societal affirmation that heterosexuals have. All
this gives gays a different perception of the world from
straights, and thus adds a cognitive barrier to the social
ones that already exist between us and straights. Finally,
since lesbians are likely to have a heightened awareness of
the likelihood of sexism and power-games forming part of
the social interaction of men (an awareness due precisely
to that altered perception), they are likely to shun social
situations in which they are likely to be caught up in such
behaviour.
Thus, not only do gays face the apparently universal
problem of finding compatible partners with which to
develop loving relationships, but also, having done so, it is
likely that those sexual relationships will be exclusive ones,
because of their heightened need for reciprocity, such as
can only be obtained in relationships with people who share
one's perception of the world. The need for reciprocity
exists in all of us, but is heightened in gays because we
cannot become involved as easily in the multitude of
partially-reciprocal , relationships which straights can. The
result is an 'artificial' separation in the people we meet into
'other gays' and 'the rest', in that what we all desire, surely,
is a situation in which we feel free to relate, at whatever
level we desire, to whoever we wish. The fact that we are
unable to do so at present is due to societal attitudes to
sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, as
part of the gender-specific ideology. Those attitudes don't,
of course, stop us from having that freedom to relate to
each other, but they make deviation from the norm, such
as a plurality of lovers, even more difficult for gays to
achieve than straights.
Within our loving relationships with other gays, there is
likely to be not only the affection, trust, love, etc. that
one would expect in any loving relationship, but also the
sort of solidarity that can only exist between members of
an oppressed group a solidarity heightened in lesbians,
since both our sexuality and our gender oppress us. Thus
relationships with other gays are intrinsically self-affirming,
as are all relationships with 'significant others', and they are
also buttresses against the external pressures we have
mentioned. This, we would suggest, is likely to be a very
effective counter-balance to the difficulties of maintaining
a loving gay relationship in a straight world, where to be
gay is to be anything from 'different' to 'abnormal'. Any
break-up in such a relationship, therefore, is more likely to
be because of 'internal' factors, e.g. the basis on which the
relationship is initiated; differing personal development;
changing interests; and, of course, monogamy.
Monogamy can be seen either as a desire to get totally
involved with one person (and thus a disinterest in others),
or as a desire to stop that one other person from getting
involved with anyone else. Obviously, the two motives are
related; the point is, which one has primacy in a particular
situation? Whatever its motive, monogamy as an expression

of a need for an exclusive sexual relationship introduces

another artificial separation in the people we meet, this
time between one's exclusive partner and 'the rest'. Once
again, we describe this separation as artificial because it
stops us and our partner from relating to whoever we
choose in whatever way we choose, and because we believe
that it is based on societal attitudes to sexuality in general
and its place within the nuclear family in particular. Also,
it is thought 'unusual' to relate closely to more than one
person simultaneously one has a best friend at a time; a
sexual partner at a time, but no more! All this doesn't stop
us from constructing non-monogamous situations, but it
does raise questions about them how realistic is it to
expect them to work in a monogamy-based society; and is
it at all realistic to expect an established relationship (even
though non-monogamous) to be able to offer sufficient
security and trust to an incoming member for them to
make the considerable investment in emotional energy
which is necessary to enable them to enter and broaden
that original relationship.
Having examined our relationships with other gays, let
us look at our relationships with 'the rest', i.e. heterosexuals
and bisexuals. We doubt whether there can, in capitalist
society at this stage, be that sense of shared perception we
mentioned earlier as a pre-requisite for closeness, in

Book Reviews
WE SPEAK FOR OURSELVES
by Jack Babuscio

(SPCK, 1976 2.95)

'We Speak For Ourselves' is the first British book published

in this country about homosexuals by a gay man who has
been involved in the gay movement. Jack Babuscio has
chronicled the methods and the language which essentially
arise out of the tradition of the women's and gay movements. This tradition has asserted the need to talk openly
about the 'personal' in order that we may struggle to be
`open', 'honest' and 'self-accepting' about our gayness.
The major intention of this book is to enable nongay counsellors of gay women and men to come to an
understanding of 'what it means to be gay'. Jack Babuscio
has drawn together many gay people's experiences from his
work as a counsellor (he was at one time an organiser of
Friend) and, in so doing, he outlines the complex maze
which confronts any counsellor/befriender working with
gay women and men who come to talk about their fears,
rejection, isolation and misery.
Transcriptions of tape recordings form the largest part
of the book and have the positive effect of bringing to life,
in a moving way, terms which we usually associate with
conventional psychiatry and religion. This process enables
us to identify the 'problems' through gay people's experiences, rather than identifying gay women and men
through the 'problems'.
For gay liberationists and Marxists, however, this book
presents several dilemmas. It explores ways in which individuals may help gay women and men to overcome their
isolation and oppression something we all support.
However, Jack Babuscio says, 'Each individual represented
in these pages speaks for him or herself alone.' But it is
precisely through this individualising process that psychiatry, religion and the state have been able to isolate us in
our personal struggles for a social and sexual identity. We
need to look for common ground upon which to explore
this identity as one of the commentators in the book
says, 'In coming together with other gays who are also trying to raise their level of consciousness ... I feel I've come
much, much closer to understanding myself and others.'
In other words, the struggle against sexual oppression will

relations between gays and straights, and so the cognitive

barrier is. a barrier to close relationships too. This is also
the case with bisexuals; further, when a gay is in a loving
relationship with a bisexual, this is especially anxietyproducing, because the straight relationship(s) that the
bisexual may have will need less effort and commitment to
maintain, because they are acceptable and 'normal'. This
means that there is always a chance of a bisexual renouncing their gay lover(s) as needing too much time and
trouble, when similar rewards are to be had for less from
a straight person. There is also the possibility, of course,
that one's bisexual partner is affecting bisexuality either
to keep the option of 'normality' open while they flirt
with their homosexual propensities, or simply because it's
hip to say you're bisexual these days.
All these factors feed back to, and increase, that sense
of homosexual isolation which we introduced so long ago.
Will the circle stay unbroken . . . ?
Notes
1 Sartre, J-P. Search for a Method. Tr. Barnes. Random House.
New York. 1963. p92.

2 ibid.
3 Marx, K. The German Ideology. Lawrence & Wishart. 1965. p60.

necessitate us submerging some of our individualism and

recognising that it is only through collective action that
that we will eventually be able to explore our individual
potential.
Jack Babuscio also tends to argue that gay women and
men will have their lives validated solely by changes in nongay people's attitudes: 'Tolerance must be replaced by both
understanding and, most of all, by acceptance of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. Until such times as attitudes
are substantively changed, however, gay people will continue to regard passing [as straight] as an attractive alternative to being open and self-accepting. And such a
decision . . . can only be accompanied by the most
unhappy consequences.'
What is missing in this statement is the anger, the
energy and pride which was generated through gay liberation and which shouted out 'We won't wait for heterosexuals to validate our lives, we'll do it for ourselves.' Jack
Babuscio, therefore, omits what can be gained from struggle
generated out of anger and oppression.
The final problem posed for Marxists is that attempting
to change people's consciousness without changing the
material base which shapes that consciousness will inevitably lead to a situation where we as gay women and men
have to validate our lives within the framework of bourgeois norms and values. As long as that framework continues to exist, the social relations between women and
men, gay and non-gay will always be unequal and will
therefore lead to the vast majority of us feeling oppressed
and exploited.
None of the problems which the book raises does Babuscio answer or even suggest that they exist. However, as a book
about personal discovery and self-acceptance, it is warm
and moving. Its case histories show the ways in which all
of us can begin to explore collectively areas of our lives
which were once considered only 'private and personal'.
Through this process we can begin to understand the importance of the personal-political and the role sexual
politics has to play in any revolutionary struggle.

Nigel Young

23 Gay Left

WOMEN AWAKE
The Experience of Consciousness Raising
By Sue Bruley
Sue Bruley's pamphlet is a very interesting combination of
the 'personal' and 'political'. It is written as a personal
account of a woman's development out of the 'dogmatic'
politics of IS through the experience of a consciousnessraising group. The political issues raised by this experience
are arousing a great deal of interest not only in the women's
and gay movement, but throughout the left.
Sue Bruley's statement against "a dogmatic Leninist
position" should not, I think, be read as a rejection of
Leninism, of a democratic centralist form of organisation.
Many feminists who are committed to Leninism both
inside and outside left groups are also committed to
revolutionising our concept of what 'Leninism' has to
become to meet the new needs, experience and political
developments of the present period. The "basic inability of
the left to take sexism seriously" is a dangerous obstacle
to the whole movement, because it restricts our ability to
understand bourgeois ideology and to speak to the day-today experience of the oppressed. Consciousness-raising
itself provides an important model of politicisation of the
' personal' which none of the left can afford to ignore.
One of the most interesting issues raised by the group
described in this pamphlet is the following division: "The
group was basically split in its attitude towards men. On
one side their entire lives were directed by their involvement with men, on the other side, relationships with men
were not fundamental, had to be treated with great
suspicion, and were always of less importance than relationships with other women." This split is defined at an early
stage in the group's development, and seems to me to be
more than a question of sexual orientation. "Those in the
group who were gay thought that the basis for a distinction
between gay and straight women on the grounds of sexual
preference was wrong and that any woman who wanted to
relate to "other women in a serious way should be proud to
call herself a Lesbian." For women, the gay/straight
distinction is not definable in male terms. Many gay men
have made the mistake of thinking that it is. Female
sexuality has been so suppressed, repressed, abused and
denied for so long that the expression and liberation of our
sexuality is a more fundamental issue than 'gay or straight'.
Some of the group didn't think they had ever had an
orgasm. "Heterosexual sex is prick-centred and rarely takes
female needs into consideration . .." Few of us have found
it possible to regain control over our sexuality in relation
to men, for the simple reason that we are oppressed and
our sexuality-for-men is necessarily corrupted and distorted.
Is there a revolutionary feminist way of being heterosexual?
The discussion on 'love' and 'couples' is also interesting.
"This designation of some relationships as 'special'
necessarily subordinates all other relationships and therefore reinforces women's isolation and dependence (psychological as well as economic) on men." This problem of
exclusivity, whether in gay or 'straight' couples, is rooted
in the bourgeois institution of monogamy, which still
defines our practice in sexual relationships. Sex is a
commodity, and is split: either the 'real thing' or 'not' the
'real thing'. The double standard still imposes itself on all
kinds of relationships. Sue took the view "that the
women's movement would always be seriously handicapped
whilst women remained in couple relationships with men,
and therefore, one of the tasks of women's liberation must
be to make women both believe and feel that they can be
complete outside of a couple relationship". If we take this
statement as a practical proposal about what goes on in
left groups, for example, we get an idea of the extent of
the struggle this would involve, and its necessity. Women
cannot develop politically if they either remain psychologically dependent on men, or feel pressured into holding
up their development by forming the kind of relationships
they need not have chosen. The potential of gay relation24 Gay Left

ships is that, although many fall into the same trap, they
necessarily challenge conventional forms.
"CR can act as a bridge between the personal and the
political." The nature of women's politicisation is allimportant. Women who have not experienced "what sisterhood is all about ... putting women first" will learn the
type of 'political consciousness' which becomes a selfoppressive commitment to fighting others' oppression and
forgetting our own; a barrier not only to feminist awareness
but to the emergence of conscious, thinking, critical and
independent revolutionaries.

Celia Holt
THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF WOMEN
Edited and Introduced by Juliet Mitchell and Ann
Oakley

(Penguin 1.25)

This is a collection of twelve essays on topics ranging over

history, sociology and literature. The emergence of the
women's movement has resulted in feminists re-assessing
the ways in which women have been perceived if at all
in these areas of study in particular, challenging the
material and ideological basis on which male supremacy
is built. As the editors state, there is no overall political
perspective uniting the essays, rather they are a reflection
of the diverse ways in which women's lives and consciousness have been moulded and an attempt to reveal their
existence where history has ignored them. The essays
largely take the form of traditional academic studies in
which aspects of our social structure and the process of
male control are investigated. In the first, Oakley gives an
account of how the care and treatment of women during
childbirth was taken out of the hands of women themselves
and became controlled by the professional medical
establishment of men. Another gives a description of the
changing attitudes towards the education of girls which
now professes the aim of equality of opportunity with
boys, but this masks the sexism inherent in the educational
system and its role in the wider society.
Rosalind Delmar's essay is an examination of some of
the central points in Engels' analysis of the family; the
emergence of men's economic power, the transition from
mother-right and the institution of paternity and
monogamy. She then considers Engels' proposition that the
overturning of this oppression rests on women regaining
economic independence through entry into socialised
production and examines briefly the experience in China
since the revolution where this theory has been partially
realised. There have been enormous advances and changes
in women's role and a transformation of the family but the
limitations that exist are not just a result of China's backwardness but are due to the deficiencies of traditional
socialist analysis. This has now been extended by the
feminist movement in their critique of the sexual division
of labour and the monogamous family based on sex-love,
which, under both western capitalism and the 'socialist
states', are evidently central to the oppression of women's
and gay sexuality.
The intricate nature of sexism in our society affects
every aspect of our lives and becomes part of our individual
psychology. In the most interesting essay, Margaret Walters
illustrates this in the dilemmas encountered by three
women writers Wollstonecraft, Martineau and de Beauvoir
in their struggles as women with a feminist consciousness.
Their rejection of the traditional feminine role met with
wide criticism. The freedom they strove for was confounded
by the limitations of individual action in developing a
consciousness independent of the feminine stereotype without merely taking on a masculine identity to achieve a
supposed equality. It is only with the growth of the
women's movement that the roles of both femininity and
masculinity can be challenged and the rejection of the
confining stereotype of one does not mean the wholesale
subjugation to and restrictions of the other.

Although most of the essays are very interesting, few

cover ground that is new to people with a knowledge of the
feminist movement and there is little which touches on the
immediate problems which confront the movement at this
point. However, the tasks of rewriting history and interpreting the social world from a feminist perspective is a
valuable one.
An important point made by the editors is their shared
criticism of some aspects of the present women's movement,
in particular the concept of 'sisterhood'. Though useful as a
starting point in building a common awareness of oppression and showing the personal as political, they now feel
that it is blinding women to the absence of any real unity.
The same problem confronts the gay movement. As a quote
from Body Politic said recently, "For gay lib to pretend
that class loyalties within the gay community are not
stronger than gay brotherhood is fatuous and irresponsible."
Unity cannot be made by merely wishing it, it must be
based on the movement's analysis and actual struggle.

Keith Birch

Ideologues of Sex
THE MODERNISATION OF SEX
by Paul A Robinson

(Paul Elek, London. 1976. 4.95)

There are many theoretical and practical problems in

writing historical studies of sex. There's the problem of
sources; the problem of interpretation; the problem of
what people understand by 'sex' at any particular time. As
a result historical studies often veer dangerously between
vulgar empiricism, where we are given 'facts' unadulterated
by interpretation; and a cosmic theorisation. what Ken
Plummer has called "metatheoretical excursions" where
facts are given short shrift. Most sexual historians take a
cautious way out: they look at the ideas on sexuality that
were generated at any particular time, and generalise backwards, seeing ideas as a direct reflection of behaviour. Thus
Victorian sexual ideology is seen as a mirror of Victorian
behaviour rather than what it almost certainly was, a
dialectical and contradictory response, partly reflection,
partly moral injunction, partly false consciousness. Paul
Robinson in this book takes another path: he treats the
work and writings of his 'modernisers', Havelock Ellis,
Alfred Kinsey and William Masters and Virginia Johnson,
as episodes in the history of ideas:
"It is the fundamental assumption of this book that
sexual thought is now an integral component of our
intellectual history, and accordingly that the most
i mportant modern sexual theorists deserve as much
attention from intellectual historians as the great
philosophers, theologists and social thinkers of the age."
This is a useful approach and the strength of the book
stems from it. The three major sections of the book clearly
examine the modes of thought, the central concepts of
each thinker (or in the case of Masters and Johnson, partnership), and examines them within their own terms to draw
out the strengths and weaknesses, the unifying consistencies
and the major inconsistencies. Robinson uses the traditional
methods of intellectual history and in doing so is able to
reveal the sinews of each work under review.
The weakness of the approach is the complement of the
strength. For in exploring them in their own terms Robinson loses a vital dimension by failing to locate them within
the structures and feelings of their time. This is particularly
true of Havelock Ellis, whose sexual writings from the
1890s to the 1930s are stretched dangerously between the
poles of revolt and conservatism. His writings on women
especially can only be understood by reference to the major
ideological offensive in the early part of the century which
stressed the role of motherhood and woman's traditional
sphere. He wrote with approval, "woman breeds and tends;
man provides, it remains so even when the spheres tend to

overlap". Ellis was a socialist, but he was also an enthusiastic eugenecist, who believed that in motherhood, the woman
is
"lifted above the level of ordinary humanity to become
the casket of an inestimable jewel".
Ellis' career is very instructive on the evolution of British
socialism, and the limitations of sexual liberalism, but this
can only be brought out by locating him in a specific social
and cultural milieu. Robinson argues that Ellis, Kinsey and
Masters and Johnson have contributed to a recognisably
modern way of looking at sex, as in many ways they have.
But the crucial question of why their ideas and influence
should have taken root is left unexplored.
Robinson formally links them by his use of the term
' modernisation'. Their contribution is assessed against the
yardstick of a postulated modernising enterprise, whose
central characteristics are revolt against 'Victorianism' a
new 'enthusiasm' for sex; a willingness to broaden the
definition of sexuality, and to explore 'deviant' sex; a
greater stress on female sexuality; and a questioning of the
traditional institutional framework for sexuality, marriage
and the family. But the notion of 'modernisation' has
unfortunate connotations; it implies a process (with strong
analogies to economic modernisation) whereby attitudes
have moved from a state of primitive ignorance to shining
freshness. Robinson is himself well aware of the limitations
of the concept he employs, but the form of the essays
prevent him from theorising these. I think a more useful
concept would be that of 'liberalisation', a political not
a technological process, which implies a loosening of the
bonds rather than a climb from darkness into light. But
the fact is that the essays are only loosely bound together
by the concept; they are basically selfcontained examinations of three different moments in the development of
sexual liberalism.
Not surprisingly the differing concerns of the four
people reflect this. Ellis was anxious to establish that
certain categories existed in a culture which only vaguely
accepted them (e.g. 'female sexuality', 'homosexuality',
etc.). In a sense he did not so much challenge 'Victorianism'
as create it as a coherent coconut shy to attack. His work
gained clarity as it attacked a well-lit enemy. Kinsey was
concerned with documenting sexual behaviour; his early
career as a student of insects was reflected in his later
endeavour as a chronicler of sexual behaviour. By massively
detailed questionnaires distributed to thousands of men
and women he hoped to build up a consensus of how
people actually behaved sexually in bed (and out of it). His
detractors, not surprisingly, felt he was revealing a can of
worms. But his determined materialism and naturalism,
and his concentration on behaviour as it was, helped undermine the pieties of received ideologies. By the 1960s
Masters and Johnson could safely assume the merits of
sexuality; they sought to make it function better by
.
developing techniques of sexual therapy. But implicit in
their determined efforts to help couples to fuck better is
an implied theory: that sex far from being a massively
threatening force can be the essential glue in keeping a
marriage intact.
The interesting element that Robinson's work reveals
is the severe limitations on the radicalism of each of the
people he studies. Ellis was trapped within gender role
assumptions as clearly as any of the Victorians he attacked.
Nor could Kinsey, despite his documentation of the widespread incidence of homosexual behaviour, quite escape
defending the superiority of heterosexuality and the
'natural' basis of male and female differences. And Masters
and Johnson, with their clinical encouragement of sex
technique learning, only treated couples (and usually rich
middle class couples at that) and ended up themselves
marrying one another. Far from challenging marriage or
the family their work explicitly elevated their significance.
Despite this, these three moments in sexual liberalisation
have had important effects on the development of contemporary attitudes to homosexuality. Ellis was a prime
25 Gay Left

mover in the conceptualisation of homosexuality-as a

'condition', a characteristic of certain types of individuals,
the 'invert' or 'homosexual', which dominated reformist
discussions up to the 1960s. Kinsey's methodology has
dominated most progressive thought on homosexuality
over the past decade; its documentation of the widespread
incidence of homosexuality, the emphasis on sexual
response rather than identity, and the use of analogies
from animal behaviour; all have had a real liberating effect
on the discussion of homosexuality. Their limitation is the
traditional one of most behaviourist tendencies: the failure
to explore the historical determinants of social behaviour
and consciousness.
Masters and Johnson have so far had less direct influence
on discussion of homosexuality (though a large scale
study is due to appear from them soon). But in their
examination of female sexuality, and in particular their
recognition of the central importance of the clitoral
orgasm. aspects of their work have been integrated into
feminist and lesbian debate.
The weakness of all these ideologies, however, is the
weakness also of Robinson's book: the failure to recognise
that not only are sexual attitudes received and learned,
they are also transformed by conscious political activity.
Robinson talks a little about the 'feminism' of Masters and
Johnson without any awareness of its limitations in their
work. And there is only a passing reference to the significance of the gay liberation movement. Yet whatever their
limitations as political movements there can be little doubt
that both the women's and the gay movements represent
the possibility of a conscious transformation not only of
sexual behaviour but also of sexual theory. That would
be a real 'modernisation', one that this book, despite its
many good qualities, does not anticipate.

Jeffrey Weeks
Note

An essay on 'Havelock Ellis and the Politics of Sexual Reform' forms

part 2 of Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks' Socialism and The
New Life (Pluto Press, June 1977). Part 1 is an essay on 'Edward
Carpenter, Prophet of The New Life'.

THE GENDER TRAP

A Closer Look at Sex Roles by Carol Adams and
Rae Laurikietis
Book 1: Education & Work; Book 2: Sex &
Marriage; Book 3: Messages & Images.

(Virago. 1976. 1.25 each)

These three books between them provide very clear, simple

but thorough coverage of the way gender roles permeate
different facets of our lives. Each book is split into two
units, and each unit into between six and nine sections
illustrating one particular aspect of the theme of the unit.
Thus the first unit in Book 1, 'The Best Years of Your Life',
includes sections on teachers, reading, choice of career and
toys. The books are very concisely written, with many
written and visual examples to illuminate the text. There
are questions posed and topics for further discussion raised
both within and at the end of most sections. It is in this
respect alone that one becomes aware that the books are
intended, to a large extent, for use in schools and colleges.
The books deal in a matter of fact way with traditionally
difficult topics for educational material such as homosexuality, pornography, abortion and rape. These and many
other topics are integrated into a work which shows that
gender role stereotypes pervade all aspects of our lives,
sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. Many facts are
presented and few readers will find the books simplistic if
only because of the wealth of material that is presented,
enabling everyone to find at least some of the information
or examples new and refreshing.

Derek J. Cohen

26 Gay Left

JUST LIKE A GIRL

How Girls Learn To Be Women
by Sue Sharpe

(Penguin 95p)

This is a book which could never have been written without

the Women's Movement. It is also an excellent informative
introduction to their ideas. Sue Sharpe begins by outlining
the historical changes which have affected women over the
past hundred years, particularly access to education and
absorption into the labour force. She goes on to look at the
processes of socialisation whereby parents, school, the
media and the rest of the world try to ensure that girls
become feminine.
The most interesting sections of the book are on the
realities that face girls at school, at work and at home. A
favourite bourgeois cliche is that women are equal nowadays thanks to legislation like the Equal Pay Act, the Sex
Discrimination Act and the Employment Protection Act.
The argument says that if they can't achieve equality now
then it must be their own fault. Sharpe exposes the fallacious nature of this argument by showing how girls are
trapped by the 'hidden curriculum' at school which pushes
them into traditional 'feminine' subjects and keeps them
away from scientific and technical ones; how careers advice
is biased towards lowering expectations so that a girl who
wants to be a doctor is recommended to do radiology; and
how most of the expectations of women are still curtailed
by the problems of what to do with their children. Saddest
of all is the fact that there is less resistance than one might
expect from the girls themselves because of the way they
have been socialised into having fewer and lower expectations of self-development.
The whole book, including an interesting section on
black girls in Britain, does not leave one with feelings of
joy or optimism. What is clear is that all the legislation in
the world will not fundamentally alter women's position
without a transformation of the material forces in society
and consequent transformation of attitudes by us all.

Bob Cant

ABORTION IN DEMAND
by Victoria Greenwood and Jock Young

(Pluto Press 1976)

Abortion law reform in the 1960s was, like the reform of

the law relating to male homosexuality in England and
Wales, a product of a particular type of sexual liberalism. It
stressed not sexual freedom, or the right to choose one's
sexuality, but the need to remove certain glaring abuses. As
the authors of this book clearly underline, the aim in
abortion law reform was to help people who were seen as
marginal or inadequate. There was no emphasis at all on a
woman's right to control her own fertility. Similarly homosexual law reform was based on the assumption that homosexuality was an unfortunate condition, better controlled
by being conditionally approved. And yet both Acts had
unintended consequences. The opportunity was taken by
women and by gay men to use the Acts to extend their
freedom to choose. It was as a reaction against these unintended results that many of the liberal supporters of
abortion law reform in the 1960s now stand in the forefront of the parliamentary attempt (backed by reactionary
support nationally) to restrict abortion. Few voices have
yet been heard to say that homosexual reform went too
far (though the Festival of Light have suggested the age of
consent should be raised to 24) but we should draw the
consequences of the retreat on abortion. The struggle
for extending a woman's right to choose is part and
parcel of our struggle for sexual autonomy. This useful
and well argued book begins to show us why.

Jeffrey Weeks

MOZAMBICAN WOMEN
The victory of Frelimo against the Portuguese in
Mozambique was welcomed by socialists all over the world.
To those of us who had supported the solidarity movements
such a victory had often seemed impossible and when it did
happen it was like a miracle. But it was no miracle it was
a victory based on over ten years' hard struggle and organisation. During the war of liberation, women and men had
played an equal part in the struggle to end Portuguese domination. But when the military struggle came to an end the
role of women was no longer so clear. Were they to go back
to their old roles? Was their revolutionary role to be the preparation of meals for male comrades? Were they to play an
equal and essential part with men in the creation of a new
society? Mozambican women were concerned about these
problems and called a conference in Maputo in November
1976 to discuss them and to plan how to combat them.
A report of the conference has recently been published
in English. Some sections of it deal with the problems
facing women still living a traditional life-style such as
initiation rites, bride price and polygamy. They recognise
that initation is designed to make girls submissive to men
and that education programmes are required to end it. The
relationship between this sexual submission and the general
passivity of women in Mozambican society is perceived, if
only on an elementary level. The problems of bride price
and polygamy, however, are much more rooted in the
poverty of the country. The involvement of women as
equals in the collective production of wealth will, hopefully,
play a great part in the abolition of these evils although
further education and consciousness raising are necessary.
Those who continue to practise these customs will be
denied access to positions of political responsibility.
The conference also recognised the way in which
bourgeois ideology, particularly in the form of liberalism,
affected the lives of many women in the cities. The structure of city life had been such that many women had been
abandoned with young children, had been unable to find
employment, had turned to prostitution, had become
alcoholics and so on. Once again the same kind of solutions
are proposed collective involvement in the process of
production, plus education.
Abortion is regarded as a 'grave social problem' and an
unwanted pregnancy as a sign that the woman has failed
to 'see the true meaning of love and the part played by
sexual relationship in love and life'. This is clearly different
from the attitude of the women's movement in industrialised countries but is hardly surprising in a society with
such a high incidence of infant mortality. Greater
emphasis is to be placed on spreading information about
family planning.
What is particularly impressive is the ideological perspective of the document on love. They believe that many
women are misled by ideas that they have found in 'rosycoloured films and literature such as magazines all spread
'by the colonial-bourgeois system'. They see that the privatisation and distortion of love and sexuality is a political
phenomenon which is not natural but a reflection of a particular society. They argue, therefore, that there must be a
spread of the concept of 'revolutionary and militant love'.
The whole document is fascinating, particularly in the
insight it provides into the attempt of a poor African
country to construct a socialist society. It raises many
important issues about the way sexual/emotional lives
would be changed in revolutionary situations. While they
hold with the traditional Marxist idea that the liberation
of women will come about through their involvement in the
economic process they go further and argue for more education to establish a new ideology of personal relationships.
It should be borne in mind too that these are formal conference decisions and the real practice may differ a great
deal from what was agreed in Maputo. But it is still much
too early to make any meaningful comment.

One important area where serious criticism must be

made, however, relates to the family and the roles within
it. They still see the family as the 'basic social cell'. They
nowhere define family as being either nuclear or extended
but this emphasis on the family of whatever size can only
be reactionary. Since there is no discussion of the allocation of housework or child care it must be assumed that it
will remain the primary responsibility of the woman.
Statements are made calling for the need for men to be
made 'conscious that as fathers they must take equal responsibility for the education of the children'. Little more
than this, however, is said on the role of fathers. In most
other areas of discussion the emphasis is on collective
involvement with women but the collective approach is
nowhere mentioned in relation to family life. And family
life based around a mother and a father is the place where
privatisation and roles are learned and consequently a seedbed for the growth of bourgeois ideology.
Finally, the point must be made that there is no reference of any sort to homosexuality either female or male.
Bearing in mind Mozambique's social formation this is
hardly surprising. Although there was, doubtless, male gay
prostitution in large coastal cities in the colonial period it is
probably the case that few Mozambicans see themselves as
gay in any way that we would understand. Such lack of
gay consciousness may be one of the main reasons for the
silence on the topic. There is, as yet, no reason to see the
silence as similar to the anti-gay hostility so vociferously
expressed by the Cuban regime. It is a situation about which
gay socialists must feel concern but one about which few of
us are qualified to make informed criticism.
None the less, although there may be little or no conscious gay self-identification, sexual activity betweeh
people of the same sex takes place in Mozambique as it
takes place everywhere. And the questions that we should
consider in relation to future debates on Mozambique are
firstly, how do people who take part in homosexual
activity see themselves and that sexual activity?; secondly,
how does Frelimo see these people and their sexual activity?
A full report of this conference is given in People's
Power No 6, obtainable from Mozambique, Angola and

Guine Information Centre (MAGIC), 12 Little Newport

Street, London WC2.

Bob Cant

SEXUAL DIVISIONS AND SOCIETY:

PROCESS AND CHANGE
Edited by Diana Leonard Barker and Sheila Allen

(Tavistock Publications, London. 1976. 3.25)

This is the first of two volumes of papers given at the

British Sociological Association's Conference on Sexual
Divisions and Society, held in April 1974 (the second
volume is published by Longmans). The papers deal, as the
editors put it, with "aspects of social relationships consistently neglected by sociologists and ridiculed or denigrated
by some". The papers are a creative resistance to this
denigration. They vary in quality, inevitably, but cover a
wide range: relationships among women in Morocco; sexual
bias in British community studies; the ideological and social
implications of divorce; the social construction of instincts;
the implications of birth control; the effect of the Chinese
revolution on women; the implications of communal living.
The editors offer a definition of sexism which is coherent
and worth noting: "We suggest that as a sociological
concept it indicates situations where the differences between
men and women are not only emphasised, but consistently
and systematically so, to the detriment of women, i.e. they
are institutionalised. Such differences are frequently, though
not exclusively legitimated by biological assumptions."
Mike Brake explores the implications of such a definition
in his paper, 'I May be a Queer, But at Least I am a Man'.
He demonstrates that not only gender definitions but
sexual meanings are socially constructed. He links together
27 Gay Left

heterosexuality and homosexuality in terms of an overall

male hegemony, so that even in gay relationships heterosexual male patterns are aped. He explores this theme in
terms of typical responses to transvestism and transsexuality,
and concludes with a rather cosmic hope that the radical
gay movement will offer a way out of the male created
i mpasse.
"Involvement in the gay struggle is understanding and
opposing sexism and supporting those who are sexually
oppressed ... the suffering of gay people is the result of
the oppression of prescribed gender with its appropriate
behaviour and psychology. It is not the fault of the
oppressed the screaming queens, butch dykes, transvestites, and transsexuals."
It is true, if not very generally recognised, that the
locus of sharpest oppression has shifted from homosexual
behaviour per se to the conceptually less clear cut areas of
transvestism, transsexuality and paedophilia. Mike Brake's
paper points the way to exploring these areas of sexuality
or sex related behaviour. He is over-optimistic at this stage,
however, in thinking that a large scale radical gay movement
is likely to exist to take them up.
The B.S.A. Conference was largely concerned with
gender divisions and the essays reflect this. Over the past
year or so, however, a group in the B.S.A. has set up a study
group on sexuality, which has so far had two conferences,
and a gay research group. Together they offer the opportunity to explore the theoretical and practical problems of
understanding sexual meanings in a manner influenced by a
feminist and a gay liberationist outlook. They can be
contacted through B.S.A., 13 Endsleigh Street, London
WC1.

Jeffrey Weeks
HOUSEWIFE
by Ann Oakley

(Penguin Books 80p)

Ann Oakley's classic study first published in 1974, now in

paperback, describes how women's role developed in industrial society; how they become a source of cheap labour
and the part they played in the production of surplus
value. She also describes how the ideology of women's
role as a housewife occurred in the late nineteenth century
-- basically as unpaid servant and childminder (the period,
incidentally, in which current attitudes towards homosexuality developed). Case histories of four housewives
tell how women see themselves today. A final section outlines the need for a revolution in the ideology of gender
roles and the concepts of gender identity. An important
socialist feminist book for us all.

Emmanuel Cooper

Letters
Gay Left c/o 36a Craven Road, London W2
AN OPEN LETTER TO SWP GAY GROUP
Dear Comrades,
I was rather disappointed that there has been no reply from
the Gay Group in SWP (formerly IS) to the article which I
wrote in Gay Left No 3 about my experiences in the IS
Gay Group between 1973 and 1975. It is true that an article
was received from an individual in the group but it was not
claimed that this was a reply and was, for other reasons,
withdrawn.
People in SWP constantly tell me that the attitude
towards sexual politics has changed and there is now much
more discussion on the issue. That may be the case internally but one would certainly never guess it from reading
Socialist Worker, Women's Voice or International Socialist
Journal. There have, it is true, been occasional articles
about victimised gay workers but this is actually nothing
new.
Paul Foot's book, Why You Should Be A Socialist,
makes several interesting points about women and the
family but nowhere does he call into question the roles
and heterosexual norms which are central to such oppression. There is not even a token line about sexism let
alone homosexuality.
I began to wonder what you were doing to change the
level of debate on sexism in SWP. I suspected, on the basis
of my own experience, that you were so eager to prove
yourselves good comrades that you only raised such questions in a way which would be acceptable to the existing
programme of the organisation.
When I saw a leaflet which you produced recently about
an anti-fascist demo in North London I felt I was correct.
You pointed out very clearly the links between gay oppression and fascism. But then, stuck on at the end of the
leaflet, without any explanation, there was the distinctive
SWP slogan 'Fight For The Right To Work'. This is not a
slogan with which I disagree, but given that you were
addressing yourselves to the gay community which often
has little knowledge of work-place politics it seems odd
that you did not clarify the links between this and the
rest of the leaflet.
There is no way that you can exist meaningfully in
the SWP without conflict. This is not because the leadership
of SWP is particularly sexist but because of the nature of
the demands that arise from sexual politics. Sexual politics
questions roles and the way people relate to each other.
These questions are threatening to everyone and Leninist parties (to my knowledge) have not yet found a way of
adequately dealing with them. They may deal with victimisations, police harassment and law reform but roles and
relationships are much, much harder. Taking them up
seriously will bring all sorts of accusations on you
'obsessed with sex', 'petit bourgeois wanker', 'unreliable'
to name but a few. Your past record and other revolutionary activity will be as nothing when you challenge such
deeply-rooted assumptions But if you are serious about
revolutionary sexual politics you must challenge these
assumptions now.

28 Gay Left

Your task is a hard one. I, like you, believe in both

the necessity for some kind of Leninist party and the
i mportance of sexual politics but I do not know how to
reconcile them. That process, whatever form it takes, will
be painful. If you think it can be done without conflict
you are deceiving yourselves.
So, comrades, what are you doing?
Fraternally and with love

Bob Cant
German Friends
We are a group of left gays, who have read your journal
Gay Left no.1 with great interest. Especially your article
about Cuba was quite good, so that it was translated into
German. It then was printed in Rosa, that's a journal of the
"Homosexuelle Aktion Hamburg" (HAH) and a few months
later in a journal of the "Kommunistischer Bund" which
was entitled with "Kampf der Schwulenunterdruckung".
(In English: "Against the Oppression of Gays"!)
We also would like to have other papers of your group,
if available. We can send you on the other side, that
material you want, from West Germany. Can someone
understand German? That would be good, for it's quite
difficult to translate things - as you see, our English is also
not brilliant.
We think that it would be useful to come in contact
with other left gays therefore this short letter. Perhaps
we can exchange information about GB and FRG and
write in our journals about important things. As you will
know things in Germany are becoming more and more
difficult. The "Modell Deutschland" (no.IV) has brought
a Climate of oppression and "Hexenjagd". Political oppression spreads out more and more. Also gays are of course
not excluded. The last stroke: in March 1976 there has
been a decision of the "highest court" in "matters of
administration" that can forbid gay activity groups all over
West Germany to address people with gay political papers.
That means, that such activities can be stopped by the
administration at each time they want. On the other hand,
they have developed "new methods" in medicine, to make
gays 'straight': they simply kill some spots in the brain! It
is practiced already in some cities.
G. S.
Readers who would like to write can do so c/o Gay Left,
36a Craven Rd, London W2.
Gays and the CPGB
In the last issue of your paper (no.3) which was sent to me
as usual from a friend in London, I found (on page 1) the
sentence that "The Communist Party now has a special
commission preparing a report" on homosexuality. As I
read in Gay News no.108 (page 15) in an anti-communist
article under the title "A day of shame", the CPGB edited
on the 12th of September 1976 a policy statement supporting gay rights. I write to you because this matter is of much
interest for me and some gay socialists here in Berlin/West.
We are in permanent discussion with members of the CP
of West Berlin about the ability to change the up to now
more or less anti-gay policy and statements of their party.
FRIEDHELM KREY, Berlin
Too Complex, Too Jargonistic
The one criticism that I feel I must make about your
journal is that through its complex construction, and sheer
volume, it may well be ignored by those who, obviously,
it sets out to help in order that they may help themselves.
I am not implying that the working class people do not
wish to fight for what they rightly feel belongs to them
but sadly forms of suppression are often so effective that
they don't really grasp the seriousness of their situation.
If the various forms of abuse against the working class
people were presented to them in a strong, honest, perceptive way but in their own jargon then they may well see

the problem more clearly, often with a form of suppression

that formally had been accepted illuminated and shown in
its true light. Then hopefully, through the presentation,
motivation towards further inquiry is provoked.
When I first read your journal I must admit that I was
highly impressed by the forcefulness of it but I thought
that there was too much sociological jargon used too soon
I was grateful to sociology 'A' level.
Personally I am very aware of what I feel is wrong
within this society and structure of society, and of course
the problem is intensified for the gay person, not only does
it face vast difficulties with other political parties, but also
it faces problems within its own party. This in itself makes
the outlook for the individual bleak, and seemingly complex, I feel that it would help if the factual problems were
presented in as simple a way as possible.
Emotionally I am prepared to fight for my freedom as
an individual yet practically and in some aspects of the
legal side I am quite ignorant of the facts of the situation.
I do not feel in any way that I am the only one that has
this problem, for I have met people in the same state of
suppression, that have understood and seen even less than
me.
E.F., London W4
Canadian Connection
The first three issues of Gay Left have been very useful to
us here in Canada. Lack of information and class analysis
has been one of the problems in developing an orientation
for the gay liberation movement here. Gay Left has begun
to bridge this gap for us, but much more work needs to be
done. The fragmented groups of lesbian and gay leftists
around the world should begin to share information and
ideas in an attempt to develop a sounder analysis (incorporating gay and women's liberation into Marxism) and to
develop a revolutionary strategy for the gay and lesbian
struggle. We hope Gay Left, which already plays a very
useful role, will become an important forum for this
interchange (as it has already begun to with the letter from
GLH[PQ] from France).
We are lesbian and gay members of the Revolutionary
Marxist Group, a Canadian sympathizing organization of
the Fourth International. We have fought inside our
organization for the adoption of a revolutionary position
on gay and sexual liberation. Some of the elements of this
are the recognition of gayness as a natural component of
human sexuality, a recognition that gay liberation is not
simply a fight for democratic rights but involves an attack
on capitalist sexual roles and the family, a recognition of
the need to build an autonomous gay movement which
will wage militant struggle for gay liberation but will also
support women and other oppressed groups, and a recognition that real socialism is impossible without full women's
and gay liberation and the transcending of the family and
sexual roles. This fight has not always been easy in a predominantly straight organization, but by and large we
have won.
Brian Caines, in his letter in Gay Left no.3, makes a
number of good criticisms of the Vancouver branch of the
RMG, and its relation to the gay question. However, we
feel his comments about our paper, the Old Mole, which
has had far more coverage of lesbian and gay struggles than
most left organizations around the world and his suggestion
that the RMG is "opportunistic" around gay liberation are
unjustified. What he doesn't cover, and possibly doesn't
know, is the role of RMG militants, both straight and gay,
across the country. For example, in the last federal
elections, our candidate in Toronto defended gay people
against several right-wing bourgeois and social democratic
politicians and spoke at a Gay Alliance Towards Equality
all-candidates meeting. Brian also does not mention the
activity of the RMG's trade union militants who have
fought in several trade union locals for support of gay
liberation. Finally, he does not cover the activity of lesbian
29 Gay Left

and gay militants of the RMG in the gay and lesbian

struggles, conferences and debates over the last couple of
years. We welcome Brian's criticism of our Vancouver
comrades because it raises some of the problems that our
organization faces in grappling with the gay and lesbian
question. He along with us can play a role in further
educating the straight comrades in our organization around
the importance of gay liberation,
In reference to Brian's last comments, the RMG does
not view gay liberation as something workers "can't
understand" but rather as an important radicalizing
question that must be raised in the working class. We also
don't view it as something "too hot" to handle but as a
question that has a political importance in the total
revolutionary process (in contributing to anti-sexist consciousness and the struggle against bureaucracy).

We are not intending to say that all gay and lesbian

leftists should be members of revolutionary organizations
at the present time. Far from it, for most of these organizations have very reactionary, opportunist or abstentionist
positions on gay and lesbian liberation. Independent gay
groups have a very important role to play right now in
building a militant gay movement. We are only trying to
point out that gay leftists who are members of revolutionary
organizations that don't defend the family and bureaucracy
can play a role in winning their organizations to support
gay liberation as well as playing a role in building lesbian
and gay struggles.
We look forward to continuing discussions.
LESBIAN AND GAY MEMBERS OF THE
REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST GROUP, Toronto, Canada

Gay Left and Women

I bought Gay Left in Grass Roots Bookshop, Manchester.
It's about the best thing I've read on being gay and at the
same time wanting to change capitalist society. It's not
escapist or "fringe" and generally I want to be associated
with it.
I appreciate very much your response to Sue Bruley's
letter, and support your need for your own CR group,
which is strengthened in commitment by also being a group
to achieve a purpose, i.e. produce Gay Left. I expect it is
easier for men to be sure of staying committed if there is
also an objective purpose. I'm not being sexist. I just
recognise the realities of socialisation for males.
You write with real understanding of the women's movement, and recognise what it can teach you and how by
following its insights you can find ways into your own
realities. For that I want to call you brothers, not just
comrades.
What I'm busy trying to find out is how the women's
movement can create its own structure as a body of
people, not just a chance collection of individuals but do
it without being infiltrated by ideas, oppressions and
attitudes carried in the institutions of the so-called democratic process. I think you may have something to teach me
if I keep in touch with you.
Beyond that still, I'm looking for how lesbians can act
together and as yet I see little sign of our ability to achieve
much on more than a personal level, and often not on that.
However, I know that determination and hope do achieve
results, when allied to real understanding of the situation.
It's undoubtedly something to do with the double oppression, with hopelessness, with a desperate reaction to it all.
When we do learn how to get together for action, I expect
we will be the most dynamic force of all. But I'm sure we
will do it by being and discovering ourselves, as you will,
and you will best help us by being and discovering yourselves and letting us see the result.
JEAN ROBERT, Lancs.

I am writing on behalf of my group in support of Sue

Bruley. It seems to be impossible for you to retain your
collective identity in the face of a critical analysis by a
feminist. Were six separate replies really crucial to get
across your points? Or was it that in your show of superior
( male) numbers you hoped to dilute the impact of perceptive (feminist) criticism?
30 Gay Left

Your response was a typical example of the inability of

men to share amongst themselves or to realise their
inadequacies as 'brothers' to your gay sisters.
CAROL LEE, Brighton Lesbian Group
I can understand why a group of men might want to get
together to discuss their sexuality and politics. However the
argument for men getting together is not the same as that
for women getting together because the oppression of men
in our society is not symmetrically comparable to that of
women. And it is sheer arrogance to imagine men can gain
a "thorough understanding of sexism" (GL no.3, N.Y.'s
reply to Sue Bruley's letter) by themselves. Pulling out
that magical 'Marxist' cliche "it's not men who oppress
women but the capitalist system" is a long-standing male
cop-out and a denial of your responsibility. Of course it's
the system of capitalism which oppresses us. But what do
you imagine this 'system' is if not a collection of people's
actions and attitudes?
Within this system it is you who oppress us as women
by your actions. You do so when as a collective of gay men
you presume to call your paper Gay Left, thereby reinforcing two prejudices: 1) that being homosexual is something
only men do, and 2) that being involved in left politics is
a male activity.
MARIA JASTRZEBSKA, Brighton

As a collective we decided to reply individually to Sue

Bruley's criticisms for two main reasons. First we did not
want to hide behind an anonymous collective identity.
Secondly we wanted to show the range of discussion within
the group. There was no intention to evade any of the
issues raised.
It needs to be emphasised that both the collective and
the journal have consistently acknowledged their debt
to the women's movement and have always stated their
opposition to sexism. This can be seen in the journal and
in its editorial policy. At no time has it been suggested that
Gay Left is only about gay men or for gay men. The
continuation of the journal depends on our maintaining
links and working with lesbians wherever this is possible.
It is hoped that we will start on-going discussions with
some of the women in Lesbian Left in order to develop
further a Marxist analysis which applies to gay women and
gay men.
Gay Left

What's Left....
THE GIRLS' GUIDE, Fourth Edition
now available from 1 North End Road, London W14.
Cost 2.00. This guide is the most widely distributed
lesbian publication in the world. It has over 3000
listings in 40 countries of gay organisations, bars, clubs
and restaurants.
LE GROUPE DE LIBERATION HOMOSEXUEL,
POLITIQUE ET QUOTIDIEN (GLH-PQ)
now has a new address -- GERS, B.P.11, 75022 PARIS.
CEDEX 01.
Their latest activity was 'la semaine homosexuelle' 2026 April 1977. Each day was organised around a separate
topic; transvestites, sexual and social roles, gay women,
homosexual struggles and the workers' movements, latent
homosexuality, the homosexual ghetto and pederasty and
children's sexuality. It included debates, films, theatre,
songs, exhibitions and books.
SOCIALIST HOMOSEXUALS
An Australian gay socialist contact. PO Box 153,
Broadway 2007, NSW.
FREEDOM SOCIALIST PARTY
3815 5th N.E., Seattle, WA 98105. Organised a 'Gays
At Work' conference early March 1977.
MAGNUS A Journal of Collective Faggotry
We have received issue No 1 of this new journal dated
Summer 1976. It is edited by a collective of 'six white
faggots' and published in San Francisco. The main article
asks what faggotry is and how does it fit into revolutionary
struggle. It is a 'beginning attempt to understand the relationship between gay people and imperialism'.
Further information from PO Box 40568, San Francisco,
California 94140, USA.
WORKING PAPERS IN SEX, SCIENCE AND CULTURE
The second issue of this journal (dated November 1976) is
now on sale in Britain. (Price 1.35 from Compendium,
234 Camden High Street, London NW 1). It continues its
amibition of critically examining the 'function of language,
ideology and scientificity in the construction of sex theories', with articles on the-group TEL QUEL, Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Marxist Feminism, Althusser's Epistemology,
and Consciousness-Raising as Self Pity. Available also from
Box 83 Wentworth Building, 174 City Road, Darlington
2008, Australia.
BIG RED DIARY The 1977 edition is concerned with Law
and Order. A bit late as a Christmas present but a good May
Day gift. From Pluto Press, Unit 10, Spencer Court,
7 Chalcot Road, London NW1 8LH.

THE NEW YORK GAY SOCIALIST ACTION PROJECT

has now produced a bibliography of books, pamphlets,
essays, periodicals etc, relevant to socialist gays, coordinated by Jonathan Katz. Further information from
Apt 10, 51 Bank Street, New York, NY 10014, USA.
GAY AMERICAN HISTORY
by Jonathan Katz
has now been published in the USA. It's a massive compendium of documents, with commentary and extensive
references. We hope to review the book in the next issue.
Lavender and Red Union, PO Box 3503, Hollywood,
California 90028 who publish the journal Come Out
Fighting have over the past year had an intensive period of
discussion and study and have adopted a Trotskyist position.
The paper on 'Permanent Revolution' has aroused a considerable debate among American gay socialists. Further
details from L & R U.
In Britain, the International Marxist Group has recently
been having an intensive discussion of the personal and the
political. The Personal/Political Grouping have recently
'
(March 1977) produced News from the Gyroscope, documents from the IMG debate.
Ron Moule, filmmaker, has prepared a series of working
notes If you read this you will read anything and Flicker
notes. Ron would be interested to hear from revolutionary
film makers at Top Flat, 58 Burford Road, Forest Fields,
Nottingham.
LESBIAN LEFT are organising a week-end conference in
the autumn as a response to the interest shown at the
National Women's Conference. Details from Lesbian Left,
c/o Women's Workshop, 38 Earlham Street, London NW1.
01-836 6081.
Laurieston Hall, Castle Douglas, Kirkudbrightshire,
Scotland is having a 'Gay Week' at the end of May 1977
intended as a radical gay get together. For details send
SAE to the hall.
Watch out for Gay Pride Week in London, 25th June -- 2nd
July.

GAY LEFT RATES

Single Copies:
Inland

50p each

Overseas Airmail

80p each (IMO only)

or $2 US or Canadian Cheque

Overseas Surface

60p each (IMO only)

or $1.50 US or Canadian
Cheque

Bulk Rates:
Inland, over 9 copies, 30p each
Overseas rates on application
Copies 50p each by post from
36a Craven Road, London W2
BACK ISSUES
Gay Left No 1
Gays in the Trade Unions, in Cuba, at CHE Conference, in
politics.
Gay Left No 2
No longer available
Gay Left No ,3
Women in Gay Left, Gays and Class, IS Gay Group, Gay
Workers' Movement and much more.
Copies 40p each by post from 36A Craven Road,
London W2.
31 Gay Left

EDITORIAL NOTES
The fourth issue of Gay Left has taken longer in coming
out than the other three issues. This has been as a result of
a conscious decision on the part of the collective to spend
more time on group study, in meetings with other groups
and also in going to talk sessions with groups in different
parts of the country. We also decided that, despite the
problems involved, it was worth spending time in jointly
writing our third collective article. We feel generally that
our growth and development as a group takes priority over
producing the journal at strictly regular intervals.
It is not our aim to help gays to live more easily in the
society in which they find themselves. Nor is it to act as a
pressure group to further the sectional interests of gays,
although we do not necessarily see those activities as inappropriate. In the broadest terms we wish to explore the
implications of our identity as gays and its relationship to
the economic and political structures which dominate our
social life. In trying to understand this identity in its historical and cultural contexts we wish to link our situation
with gays elsewhere and with other oppressed groups. We
hope to join with those who wish social life to change so
that ways of relating become more honest, more enriching.
more satisfying not just for gays but for all people. Our perspective remains uncompromisingly marxist in so far as we
see consumerism and commodity dominated social life as
li miting factors in this development.
We are aware of the criticisms on the part of some of
our readers that we are an all male collective and in the last
issue we attempted to answer these criticisms. All of us as
individuals are involved in situations at work, in trade
unions or other political groups where, as gay men, we are
often in a minority of one, and the group that formed the
Gay Left collective arose originally from a need to be free
from the constraints of a straight dominated society to express ourselves and develop our thinking. In view of our
own experiences and given our commitment to the struggle
against sexism the suggestion that an all male editorial
collective implies a bias in favour of male gays cannot be
taken lightly. We must repeat that we do not claim to be
representative of all or indeed any sections that comprise
the gay left. Nevertheless, we realise that in order to
develop as a forum we must not only be open to contributions from all sections, but actively solicit such contributions and encourage those who are sympathetic to
become involved in the work of the collective.
An important part of this involvement so far has
been the readers' meetings (elsewhere we say how we want
to develop this next time). At the last readers' meeting we
had a discussion concerning women and Gay Left which
strongly influenced us. This is a continuing debate as letters
in this issue show. We are open to suggestions as to how we
might extend such forums of discussion.
Contributions to the journal can take the form of
illustrations as well as articles or letters. There is one
proviso. We do not publish articles which are antisocialist, anti-feminist or anti-gay. We would be grateful,
also, to those who would be prepared to undertake selling
Gay Left -- particularly in areas where there are no other
outlets.

PRICE RISE
This was a difficult decision. We tried to work out ways of
keeping the price of this much larger Gay Left at 30p, hut
the position seemed to be this: if the price remained unchanged we would need to sell every copy printed in order
to get near the projected cost of the next issue. 40p seemed
the realistic price, particularly as we do not carry paid advertisements. The point needs to be made, too, that every
penny we get from sales goes into basic costs and making
for a bigger and, hopefully, a better journal.

32 Gay Left

Contents
Love, Sex and Maleness ..........................................................
Come All You Gay Women,
Come All You Gay Men ..........................................................
Communists Comment ..........................................................
Five And A Half ......................................................................
Lesbians Aren't Oppressed By The Law? .....................
Film Review ...............................................................................
Movement In Straight Circles ..............................................
Book Reviews .........................................................................
Letters ........................................................................................
What's Left ...............................................................................
Editorial Note

2
7
9
14
17
19
20
23
28
31
32

THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Gregg
Blachford, Bob Cant, Derek Cohen, Emmanuel Cooper,
Randal Kincaid, Jeffrey Weeks, Nigel Young.

GAY LEFT CONFERENCE

The Gay Left Collective is organising a one day workshop
conference on 'Socialism and the Gay Movement'. The
conference will be at a venue in central London (to he
announced later) on July 2 nd , the Saturday ending Gay
Pride Week. Full details will be in Gay News, Time Out
and in the Gay Pride Week Publicity.

Typeset by Caroline McKechnie

Gay Left Collective 1977
Printed by S W Litho, London E2
ISSN: 0307 9813
Distributed by Publication Distribution Co-op, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1.

In The Balance
by the Gay Left Collective

Effective political intervention demands clear political

analysis. To know where and how to intervene we must
understand as best we can the circumstances in which we
struggle. At certain points any struggle to keep the flame
burning is better than none at all. But in any political movement, and especially in the gay movement where our
resources are limited and our unity tenuous, it is all too easy
to dissipate energies in unco-ordinated activities. This
collective article will attempt to draw up a balance sheet of
the present situation of gay people in this country. We shall
try first to describe how the situation of gay people has
changed in recent years and then look at the overall direction
of the gay movement.
I

Oppression in Liberation

The ambivalence of these changes has led to a crisis in the

gay movement. Now, if you are out at all, you are liable to
be out in a reasonably comfortable ghetto, which tends to
blind you to the need for political activity. Only when a
major confrontation arises, such as the Gay News trial, are
people willing to become activist on the basis of a single issue.
Attitudes to sexuality have a certain autonomy, but they
are defined within a wider social context. Current attitudes
are thus complexly related to the current national social
crisis and in turn to the national and international economy.
The crisis of combined inflation and mass unemployment,
for instance, has almost certainly limited the possibilities of
women leading autonomous lives, for it seems probable that
one of the consequences of the economic crisis has been a
relatively larger increase in female unemployment. The cut
backs in the welfare state have also had an indirect but important part in reinforcing the traditional female role, e.g.
through the cut back of nursery provision and community
health care. Lesbian mothers are one group who will feel the
impact of this particularly sharply.

Despite the real advances of the gay movement since the late
1960s, most lesbians and gay men still experience difficulty
in being homosexual in this society. Although the gay world
is now bigger and more accessible than ever before, the problems confronting homosexuals in the rest of their lives
remain. Lesbians and gay men still face social ostracism,
harassment on the streets and the possibility of losing their
jobs. There is still a discriminatory legal situation in England
and Wales, and an even more oppressive one in Scotland and
Northern Ireland. Individuals are still harassed by police,
press and neighbours. And even when we manage to avoid the
excesses of law and prejudice, there is still the difficulty of
establishing an identity in a gay world riven by distrust and
anxiety.

Periods of economic crisis tend to be periods when the

emphasis on the family increasesboth out of economic
necessity and under moral pressure. There is a tendency not
to see the crisis as a crisis of capitalism. Instead 'lazy
workers', 'immigrants' and 'permissive moral values' are
lumped together with 'queers', 'reds' and 'women's libbers'
as the cause of all our ills. As conservative thought invariably
displaces the economic crisis from the reality of class struggle
to the moral sphere, so the family and its supposed traditional values assume a peculiar resonance. We can see this in the
campaigns of Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers'
and Listeners' Association and the Society for the Protection
of the Unborn Child.

At the same time there are now better social facilities than
ever before. There are organisations which are able to help
lesbians and gay men in trouble with the law. There are
various gay self-help groups like FRIEND and Icebreakers,
gay switchboards and local gay groups. We now have a
flourishing gay press and more media publicity than in the
past. Even the negative factors, like the trial of Gay News for
blasphemous libel, or the press vilification of lesbian mothers,
do also have the effect of publicising the subject and giving
isolated individuals the possibility of realising that they are
not the only homosexuals in the world.

The crusades of the moral conservatives have had an

undeniable influence on the terms of the public debate on
sexuality. There has been an influence on the content of
television programmes and the controller of BBC Radio 4
banned a programme on lesbians because it was too positive.
In areas with conservative local councils there has been an
increase in censorship, for example of films in London,
against pornography in Manchester etc. In this city also there
has been an atavistic attack on men dancing together
('licentious dancing'), thus reviving another ancient law as
Whitehouse did with blasphemy.

These changes are rooted in two factors. First, the

liberalising sexual climate of the 1960s gradually led to
moderate but important legal changes (e.g. on divorce, abortion, male homosexuality) out of which a space was created
for a greater public openness about sexuality in the 1970s.
Secondly, the activities of the women's and gay movements
from the late 1960s expressed and encouraged a new sense of
sexual identity and autonomy.
Despite the importance of these developments, all sorts of
tensions have arisen, because these changes have taken place
within a limited framework. It is easier to be gay than
before, especially if you are white, male, metropolitan,
middle-class and over 21, although even here there is continuing harassment and stereotyping. But there has been an
increase in public hostility towards those whose lifestyles
pose any threat to the traditional values of the family. Lesbian mothers and paedophiles have recently been attacked
and pilloried in the press. What is happening is not so much a
'liberation', a transcendence of heterosexual or family norms,
as an increased sense of identity within society as it is--something early GLF believed was impossible. We are allowed to
do a lot of what we want, as long as it does not go across
certain intangible, shifting but very real barriers. The increasing police pressure on traditional forms of male gay promiscuity, such as cottaging, tends to sharpen the divide between
tolerated and deviant gay behaviour. As the space for gay
people becomes more clearly defined, it correspondingly
becomes narrower, more separate and moreover actually
reinforces the category of 'heterosexuality' which oppresses
us.
Gay Left 2

Crises

Prospects for Change

All this has restricted the possibilities of further changes in
attitudes to homosexuality at the level of the state. Since
1967 no real parliamentary attempt has been made to iron
out the anomalies of the situations of gay men in England
and Wales (e.g. in the army, navy and merchant navy).
Efforts to harmonise the law in Scotland with that in
England and Wales have failed. Northern Ireland still remains
legally archaic. The Rev Ian Paisley has mounted a campaign
called Save Us from Sodomy which wants any manifestation
of homosexuality made illegal if the laws in Northern Ireland
are ever brought into line with those in England and Wales.
The Home Office Criminal Law Amendment Committee on
the laws relating to sexuality will probably recommend some
changes, but the likelihood of legal changes in the present
political climate is minimal. It took ten years between the

issuing of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 and homosexual

law reform. On another level the rising rate of convictions
suggests that the police are more anxious to harass gays than
everoften just to boost conviction rates. There seems to be
little Home Office direction of this harassment, but certainly
no Home Office efforts to reduce it. Efforts of local 'liberal'
police officers to liaise with the gay community are usually
aimed at persuading gay men to collude in the policing of
their own ghetto.
The media helps to foster this ambivalence. Press coverage
of homosexuality is wider now than everthirty years ago
the word could hardly be mentioned, now 'gay' is even used
in headlines. But we still have to contend with all the
salacious stories about the private lives of gay public figures.
Some media personalities are more willing to come out than
before, but the media still find it easier to accept a person as
bisexual. Homosexuality is slowly being treated more
positively in films and television, although most of the time
we are portrayed as limp-wristed caricatures by a whole breed
of camp comics. The assumption behind such images is that
feminine traits in men are inherently laughable.
There is now a greater public presence of gay people. We
have, because we have demanded it, some sort of identity,
especially in the world of leisure and culture. There has not
yet been a backlash. Gays are becoming more acceptable as
long as they do not threaten traditional values or the future
generation. But the word is: Thus far and no further. We have
not yet lost anything substantial of the gains made over the
past ten years. But it is still up to us; our future is very much
in our hands.

The Relevance of Women's Struggles

In concentrating most of our energies in campaigns about
law reform and in defence of Gay News there has been a tendency in the gay movement to forget the ideological advances
made by the various campaigns of the women's movement.
Campaigns such as the National Abortion Campaign bear a
direct relation to our own struggles. The women's movement
has made advances both theoretical and practical in the area
of sexual politics, an area neglected by traditional left
politics. In particular, it has posed the relation between the
personal and the political and the value of autonomous
groups, and has questioned the validity of traditional narrow
revolutionary organisation. One of the major unifying
features of all the campaigns of the women's movement is
their attack on the immutability and 'naturalness' of both
heterosexuality and the roles we learn in the nuclear family.
Thus women have demonstrated the possibility of alternative
lifestyles and different types of relationships to those of
marriage-and-family. The demand for comprehensive nursery
provision can challenge the idea that only biological parents
should be involved in child care. Groups such as Women
Against Racism and Fascism have demonstrated that the
fight against fascists is not an activity solely for street-fighting straight men, for fascism is centrally about the family and
women's place in it. Gay men have gained a great deal in the
recent past from these struggles. There is a common aim in
the struggles of gays and women in the claim we both make
for control of our own bodies. This does not mean that our
situations are identical. Gayness is 'invisible' in a way that
femaleness is not. We have to develop a theory and practice
that extends both into our own specific oppression and the
structuring of human sexuality in general.

Gays at Work
Since the early days of GLF there has been concern
expressed over the problems of being gay at work, and there
have been many attempts to set up gay groups in unions. The
aims of such groups are diverseproviding a social gathering
for gays in the same occupation; supporting the process of
coming out at work; educating the rest of the union membership. The bulk of such groups are in white collar unions
often in jobs such as teaching, child care, social work, which
are points of strong ideological sensitivity. Some groups have
been set up in manual unions but these have been exceptions.

Thames Television's Rock Follies'

II
Disunity in Unity
The gay movement today is composed of small self-help
groups, switchboards, political groups, action groups and
some centres. The only unifying factor of all these bodies is a
common gayness. A growing gay consciousness has enabled
us to develop a general organised response to the political
forces which are attempting to contain or push back the
social and sexual reforms of the 1960s.
It has only been with the setting up of specific defence
organisations around Gay News and the response to the
Evening News attacks on lesbian mothers that we have witnessed a coherent level of activity within the gay movement.
The problems of sustaining gay political activity are enormous and it is therefore much easier to organise defensive
campaigns around specific attacks. The Gay Activists'
Alliance, formed on the basis of the National Gay News
Defence Committee and relying on grassroots self-activity, is
an important new initiative which holds out the possibility of
for united action.

Gay groups within unions have been invaluable in promoting discussion of gay politics and beginning a shift among
other trade unionists. But many of those involved in gay
work in the trade unions are isolated and often find themselves lost in a bureaucratic morass. They are often prevented
by officialdom from contacting other gays. Gays and other
oppressed groups are particularly vulnerable in the face of an
economic policy that sees redundancies and cut-backs as a
solution to the crisis. It is important both that trades unions
recognise this vulnerability and that gays join the common
fight against the cuts.

Gays in the Left

Some advances have been made on a different political level
with the establishment of gay groups within the Communist
Party, the International Marxist Group, and the Socialist
Workers' Party. All these groups have made policy statements
of various lengths and depths on the gay question. Like
trade union work, these groups provide an important focus
for the task of raising issues not only of sexuality but also of
authority, emotions and the ideology of 'private life'. The
development and strengthening of such theory and practice
on the traditional left is of vital importance.
The real problem for us as gay socialists is that more and
more people identify themselves as gay but do not relate to
the gay struggle. And they certainly do not relate to the
world of the labour movement and the left. Given the nature
of the gay community to which they belong this is hardly
surprising. The terms of reference of that community are set
by fairly conservative or ostensibly apolitical forces such as,
at best, Gay News or, at worst, owners of gay facilities who
exploit the vulnerability of their clients. It seems to us that it
is a function of the gay movement to address itself to this
Gay Left 3

wider gay community in order to make the relevance of gayness move beyond the sphere of leisure and culture to which
it is often confined, to inform how we live all aspects of our
lives.

Gay Times

The gay scene is attractive and fun, partly because it has the
resources to make it so. But there could be more to gay life
than that. The success of the recent Gay Times Festival in
London makes it clear that many gay men welcomed the
opportunity to talk to other gay men in an atmosphere where
they were free to meet whether or not they wanted to pick
each other up. Centres such as that in Birmingham provide a
continuing social and political focus, and are of special
importance when the only available facilities for homosexuality are cottages and pubs.
Once gay groups and centres have been established they
begin to widen their horizons. The activities of Gay Sweatshop and of the Tom Robinson Band are examples. Just as
with the dominant media, these have their own contradictions there is no way an oppressed group can suddenly start
expressing itself shed of the scars of its oppression. Sweatshop's ambiguous use of camp, the male identification of
rock music (even with right-on lyrics) these require further
discussion. Yet these groups' public and unremitting commitment to gay liberation offer an alternative cultural framework. They suggest the possibility of relationships and life
styles created on our own terms.

Attempts to work on our own terms meet with opposition

from all kinds of 'conservatives'--gay and straight, left and
right. In these circumstances it is necessary to link forces
wth other groups. The recently established Gay Activists
Alliance may provide a campaigning national structure which
will co-ordinate campaigns around issues as they arise. The
affiliation of gay socialist groups, in for instance North London, Birmingham and Bradford, to anti-fascist groups provides a useful example of the way a gay group can strengthen
its collective links with the rest of the left on a local level.
But there is still the need for a national co-ordinated gay
socialist presence.
This leaves many questions unanswered. As we said at the
beginning, this has been an attempt to draw up a balance
sheet. We have had to keep saying 'on the other hand', 'but',
and using words like 'ambiguous', 'contradictory' and 'complex', because only such language accurately conveys the
present position. We have to end with questions. What are the
real sites of struggle, and are we fighting on them? What are
the points of influence and change? We seem to have made
some gains, but are we blind to what we have lost? Above all,
where do we go now? What is gay liberation? What do we
mean by 'gay'? What should we mean by 'liberation'?

The State, Repression and

Sexuality
Homosexuality and homosexuals

by Dennis Altman

This is an edited version of a paper prepared by Dennis

Attman in 1976. Although written before the appearance of
elements of what has been sometimes described as a 'backlash' it tackles many of the issues we must come to grips with
if we are to understand recent events.

Taboos
Basically this paper addresses itself to the general question of
how far sexual liberation necessarily implies far-reaching
social change, how far, that is, contemporary capitalist
societies depend upon a certain regulation of sexuality
according to what Marcuse has called 'the performance principle'. 1 It concentrates on the deregulation of the taboo on
homosexuality which is a central part of the overall prescription of 'normal' sexuality in western societies.
Why argue for the centrality of the taboo on homosexuality? One could, after all, argue that sexual repression in
western society has much more basic factors, such as the
emphasis on genital sexuality and the restriction of sexual
expression to certain fixed times and places. But while this is
theoretically persuasive I would argue that it is the failure to
fully repress homosexuality that makes it so significant.
Despite the existence of the most severe sanctions which
identified homosexuality as a crime of unique horror
(western sexual morality culminating in the Nazi internment
of homosexuals in concentration camps along with Jews,
gypsies and communists) homosexuals have never been fully
suppressed in western history, and homosexuality is thus
more of an apparent threat to the existing sexual order than
the much more successfully repressed (and vague) areas of
'polymorphous perversity'.
In the last ten years there has been a dramatic change in
the capitalist state's attitude to homosexuality. Because this
has occurred simultaneously with new measures of repression
in non-advanced capitalist societies (e.g. Cuba and some Arab
states) it becomes possible to suggest the historically specific
nature of the taboo on homosexuality.
Gay Left 4

It becomes immediately necessary to distinguish between

homosexuality and homosexuals, and in the latter case
between males and females. The crucial point to insist on is
that homosexual behaviour and homosexual identity are distinct phenomena, the second existing in a much more
restricted number of societies than the first. Even in western
societies it is probably a safe generalisation that the majority
of homosexual behaviour is not engaged in by men, and even
less by women, whose self-identification is homosexual;
rather it is an experience of adolescence or of particular
single-sexed institutions (e.g. prisons, schools, the army) and
is not regarded by those involved as negating their heterosexual self-image. In many non-western societies temporary
homosexual behaviour is legitimated and given official social
recognition. Thus, writing of a visit to Morocco in 1952 Marc
Oraison says:
"The students of the islamic universitywhich I was able
to visitpractised homosexual relations openly and publicly. This did not prevent them, having finished their
studies, from marrying and settling down."2
Such students did not, quite clearly, define themselves as
homosexuals. To so define oneself implies more than just
sleeping with another woman or man, but rather the granting
of a particular meaning to the gender of one's sexual partners, which in western societies takes on considerable importance. In the majority of human societies it appears that
some form of homosexual behaviour is known. 3 Homosexuals, that is, persons identified as such because of their
sexual preference for members of their own sex, are far less
common, and societies that condone homosexual behaviour
in certain circumstances can he simultaneously very condemnatory of those who are identified as homosexuals.4
The existence of a considerable number of women and
men whose self-definition is homosexual, and who regard
homosexual relations as the primary ones in their lives, seems
largely the product of modern western societies, and must be
understood as possible only under the particular social formations of urbanisation and industrialisation. Traditional
societies are organised in such a way as not to allow the
possibility of a child choosing a way of life other than that

prescribed by tradition, thus exclusive homosexuals, where

they exist, take on particular roles, often religious (as in the
case of Amerindian 'berdaches') or become outcastes (which
appears, literally, to be the case among northwest Indian
Hindus). It is only with the breakdown of the ascriptive
family and the very narrowly defined social roles of traditional cultures that it becomes possible to live as a homosexual in other than this very rigid way. Only in urban
societies, where social institutions can develop independently
of the family and clan, can a homosexual sub-culture develop.
Such relative freedom has always been much less available
to women who have accordingly been far less likely to
'become' lesbians or to develop a female 'gay world'. Moreover, while in a male-dominated society homosexuality is a
way for women to assert their independence against the
dominant male ethos, it is for men rather a partial abdication
of male privilegessometimes compensated for by either a
super-butch persona, or the mocking of women through
'drag'. Lesbianism and male homosexuality, therefore, have
very different social meanings.
What biological evidence we have suggests that homosexual behaviour is as 'natural' a way for humans to respond
to certain situations as is heterosexual. But if Gagnon and
Simon are correct in arguing that 'the sexual area may be
precisely that realm wherein the superordinate position of
the sociocultural over the biological level is most complete',5
then for homosexuals to appear in a given society there need
exist conditions in which one can both imagine homosexual
activity and emotion, and then act them out. Where the latter
possibility exists it is likely that a gay subculture will emerge.
And it is precisely in the large cities of the west that one
finds the most open and structured set of institutions catering for homosexuals.
In its early stages this subculture will probably be very
closed and furtive. It will, moreover, tend to imitate the outside world, in particular to reproduce the assumption that
heterosexuality is 'natural' by creating effeminate 'queens'
and butch 'dykes'. This confusion between sex roles and
sexuality tends to break down, so that the contemporary gay
world of north America and northern Europe is far less likely
to exhibit the stereotype features than was true twenty years
ago 6 or is still true in less affluent and liberal societies.
More than purely socio-economic factors are involved.
Attitudes to sexuality, as to sex-roles, are the product of a
complex of factors. Thus, while a recognisable homosexual
subculture is the product of urban industrial society, variations between such societies are to be explained by other
factors. For example, although there are a number of selfidentified homosexuals in most Latin American countries,
even such major centres as Mexico City or Buenos Aires have
a very small and hidden homosexual subculture. This would
seem due to a combination of Catholic values and the
peculiar 'macho' traditions of Latin America, which seem
responsible for some of the most vicious contemporary
homophobia.7
In an odd way the best evidence for the assertion that a
homosexual subculture is the product of modern urban and
industrial society is found in certain non-industrial societies
which have been exposed to the impact of western imperialism. In the large cities of the Third World one finds homosexual cultures that exist in a symbiotic relationship to the
dominant imperialist culture; pre-Castro Havana, San Juan
(Puerto Rico), Tangier, Bangkok all have their gay milieux,
which provide a transition for locals between the traditional
restraints of the national culture and the attractions of the
western gay world. That prostitution is often the result is
hardly surprisingthe 1975 Spartacus 'Gay Guide' refers to
boys at Kundu Beach, Bali, as 'available for a cigarette'nor
indeed does this differ from the normal heterosexual pattern
of interaction between western and non-western societies. It
does, however, help explain the hostility of many nonwestern revolutionaries towards homosexuality, just as the
experience of prison homosexuality helps explain much
opposition to homosexuals by black writers such as Eldridge
Cleaver.8
The so-called socialist countries of eastern Europe are a
special case. There the preconditions of urbanisation, industrialism and the breakdown of the extended family certainly
exist, but the homosexual world is very limited.9 Which

Photograph by
Alan Bistry

The Photographers' Gallery

8 Great Newport Street London WC 2

suggests that the explicitly political dimension of liberalism is

essential for a homosexual world to flourish. It is odd, but
perhaps not surprising, that Marxist puritanism is more
effectively enforced nowadays than that of judaeo-christianity.

Liberal advances
In the past ten years official prohibitions on homosexuality
have been drastically reduced in liberal capitalist societies. I
would argue that the change is in fact equivalent to the
triumph of the demands of a consumer-oriented capitalism
over one based on production and hence represents a more
efficient and modernbut not necessarily less repressiverole
for the state.
Obviously one of the key factors influencing changes in
sexual mores is the invention of adequate birth control
methods, which by breaking the link between sexuality and
procreation for women has, by extension, destroyed the basis
of the ideology that branded homosexuality as 'unnatural' by
virtue of its non-reproductive nature. Sex is now technologically 'freed' to become a commodity.
This thesis would suggest that the homosexual movement
can quite easily be contained within modern capitalist
society, and that those who argue it is no real threat to that
society are in fact accurate. Homophobia is undoubtedly a
dominant attitude in most western societies, 10 but changes
in the role of the state have come about remarkably fast in
the last twenty years. Just as the feminist struggle for abortion and adequate contraceptive services are likely to succeed
in capitalist countries, so is that for homosexual rights, and
for the same reason: the capitalist order no longer demands
that sexuality be bent to the needs of the reproduction of
labour power. Indeed the present requirements of capitalism
are for privatised hedonism to maintain the extensive consumerism on which the system rests, and here homosexuals
represent an attractive market rather than a social threat.
It is my guess that the stigma against homosexuals will
gradually decline, though upholders of the old ethos, will
still seek to enforce it. As part of the new permissiveness
Gay Left 5

homosexuals will no longer be branded criminals, and indeed

their 'right' to serve in the civil service and armed forces, to
marry and to adopt children will be recognised. That is, as it
is no longer necessary to force everyone into the role of
producing and raising children it will become possible for
people to both reject that role by open homosexuality and
to uphold it by parodying heterosexual marriage.

The GayMovement
In discussing the changing role of the state in regulating
homosexuality one need consider the role of the gay movement, at one and the same time a product and a cause of
change. It could arise, of course, only under certain conditions, but to recognise this is not to deny its importance in
helping produce both attitudinal and behavioural change.
The gay movement, as we know it, is essentially a product
of the sixties, and with individual variations has gone through
a three-stage development in North America, Western
Europe and Australasia. The earliest groupse.g. the Mattachine Society (USA), Arcadie (France), COC (Holland) were
low-key and deferential in style, aiming at gradual amelioration of the quite savage persecution that was the norm almost
everywhere in the west until ten years ago.
In the upsurge of radical energy of the late sixties, the
second wave of the gay liberation movement emerged. Unlike
their precursors, Gay Liberation demanded not tolerance but
a radical change in society so as to attain full equality for
homosexuals and recognition of homosexuality as part of the
human potential.11
We are now in a third wave, one that combines the overall
social moderation of the first with the direct political activity
of the second, and is much more disparate. It includes both
church groups and radical collectives; it has increasing links
with the commercial gay world which is for economic
reasons ambivalent in its attitudes to homosexual liberation.
These moves are predicated on the assumption, which gay
liberation rejected, that homosexuals can achieve equality
within society as presently constituted. Homosexual activists,
in fighting for their rights, are also fighting for the triumph
of 'modern' values over traditional ones. But they are not in
any fundamental way undermining the liberal capitalist state.

Limitations
Only a small minority of homosexuals in any way become
involved in the gay movement. As the gay movement became
much more visible and aggressive in the late sixties/early
seventies there was considerable optimism about its ability to
expand and draw in the majority of homosexuals. Even the
great proliferation of organisations that went to make up the
movement could be seen as a sign of strength. The mid seventies have seen some consolidation of the movement, in particular the emergence of a few more structured and permanent
groups such as the American National Gay Task Force. By
and large, however, the gay movement has not become a
mass movement. In as far as one can disentangle the results
of movement activity from more general social change, the
gay movement has had some considerable successes. What it
has not succeeded in doing is involving in its activities the
majority of these people who identify themselves as homosexual.
Why this is so may throw light on something that we
know very little about, namely under what conditions people
come to perceive themselves as oppressed and to organise
against this oppression. The contemporary gay movement
began as part of a far wider socio-political movement. It was
the expression of homosexuals who felt both sufficiently
self-confident and sufficiently angry to make their sexuality
a basis for political action. That only a minority of homosexuals then and in the foreseeable future share these feelings
is a continuing problem for the gay movement.
It seemed self-evident to those homosexuals who became
involved that they were oppressed. It is not, however, selfevident to most homosexuals, many of whom, indeed, resist
this analysis very vigorously.
Two sorts of answer come to mind. The first is that homosexuals have been so badly oppressed, in particular have so
internalised the pejorative judgement of society, that they
Gay Left 6

fail to perceive themselves as oppressed. The best example of

this would be those homosexuals who seek 'treatment' to
'change' their sexual orientation. If one accepts homosexuality as a 'sickness' or a 'pathology' one is hardly likely to see
legal or social restraints as oppressive.
But far more common are those homosexuals who accept
their gay identity and yet reject the movement analysis that
their situation is so oppressive that it should form the basis
of a political movement. It is tempting to dismiss such persons as suffering from 'false consciousness', implying that we
(namely the radicals) understand their situation better than
they. To do this is to overlook one of the realities of social
structuring, namely that only in extreme cases do oppressed
groups not gain some benefits from their inferior position.
This is something that is rarely discussed, but it does seem to
play a role in explaining why groups do not always behave as
radicals would want.
Kate Millet has written in Sexual Politics:

. . . something in me never wants to relinquish what took

so many years hunting down ... I have borne this label so
long it is a victory to embrace it, a way of life accepted.. '
What Millett hints at, that the oppression experienced by
homosexuals and hence the furtiveness of the gay world are
an essential part of a gay identity, suggests that homosexuals
do indeed have something to lose if gay liberation were to
succeed. For the aims of gay liberation, as expressed in its
heyday, imply a fundamental assault on that identity, and
the possibility of, as I once put it, 'the end of the homosexual'. In modern western society, where being a Homo-.
sexual is a way of identifying oneself as a member of a
particular and somewhat exotic sub-culture, this is not
necessarily something to be desired. Like Jews, homosexuals
may choose to cling to their separateness, even if this provokes persecution from the dominant majority.
In its present stage, however, the gay movement aims at
far less than the radical restructuring of human sexuality that
that would mean an end to the homosexual. Rather it seeks,
as Gay Left (no. 2) put it, a situation in which the ghetto
can come out, and to this extent it may well succeed in
attracting a large number of homosexuals who will be able to
have their cock and eat it too. The implication of most current
activism is that homosexuals should define themselves as
another minority group sharing the dominant cultural values
of larger society while maintaining their right to a separate
and equal existence. Homosexuals thus become the equivalent of an ethnic group. This undoubtedly is preferable to
the present situation, but it hardly represents a radical
threat. Much of the contemporary gay movement can be
seen, indeed, as working for the better integration of homosexuals into the on-going society, even to the extent of
propping up such institutions as marriage and the army.

Partial integration
What is apparent, nevertheless, is that only a certain form of
homosexuality is accepted by society, and in so far as the
gay movement works within this framework it will be both
successful and no real threat whatsoever. Even in cities like
New York or Sydney where homosexuality remains technically illegal, there are vast and overt opportunities for
homosexual activity, and the growing numbers of those prepared to 'come out' publicly find that public sanctions
against homosexuals are declining. (Though, one must note,
at a very uneven rate.) The new 'permissiveness' has
undoubtedly benefited homosexuals, though it is questionable how far this 'freedom' could be extendedwhether, in
particular, armies and police forces, not to mention car
assembly lines, could tolerate open expression of homosexuality. Fairly clearly sex is 'free' only in times and
circumstances that are intended for consumption, rather
than production and regulation of the society. In the case of
homosexuality, it is the burgeoning ghetto that offers such
opportunities, just as heterosexuals find an increasing range
of travel and entertainment industries to cater for their new
freedom. But within these limits all forms of sexual expression are increasingly seen as equally valid.
This is the new, open 'pan-sexuality' of the 'liberated'
seventies. It is expressed almost too well by Steve Ostrow,
entrepreneur of New York's Continental Baths,
'In 14 years of marriage I'd never been with another
woman. Have never, because I'm still happily married to
my wife. Sex with another woman would have caused me
deep remorse, but sex at a bath with boys, that was
simple release. And I knew the country was full of men
like me. Sex, after all, is the most intense form of
communication, and this is a technological society built
upon expanding communication, much as capitalism was
built on expanding money; I sensed we'd need to expand
a sexual communication by promiscuity without guilt,
and that if I could create a place in which the middle class
could create its own values, instead of living by values
imposed upon it by the church, the state, as it always
had ...'12
Note that homosexuality is not seen as a full and valid way
of relating to others, nor as a real alternative to the heterosexual family. Its whole role is to provide safe release for
genital urges. Guilt persistsnot now about homosexual
encounters, but about homosexual relations, as any observer
of the current gay scene will notice. There is, clearly, a
parallel with heterosexual 'swingers', who take pride in their
'non-involvements'.
The new freedom offers on one level considerable derepression, while on another promoting the continued
supremacy of the heterosexual norm which, it is now perceived, can tolerate far more 'deviance' than traditional
moralists argued. Indeed this example suggests that the contemporary tolerance of homosexuals can in some cases
extend to a tolerance of homosexuality among those otherwise seen as 'straight', and to this extent, as I shall argue, it
does contain a radical potential.

I want to conclude this paper with what is necessarily a

very speculative argument about the link between male
bonding, the repression of homosexuality and the perpetuation of certain sex-role characteristics among men. The
concentration on males is not meant to suggest that there is
not repression of female sexuality, but that, as Fernbach
argues, its repression is of a quite different nature.
Such an analysis bases itself on one of Freud's central
theses, namely that in individual development we all necessarily repress a large part of our sexual energy, which, nonetheless, persists in a transformed guise in everyone's behaviour.
The possibility of homosexual object choice (as of heterosexual) is something we all experience, even if awareness of
this is deeply repressed. 14 Thus real de-repression of homosexuality need extend through the whole population, and
will have an impact on social organisation far beyond the
acceptance of the homosexual's right to do his or her 'thing'.
This argument sees the repression of homosexuality as
essential in the formation of male bonding, itself the psychological basis for authoritarian and competitive relations in
virtually all existing societies. Both contemporary feminists
and ethnologists, despite their attacks on each other, accept
the thesis that male bonding is a dominant reality in social
organisation. This view is also apparent in Freud, except that
Freud sees libidinal energy as underlying such bonding, a
concept which the ethnologists tend to reject. How far the
libidinal energy which unites all-male groups is specifically
homosexual in nature is not clear in Freud's writings.
Yet while Freud rejects the idea of specifically homosexual urges as being sublimated into the maintenance of
group ties, it is not really apparent why 'there is scarcely any
sense in asking whether the libido which keeps groups
together is of a homosexual or a heterosexual nature' 15 ; the
libido itself is (and can be) neither, but the idea that male
bonding results from the sublimation of homo-erotic urges is
to be found elsewhere in Freud. It is suggested in the famous
myth of the brothers banding together to slay the primal
father; the brothers' ability to coalesce 'may have been based
on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during
the period of their expulsion from the horde.' 16 Most
specifically it is found in Freud's comments written in 1911
on the 'Schreber case', where Freud wrote:
'After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been
reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be
supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are
merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to
fresh uses. They now combine with portions of the egoinstincts and, as "attached" components, help to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic
factor to friendship and comradeship, to "esprit de corps"
and to the love of mankind in general. How large a contribution is in fact derived from erotic sources (with the
sexual aim inhibited) could scarcely be guessed from the
normal social relations of mankind. ..'16

Radical potential
Where the de-repression of homosexuality does seem to me
to retain its radical potential is in terms of an argument
about the inter-relationship between sexual repression and
sex-roles. As David Fernbach has argued:
'The psychological production of masculinity and
femininity involves the repression of homosexual tendencies, but this process works differentially for each
sex. For the girl, it is not specifically lesbianism which
is repressed, but rather any claim to sexual autonomy
independent of the penis. For the boy, homosexuality
seems equivalent to castration, involving the loss of his
position as a sexual subject and becoming like women
the object of male sexual aggression . The famous "male
bond" serves to guard against this by harnessing male
penises in the parallel, so to speak, towards the penetration of female sexual objects.'13

Gay Left 7

If Freud is right then the full de-repression of homosexuality would seem to have very considerable consequences for social order. In a society which maintains
heterosexuality as the norm (even were it to grant full rights
to 'deviants'), the generalised de-repression of homosexuality
would, according to speculation of this sort, begin a process
of far more radical sexual release. Freed from guilt, the
discovery by men of sexual feelings for each other could
make it easier to break down hostility and aggression
between each otherand, by extension, make it easier for
them to relate as equals with women against whom
aggression is also often directedbut to do so homosexuality
would have to move beyond its current emphasis on genitality, often of an extremely aggressive sort, 17 to an
exploration of the tender dimensions of eroticism, the transformation, perhaps, of male bonding into a sisterhood of
men.
The search for full sexual liberation, then, may need to
move in a direction quite opposite to that of the gay movement which, having accepted the need to be integrated into
the dominant heterosexual order, comes to support and
indeed bolster its values. Often there is no alternative; in
practice co-option is better than persecution. But it is not
revolutionary, nor is it necessarily linked to any real change
towards a less aggressive and more loving society. 'Make love,
not war' is an appealing slogan, but it forgets that through
history men have done both.

Notes
1 See H. Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation, N.Y. Vintage, 1961, ch. 2.
2 M. ()raison: La Question Homosexuelle (Paris 75) p.96.
3 See C. Ford and F. Beach: Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (London
1952), pp.132-42.
4 This seems to be the case in the modern arab world. See Karlen:

THE GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE

The prosecution of Gay News by Mary Whitehouse led to the
setting up of a National Committee to organise activities in
its defence. This culminated in the massive demonstration on
February 11th 1978 of over 5000 people through London,
the biggest gay march ever seen in this country.
In the present climate of attacks on lesbians and gay men,
many people felt that the Gay News Defence Committee
should continue in some form to respond to other events,
based on the successful local action groups that had come
together in several towns.
A conference was held in Birmingham on February 25th
when it was decided that continued links were necessary at a
national level for the local activist groups. The name Gay
Activists Alliance was chosen for the umbrella organisation.
A statement of aims was agreed as follows---"The aim of the
GAA is to co-ordinate at a national level the fight against the
increasing attacks being made on homosexuality and homosexuals. We see our struggle as part of that of other
oppressed people and therefore we seek to win the active
participation of the maximum number of gay and non-gay
individuals and organisations in this aim."
A second conference was held in Manchester on April
1st and 2nd in which information was exchanged and workshops were held on several issues the harassment of gay
people in Manchester with the threat of prosecution for
'licentious dancing', lesbians and the GAA, Law Reform in
Scotland, the threat of the National Front and the banning
of Gay News by W.H. Smiths.
The main discussion, however, centred on the organisation
of the GAA itself. First, should it have an explicit socialist
commitment or be a coalition of gay activist groups drawing
in as many people as possible. Secondly, should it be a
delegate conference or try to draw together what ever groups
and individuals who may wish to attend. The latter arguments won in both cases.
The address of the secretariat is
Brighton GAA/Lambda, Box 449, Ship Street, Brighton
BN I IUU. Tel. Brighton 202930.
Gay Left 8

Sexuality and Homosexuality, ch.26, pp.463-83.

5 J.H. Gagnon and W. Simon: Sexual Conduct: the Social Sources
of Human Sexuality, London, Hutchinson, 1973, p.15.
6 See L. Humphreys: 'New Styles in Homosexual Manliness',
Transaction, March/April, 1971.
7 See G. Hannon: 'Oppression in Mexico', Body Politic (Toronto)
N.13, May-June 1974 and the Latin American issue of Gay Sunshine (San Francisco) No.26/7, winter 1975-6 for an introduction
to this area.
8 Soul on Ice, N.Y., McGraw Hill, 1968. Juliet Mitchell suggests a
similar reason for Wilhelm Reich's homophobia. (See her Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.141.)
9 See, e.g. Sue Bruley: 'Ah, lesbianka!' Gay Left (London) No. 2,
Spring, 1976, and Tom Reeves: 'Red and Gay', Fag Rag (Boston),
No. 6, Fall-Winter, 1973. It is however reputed that there is a
more overt gay world in both Warsaw and Budapest. There is also
some interest in changing western attitudes among eastern
European scientists.
10 For a discussion of this term see G. Weinberg: Society and the
Healthy Homosexual, N.Y., St. Martin's, 1971.
11 For a discussion of the emergence of a radical gay movement in
the late sixties see my: Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation,
New York, Avon, 1972.
12 Tom Burke: 'King Queen', Rolling Stone (English edition), May 6,
1976, p.13.
13 D. Fernbach: 'Towards a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation', Gay
Marxist (London) No. 2, July 1973.
14 S. Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, London,
Hogarth Press, 1962, p.11 (footnote).
15 Totem and Taboo, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950,
p.144.
16 S. Freud: 'Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia' in Complete Works (J. Strachey, ed.),
London, Hogarth Press, 1958, p.61.
17 For some interesting comments on homosexuality as a form of
aggression see T. Vanggaard: Phallos, London, Jonathan Cape,
1972, ch.8.

TROTSKYISM AND GAYS IN THE USA

You may be interested in hearing about what's happening

here within the Gay Left movement, and sympathetic
straight movement. This sympathetic movement is small.
The largest political groups are hostile to gays, and to larger
sexual questions. Most of the 30 or so Trotskyist groups are
either ignorant of anything but the transitional programme,
or open to recruitment of gays, but not open to the independent organisation of gays.
The largest group of left gays was in Los Angeles--you've
probably heard of them, the Lavender & Red Union. Well,
the L&RU is no more. After spending a year or two studying
political questions (and nothing else), they decided that the
ultra-sectarian Spartacus League was the group for them. In
a large public meeting held in L.A., with all 30 of the L&RU
people on stage, they announced they wanted to build the
correct leadership. Now those members have been dispersed
throughout the country, and are discouraged from proclaiming their politics where they are. As long as everything
different about them is hidden under sheets, that's fine.
The right turn of events (Supreme Court rulings, Anita
Bryant, etc.) has made the largely male gay movement (the
lesbian movement appears, from the outside, to be fairly
hidden within separatism) more political--but not necessarily
more left wing. In San Francisco, where the male population
between the ages of 21-50 is estimated to be one-third gay,
many groups are operating within the Democratic Party.
I' m a member of the International Socialist Organisation,
the fraternal group of the British SWP. We haven't found the
same problems that Bob Cant has run up against, although
we're a much smaller group, with a very informal leadership
structure. An end to discrimination in all forms is one of our
political stands. Our paper, and I'd be blind to miss it, carries
little on gays other than workplace stuff which is tame. We
did carry an interview with Kate Millet, and why she is being
cast out for her sexual preferences by the Democratic wing
of the feminist movement.
The real trick is for us to translate our official stand into
our regular political work and into our personal lives, to
incorporate an understanding of sexual politics into our work.
Kent Worcester, 88 Fisher Ave, Boston, Ma. 02120, USA.

Lesbians SplAID
by Sue Cartledge
I was on my way to a Lesbian Left meeting one January
evening when suddenly the word that dare not speak its name
confronted me on every news-stand: LONDON'S LESBIAN
BABIES! EVENING NEWS EXCLUSIVE! it screamed in
foot high letters.
Thus was the unsuspecting commuter introduced to a
story that seemed a winning gutter-press combination of perverted sex, shady medical ethics ("Dr. Strange Love"), and
innocent babies; with a dash of racism thrown in. In the
ensuing days the "extraordinary and disturbing case" of a
doctor (full name published to make sure everyone knew he
was Jewish), who had helped a handful of lesbians to have
children by artificial insemination, received extensive coverage in the press, on radio, and on television.

He Called Me Daddy
Few other papers descended to the level of the Evening News,
who not only engaged in extensive betrayals of confidence to
get the original story, but proceeded thereafter to adopt a
tone of high-minded self righteousness. They claimed they
had withheld the names and photographs of one household at
the request of the people concerned, but failed to mention
that the request had been backed up by the threat of a legal
injunction. There were, of course, the inevitable cartoons of
hefty tweed-suited ladies exclaiming "He called me Daddy!".
But the press generally chose to adopt the tone of reason
("cause for concern") rather than the original hysteria of the
Evening News ("BAN THESE BABIES"). However in many
ways the reasoned arguments of the liberal press are a clearer
reflection of the prevailing attitudes towards women, children, gays and the family, and a better guide to just what we
have to fight, than the prurient hypocrisy of the News.

Life Without Father

The nation's dial-an-expert service was on 24 hour standby
that week, breathlessly awaiting their chance to weigh in with
their opinions. Conservative Members of Parliament Jill
Knight and Rhodes Boyson ("This evil must stop") were predictable. But 'liberal' child expert Mia Kellmer Pringle put
her finger on the basic reason for all this fuss: "There is
evidence that some boys brought up without a father figure
have difficulty in establishing normal heterosexual relationships". Poor things, just think what they're missing ... and
note the greater importance of boys' sexuality. No one
seemed particularly worried about how the girls might grow
up. The Evening News stated clearly that its main objection
to lesbian mothers was that their children might not grow up
straight: "Will they too be likely to become homosexuals?
What are their prospects of security and happiness?" Even
Polly Toynbee in The Guardian closed a fairly sympathetic
article by quoting a researcher investigating lesbian parenthood: "There seems not to be any harmful effect on
children's psychosexual development". For 'psychosexual
development' read 'learning to be heterosexual'.

Grave Threat to Nation

One could search in vain through the columns of the press for
one person prepared to say: So what if the kids did grow up
to be homosexual? The message was, we may tolerate those
unfortunates who are already queer but for god's sake don't
let's have them breeding any more! Meanwhile a paradoxical
and vital statistic was overlooked: 99% of existing homosexuals have heterosexual parents! Perhaps the Evening News
could suggest what could be done about this grave threat to
the moral health of the nation ...?

Member of Parliament Drafts Eleventh

Commandment
Sympathetic comment was largely confined to quoting cases
of happy, stable, well off lesbian households with happy,
stable, normal, blond, blue-eyed kids. Don't worry, folks,
these funny people also renovate marble fireplaces, just like
real families. And features of heterosexual nuclear family life,
like wife battering, child-battering, alcoholism and the rising
divorce rate, were suddenly and mysteriously forgotten. "A
child needs above all a normal and natural family environment", stated Jill Knight. While Rhodes Boyson considered
that "to bring children into this world without a natural
father is evil and selfish".

Cornflakes
There was plenty of "concern" and "worry" about the
hostile attitudes the children could encounter at school and
in the outside world. But it didn't seem to occur to these
same concerned people that maybe they should be trying to
change these attitudes, rather than attempting the impossible
task of ensuring that no child ever grows up except in a
white, anglo-saxon, protestant, nuclear cornflakes packet
family. Likewise none of the experts thought to draw attention to society's signal failure to provide money and help for
children and their parents in the form of adequate child
benefits, nurseries etcetera, just so long as they grow up
"normal".

Lesbian Knocks Sacred Cow

It was left to Pat Arrowsmith to make the bold suggestion
that the nuclear family may have its drawbacks: "Many
people argue that capitalism is based on the whole concept of
the family in manageable units. I think that this tight unit is
itself rather unhealthy ... there is far too much sense of
owning a child." But she was alone in putting forward a
socialist and feminist perspective. None of the other
commentators, except in the left press, seemed aware that
many women, and some men, are trying to bring up children
in a different way. The mother-child bond shone unquestioned. In the end, when you scratched the surface of the
quality press, it really looked quite like the gutter press
underneath"They might grow up queer" screeched the
reactionaries. "No, no it's O.K., they'll probably grow up
normal", reassured the liberals. Know your enemies.

Gay Left 9

Two Steps Forward

Coming Out Six Years On by John Shiers
There are an enormous number of areas in the experience of
being gay which have yet to be explored. Thus it is still
possible to find problems we experience in everyday life
continue to be non-issues. The barriers which are built up to
avoid raising certain kinds of questions are as great as they
ever were. There is a gap between how I believe I ought to
live, feel and act as a person committed to a broad socialistfeminist perspective, and how I actually do live, what I feel
inside and the things I do as a gay man in this society. Perhaps for the traditional left this is not an issue at all: it is
"idealist" to attempt to change your life, better to sublimate
all hang ups in working for the revolution. But once you
come to accept that "the personal is political", the way we
live as people cannot be ignored any longer. I want, in this
article, to write about my experiences not in coming out but
in being "out" because I feel, six years after openly defining
myself as gay, that a whole new series of issues, which I
define as "problems", have emerged so intensely that I have
longer and longer periods where I feel totally screwed up
inside.

What "coming out" did for me

Like many others who came out into GLF, I found the
initial experience tremendously liberating. My sexuality, the
part of me with which I most strongly identified and most
intensely denied, was no longer hidden, no longer even bad:
but something positive, good, perhaps even better than the
heterosexual, gender-defined norm. I threw myself rapidly
into GLF and its ideology because it seemed to relate to my
experience, to articulate my oppression. I particularly identified with feminist ideas because as well as my submerged
sexuality, I had always felt inadequate as a male; never found
myself able to play the role that most other blokes I met
before GLF played. Understanding sexism and the oppression
of women seemed like the key which unlocked the prison
gates.1
GLF thus gave me confidence for the first time in my life:
the confidence to be proud of my sexuality. It also gave me
an ideology that located my oppressors: capitalism and maleness, and a movement in which I could work for change.
While I had previously agreed with socialist goals, I had never
been able to cope with the heaviness and severity of members
of revolutionary groups I had met and the whole "macho"
aura they exuded.
But years of self oppression, combined with my childhood experiences, had taken their toll in terms of my selfi mage and way of relating to others. These things I couldn't
explore in GLFand only dimly recognised at the time in
myself. While we constantly talked about "making the personal political", it was always easier to blow up enormous
personal conflicts between ourselves than it was to open up
about deeply rooted feelings and experiences.
I felt acutely unattractive: hideous even, right through the
year that I was a member of Lancaster GLF. I never dared
admit this to anyone yet it was one of the basic underlying
feelings that I took with me into every situation when I was
with gay people. I found it virtually impossible to envisage
that anyone towards whom I was attracted sexually could
ever feel the same way towards me. The costs of rejection
from people in the group were so great that I only dared risk
making any indications to people that I was attracted to
them outside of it. That meant at periodic visits to conferences or to London GLF where rejection mattered less since
I didn't have to see the person every day (and anyway the
people in these contexts were far more bold in telling you if
they fancied you than we were in Lancaster!) and at monthly
parties above a snack bar in Lancaster (the nearest thing to a
commercial scene which existed in that part of the North
West).
The political and sexual parts of myself rapidly became
totally fragmented: I could unendingly argue about the
Gay Left 10

politics of gay liberation; support new people just coming

out and appear "sussed out", but at the same time feel inside
totally inadequate at actually having gay relationships. While
I overcame the worst feelings of self-disgust, purely because
people sometimes did seem interested in me for my body and
not just for my mind, I have still in no way gone beyond the
fragmentation: in some ways it is worse than ever.

Exploring the commercial gay scene

Throughout my time at Lancaster and the following year at
York I was scared of what we defined as the "gay ghetto"
gay bars and clubs. In the group we had a very ambiguous
attitude towards it. On the one hand, we condemned it
because of the money the owners and managers were making
out of gay people; for the values that developed in the people
who used it and for its sexism, ageism and commercialism.
On the other hand, many of us (particularly the men) were
fascinated by it and greatly tempted by it.
It wasn't until I moved to Manchester, the first place I'd
lived which actually had any sizable commercial scene, that I
really began to explore it in any serious way. I found that the
bars and clubs attracted me and repulsed me at the same
time. On the one hand it all seemed so exciting, a magic fantasy world where, for an hour or so on a club dance floor, I
could simply be, transcend all the hassles of the real world.
On the other hand it was all so uptight and unpolitical compared with GLF. I felt guilty going down to it: particularly
because I seemed to be going more often than my friends.
But I rationalised (of course!) that I was taking GLF ideas
into the grass roots from which it needed to build its base. I
was there not because I actually needed the company like
everyone else but because I could aid the politicisation of the
vast mass of gay people!
At some point which I can't clearly recall, I found the
reverse was happening. It wasn't me who was changing the
gay scene, but the gay scene which was changing me. It
happened first in quite subtle ways: I began to be concerned
about whether I was wearing 'suitable' clothes and whether I

Two lesbians being refused admission to Napoleon's club

during a picket by gay activists in April 1977.

.......... One Step Back

was parting my hair in the 'right' way. Then my absorption
became more self-evident: should I wear gay badges all the
ti me in pubs and clubs because they might put people off;
should I talk to anyone around whether or not I was attracted to them or would they get the 'wrong idea' from me being
friendly with them; how strongly should I argue with people
who said things I considered to be gross?
As the "alternative" gay lifestyle which GLF promised,
began to wither and decay, so my dependence on the commercial gay scene increased. The ideas that I felt so committed
towards became ideals, beliefs which seemed impossible to
live out. Gay men were not the potential revolutionaries just
waiting for the word of gay liberation to inspire them to
political struggle that I had, in my innocence, thought. Gay
women I met outside of lesbian groups and uninfluenced by
feminist ideas were no more likely to rise up in spontaneous
anger against male dominance either. The barriers in communication and lifestyle between "revolutionary" gays and
"ordinary" lesbians and gay men seemed more like a brick
wall. There was no way that in our role as gay liberationists
we could get through. Some people in the face of this had
withdrawn totally from the scene in disillusionment. I carried
on going to pubs and clubs mostly because, as I've said, I
needed the company: it was somewhere to go. I also have the
feeling however, that withdrawing can simply mean avoiding
confronting the reality which has to be changed. Keeping
"pure" ideologically and socially can easily end up as a new
form of elitism which judges and despises the way of life of
everyone else. The success rate that gay liberationists like me
have had simply in keeping our own lifestyle and values together is, however, hardly a model to inspire those who
regard it as a cop-out.

Copping out in clubs

What participating on the commerical scene showed me, too,
was that however much I have solidarity with the oppression
of lesbians, however much I enjoy the friendship of women,
I remain a man and as such need the company of other gay
men as well as close emotional relationships with women.
This really hit home when it became obvious that lesbians
were being discriminated against in admission to the two gay
clubs in Manchester. One club banned at the time all women
unless they looked "feminine" enough to satisfy the whims
of the management; the other has a male-only membership
and women are only allowed in if accompanied by a member
(read man). While a number of us protested frequently about
this, and some of us made token attempts to change their
policies, first by a picket and leafleting outside one of the
clubs, then by a petition. When it came to the crunch none
of us, including myself, was prepared to take action which
would result in our being expelled from the clubs, or to boycott them as an individual protest. We valued our gay social
lives more than the principle of outright opposition to
mysogynist male managements. The one disco per week
which comprises the sole remnant of an alternative gay scene
simply did not provide us with sufficient opportunities to
mix with other gay men. We could not cut ourselves off from
the only places where it is possible to meet and relax with
one another. We have completely accepted the terms laid
down for us by the rip-off club owners for relating to one
another.

Coping with sexual needs

The fragmentation between my "political" self and my
"sexual" self which began in Lancaster has, of course, been
compounded a thousand times over since I've begun to go to
the commercial gay scene. I have never resolved my basic
self-disgust at myself; consequently I've never let anyone
relate sexually to me for more than a few weeks. My sexual
and emotional responses are totally disconnected from each
other. I have friends, women and men whom I care a lot for
and feel close to and casual sexual encounters with people

who then get to be defined as "friends" (and therefore not

sexual partners) or who disappear altogether from my life.
Sex becomes a means of affirming to myself that other
people can find me attractive; physically can like my body.
If I go for more than a month without any sexual encounter.
I just feel permanently depressed. I get deep feelings of selfworthlessness. That is how I've come to dabble with
cottaging (which is counter-productive because the guilt after
the encounter is worse than the depression which leads me to
go in the first place) and gay saunas (which are at least in
physically comfortable surroundings).
The other side of this inverse narcissism is that I can only
sexually relate to people who are socially defined as highly
physically attractive. I am relating to their bodies not to
them (which is why I can so often sleep with people with
whom I have nothing remotely in common): I would like my
body to be like theirs. Through sex I can, for a few moments,
"become" the body of someone who is not disgusting like
my internal self perceives me to be.
Basically, 1 would like my sexuality to be integrated into
my friendships and emotional relationships. Sex seems to
have a symbolic meaning inside my head which gives it little
or no connection at all with feelings of emotional commitment. So it becomes almost totally commoditised.

Living with the contradictions

It shocks me how well I can present a public image of being
"sorted out". I can function in daily life, I can participate in
the work routine and have close friendships with people, I
can belong to "Friend" and help some gays through the first
stages of accepting their seuxality. Yet I can't stand being on
my own for any length of time. I go through long periods of
feeling how meaningless everything is. I reject every attempt
anyone makes to have an ongoing sexual relationship with
me. My "public" and "private" lives seem totally divorced.
What is worst of all is that I experience discontent yet do
not know how to begin to change and however much I talk
to friends about things, analyse the problems, they still
remain. Yet I have the feeling that I'm not that peculiar.
Many others share similar feelings although their social
experiences and contexts are different. Perhaps in writing
this article I'm also asking whether it's time to move on in
gay liberation thinking. Shouldn't we start examining some
of the "internal" factors which generate our oppression, how
"the system" gets into our system. How to cope with and
change our psychic structures which have been shaped in a
sexist capitalist world that is also the world we have to survive in but at the same time work to transform. Where, in
brief, we go after we're out.

Making sense of it
This article has been highly personal and, at times, painful to
write because none of the issues it raises have been resolved.
But I think it is important to abstract from the personal and
see whether it has anything more general to say about both
the first phase of the gay liberation movement and directions
towards which we might be moving today.
Firstly it seems clear to me now that GLF ideology (I)
was rife with individualistic assumptions about the potential
of individuals to change by their own efforts. It assumed that
a lifetime of conditioning could be magically wisked away by
one simple act of coming out. While the analysis was of the
structural factors which generate oppression, the practice
was based on individual self-change as if this was boundless.
Changing our lifestyles and challenging ideologically the
gender role system is not going to make the revolution. This
is no reason not to attempt to make such changes and to
challenge sexist ideology, but it is reason to really take
account of the deep barriers both personal and social which
we have to confront and to examine ways of gradually
chipping down.
Gay Left 11

Equally there are dimensions of self which are rooted in

our underlying psychic structure: largely hidden from our
consciousness but powerful in motivating our actions and
shaping our feelings. Perhaps one task of gay socialists should
not be simply to keep the flame of gay liberation ideas alive
but to pioneer new kinds of group which do seek to reach
that underlying psychic structure. Maybe it is only from
beginning to bring that level to consciousness that the foundations for a revolutionary psychology can be built: one
from which we all could benefit.2
Secondly, my anxiety has been exacerbated by the lack of
any norms to provide me with guidelines as to what kind of
personal relations I "should" be working towards. Having
rejected the bourgeois norm of the happy heterosexist
couple, what kinds and quality of relationships are the goal
of gay liberation? In GLF there seemed to be a vague belief
in the "eroticisation of everyday life", of sex no longer being
a "special" act done in "special" places with "special"
people, but merely an extension of a general sensuality which
would be part of all relationships. I have never met anyone
who has achieved this goal. Few of us have even begun to
break down our stereotypes despite mouthing attacks on
"ageism", "sexual objectification" etc. The male gay scene
offers the possibility of sex disconnected in any meaningful
way from emotional relationships. This route is the route
which has been traditionally taken by probably the majority
of gay men who have got as far as meeting others socially at
all, but still at the back of their minds (and mine) there is
usually a strong desire for an intense one-to-one relationship.
Could we not be working out more clearly the kinds of
social/sexual relations which advance the development of a
gay liberationist consciousness and way of life, and which are
merely the result of a brutalisation of our lives under capitalism, a reduction of others to objects which we can consume
and a making of ourselves into objects for consumption? I
don't mean that this should be done in a moralistic way of
laying down new "you should's" and "you shouldn't's":
there was too much of that in GLF. But through thought,
discussion and sharing of experience, and probing of the
internal and external forces which keep us committed to lifestyles we feel discontent about, new possibilities may emerge.
At the moment, I am particularly vulnerable to whatever
norms get to be thrown up in the social groups of which I am
a member. Since I, like many others, have come to depend
on the gay scene, I am particularly likely to be influenced by
the norms which emerge "within the walls" of the scene
itself.
Thirdly, we grossly under-estimated in GLF the capacity
of capitalist enterprises to colonise gay men. We tried to
avoid confronting the gay scene altogether, hoping that some
mass conversion would turn out all its participants from the
bars and into our ranks. But the reality is that they can provide better facilities than we could in a material sense, more
regular meeting places and more exciting discos. Socially we
could not compete and little attempt was made in GLF to
welcome people who did not already have a fairly clearly
defined left-wing stance.
In many small towns up and down the country the bar is,
literally, all that there is for gays in the area (apart of course
for the public conveniences which become cottages for gay
men). Since commercial facilities are obviously going to he
the main places where gay men and probably lesbians too,
are going to meet for a long time to come, gay liberationists
in the gay movement ought to be starting to press organisations like CHE and NOOL to organise effective campaigns to
prevent at the very least sexual or racial or class discrimination in access to these facilities. How this is to be done in
local areas and nationally I don't know, but surely we should
immediately put it on the agenda both as a serious gay issue
and for action. 3 Maybe rip-off, mysogynist gay capitalists do
determine many of the places we meet, but why should they
have everything their own way?4
Fourthly, a lot more attention needs to be paid to the
provision of decent alternative social facilities in areas large
enough to sustain gay groups. The total inadequacy of gay
commercial facilities as genuine centres of gay community
can be seen by briefly looking round at the groups of people
who are absent from them, not by those who are present.
Gay Left 12

Places like the Birmingham Community Centre perhaps pave

the way for what could exist in a lot more areas. The problem is centrally to do with who does the work to get alternative facilities together. How much time is it reasonable to
expect individuals to give up in organising social events?
When they are provided without the hassle by private enterprise, it is tempting to give up the laborious process of hiring
rooms and equipment for discos; making sure Gay Centres
are adequately staffed etc. When the collective anger that
partially gave rise to GLF dissipated, did the desire to create
a radically different form of community life dissipate, too?
I would like to see local gay groups more concerned about
the kinds of community they wish to build in their areas and
the kind of facilities the members feel they need, just as
much as I want to see them working to prevent discrimination in commercial facilities.
I hope this article has not given the impression that here is
poor, weak, innocent John Shiers who has got sucked into a
nasty, horrible gay world which is fucking him up. I actively
sustain my lifestyle: I am not like a pinball being pushed
around without any power to stop the cycle. I choose to use
commercial gay facilities; I consent to the one night stands;
I also have a fairly satisfying and enjoyable social life quite
independent from all of this. Yet my choices are not "free":
I have needs which gnaw away under the surface and which
gay bars, clubs and sex do provide temporary relief for. But
it is temporary: the underlying issues remain and I have no
idea how to begin to go about fully understanding them, let
alone sorting them out in such a way as to give me a constant
feeling of personal integration.
Part of me says "be realistic; realise that personal integration is an illusion in this society. Accept yourself as you are
because it's not that terrible". Yet I can't totally accept that.
Another part of me says, "NOstruggle against your fragmentation", for it is the awareness of fragmentation that
sustains emotionally and not just intellectually my socialist
commitment". And perhaps after all that is the chief gain,
six years on.
Notes
I
My new ideology went something like this. Men oppress women
by their "maleness", by "machismo". Male dominance is structured into all the institutions of society; into our whole culture
and way of life and into our most intimate personal relations.
Heterosexual relations are the lynchpin which holds together the
gender role system. The rejection of heterosexuality is thus a
revolutionary act, particularly for women, but probably also for
men because it provides them with the possibility of developing
non-gender defined ways of relating both to themselves and to
women. GLF meant more than being simply a campaigning
organisation; it was a way of life which, alongside the Women's
Movement, was to revolutionise personal relationships. Through
the transformation of the "personal", the consciousness of the
necessity to transform the capitalist economic system would also
develop, since capitalism was built round sustaining the power,
wealth and status of a small number of white, economically
exploitative men. The rest of us were conned by the subtle kinds
of divisions which translated capitalist authority relations into all
social relations. This could be blown wide open by womengay
and straight and gay men collectively rejecting male power. The

result would be the rejection of all authority relations in capitalist

society since they are built round the "first" authority relation
the power of the man.
2 I think it is important not just to develop a psychological theory:
but also techniques of therapy. Even if (a big if) a revamped Freud
does have a contribution to make to understanding the human
psyche under patriarchy (as Keith Birch was suggesting in "Politics
and Ideology"/Gay Left 5, how can we go about beginning to
liberate ourselves from our pasts? By psychoanalysis?
3 An illustration of the lack of importance which this issue at
present merits can be seen in the refusal of Gay News to publish
either of the articles we sent it about our activities in relation to
the two, sexist, Manchester clubs. Any campaign would also have
to be properly co-ordinated. There was simply too few people
involved in ours and little enthusiasm from lesbians themselves to
participate. They either weren't interested in going to the clubs or
thought that it was impossible to change the clubs' policies anyway. The majority of gay men we talked to, while agreeing with

Julia

A Review by Bob Cant

Hollywood has been one of the major agencies in creating
images of women in the past half-century. The child like
qualities of Pickford in the 20s, the glamour of Dietrich and
and Garbo in the 30s, the toughness of Bacall, Davis and
Lupino in the 40s and the vulnerability of Monroe in the
50s were highly important in moulding images of women at
the time. These representations are also a useful indication
to us of the way in which Western society has altered its
perception of relationships as a whole. The disappearance
of women from many Hollywood films in the last decade
reflects the way in which the women's movement has
forced a re-examination of women's roles and the origins of
these roles. The production of films like Julia (and also the
The Turning Point) in which women are portrayed as active
and creative was a welcome end to this period of silence.
But welcome though this change is, how significant is it?
Firstly Julia was made for 20th Century Fox. Doubtless,
the directors of Fox have as little difficulty in accepting
the profits from this feminist film as they did in accepting
the profits made from the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe.
Secondly, the director of Julia is Fred Zinneman who is
not a woman. More importantly, he has also made films
like High Noon which preach good old American values
like individualism and renunciation. Thirdly, the stars of the
the film, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, are world
famous not only for their screen performances but also for
their off-screen activities. The value, for Hollywood, of
Fonda's support for the struggle of the Vietnamese people
and Redgrave's Trotskyism, is that they are extra curiosity
factors in selling the film.

us that discrimination against lesbians was bad, were worried

about getting on bad terms with the management of the clubs.
Such is the power of club managements in their quasi-monopolistic
position in all parts of the country outside London.
4 There is also an important political point to bear in mind in such a
campaign: that in opposing discrimination in clubs, what is being
opposed is the right of men to restrict access from social facilities
to women. If women (or any other groups at present in the process of defining an autonomous identity for themselves from their
dominators) choose to set up their own clubs and restrict access to
them from men, this I consider to be quite acceptable. To refuse
to support male only gay clubs but to support the right of women
only clubs is a recognition of the specific oppression women
experience from men. If this view is generally accepted, it makes
the terms of such a campaign an important issue to discuss, particularly in organisations composed mainly or entirely of men such
as CHE.

not of a closet homosexual, but of a proud woman defending herself from the pathetic sneers of a man who cannot
conceive of any integrity in relationships which are lacking
heterosexual intercourse. In this context, it is a surprising
omission of the film that we are never told that the theme
of the play we see her writing, The Children's Hour, is
lesbianism.
The rest of the film is pure Hollywood--the flashbacks to
to happy childhood memories, the first night success of the
new playwright, Americans in Paris, the Hitchcockian train
journey and the search for Julia's child around bakers'
shops of Alsace. All these are in the best entertainment
tradition of the Hollywood comedy/thriller--but really no
more. Hollywood has certainly not overturned its conventions in its acknowledgement of feminism.
Indeed, when we look at some of the other films
recently produced by Hollywood we see that its conventions as a whole remain unshaken. Bobby Deerfield is a
seductively made film about how a world famous racing
driver can only find himself through his love for a dying
heiress. Looking for Mr Goodbar relates how a teacher of
the deaf is killed by a bisexual hustler whom she meets in
a singles bar. Choirboys perpetuates the crude Hollywood
tradition of portraying women as either hysterical or
nymphomaniac, if they are portrayed at all; but then this
fil m also degrades gays, Vietnamese etc etc--something to
offend everyone.
Despite the fact that Julia is worth seeing it has to he
judged in the context of films produced by a profitoriented, long-established, patriarchally-dominated system.
That system is far from crumbling when it co-opts feminist
themes into its films. It is extending its terms of reference
and corrupting these themes in the process. Feminist films
can only be made by feminist teams of film makers.

Despite all this, I liked the film. It was good to leave the
the cinema with elderly women who, for once, were able
to see a screen representation of women of their generation
as something other than the butts of humour or pity.
The central relationship between Julia and Lilian
Hellman is depicted as a close, warm relationship between
two women who are attempting to have some control over
their own destinies. One is a doctor and the other a writer;
they are both involved with men without being dependent
on them. Their political involvement, and that of other
anti-fascist women, is a testimony to the activity of many
women against Hitler and Nazism. The images they project
of independence and creativity are powerful and welcome
despite their base in private incomes unavailable to most of
the population.
The two women work to develop their relationship on
their own terms away from traditional inhibiting stereotypes. The openness and warmth of their commitment to
each other is the single most validating feature of the film.
The attack which Hellman makes on the man who implies
that she has a lesbian relationship with Julia is the response
Gay Left 13

by Guy Hocquenghem
from Gaie Presse, numero 1, Paris, January 1978.
Edited, translated, and introduced by Simon Watney.
Guy Hocquenghem has been a leading member of the French
Gay Movement since the "events" of 1968. His first book,
Le Desir Homosexual, appears in an English translation later
this year. The present article, taken from the very welcome
new French radical gay paper, Gaie Presse, pursues some of
the themes dealt with in the book, namely, the sources of
anti-homosexual manifestations and the submission of gays
to dominant heterosexual models. He also examines some
aspects of gay politics in France in the context of the recent
elections, as well as the wider international situation, significantly, perhaps, ignoring the situation in the U.K.. I have
slightly shortened the original text and given it a title and
internal headings.

Morality and Consensus Politics

During the last six months to a year there has been a change
in the consensus of opinion regarding sexual liberties and, in
particular, the relations between children and adults. Up till
now we have all been living under the illusion that we were
following a continuous and progressive movement towards
greater sexual freedom, partly for the population as a whole,
and partly for children. It is this double illusion which we
now have to denounce.
There is one historical experience which it is important to
cite here, that of Hirschfeld in Germany, who achieved
massive and important results when the League for Sexual
Reform counted hundreds of thousands of followers.
Hirschfeld practically achieved the abolition of the Article
175 on the German penal code which condemned homosexuality. And at that very moment a very brutal reversal of
public opinion took place.
The illusion, that liberal positions can he bought and
provide us with new points of departure, is complete.
There is no area in which a more brutal reversal of ideology and consensus politics is being made than that of
morality. It is an extremely changeable area in which opinion
may completely alter within an year. I am not saying that
this is totally what is happening in France; but this tendency
is contradictory to the sexual liberation movements as they
have developed. Such a fluctuation has displaced the problem
of liberation. It has displaced it from the point where it was
situated in the period of Gay Liberation Fronts to another
problem, permitting many more severe and effective repressions the problem of the protection of childhood on
which the consensus is much more easy to realize.

The Role of the Press

In this sense we see that the Anita Bryant case was at first
treated as a joke (plaisanterie) and then effectively turned
into a populist movement. Anita Bryant's initial argument is
not to say that homosexuals are monsters, but to say 'Save
Our Children'.
A special kind of press campaign has developed, the
history of which is interesting since it began with the
American dispatch agencies and carried on with a big article
in the Springer group German newspaper, Der Spiegel, and
was taken up more recently in France with an article in Le
Monde and finally with a dossier in Le Nouvel Observateur
entitled 'Pornography and the Exploiters of Children'.
The Journalists are relaying a species of police scoop,
making it journalistic and extremely marketable of course,
Gay Left 14

since it is itself on the limits of pornography, and consists of

describing in detail the states of vice and depravity to which
the liberation of minors might lead, in particular the liberation of homosexuality, by the effect it has on children and,
in particular, on child prostitution and child pornography.
This campaign has even caught on in The East, since
Paradjanov 1 has been accused of child-rape after having been
accused for a long time of homosexuality; such is the
combative displacement. Firstly, one discovers child
prostitution. This is extremely astonishing if one considers
on the one hand the body of literature which has been
devoted to it, and on the other hand the fact that it has been
a massive and endemic evil since the Nineteenth Century
which, moreover, the principal laws of that period were
essentially aimed at.
As for the disquiet felt by the Nouvel Observateur journalist
at prostitution as such, she starts off from a 'given' that child
prostitution is 'particularly odious'. One must carefully
weigh up the sense of this 'particularly', for it is this that
permits the transference of meaning to different levels.

Child Prostitution and Child Pornography

Child prostitution is equated with child pornography. Both
are seen as 'particularly odious' because, with regard to children, all sexual acts or erotic relationships are seen as 'particularly odious'. In order to make the machinery which makes
children untouchable function, it is indispensible to associate
childhood sexuality with crime, drugs, pornography. It is a
method which, working by associations, is not particularly
new. But the organization of its discourse -- that is to say,
the way in which terms which have nothing to do with one
another are made to appear to follow on, the one from the
other, like homosexuality, prostitution, child pornography
and then sodomy (which is simply and solely a sexual act)
all that ends up creating a sort of unformulated evidential
base for public opinion which understands precisely what is
being driven at. Whether it is prostitution or pornography,
the issue is all sexual relations with children. And for that
unformulated position to be constituted satisfactorily it is
necessary that a certain number of archaic ideas such as
buggery are mixed up with very modern notions such as
interference with children, drugs, etc ...

The Monster on Everybody's Doorstep

One of the essential arguments of this new campaign is the
association with violence. It is necessary on the part of the
journalists to enlarge upon police communiques, to 'psychologize' them, to give them a human presence, so that the
monster must seem to be at the same time on everybody's
doorstep whilst at the same time he must be completely and
utterly unformulated. The method lies in the description of
the monster. One mustn't seek to know what he does or
what he might do; every detail one is given of him only
confirms that he is indeed the monster through and through.
Thus, at the end of the Nouvel Observateur article, the
journalist decides to actually 'meet' a paedophile and falls
upon this individual who appears as monstrous in making
love with kids (gosse) as in the strange blue glow behind his
eyes ... the ring on his finger ... All this is extremely
disquieting.

The Criminal without Crime

One more remark: the sado-masochist style, or the vogue in
leather in certain homosexual milieux, is systematically
associated with violence itself. In this same set of ideas one
can end up saying that a man in leather is a violent man, a
criminal, since he wears the signs of violence. The same thing
happens moreover with the Punks who wear Nazi insignia;

because they wear Nazi insignia they must be Nazis. Here an

extremely interesting criminal appears, since this is a criminal
without crime. But what has been made up by the papers
which press this particular campaign has a direct influence on
the men of the law. A consensus is established between
sexual morality and the elections in which even the ecologists
take their place along side of the Nouvel Observateur, The
Socialist Party, and Chirac2 who has renewed raids on the
public gardens and the saunas, by their very backwards
looking position on different kinds of sexuality. Certain of
them are not far from considering these as pollutants. Thus,
in the journal of the Ecologists Committee of St. Germain
one reads of 'certain ignoble scenes which carry on around
our public lavatories'.
The barristers are at enormous pains to defend their stated
case, that 'the turner aside of minors runs the risk of being
suspected of having a certain inclination for crime itself'. It is
easier today to defend a criminal responsible for the deaths of
of a dozen people than a homosexual or a pederast.
NOTES
1. Paradjanov. Russian film director. Convicted in Kiev in 1974 of
'incitement to suicide' and sent to a Labour Camp. Recently

released.

2. M. Jaques Chirac, the Gaullist Mayor of Paris.

Capitalism and the Family

Agenda Publishing Company. San Francisco, 90p.

Reviewed by Simon Watney

The Introduction to Capitalism and the Family notes, in

familiar reverential terms, the mutual influence of traditional
socialist theory and the critical self-analysis of the
women's movement on one another, concluding that this has
led to a more advanced understanding of contemporary
capitalism "as a complex social form". Unfortunately David
Fernbach's essay, 'Towards a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation', does not fulfil this promise, largely due to its dogmatic
Freudianism.
His analysis of the process of gender identification would,
for example, have us believe that all girls "have to repress
their autonomous clitoral sexuality ... seek satisfaction in
being penetrated by the penis"; and that all boys, regardless
of class or culture, are brought up to "devalue women", to
"cultivate an aggressive sexuality" etc. As in all such abstract
psychologysing, empirical observation is strained through an
inflexible model of child development which is believed to
obey its own "laws" which, in familiar Structuralist jargon,
are held to be "autonomous". Any empirical observations
which might seriously challenge the validity of such theories
are derided as "empiricist" and are, as such, rejected.
Fernbach rightly argues for separate understandings of the
genesis of female and male homosexuality, but locates them
solely on the terrain of some purely genital consciousness
penis envy etc. Like Lacan, he assumes a universality of
sexual forms which leads both into a similar a-social,
a-historical idealism. It is in this manner that we are told that
the traditional constraints upon pre-marital heterosexual
activity required equally strong constraints against any
temptations towards homosexual activity. The argument is
neat but spurious, since it confuses institutional proscriptions
on the part of both church and state with actual lived human
experience. Was pre-marital intercourse unheard of before
the pill? Is pre- and extra-marital homosexual activity not
successfully institutionalised and contained in many societies,
notably Islamic? This is just bad history.
Taboos against homosexuality then are seen as determined by the threat it poses to "the reproduction of labour
power". In this way an inflexible economism is operated
alongside an inflexible Freudianism. Where one breaks down
the other makes do. In this context we recognise the enormous convenience of the vague concept of "relative autonomy", current in so much contemporary "Marxist" thought.
For example, if the position of women or male homosexuals

is autonomous (or "semi-autonomous") from capitalism,

then their determinants are seen as psychological. Conversely, if the psychology of women or of male homosexuals is
seen as autonomous (or "semi-autonomous") then their
determinants are seen as economic. All this shows is two
inadequate and ostensibly exclusive interpretations of human
behaviour locked in circular, if mutually reinforcing, combat.
By far the strongest aspect of Fernbach's paper lies in his
insistence that "it is wrong to believe that gay people can be
organised against the capitalist state and for socialism on the
basis of civil rights". But for no apparent reason gays are
supposed, "by definition", to exist outside of the family, and
hence, we are told, that area of struggle is closed to us. This
seems to me to be an extremely contentious political reading
of the realities of most gay people's lived experience of this
society, a society which is as we know crucially arranged
around the family, for gays as for everybody else. He is thus
forced by the logic of his own position to criticise ALL civil
rights campaigns as being "non-revolutionary", and concludes
with depressing Leninist railings against "opportunism",
"reformism" etc.
It is perhaps a little unfair to criticise this essay so comparatively late in the day. It was, after all, first printed in
19 73. But in the light of so much contemporary theoreticism
it remains vitally important to challenge just this kind of
eclectic "fitting-together" of Marxism and psychoanalysis
which, in Fernbach's fairly representative case, succeeds only
in creating a kind of pseudo-materialist astrology of human
behaviour, rather than a dynamic theory of specific historical
functions and social formations.
In the last essay in this pamphlet Mina Davis Caulfield
argues that men are exploited as social labourers precisely
because they can "be more intensively exploited than
women, not having to nurse and rear children". It is along
these lines that we need to question the terms of our understanding of Gay Liberation, terms borrowed analogically
rather than analytically from other political struggles in the
19 60s. We need to reject all essentialist notions of homosexuality existing as some kind of quantity either above the
history of societies (Marxist Abstract Objectivism) or above
the history of specific individuals (Freudianism). We need
then to ask how we are constructed rather than how we are
supposedly "distorted" from some normative and unchanging gay "essence". At the same time we must not throw out
all notions of distortion from our political analysis in timid
fear of appearing elitist. For, as materialists, we do indeed
claim to "know better".
Gay Left 15

LOOKING AT PORNOGRAPHY:
EROTICA & THE SOCIALIST MORALITY
by Gregg Blachford
One of the main contributions of feminism to socialist
political practice is its stress on the necessity of taking the
ideas of our political activity and theory into all aspects of
our private lives. Feminism has stressed the importance of
breaking down the artificial barrier between the personal and
the political. We, as gay male socialists, have accepted the
validity of this. For us, many areas of our personal lives have
changed greatly over the last few years because of our
involvement in socialist and feminist political activity, such as
as how we relate to the people we live with, to our lovers, to
those we work with, etc. But many areas of our personal lives
still remain unexplored in terms of connecting them to our
political practice. They are mainly connected with sexual
behaviour and include masturbation, cruising, cottaging, S/M
sex and pornography, not unimportant parts of many gay
men's, including gay socialist men's, lives. Much work still has
to be done to analyse these activities from a gay socialist
perspective, especially since many of them are certainly
sexist.

Looking At Pc

Having accepted the idea that 'the personal is the political'

it becomes necessary to evolve a socialist morality. The idea
of creating a morality (or passing judgement on what should
be considered as 'proper' or 'improper' behaviour) would
have been abhorred by the 'do your own thing' libertarians
of the '60s and early '70s counter-culture. Also, the strict,
anti-sex morality that is imposed in so-called socialist countries like those in Eastern Europe, Cuba and S.E. Asia tends
to make us wary of the whole concept of morality. But a
commitment to eliminating the personal/political split
requires an examination of our personal lives. We must consider the effect that our seemingly 'personal' behaviour has on
others.
In this article, I want to examine how pornography can be
analysed from a socialist perspective. The definition of it
must come first before looking more concretely at the
attitudes of political groups to porn and their attempts to get
it on or off the shelves of bookshops. What should our
attitudes as gay male socialists be to these struggles and
especially to the perspective of many feminists? Can pornography have any place in our own lives as we are committed
politically to a fight against capitalism and its manifestations
in terms of economic exploitation and sexism?

Definition
Writing about pornography is difficult because of its problematic nature, its emotive connotations and because of the
many forms that it takes. What is considered to be pornographic varies from culture to culture and from time to time.
It cannot be analysed as a concept or as a reality on its own.
It must be placed firmly within the structural and historical
network of the economic and social relationships from which
it springs.
The term pornography itself was first used in the 1860s,
meaning literally the photography of prostitutes, but it has
its present origins in the 17th century and has persisted,
developed and flourished throughout the 19th century to the
present. Steven Marcus claims that the growth of porn is
inseparable from and dependent on the growth of the novel.
Both depended on urbanisation and industrialisation which
provided an audience of literate people (while England's
population grew fourfold in the 19th century, its literate
population grew 32 fold) and a process for mass printing and
distribution. During these times of rapid change, there was
also the possibility of increased privacy and private experience
(an essential element of porn) in the urban areas especially.
Sexuality, at the same time, was being confined to a separate
and insulated sphere of one's life.
A large part of pornography has to do with fantasy. But
how are images of sexual fantasy constructed in our minds?
People's fantasies do not materialise randomly, although
Gay Left 16

many people commonsensically , believe that their sexuality

(images and behaviour) are private and therefore under their
total control. But since all societies have to organise and
structure sexuality to some degree, values will emerge dealing
with how people should handle and think of sexuality. But
the exact relationship between these dominant values and the
actual behaviour and fantasy that people engage in is not a
direct one and quite complicated. Even the limits of acceptable behaviour are not clear-cut. Also, the extent to which
people feel guilty or embarrassed if their behaviour or fantasies go beyond that limit is unknown.
Despite the lack of biological limits at the level of imagination, it seems necessary that limits on the extent of our
sexual behaviour and imagery are set (by some unknown
extent) by the ideological values of society. If sexuality is
socially constructed at all, it will of necessity be culturally
li mited.
But saying that sexual fantasy and its concrete form,
pornography, are constructed within an ideology is not
enough to provide a full definition. It is also necessary to
note that the nature of pornography is inherently secret,
furtive, guilt-ridden and essentially private. Its subject matter
often involves power and violence in a sexual context.
It can be argued that erotica differs from porn in this
respect. Erotica can be what is defined as sexually exciting
but it may have little association with feelings of guilt or
degradation. Art in certain times and societies has been
blatantly pornographic by our cultural norms but there are
few indicators as to whether it would have been associated
with disgust or depravity in the society from which it came.
Nevertheless, the line between porn, erotica and art is not
clear and is problematic.

Objectification and Exploitation

The basic starting point of many feminists is that society is
sexist, a place where men and women are taught and
expected to behave differently in all matters and especially in
the sexual. Men are given the power to exploit women
economically, emotionally and sexually (although not all
men use this power). Socialist feminists go further and say
that the purpose of this relationship between women and
men is for the production and reproduction of social relations in the capitalist mode of production which leads to the
maintenance of the status quo. This perspective influences
the way in which some feminists view pornography. Their
argument can be divided into two sections.

Pornography

1. Sexist elements of pornography

The publicly available content of sexual fantasy is almost
totally defined by male needs, as is the content of pornography. Porn is made by men and for men. Even depictions
of lesbian sexual behaviour is sold to men for their titillation.
It reinforces the male-dominated view of sexuality which sees
men as aggressive and active in sex and women as passive,
willing victims. Susan Brownmiller expresses a feminist contempt for porn by seeing it as a reflection of America's cultural output which gives an ideological base to the continuation of female oppression in promoting 'a climate in which
acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only
tolerated but ideologically encouraged.' (p.395) She claims
that women are disgusted and offended by porn not because
they are sexually backward or more conservative by nature,
but because of 'the gut knowledge that we and our bodies are
being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of
ridicule to bolster that "masculine esteem" which gets its
kick and sense of power from viewing females as anonymous,
panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanised objects to be
used, abused, broken and discarded.' (p.394)
Brownmiller links this to the philosophy of rape and says
that instead of porn being a 'safety valve', it in fact encourages men to rape or use women whom they have learned are
not 'real'. She would also reject the libertarian view and say
that individuals are not simply 'doing their own thing' when
masturbating to sexist images of women. They are, by extension, objectifying and therefore oppressing all women.

Attitudes to Pornography
Responses to porn vary considerably and are often related to
an individual's political perspective. The conservative, liberal
and libertarian arguments have been aired sufficiently and
don't need elaboration here. Suffice to say that, although
they may seem quite different, they all share the same notion
of a 'sex drive', of a biologically rooted 'sexual instinct'
which is fundamentally selfish, pleasure-seeking and anarchic.
Liberals think that only children and 'sick' individuals are apt
to give way to this 'beast' of anarchic selfishness, since
socialisation is usually a sufficient check. Therefore porn
should be available to those who have been insufficiently
socialised so as to provide a safe sexual outlet for them. Conservatives are less optimistic and see this beast lurking very
close to the surface in everyone and therefore it needs to be
kept closely and continually in check or the social order will
be threatened. Therefore porn must be carefully controlled
or eliminated if possible, or else it may act as a catalyst to
the release of the beast.
The libertarians see the sex drive riot as a beast but as a
means of creative self-fulfilment, if it was not twisted and
repressed by an oppressive state for its own ends. They
would advocate that porn should be published without
li mits, if there is a market for it, to allow the demand to be
satisfied. Whatever forms of sexual pleasure an individual
desires should be catered for.
The feminist attitude to pornography and sex is what I
want to investigate in most detail as I believe it raises issues
central to porn in particular and to "the socialist morality"
in general.

Men have recently been displayed as 'sex objects' in slick

American soft-porn magazines such as Playgirl and the early
Viva. One might conclude that the tables are turning. But
feminists point to the different ways in which men and
women are displayed in these heterosexual mags. The nude
men are personalised and their hopes, ambitions and dreams
are shown. They are sensitive, creative and deep, absorbed in
their own activities, thoughts and bodies. But, at all times,
their masculinity is reinforced by the text which underlines
the butch message. Stunt man Nick 'takes to chicks and
violence the way a duck takes to water.' Shep, a soccer goalkeeper, finds the joys of sex in sport'a climax and a feeling
of conquest'and vice versa. There is usually at least one outdoors shot to establish how healthy and natural, how basic
they really are.
Women, on the other hand, are most often displayed as
being conscious of being looked at by men, as being passive,
waiting for a man. Little is known or said about them personally and what is said is bland and mundane. 'Sexy Susan is
a secretary and loves looking after her boss. Her leisure
interests include sports, fun and sun.' Her personality is
relatively unimportant compared to her naked body with
breasts and genitals exposed. Therefore the way in which
women and men are shown in porn reflect the way in which
they are expected to behave in all other areas of their lives.
Gay porn is often no exception to this as it repeats the
pattern of one partner dominant; the other submissive:
"Eventually, he turned Marley onto his stomach and
pressed his lips into the crevice between the throbbing
cheeks. The whole frame of the smaller man began to
tremble, and he begged weakly for Dick to spare him.
'I hardly ever get fucked', he whispered, 'and by God,
baby, you're hung like a couple 'a horses...."
Gay Left 17

Dick held him firmly against the bed, removing his mouth
from the tender channel just long enough to answer.
'They all get fucked', he said simply. 'There hasn't been a
toy in this room that hasn't gotten this iron up his ass!' "
So, most porn, instead of challenging bourgeois notions of
sexuality, goes all the way in reinforcing the most traditional
views of sex and gender. 'Hard-core pornography is not a
celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of
female sexual activity through the device of making all such
activity, and consequently all females, "dirty".' (p.393
Brownmiller)
2. Exploitative elements of pornography
The socialist feminists have not only argued against porn
from the sexist angle but have also been concerned with the
way in which porn exploits its consumers.
Porn has become a big, multi-million pound industry, It
has grown along with the development of capitalism. The
continual search goes on for higher profits. The method for
doing this has become quite sophisticated because what is
being sold, especially in soft-core, is more than sex as a
commodity itself, but sex as part of a whole lifestyle. A
world is conjured up in readers' minds that is slick, glamorous
and romantic. And that world is for sale. Sexual success is
linked with the professional or business success that is
necessary to finance a glamorous lifestyle that will attract the
beautiful people in these magazines to the bed of the reader.
America has seen a profusion of mags similar to Playboy
oriented to a gay market such as Blueboy, Mandate, In Touch
and Playguy. Homosexuals, feeling less self-oppressed than in
previous decades, have reached a point where they are 'open'
enough to purchase products that are being marketed exclusively for a gay market. As a result, 'Gay is Good' begins
to mean 'good for business'. The following are quotes from
advertising magazines:
"Gay money. Twenty-five thousand dollars. That's how
much your average gay worker earns in a year. Multiply
that by 20 million gay consumers, and you've got an
affluent and very powerful market. Gay dollars are just as
green as anyone else's. And West American Advertising
will help you make sure that they stack up in the right
place.

suggested by both conservatives and some feminists. I want

to outline some problems that will inevitably follow this
course of action.
Firstly, efforts to legislate porn out of existence on the
grounds of obscenity have always failed, not least because of
the essentially subjective nature of all attempts to define it.
Secondly, attempting to enforce stronger obscenity laws
would necessitate stronger and more repressive state apparatuses such as the police, courts, stiffer sentences, etc. This
would he dangerous for the freedom of expression of ideas in
areas other than porn. If censorship becomes acceptable, it
will not be too difficult for the state to move it into political
areas as well. And when the state goes in for control of
sexual behaviour, it does not only centre on pornography.
Birth-control information, access to abortions, prostitution,
male homosexuality and the hard fought for rights of women
are attacked at the same time.
Thirdly, the ends of both the Whitehouse morality campaign and feminist campaigns are exactly the sameno porn
even if their reasons for doing so are opposite to each other.
Will the mass media be able to understand the differences in
the arguments? I doubt it. For example, the campaign by the
NUS against sexist student revues was reported by the Press
as a prudish anti-sex morals campaign.
Fourthly and finally, as with any commodity in short
supply, a black market is bound to emerge which will make
porn even more degraded and furtive and may even increase
the demand for it. And it will still be available to those with
money who will never question why it is being banned. The
real basis of sexism would remain untouched while the sex
shops in Soho have their front windows smashed.
If the existence of porn is to be threatened, then it must
be only part of a much wider campaign to alter sexist social
relations. Then men with some knowledge of what sexism
means might reflect on the implications of porn for the
situation of women and consider not buying it or using it.
The threat of a bar could become a form of consciousnessraising and could be more effective than an actual ban.

What people do in the privacy of their homes is their

businessbig business."
This gay lifestyle, though, does not speak to or for women or
third world peoples or drag queens or anyone else who does
not have the privileges needed to exist happily under capitalis m.
In conclusion, both the sexist and exploitative elements of
pornography set up an ideal world of objects that the readers
are expected to desire. Like advertising and the ideology
which encourages infinite expectations for 'valued' goods,
porn both sets the standards of the commodity market and
denies the satisfaction of needs by encouraging insatiable
wants and only temporary satisfactions through the creation
of an illusory facade of both material goods and physical
bodies, which is unobtainable, mystifying and alienating.
In this way capitalism, as it exists, comes under very little
real threat from the 'sexual freedom' advocated in porn.
Social relations remain stabilised. It shows the ability of
capitalism to co-opt potentially threatening groups or attitudes. Its markets can be expanded while ideological control
is kept over the thoughts and actions of those in the society.
Instead of liberating people sexually, as it claims to do, porn
manages to continue to influence sexual thoughts and fantasies which most people believe to be their most private
domain, under their own control.

What to do
Unfortunately, knowing the problems with porn does not
automatically tell us how to go about solving them, in the
same way in which knowing that the image you are masturbating to is sexist, does not stop it from being sexually
exciting. The immediate reaction is to ban all forms of pornography by having stronger obscenity laws, a proposal
Gay Left 18

Gay Male Pornography

Although gay porn has many similar elements to heterosexual
porn, there are differences that need to be examined. As I
mentioned earlier, gay porn includes the commercially slick
American magazines and the broadly similar British Q International and Him Exclusive. These are aimed primarily at
middle class gay men who have money to spare and who
want to buy all manner of things befitting a 'gay lifestyle'

much of it unnecessary. But many working class men who see

themselves as homosexual also buy them because it is through
these magazines that they find a very acceptable alternative
to the only other image of homosexuals that they have seen
in the past--the limp-wristed John Inman and Larry Grayson.
This may go part of the way in explaining why many working
class gay men become middle class in their behaviour and
attitudes if they get involved in the gay subculture. Therefore, I believe that these magazines cannot be dismissed so
easily out of hand as their heterosexual equivalents because,
although the context is clearly exploitative, the images presented are important to many gay men because they furnish
evidence that gay male sexuality actually exists! I remember
the very exciting feeling I got when I first saw one of these
magazines before I came out. There I saw men kissing and
holding and loving each other; something that I never
thought possible as the mainstream culture manifests itself in
overwhelmingly heterosexual and macho terms. It was proof
of a homosexual community and it was through porn that I
learned of its existence.
The opposite to this is a magazine called Straight to Hell:
The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts etc. It is published
periodically (over 37 issues to date), has a circulation of over
3,000, costs $1 and is definitely not slick. It is printed by just
one man in photo-offset on cheaply coloured paper. It has
two types of articles. In the first type, the anonymous editor
lists the crimes that straight men commit, sexually, in business and in politics. He sarcastically attacks their machismo
and bashes unmercifully at their hypocrisy and violence.
They are 'homo but not sexual', professing love for the
women they only use as trophies, hiding their fear of homosexuals in hatred of homosexuals.
The second part of the magazine consists of stories from
readers who write in and explicitly describe sexual situations
that they have been in and enjoyed. It probably can be
assumed that some exaggeration does occur in the telling of
these stories but it does not seem to matter. The editor continually compares the activities of straight men with these
self-reported sexual activities of homosexuals and asks how
you can feel S.T.H. dirty and sick in comparison to the 'real
filth from the straight world'. In an answer to a reader who
complains about 'too much politics' in S.T.H., the editor
answers that he 'must cater to both those who like to read
obscenity (the political news) and to those who like inspiration (the sex news)'.
But how inspiring are the stories? It's difficult to pick out
one that is representative, but an example follows:
"INDIANA.
It was a very hot, humid night in northern Indiana.
3.00 A.M. and still 94. And to top it off I was starving
for a load of hot come. While walking the streets in search
of some horny stud I came upon Jeff, Reggie, and Terry'straight' rough trade dudes that I bought grass from once
in a while. Reggie asked me if I'd like to take a ride with
them and try some of his new pot. I hopped in the car and
noticed that they are only wearing swimming suits....
By the time we got to the beach I was so high on pot and
horny from being with the guys that I was slobbering. We
went to a clearing. One of the guys told me to get down
on my knees. Terry looked at the other two and said,
' Hey man I gotta take a piss but there's no toilet around.
I'd sure hate to get this pretty sand all wet with my nasty
piss.' Jeff said, 'Man here's our fuckin' toilet right here.'"

men, but a large majority describe well-liked sexual

experiences with the same straight men that the editor castigates in the rest of the magazinethe 'straight rough trade
dudes'; the sweaty hardhats on the construction site; the
nice, humpy married Italian guy from down the street; the
East End Teddy Boys. This is a dilemma that clearly confronts us as gay, male, middle class socialists. We hate macho
behaviour and all its manifestations but like it as far as sex or
at least sexual fantasy is concerned. S.T.H. . is significantly
sub-titled 'Love and Hate for the American Straight'.
The class element of the stories cannot he ignored where
middle class men are still fantasizing about working class
straight lads. Why? Andrew Dvoisin gives his explanation in a
Gay Sunshine article when he says that 'each one wants what
the other has: faggot class and cultural superiority on the one
side; on the other, straight macho supremacy'. What possible
links with feminism and socialism could this attitude have?
So, although it vaguely links sex and politics, S.T.H. does
not have a vision of what structural changes are necessary to
bring about a society that does not have an ideology that is
anti-homosexual, anti-women and anti-children. Do readers
even begin to see that sex has something to do with politics?
S.T.H. is, as yet, crude propaganda for sexual tolerance and
awareness but it takes us nowhere in our struggle against
sexism and for socialism.

S.T.H., though, cannot he dismissed because it does show

us clearly what many gay men's sexual fantasies are and these
cannot he wished away. We may abhor them rationally hut
they continue to exist. Also, its importance, although not
primarily ideological, is structural as it has set up a production and distribution system quite independent of commercial interests. This advance is not at all unimportant.

Objectification and the Socialist Morality

Sexual objectification is a concept and a reality that has
come up very often in this article and is continually being
discussed in feminist and gay men's groups. In this final section. I want to examine it in more detail because it raises
broader issues beyond pornography about a socialist morality
and how men and men and women and women should form
relationships with each other.
As I have said, one of the strongest arguments against porn
is the feminists' claim that it objectifies and therefore
exploits women. It encourages men to think of women only
as bodies and not as whole individuals. The gay subculture
also stands continually accused of encouraging sexual objectification by putting stress on physical appearance and not on
'getting to know people as people'.
Inherent in the argument when presented as above is, I
believe, a moral implication about the way in which women
and men should relate to each other; that is, as whole or complete individuals: their personalities, ambitions, thoughts,
beliefs, etc. must he known before they can see each other as
possible sex partners. Sex only belongs within a relationship
built on a strong emotional base where people see each other
as equal individuals.

Is this liberating? It has been claimed that it offends and

therefore threatens bourgeois morality because it redefines
'sickness' and calls on us to celebrate sexual behaviour as a
mutual exploration of pleasure in the human body without
reference to marriage, property or 'social normality'. I question the strength of this claim because it ignores the question
of what makes these types of sexual fantasies exciting and,
more importantly, it doesn't ask whether we should he
challenging or attempting to change these fantasies.
But we can learn something about the nature of our fantasies by looking at the contradictions that are blatantly
evident in S.T.H. itself. Most of the stories are written by gay

Gay Left 19

To me, this argument has two implications.

Firstly, it seems too close to the absolutist notion of sex
that the conservatives have where they say that sex is only
allowed within the context of marriage and that any form of
sexuality outside of that framework is perverted or criminal
or sad: somehow degrading of `the real thing'.
It can also become a denial of the erotic, an eroticism
that, despite its problems, has only just been allowed to surface ever so slightly over the last 20 years. It denies that sex
can be a number of different things and used in a variety of
ways all of which have the potential of being non-exploitative
and mutually enjoyable if there is an understanding of the
meaning of the sex act to those who are involved. This means
that sex can vary from a brief encounter intitiated by an
erotic interest in each other's physical selves all the way to
sex being used as the basis of a long-term monogamous
relationship.
It is clear that this is much easier for a gay man to say and
women, who have been treated exclusively and dishonestly as
sex objects, may find it difficult to understand the open and
prominent place that sex, especially casual sex, plays in many
gay men's lives. Carl Wittman in A Gay Manifesto attempts to
explain what sex means to us. 'Sex is precisely what we are
not supposed to have with each other. And to learn how to
be open and good with each other sexually is part of our
liberation ... Objectification of sex for us is something we
choose to do among us, while for women it is imposed by
their oppressors.'
A second implication of the argument is that objectification is inherently `bad' or 'wrong'. But in our highly specialised society. we objectify people all the time. When we
purchase goods, we make the sales clerk into an object to
satisfy our needs. Marx did not refer to objectification as
inherently bad but generally as man's natural means of porjecting himself through his productive activity into nature;
the production of the worker. But in wage-labour (that is,
labour in the capitalist mode of production), 'the object that
labour produces, its product, confronts it as an alien being, as
a power independent of the producer.' The worker has no
control over the created object because of the nature of the
capitalist relations of production.
Can we in the same way see sexual objectification as not
inherently bad in itself? Instead the problem could be seen as
resting in the power that men have been given over women
and the way in which that power is used in the daily contacts
and relationships between men and women institutionalised
as sexism in the structures of society. So, what is objectionable is not objectification itself but the power that exists in
one person (the male) to determine the nature of the sexual
and emotional relationship and retain control over it: in the
family (husband/wife): in the advertising business (adman/
nude women used to sell products); on the streets where men
feel justified in whistling at women or even in raping them.
This view of objectification is summarised by Carl Wittman when he says that the use of human bodies as sex
objects is legitimate (not harmful) only when it is reciprocal.
Objectification to work must be open and frank. People are
sexual objects, but they are also subjects, and are human
beings who appreciate themselves as object and subject.
What is reflected in pornography is the unequal distribution of men's power over women. Porn is a sympton and a
reflection of a sexist society characterised by its anti-women
bias and violence. This has to he the target of the attack, not
the emphasis in some porn on the potential for joy in sexuality.

Good Looks
But this view of objectification, while admitting the power
differential between men and women, ignores another form
of power that enters into relationships with regards to
differential physical attractiveness. Human beings in the
sexual market place are evaluated according to their
'exchange value' in the market, some being systematically
denied opportunities for sexual behaviour because of the
unequal distribution of the socially defined marketable
Gay Left 20

capacities. So even the 'honest' objectification as put forward

by Wittman may be seen as alienating because some may not
even get the opportunity to objectify someone else even if it
were to be on an equal basis.
A second criticism of Wittman's approach is that it has the
inherent assumption that both male and female sexuality
inherently needs an object. As Freud says, there is a need for
a detached object 'from whom sexual attraction proceeds'
(p.45). This assumption ignores the argument that since men
and women are socialised differently with respect to gender
expectations, then there is the possibility that it is only men
who need objects and that women may not need objects to
get sexually excited. If this is true it might explain women's
objection to being used as an object when they, in return, do
not receive any pleasure from a similar objectification of
men. Evidence pointing to this might be given by the
example whereby seeing more and more of the bodies of
naked women in men's porn mags was considered to be
better and more exciting whereas women seem to have less
need to see men copulating or with erections and may in fact
be able to achieve sexual satisfaction without reference to an
outside object or even an image. Kinsey reports that a
majority of males (77%) were 'aroused' by visual depiction of
explicit sex while a majority of females (68%) were not
aroused. Further, 'females more often than males reported
"disgust" and "offence".' (p.394 Brownmiller)
Objectification then, as a concept, needs further clarification and explication before moral conclusions can be drawn.
There needs to be continuing debate about the positive and
negative aspects of objectification in porn specifically and in
relationships generally.
At the present time in this society, a struggle is going on
over pornography on two levels. The first is within capitalism
itself where porn is consistent yet contradictory with
dominant values. As a commodity, it has exchange value
that is, surplus value can be extracted from its production.
But it also has a use value for its consumers that is contrary
to some aspects of ruling class ideology with respect to sexual
behaviour.
Secondly, there is a struggle going on in our lives as
socialists who may find certain aspects of porn exciting
despite the fact that the images are sexist and involve
exploitation that may carry over into the 'real world'. The
question remains, can we retain the erotic elements of sexual
i mages and eliminate the sexist and exploitative elements'?
Can we wrench porn from its ideological moorings? Can we
turn porn into art: that is, something that is utopian, ideal
and therefore anti-status quo? These are the questions that
must he tackled in our continuing struggle to integrate our
political theory and practice into our personal lives: an
evolution of a socialist morality.
Works referred to in writing this article:
1. M. Bronski, 'What Does Soft Core Porn Really Mean to the Gay
Male?' in Gay Community News, Boston, 28/1/78.
2. S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, Penguin, 1975.
3. A. Dvoisin, 'A Personal View of Pornography' in Gay Sunshine,
no. 24.
4. S. Freud, On Sexuality, Penguin, 1977.
5. S. Marcus, The Other Victorians, Corgi, 1969.
6. J. Palmer & I. Manson, 'Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short',
Unpublished roneo.
7. Straight to Hell is available by subscription at $1 the copy. Make
cheques payable to Cash and mail to: Box 982, Radio City
Station, New York, N.Y. 10019.
8. Nigel Thomas, Carol Sarler, Russell Southwood and Tony
Nicholls, 'The Sex Mags' in The Leveller, no. 4.
9. Ruth Wallsgrove, 'Pornography' in Spare Rib, no. 65.
10. Margaret Walters, 'Play Males' in Spare Rib, no. 33.
11. Carl Wittman, Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, San
Francisco, 1970.
This article ends with many questions and very few answers. The
issues of socialism, morality and objectification are just beginning to
be aired. More work must be done. In the formulation of these
questions, I want to thank Andrew Hodges, John Marshall, Frank
Pearce, Ken Plummer, Steve Smith and the Gay Left collective for
their assistance. Ideas from written sources are credited at the end of
the article.

Working Class Lesbians

In writing this article I don't know whether to describe
myself as a working class lesbian or not. Although I come
from a working class home I have had a middle class
education but I suppose a black lesbian with a middle class
education wouldn't and couldn't deny her blackness so I
don't and won't my working class roots.

Being a lesbian and working class is very confusing. Firstly

your sexuality is one of the main bases of working class
humour alongside blacks and "poufs" and your status in the
working class is that of a woman, not a very desirable situation to be in. Many working class lesbians see their primary
and only oppression coming from their being lesbians, many
are not aware of their oppression as women because to a
certain extent working class lesbians accept the cultural norm
- they do not see any way in which they could be making a
political statement through their sexuality.
An everyday working class lesbian in the North-East of
England, from where most of my experience is drawn,
usually works in a factory or an office (e.g. rather like her
straight working class sister). The majority of women work in
all-female factories and offices and feel it safer to keep quiet
about their lesbianism because, although anti-gayness doesn't
seem to be very strong or explicit, there would be a hard core
of misunderstanding and ignorance. This might make it
difficult for a lesbian to work with the other women. Also
lesbians have to hang on to their jobs for obvious economic
reasons and as the work is usually hard and boring anyway it
is important to keep the work relationships as easy and
happy as possible. So she can either state her sexuality which
means the other women accept her superficially but feel
guarded about what to say or how to act in her presence, or
deny her sexuality, keep in the closet at work while socially
she and her lover hang round with two gay men and pretend
to be straight. That is drinking in Workingmen's Clubs with
gay men so that workmates can see that they have blokes so
must be straight. From the workingmen's club the foursome
usually go on to a gay club/pub and get on with being
lesbians or gay men.
But even in the gay club/pub the working class lesbian still
has to crack down to gay male culture. A working class lesbian's only source of contact and the only way she can
socialise with other lesbians is through male dominated clubs/
pubs. The overwhelming presence of gay men and the power
which they hold within these social areas becomes oppressive.
In the North East there exist three gay clubs and about eight
bars -not much choice for an area of this size. In Newcastle
for example there are two pubs and one club and a normal
evening will consist of a drink in the pub and then on to the
club, something which begins to pall after five years of doing
the same thing every Friday and Saturday.
To a great extent the working class lesbian accepts and
indulges in the worst aspects of gay male culture and heterosexual working class attitudes. For example because a
working class lesbian is constantly bombarded in her workplace and family with rigid heterosexuality she feels the only
way of making her lesbianism acceptable is to fit lesbianism
into role playing etc. No relief or other answer is given in gay
club/pub culture where sexism and materialism are rampant.
When I first went into a gay club, I totally accepted the fact
that I had to be well dressed and quite trendy and went
through more insecurities about my physical shortcomings
than I ever did when I was heterosexual. The only other
acceptable alternative would be for me to be extremely
butch, wear 3-piece suits, have short hair, ties, pint glass and
a swagger. The two values, as directed by gay male culture
and heterosexuality are obvious here: if you want to be part
of the male dominated gay scene be hip and trendy; if you
want to take on heterosexual stereotyping of lesbians be
extremely butch or femme. To me there was no other way so
I became hip and trendy and just a trifle butch.
Because, generally speaking, the working class has such
rigid divisions of the sex roles it is easy to understand why
working class lesbians fall more easily into butch/femme

by Kay Young,

relationships. Although younger lesbians feel that the butch,

femme roles are not so important as they used to be for the
older women there is still evidence of its presence. Some feel
that it is easier to survive as lesbians within the working class
if they take on easily-identifiable heterosexual roles so that
heterosexuals can identify with them and accept them to
some extent. For most working class lesbians, women's
liberation/feminism is something very unreal and they are
very wary of it and who wouldn't be. In most cases they have
never analysed their lesbianism from a feminist point of view
hut have instead explained it in terms given by this male
dominated society
"I was born like this" or "I'm queer and
that's it!" To working class lesbians most feminists appear
posh talking, upper class women who eat funny "rabbit
food", dress "scruffy"'deliberately, and call their kids
Benjamin or Jane. They feel totally unable to relate to these
women and relate more to a working class man than a middle
class feminist. This sounds like a juicy bit of propaganda for
oppression lying only in class but this is not so. Women find
it so fucking hard to relate to each other in their own class.
how can you expect them to hit it off a treat with women
from a different class. Middle class lesbians, through
feminism, have found some form of unity and culture, but
working class lesbians have not. They have not the same
facility, education, or values as the middle class. How can
working class lesbians find common ground with each other
when they exist in a class which totally oppresses them as
opposed to the liberal values of the middle class. I believe
that until working class lesbians somehow get together with
themselves and other working class women, there will never
he a working communication with middle class lesbian women
women because the cultural differences are so strong.
Most working class lesbians I have spoken to say they feel
totally put down and patronised by middle class lesbians
This is directly caused by power relationships due to the
differing class values. It is hard for a middle class woman not
to dominate or monopolise a meeting, group or relationships
where working class women are involved. Alternatively it is
very difficult for a working class woman to feel confident
etc. where middle class women arc involved.
In my experience as a feminist I feel solidarity with my
middle class sisters as a lesbian, but as a working class
woman I feel separated and intimidated. I do not feel that I
am attacking middle-class women/lesbians but I am trying to
tell my sisters that there is a class difference which will have
to be overcome before we can unite. For example, I was at a
meeting on rape. The majority of women were middle class
lesbians and there were a few women from the local Women's
Aid Refuge. The middle class women did not want to talk
down to the women from the Refuge and so did not try to
explain the things they were saying which made it worse for
the refuge women who felt in turn that they could not ask.
At one point somebody suggested to try to think of ideas to
get the recognition from judges etc. of the brutality of rape.
Immediately a refuge woman said she would go out and get
raped and make a showcase trial. The middle class women
went silent with shock. Instead of explaining why she should
not get deliberately raped they said nothing. They were not
going to reprimand her in case they intimidated her but they ,
in fact put her down by treating her almost as a child who
makes an innocent/provocative remark and is ignored on the
basis of their naivety. So it seems like a vicious circle of misunderstanding through class and cultural power structures
Working class lesbians and middle class lesbians must contribute equally their values to each other, not the middle
class lesbian saying how one must dress, eat. smoke. and
enlighten one's consciousness. There must be a fair exchange
of relevant values between the two before lesbians as lesbians
not middle class or working class can really start doing things
together. We are not all women together because we live in a
class society. We are, though, definitely all women oppressed
together and it is from this oppression which we must fight
that our unity as a classless women's movement will come.
Gay Left 21

Clienting
I NDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS TO
COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS
by Derek Cohen
Every lesbian and gay man, practically, starts her/his life in
isolation. Most of us developed our (homo)sexual awareness
in a situation where we, ourselves, were the only gay person
we knew. In my teens I was fascinated by some of the other
boys at school. It started out as a jealousy of their "attractiveness" rather than an actual attraction, and there was
certainly little sexual about that attraction. Nonetheless
most of my sexual phantasies were about men. My only
contact with other gay men was through the mediacamp
queens on television, documentaries featuring anonymous
"unhappy" homosexuals interviewed in shadow. Homosexual men were rarely shown positively and never as a
movement or expressing collective strength. Though often
portrayed in a better light now, we are still shown largely as
individuals. Gay women were not shown at all. On the basis
of my isolation and the isolated lives homosexuals were
presented as having, I saw my own homosexual feelings as
some sinister base part of my individual nature that I had to
exorcise in order to be "normal". This is a very common
experience yet I, like very many gay people, thought I was
one of very few. I felt I "shared" my feelings only in the
sense that patients in a doctor's waiting room share their
suffering. I never knowingly met any other gay people until
I was about 19 or 20. I saw my homosexual feelings as an
individual problem, as something that was wrong with me,
and as fault of my personality. I now see that being "a
homosexual" is more than a personal characteristic. It is the
result of an attempt to polarise human sexuality into two
clearly separate (and mutually exclusive) areas, only one
of which is deemed "normal".
I am going to use the term clienting to denote the process
whereby members of disadvantaged or oppressed groups
come to accept the conflicts and tensions of being a minority
group as individual personal internal problems rather then
collective experiences. The term "clienting" is derived from
social work and other "helping" professions where people
experiencing certain problems are treated as clients, objects
to be "helped", "treated" and dealt with so as to bring them
as individuals back into line with the rest of the world.
Clienting is when I come to think homosexuality is my
problem rather than seeing the unhappiness as the consequence of certain prejudices, role expectations and dynamics
between groups of people. The conflicts between my own
desire to explore the potential of my sexual attractions and
the limited (heterosexual) role expectations of being a man
are experienced not as role conflicts, as experiences common

Gay Left 22

to a group (and usually this is an other-defined group), not

as something with a root outside myself, but as personal
problems to be overcome by individual effort, personal
growth, personal treatment. The experiences "cliented"
individuals often have depression, low self esteem, a desire
to "get better and be normal", a jealousy of the majority
group's values and attributes.

Our History
There are any number of processes that lead us, in different
parts of our lives, to take an individualistic, cliented view of
ourselves, both in terms of our inner emotions and personality, and terms of our external relationships. Generally we see
our inner worlds as being the essence of our individualityif
all else I know what I feel and what I think. Emotions are
somehow meant to be more "real", somehow underneath
our skin and bone there is meant to be something different
more fundamental and lastingwhen in fact there is just
more blood and guts. Beneath the layers of conflict and
turbulent emotion is, supposedly, and essential "natural"
state of beingyet there are merely different sets of socially
constructed feelings and attitudes. Childhood innocence
and "spontaneous natural ways of being" are as socially
created and culturally specific as adult roles and adult
conflicts, as that magical state of flux termed adolescence.
In contrast by looking at our relationships with other people,
whether at work, in the family, in sex or whatever, collectively we can see our inner worlds as shared experiences
social entities rather than individual personal private items,
and usually problematic ones at that. If I discover that my
experiences, whether of early self hatred and distancing from
my homosexuality, or of finding that such things as sexual
satisfaction and the making of satisfactory non-exploitative
relationships are really difficult, what becomes of my
individual "pathology"? The common experiences that are
propogated are of heterosexuality, happy family life and an
ambitious self generated road from birth to sucess. We do
not easily perceive the complement of thisan excluded nonheterosexual preferenceas being a shared experience in the
same way.
It isn't hard for me to see why I developed this way of
seeing myself. From an early age I learned to relate primarily
on hierarchical lines. There was little emphasis on relating
"horizontally" on a peer basis. My first relationships were
with my parents and my relationships with my sister and
other children were given a lower priority. At my primary,
and later, grammar schools I competed or was put in a
competitive situation with other children for teachers'
attention, status positions, marks. How rarely were we
taught to solve problems collectively! I was never encouraged
to take notes on what other children said as opposed to what
the teacher or the books said. The whole concept of learning
from other "learners" was rarely stressed and is often put
down as cheating. Feeling different from other children,
though as yet without any clear reason, it was even harder
to relate to my p eers and relationships at home and with

teachers became even more important. Once I started

work I had great difficulty relating with fellow workers
except on a competitive individual basis. This competitive
atmosphere reinforced and was reinforced by both a hierarchical structure and an individualised privatised cliented
view of myself. I failed to work collectively with ease at
first; it took a positive change for me to see what I had in
common with other workers, to recognise how our roles
are externally defined. These processes pervaded not only
work, but my living situations, my close relationships, and
my politics.

Declienting: Forging The Links

The consequences of my inability to see myself, for us

to see ouselves, not as "individual homosexuals" but as
members of an "other-defined" group sharing a common
disapproved and supposedly minority sexual preference is a
failure to recognise and utilise the potential of our collective
strength. In sections of the amorphous huddle that is the
gay movement there are groups of lesbians and gay men that
meet and try to make use of their shared experiences.
Recognising the potential of collective strength is the first
step in declienting. My first experience of declienting was at
a CHE conference. I went as an individual homosexual
tentatively trying to come to terms with and accept my
homosexual feelings. I came away Gaya part of wider
identity; not something I could share but something I
blatantly did have in common with very many other people
independently of my will.
My early relationships with gay men showed me that my
insecurity about my homosexuality, my fears about and
ignorance of gay sex, the tentative way in which I felt able
to come out in different parts of my life, all were shared
experiences. I am not idealising my experiencesbut by
sharing them through the medium of this article I increase
the possibility of myself and other people recognising their
very "usual" nature.
In Gay Left meetings when we have talked about our
experiences, whether past or present, I have been surprised
and felt greatly assured by their similarity to my own. These
benefits were not directly my motives for joining a groupI
joined to end my isolationyet the benefits are far beyond
what I could hope to achieve alone.
In seeking to form new relationships or develop existing
ones I find myself with limited options. I can find someone
to "settle down with"; I can attempt to cruise the bars and
discos; I can attend the social millieu of CHE groups; I can
remain alone and isolated. On my own I can possibly increase
my ability to make use of these particular types of choices.
I can persevere longer in sustaining central relationships; I
can gain more confidence at approaching strange men; I
can become a better mixer in social groups; I can cope better
with loneliness. I may gain some benefits from these situations but increasing my options is something that I know I
cannot in any way do on my own. I cannot, on my own,
create new settings for contact with other people and

develop new forms of relationships,because those possibilities aren't created by my own act of will, but by a
continuing creative collective process.
At a meeting held as part of the recent Gay Times Festival
held in London a majority of the men expressed the need to
be part of a group; for the feeling of togetherness and solidarity experienced at the Festival to continue. They had, in
various groups, experienced new ways of relating that they
wished to develop. On their own, outside the Festival, they
would not have been able to create these opportunities, but
working within a group of other gay men made a creative
process possible.
I do not, though, want to give the impression that just by
meeting in groups we will necessarily develop greater options
or become more aware, or in achieving these things find the
going in any way easy and straight forward. Declienting
ourselves means not just sharing experiences but using those
insights to take action in our lives; to confront the group
pressures around us. Collective strength has enabled us to
walk, arm in arm, kissing and cuddling down Oxford Street
on a march; to join pickets at Grunwicks; to establish a gay
presence in many political settings. But it could easily lead
us to give better coffee mornings, perhaps set up more comfortable cruising areas and no more. Men's groups (whether gay
or non-gay or mixed) are particularly problematic
because they can so easily find themselves providing group
support to boulster male chauvinistic attitudes that are
under attack. We should be able to use collective strength, a
collective identity, to move out of rigid ways of relating
rather than to reinforce them.
Further dangers arise as self-defined groups get stronger.
Gay men can become more out of touch with lesbians and
other women, with racial minorities, with other classes, with
other age groups. I could extend my methods of relating
with other gay men and retain sexist racialist ageist and class
prejudices. These attitudes would inevitably produce limitations, and many gay groups have owed their demise or
disruption to conflicts over these issues.

Ghosts

Even allowing for these reservations change does not come

easily. Recognising socially structured emotions and the way
we are presented with limited options for development we
try to behave differently. Yet the past lingers on. How often
do the relationships we had with our parents, or we saw the
them having with each other, reappear in other guises in
different parts of our lives? It remains incredibly difficult
to hold on to new options. I often find myself in situations
eerily similar to past ones. I am tempted to say "how do I
set these things up? What am I doing that is an old habit?"
But I must resist. I am not the only person to experience
these conflicts. I know I share these experiences with others.
The resolution lies not in me, not even between myself and
my friends, but in a wider context. I spent six years as a
social worker treating other people as "clients". I have
stopped clienting other people. I must stop clienting myself.
Correction, We must stop clienting ourselves and each other.
We have collective problems and must not seek individual
solutions.
Gay Left 23

Gays At Work - Boxed In

The main practical emphasis of the Gay Movement has
tended to be with alternative ways of living, construction of
relationships and social facilities. The workplace has not been
an area of major intervention. For while the gay worker's
experience of exploitation and alienation is not fundamentally different from that of any other worker, the gay
oppression which she/he experiences created a different perception of events from that of the stereotyped worker who is
white, male and heterosexual.
Most gays still endure the sexist language of the workplace
whether that is concerned with "knockers" or "engagement
rings", and allow their identities to be ignored and oppressed
Having met a member of Gay Left at the filming of Nighthawks, we fell into discussion in one of the long waits
between scenes. It arose that some of us felt that gay socialists intellectualise the problems and aspirations of the left
overmuch, causing a detachment from the more working class
members of the gay community. The chances of a left-wing
movement of this nature, be it straight or gay, influencing the
general body of union and non-union workers in industry is
sli m. Having said this, I was asked to put my pen where my
mouth was, so to speak; that is to write a non-intellectual
account of being gay in a very working class environment,
ie a paper and container factory.
My job is the printing of containers and boxes, my function is that of Machine Manager. This is considered a skilled
job, although the nature of the work does not demand much
of my actual skill. I served an apprenticeship in a very small
jobbing printers. Throughout this period of apprenticeship I
was not overtly gay in any way in my private life or at work,
although 1 always knew from an early age where my sexuality
was at. Consequently I was very frightened and confused
throughout this time.
Being in a very working class environment, reactions to
one's sexuality are very strong, they call a spade a spade, or a
poof a poof. This may be a very strong reaction but at least
you know where you stand. Of course the common view still
held is that all male homosexuals are effeminate and practise
buggery, although of late they seem to have caught onto the
idea of fellatio. Concerning lesbians they usually assume they
all use enormous dildos and are only indulging in lesbianism
because they can't find a man. Not necessarily an attractive
man, just any man. Although this rather belies the image
given to them in various pornographic magazines liberally
scattered around the firm, wherein the two women indulging
in the act of sexual intercourse are both nubile and the
heterosexual man's ideal. Of course these women are not considered to be really lesbians but just indulging in a little light
relief until the big 'fuck' comes along. As you can imagine
from this their sexual awareness is not very great. Being
presented with such blanket prejudice the obvious course of
action would be for me to refute it; alas here I feel I am sadly
lacking, usually falling into a safe non-committal stance. One
of the few times I made a stand I revealed my gayness to one
of my work-mates. This all started from a CHE programme
on the television the previous evening, and one particular
person's objections to it. His main reaction was disgust about
the outward show of affection between men taking part
although he seemed quite ready to accept the women doing
the same. I suggested that he was disgusted by it because he
equated affection between men as weakness and unmasculine
behaviour. Another work-mate agreed with me and since I
was so surprised at a supportive voice I confided in this person about my gayness. From that moment on he showed
great interest and much sympathy about my being gay. I
obviously raised his consciousness since he has now left the
firm, also leaving his wife and child, to live with another man.
Before doing this he revealed his growing awareness of his
homosexuality.
Although I rarely admit my gayness at work I have never
made a secret of the fact that I live with a man or for that .
Gay Left 24

by John Quinn

by the verbal pre-occupations of their workmates, and the

sexism of their bosses.
This series, Gays at Work, is an attempt to examine some
of these problems. We hope that the experiences of the
people who write for us will be of use both to our individual
readers and the gay movement in its attempt to develop a
strategy for tackling gayness at work. Contributions will be
welcomed. We do not expect them to be in the vein of 'How
I came out at work and still became General Secretary of the
AUMGMW'. We will, however, welcome pieces which honestly discuss people's attempts to cope and struggle with the
problem of gayness at work.
matter that I share the same bedroom. Also I have never
made up false women friends for the benefit of their curiosity.
An interesting aspect of my work is the high percentage of
black people in the factory, the vast majority being West
Indian. When I arrived at the firm my experience of multiracial environments was very limited, having served my
apprenticeship in a new town where there are no coloured
immigrants at all. I think my being gay gives me an empathy
with them as a minority group and also I hope gives me a
more open attitude to accepting them on their own terms.
The most common prejudice towards them at work stems
from people expecting them to react to situations as if they
came from a European cultural background. The West Indian
attitude to gay people is strange in that they seem to think of
gayness as a complaint peculiar only to white people. They
also find it slightly amusing but no threat to their excessive
outward display of masculinity. This attitude coincides with
their attitude towards women which seems positively feudal
at times. Lately they seem to be realising the truth about me
with their references to 'batti-batti-man' (bum-man) and my
'friend' Dennis.
The white workforce are more vocal and aware of gay
people, they seem far less secure of their sexuality. As a
result they camp around far more, acting out their preconceived notions of what gay people are like. Larry Grayson
and the like have a lot to answer for on that score. The fact
that I do not conform to their stereotype confuses and
worries them, making them suspicious of my life style, but
dismissing my being gay, since I look and behave for the most
part like them.
Another aspect of working on the factory floor is the
amount of bodily contact encountered, the need to touch
one another seems to be extremely strong. An assumption
one could draw from this is that they are relieving their latent
homosexual urges. It would seem my arse is touched more at
work than it is at home. Most of this contact is done on a
very subconscious basis, and most of them would be very

affronted if you suggested it had any sexual connotation.

Their whole range of 'butch' mannerisms are at times as
affected as the most outrageous camp 'queen'. It is hard to
know how many of them feel about women as they rarely
drop their 'macho' front on this score. Surely they must have
other attitudes than sexual ones towards them. Women are
very rarely talked about as personalities in the all-male shop
floor environment. I get the impression that many of them
never actually talk to women at great length. The women
who actually work in the factory are reduced to doing
boring, menial labour and are given no incentive to improve
their lot.
The political stance of most people in the factory seems to
be apathetic or at best on an immediate and personal level; if
anything they veer more to the right than to the left. This
could be put down to a lack of information and reading the
Sun newspaper, which seems to amount to the same thing.

Their belief in everything the popular press writes as gospel

never ceases to amaze me.
When asked to write this article it annoyed and saddened
me to know that I'm still in my closet at work, it seemed to
be the last hurdle in my coming out. Having said this,
explaining my gayness to people so outwardly hostile to the
idea frightens me. A martyr eight hours a day is something I
cannot manage just now but perhaps one day. If this article
sounds like a total put-down of the working classes it isn't
intended. I realise that most of the people cannot be bothered
or even find the energy to worry overmuch about minorities,
sub-cultures etc, which do not strongly affect them. After
working long hours in a noisy, dirty, boring and relatively
poorly paid job their main pursuit outside seems to be to
escape from the constraints of their working life. To accuse
them of playing games is, on my part, rather hypocritical as
I am playing a bigger game in not admitting my gayness.

A Cure for Psychiatry?

by Chris Jones

In our last issue we suggested the potential importance of

recent developments of Freudian theory for an understanding
of sexual differences and oppression. This article approaches
the question from a slightly different position by examining
the limitations of current psychiatric practice as well as the
relevance for us now of Freudian concepts. We must neither
ignore nor be totally deterred by the development of psychiatric practice since Freud in appraising his importance.
"Healthiness is a purely conventional concept and has no
real scientific meaning. It simply means that a person gets
on well; it does not mean that person is particularly
worthy. (Freud uses the word 'wertsvoll'). There are
'healthy' people who are not worth anything, and on the
other hand there are 'unhealthy' neurotic people who are
very worthy individuals indeed."
These words of Freud stand in marked contrast to the practice
of psychiatry today. Psychiatry deals in terms of 'normality',
'abnormality', 'illness' and 'cure'. This article is concerned
with showing how the therapeutic judgement and treatment
helps to maintain, and indeed form, an oppressive ideological
superstructure, by ensuring that the dominant ideology is
successfully 'consumed' and internalised by us all, and in the
face of this practice, to see what credence we can lend
attempts to regard psychoanalytic theory as affording a
revolutionary analysis of ideology and sexuality (attempts
which at present are becoming fashionable in certain theoretical Marxist circles).

Bourgeois Psychiatric Practice

Bourgeois psychiatry (and psychology) takes the individual
as its unit of study and meaning (variously described as the
mind, mental processes, or behaviour). A strict dichotomy is
established between inner and outer, public and private,
society and the individual. The lack of an individual's power
over social reality and the meaning the individual gives to
this situation is converted into the language of unconscious
motives. The social order is reduced to a projection of a more
real world of inner psychic conflicts. The unconscious is seen
as separable from the social situation. The individual's
activity can thus be examined apart from the social relations,
of which he/she is a part. Yet psychiatrists cannot be neutral
when working within a mesh of power-structured relationships. The professional psychiatrist, enhanced by social and
'scientific' status along with technological advances, is faced
by the amateur patient/client, who is forced to rely on the
psychiatrist's wisdom. The psychiatrist produces treatment
which the patient/client consumes. The Marxist suspicion of
the expert can combine with the feminist attack on a male
authority figure (it is generally irrelevant whether the
psychiatrist is actually a man or a woman) in order to focus
criticism on this unequal active/passive relationship. Any far-

reaching attempt to democratise the National Health Service,

the relationship between treater and treated, treater and
treater, is inevitably thwarted by the structure itself, which is
a vast monolith of hierarchies within hierarchies.
It is in their roles as deceivers (though of course it may
often be necessary that psychiatrists do not see themselves as
such) that Donate Mabane Francescato, an Italian psychiatrist, has this to say:
"Psychiatrists (along with sociologists, psychologists and
social workers) have become the new administrators of
the violence of the power structure. In the measure that
they soothe conflicts, break down resistance and 'solve'
the problems created, they perpetuate the global violence
by convincing the individual to accommodate to the
oppressive conditions."
The process is simple. The psychiatrist gives an opinion that
someone is ill. This judgement becomes fact, in Marxist terms
a material condition, and once classified as mentally ill, the
person loses his/her subject-status and freedom (albeit a
li mited freedom). Any attempt by the amateur patient/client
to claim otherwise is simply treated as resistance (here used
as a term of psychiatric jargon) and a further symptom of the
illness itself.

The Ideology of Normality

The terms of 'adjustment' or 'treatment' are those of normal
behaviour, which are not measured by any neutral medical
standard (unless an illness is clearly organically caused, in
which case physical treatment is required) but by psycho,
social, legal and ethical standards mystified as medical
diagnosis and prognosis, that is definition and treatment.
Therapy inevitably deals with conflicting goals and values,
and plainly the distinction between normal (Moral) behaviour
and abnormal (emotionally disordered) behaviour rests on
ethical and moral judgement. It is in this manner that
psychiatry promotes the primary values of the community.
In Marxist terms, psychiatric treatment carries with it a
cultural/ideological significance. Thus the effectiveness of
treatment is measured by standards of performance at work/
school/sex etc.we get better by performing better (by
making the grade)we feel better (we feel placated)--we seek
employment (we are being worthwhile)we are getting/staying married or leaving a 'bad' marriage in order to enter a
'good' one (we are being normal). The psychiatric ideology is
simplified for consumption by the masses, endorsed by legislators, courts, churches etc. In the words of Thomas Szasz,
`sort of general ruling consensus as plain commonsense' is
established.
Homosexuality offends this web of 'commonsense'. The
psychiatrist often bases his/her judgement on early familial
relationships-to put it baldly, good family structures produce 'normal' healthy people- faulty family structures proGay Left 25

duce 'abnormal' neurotics. Homosexuals are frequently

defined as necessarily neurotic, and cases of personality disorder. In this context the psychiatrist can explain away
homosexual relationships as inferior versions of their heterosexual counterparts. The man may only play wife, the other,
husband. The butch lesbian only pretends at 'real' masculinity. The femme role is only a charade of 'true' femininity,
and of course many homosexuals do conduct themselves in
this manner, because it is the only structure of relationships
they have learnt, and of which they can conceive, thus providing observation fodder for the psychiatrist.
The only real sign of health and normality is taken to be
the homosexual's desire not to be homosexual, not to exist
as the person he or she is. The conflicts of the gay in the
straight world have been well documented in many books
and articles, but the psychiatrist is inclined to disregard social
context, and reduces the problems a homosexual experiences
to her/his own condition, as a maladjusted/abnormal/deviant/
immature/neurotic etc. person. The psychiatrist when faced
with a homosexual who believes herself/himself to be ill, far
from eradicating the internalised feelings of self-hate,
inadequacy, guilt, respects the person's wish for 'treatment'
and oils the chains that bind a homosexual so that he or she
can move more comfortably, but on no account more freely.
The permeation of psychiatric ideology is extraordinarily
deep, and the problems for the gay in terms of resolving
emotional problems and ridding him/her self of the label
'unhealthy' are vast.

Power Relations in Therapy

The psychotherapist Karl Jaspers had no illusions about the
functions of the therapist. He said
"All therapy, psychotherapy and attitudes to patients
depend upon the State, religion, social conditions and
dominant cultural tendencies of the age and finally but
never solely on accepted scientific views . .."

And we must remember that psychiatry is broadly defined as

the science and practice of treating mental and emotional
behavioural disorders, and especially as originating in endogenous causes or resulting from faulty interpersonal relationships. Psychiatrists are cast and cast themselves in the role of
'scientific experts' on personal relations. The key concept of
mental health (normality) and sickness (abnormality) are
used as their own justification so that the psychiatrist
elevated into such a prestigious position may use his/her
power to discredit different forms of social challenge.
Plainly the ability to respond to this pressure, depends on
how articulate one is, how much influence one has as an
individual and as a member of a class, and how much money
and time one has at one's disposal. Relatively speaking, there
is a world of difference in the amount of control one has
over the therapeutic process, between the patient on the
Gay Left 26

Harley Street couch and the patient in the NHS clinic or

hospital; the standard of treatment one receives on the NHS
may well depend on something as circumstantial as where
one lives.
Faced with this armoury of ideological weapons, the
ramifications and variations of which I have barely touched,
one is naturally drawn to the conclusion that in the words of
Rick Kunnes, an American radical therapist --"as long as we are
not explicitly conscious of and actively fighting against the
therapeutic process, we will remain politically unconscious.'
In attempting to gain a clear(er) understanding of sexuality and using this new understanding to form a base from
which to attack some of the monstrous distortions of human
reality in which psychiatric theory engages, many have
elevated conscious choice and social context, so that a more
complete explanation of a person's social/sexual existence
may be afforded. Marxist materialism is not about the crude
effect of matter on brain, but a relationship, or better still
the interrelatedness of human consciousness within and to
social context. However, traditional bourgeois therapy has
focused on the Unconscious at the expense of the process
and praxis of the human situation; we are turned from a
social context towards one that is intrapsychic. The reaction
to this has been a rejection of the Unconscious, as a mystifier
of social relations. This of course deals with the problem of
the validity and value of all forms of psychotherapy; they
simply become rituals in maintaining an illusory nonsense,
which only serves to placate and deceive people, maintaining
them in 'false consciousness'. This form of attack bears a
striking similarity to that made on religion, as an institutionalised form of ideological control. Thus it seems perfectly
acceptable to talk of psychiatrists as the 'new priests' of a
'secular religion'.

A New Understanding
Yet a newer and quite remarkable trend is a return to the
work of Freud himself and his own concept of 'psychoanalysis' with the claim that if the mistakes and misunderstandings of the past, and the growth of present psychiatric
theory and practice, with its emphasis of adaptions and
adjustment, were all stripped away, a reinterpretation of his
work would offer real hope for a clear analysis of the human
situation. All the more remarkable is that some of the
strongest support for this claim comes from within the
feminist circles which have always been closely associated
with the most vehement attacks on Freud.
Obviously at this stage it would be impossible to detail
the possibilities this viewpoint raises, let alone talk of its
implications for psychotherapeutic practice. However some
important points need to be borne in mind if one is going to
take this path. It is probably symptomatic of that permeation
of psychiatric ideology that I find it hard to dismiss the
Unconscious as a viable concept. It is when considering how
we carry around certain social relations within us, which
cannot be analysed and eradicated by a simple recall to
conscious attention, that the notion of the Unconscious
becomes a valuable tool in our understanding of how
ideology maintains its stronghold over and within people's
lives. It is with the possibility of a repression of ideas, ideas
with which we as conscious individuals cannot cope, that the
complexity of ideological structures can begin to be appreciated, and it is this repression which necessitates the existence
of an Unconscious. With this mode of explanation it becomes
clearer how people may internalise, and indeed be motivated
by, certain 'facts' about themselves, without being aware of
them, and quite possibly finding it necessary to deny their
very existence.

The Oedipus Complex

Our interest focuses on the question of how this 'Unconscious' may facilitate an understanding of the social relations
in which we are engaged. For Freud the contact between the
individual and culture is at the time of a resolution, or rather
dissolution, of the Oedipus Complex. The Oedipus Complex
can crudely be described as that 'structure' of neuroses which
develops because of one's incest wishes. (It was with his
development of his work on the Oedipus Complex that Freud

found confirmation for his concept of bisexuality). The

Oedipus Complex while expressing itself within social
relations is not bound to those selfsame relations. In fact real
events and people are not necessarily present. Juliet Mitchell
describes it in these terms:
"The Oedipus Complex is not a set of attitudes to other
people, but a pattern of relationships between a set of
places actually occupied or otherwise."
That 'pattern of relationships' Freud believed to be a 'universal event'. So in our own specific historical context, the
dissolution of this Complex is worked out within the
'nuclear' family. The nature of the culture into which one
enters is patriarchal for reasons which are bound up with the
nature of the Complex itself. If this Complex is a 'universal
event' it now becomes clear as to why all civilisation is
synonymous with patriarchal culture. If one desires a change
in the nature of 'culture' yet still maintains the importance
of this Complex as an explanation for culture, then one is
going to look closely at the nature of this 'universality' and
the Complex's relation to 'actual social relations', if psychoanalysis is going to be used as anything more than a description of sexual oppression.

Necessary Perspectives
Finally there is a methodological point that must be considered. Your view may well be that psychiatric practice is a
total distortion of Freud's own work, indeed flatly contradicts what he had to say, and therefore can legitimately be

Motherhood
Of Woman Born
by Adrienne Rich
( Virago, Hardback 7.50, paperback 2.50)

Reriewed by Jane Lewis

This is a very powerful and evocative book. Poetic prose was
to be expected, but the book is also finely structured and
Rich's total belief in, and commitment to, her vision of
motherhood provides its strength. Yet somehow it remains a
vision and does not withstand detailed analysis. Either you
empathise with it or you don't, but if you don't you will in
all likelihood still identify strongly with the reconstruction of
Rich's own experiences.
Rich believes strongly that 'the personal is political' and
regards the most personal chapter in the book (on mother/
daughter relationships) as the "core" of her work. This, and
the preceding chapter on mothers and sons, are probably the
most effective. As the mother of three sons, as a daughter,
and as a woman involved emotionally and sexually with other
women, she is able to articulate and identify with so many
female experiences and she has the ability to relate a particular recorded experience to the wider framework of women's
existence. Moving easily among works of history, anthropology, myth and literature, she picks up a letter in Margaret
Sanger's Motherhood in Bondage to illustrate the impossible
contradiction demanded of women by institutionalised
motherhood: "to be natural and play the part", or the had
relationship between Anna Gordon and Stephen in The Well
of Loneliness as symptomatic of the taboo put upon women
seeking intimacy with women (even with our mothers) after
adolescence by a patriarchal system which fears the bonding
of women and the power of motherhood.
Early on in the Vietnam war a Frenchwoman asked Rich,
the mother of three sons, "Vous travaillez pour l'armee,
madame?" The phrase is repeated twice more in the book, as
a motif symbolizing the powerlessness to which Rich
believes patriarchy has reduced motherhood. Women have no
control over either the number of children they shall bear
(abortion and contraception laws having been invoked and
repealed according to the dictates of perceived population
needs over the centuries) or the event of childbirth itself.

seen as distinct from it. Yet one cannot examine the nature
of psychiatry's role today without accounting for its historical development, and that must include an honest analysis of
Freud's work, particularly his own very specific understanding of the Unconscious, and what links that may have with
present-day experience. Speaking of the "gross perversion for
primitive or ideological purposes" of psychoanalysis Mitchell
says,
"It is another question whether or not there is something
within Freud's work that leads to this ideological abuse.
In a sense it is obvious that there must be, but exactly
why or what it is, is a complex and interesting subject and
whatever it is, it would not, of course, invalidate what
surrounds it, though it should be extracted from it and
rejected."
That must be the main priority of those who wish to offer us
a reappraisal of Freud, for unless that is done, we may he
embarking on a course of action the results of which may
well be reflection of those 'facts' against which we are
presently struggling.
Books referred to in the writing of this article:
Thomas Szasz The Myth of Mental Illness - Ideology and Insanity.
Radical Therapist Collective The Radical Therapist.
Phil Brown (editor) Radical Psychology.
Juliet Mitchell Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
Karl Jaspers 'The Nature of Psychotherapy' from his General Psycho-

pathology.

Rich sees patriarchy as the factor common to all present

day societies and thus as the fundamental determinant of
women's oppression. It is not clear how patriarchy is to he
defined, how it created "the institution of motherhood", or
how exactly this institution operates. We are provided only
with a forceful description of the pain and violence suffered
by mothers actual and potential in our society (which women
have been taught to consider 'natural') and, via an exploration of a little anthropology and a lot of myth, a reconstruction of "pre-patriarchal" motherhood. We have to take the
interaction between patriarchy and motherhood on trust.
Rich states briefly that the family is the core of patriarchy
and institutionalised motherhood and heterosexual relations
are essential to its existence, but she does not elaborate.
What exactly our strategy should he in the light of this is
unclear. A return to some form of matriarchy is not seriously
suggested. The discussion of pre-patriarchal motherhood is
rather to fill the need Rich feels for traditions of female
power. Nonetheless, Rich feels that we must work to abolish
patriarchy because only then will institutionalised motherhood disappear. So, how is it to be done? Rich catalogues
very briefly the collective efforts of women in the States to
confront some typical situations where gay women are denied
custody of children, abortions are hard to obtain and home
births unheard of. But it appears that the chief force for
change must come from within our own heads. We must rethink.
Rich undoubtedly makes a valid point when she describes
the way in which the influence of patriarchal attitudes has
warped women's attitudes to their own bodies and their
views of childbearing. Many women, for example, do feel
distaste and revulsion at the early mother-goddess figures
which emphasize breast and belly. The childless woman does
often congratulate herself on her 'good sense' and the woman
with many children and few support services channels her
anger into envy of the 'child-free'. But will an individual
solution, whereby each of us resolves to change the way in
which we love and bring up any sons or daughters we might
have, really work?
'The personal is political' was the rallying cry of consciousness raising groups in the women's movement and these
often came to grief for lack of a collective strategy when
consciousnesses had been raised. For all its insights. Rich's
work is similarly unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, it is one of the
most readable, moving books to have come out of the
women's presses of late.
Gay Left 27

Jubilee

Reviewed by Nigel Young

"Politics has had it ... Marxism, capitalism and socialism are

all part of the great ant heap, building the same materialist,
commercial culture", says Derek Jarman in Gay News 137.
However the nihilism of his film, Jubilee, is no less rooted in
a political attitude, and in some ways a very nostalgic and reactionary attitude too.
None of us would argue that we live in a perfect society,
but it is senseless to dismiss the gains achieved through
political struggle over the last century, whatever the problems
are in 1978. In Jubilee these gains are dismissed. Society is
represented as plastic and meaningless. Queen Elizabeth I is
reincarnated and surveys, horror struck, the decadence and
destruction of that society. A group of punk terrorists become the symbol for the final protest against the horrific
progress of the twentieth century. It is an amusing if
unintended paradox because today's political "ant heap" does allow
the politics of protestQueen Elizabeth's non-conformists got
their heads chopped off or were burnt at the stake.
The punks in Jarman's film confront us with gory images,
shocking images, decadent images, but are they more than the
the reflections of the eccentricities of Jarman's mind? Do
they tell us anything about the nature of punk, women, gays,
and finally the complex relation between sex, power and
violence?
Punk may be a rebellion and a protest against social and
political conventions; it may be about anti-regulation, antiplanning, anti today's realities and tomorrow's dreams.
"Don't dream it, be it" says one of the characters in the film.
Punk seems to have no structures, no institutions. No
individuals have power in the punk world. Jarman's punks,
though, are given power as a roving band of individualised
terrorists and they are destroyed by other individuals (the
police) who have more power. In Jubilee he has reconstructed punk so that it becomes the preserve of an elite group of
terrorists. We are therefore forced to dream what we cannot
be. In this sense Jarman's film is a cabaret of elitist political
individualism and self destruction. It makes punk the
preserve of minor superstars, the antithesis of punk's avowed
aims.
The central role of women in Jubilee is totally undermined by the way Jarman presents them as caricatures of
liberated women. They are physically, sexually and aesthetically aggressive. The pinnacle of their achievement becomes
the ability to sexually objectify, torture and destroy as well
as any man. These are depressing images which reinforce the
power of masculinism, rather than the power of women.
Jarman offers no anti-masculine perspective for women to
control their own lives and therefore their experience of
rebellion is dominated by male forces.
Just as the images of women are constructed within a conventional framework so are the images of gay men. Lesbians
play their usual non-existent role in this film. Two punk
brothers love each other gently between the sheets. But apart
from being nice to each other, which is a rarity for gays in
fil ms, they are unexamined as personalities. Their relationship to the women is unexplored, and their own convictions
unstated. Two sensuous men, but in the end about as accessible as a super stud in Play Girl. And to cap it all, like all nice
gay guys, they get murdered.
As far as the relationship between sex power and violence
is concerned, Jarman overindulges in the use of sadistic
images and in so doing he dulls rather than disturbs, shocks
rather than analyses. For instance, a pyromaniac sets fire to a
baby in a pram, another punk woman kills her lover after he
is fucked by her, there is a ritualised, half crazed, violent
assault on a transvestite cafe assistant, we watch the cutting
to pieces, with broken glass, of a pretty punk boy by police
riding motor bikes and wearing leather boots and walking like
fascits- -hardly original, the gunning down of the gay brothers
by the same policemen and the revenge killing by the women
of the policemen; one is disembowelled and dies with an
erection, the other is blown up by a molotov cocktail.
Gay Left 28

Beyond making me feel queezy these events seem a crude

analysis of the ways in which sexual oppression is distorted
in modern society. In the last fifty years we have already had
extensive writings (Marcuse and Reich) on the ways our
sexual energy has been channelled and controlled and the
effects this can have. But whereas past writers on this subject
have suggested creative uses of the release of that energy,
Jarman offers us none. Will it help us to lead fuller lives,
make us happier, achieve personal liberation or freedom from
economic exploitation? For Jarman the answer is obviously
no. He calls those struggles "the ant-heap of politics ...
building a materialist culture' .
In the end Jubilee pretends to be a banquet but when the
curtains close you feel you've only been given the crumbs
a freaks' show.

Switchboard

LONDON GAY SWITCHBOARD

London Gay Switchboard, open 24 hours a day, took over

117,000 calls in 1977, and it is already clear that the total
for 1978 will exceed thismany of the calls being from
people who have had no previous contact with the gay
community. New volunteers are regularly needed to help
cope with the ever-increasing volume of callsalthough we
have three phones, we cannot always muster two, let alone
three volunteers to cover every shift, with the result that we
often get complaints from callers that our number is continually engaged, and urgent calls (e.g. from people who have
just been busted) may get delayed.
Volunteers need to be able to deal swiftly and accurately
with straightforward information calls, as well as coping with
a wide range of counselling calls, and are also expected to
help with the mountain of 'administrative' work behind the
scenes which keeps the service going.
Prospective volunteers should initially phone London Gay
Switchboard (01 837 7324) and leave their phone number
and address, and they will be contacted in due course and
invited to an interview.

Kollontai

Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings. Translated

with an introduction and commentaries by Alix

Holt. Allison & Busby 1978 3.50 paperback.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Weeks

For the post-revolutionary generation of the 1920s

Alexandra Kollontai was the epitome of the new communist woman. For radicals in the West she was the embodiment of the will to transform sexual relations in the new
Russia; she was an Honorary President of the British
Sexological Society, a sponsor of the World League for
Sexual Reform. For the revolutionary she was the prophet
of sexual anarchy, "free love", sex as a glass of water. And
for the gathering conservatism in the Soviet Union from the
mid 1920s she was the butt of sharp polemic and moral
censure. She lived all the major crises in the international
workers' movement from the early part of the century from
the first movement of revolutionary hope in 1905 to the
retreat into single party dictatorship and the stifling of inner
party democracy; the decline into bureaucratic conservatism
and then Stalinism; and the painful, effective exile of public
honour and political silence that marked the last thirty years
of her life. And running through is her commitment to
women's emancipation and sexual reform--a major guidelight
of her communist politics up to the 1920s and a subterranean
memory in her work thereafter as a servant of Stalinist Russia
in various honorific diplomatic posts abroad.
It was inevitable that when the women's and sexual
liberation movements revived in the late 1960s and a connection with socialist politics was sought, it was to Kollontai
that we looked (the London Gay Marxist group, for example,
studied such of Kollontai's pamphlets that were then available in England). Now for the first time, we have a representative selection of her work available in clear translation;
certainly the most representative sample we are likely to see,
this side of a new revolution in Russia. Alix Holt's translations and introduction are clear, readable and informative.
My main criticism on the editorial side would be that each
individual article or extract is not clearly dated and placed.
The information is all there somewhere in the text, but it is
tedious to have to search it out every time. Apart from this,
we are usefully guided through the various phases of her
work, from her early involvement in social democracy,
through her exile, the revolution, her work as Comissar for
social welfare, her participation in the workers' opposition,
her advocacy of a Communist Morality, to her diplomatic
work.
The political point that seems to me to come out of the
Selected Writings is that Kollontai's political work and
writings, though inspiring, cannot be unproblematically
assimilated to our own. There are no theoretical insights that
we have lost, or formulae that we could easily employ today.
What we have are the examples of her endeavours to integrate
the struggle of women with the struggle for socialism; and
the negative example, of the lessons of her relative failure.
Holt captures the essence of this latter point when she notes
that Kollontai's career "fits the broad pattern of women
taking a back seat and not aspiring to the realms of theory or
leadership". Someone like Rosa Luxembourg is the exception
that triply undermines the rules, for she had almost nothing
to say on women. This focuses attention properly on the
failure of the Bolsheviks to fully integrate a feminist theory
and practice into their work. The Russian movement always
had a formal adherence to fighting on women's questions,
but, given the way it defined the tasks before it, there was a
persistent reluctance to devote energies to it. And behind this
was a formal rejection of "feminism" as such, which was
invariably identified with "bourgeois feminism", the pursuit
of mild reformist changes, such as the vote, in a society
where this would affect only a tiny number of women. It was
this rejection of "feminism" and therefore of the necessity
for a strong militant, socialist inclined but autonomous
women's movement, able to press its demands on the party
and work for change within the new state, that was one of

the roots of the ultimate failure of the "sexual revolution" in

Russia. For without it Kollontai had no base in Soviet Russia
to fight for a stronger commitment to radical change in
relations between the sexes. Alix Holt seems to suggest at
one point that this lack of commitment was the result of the
political and theoretical weakness of Kollontai. But this in
turn is a product of her isolation and her adherence to a
party ideology which believed that all struggles would be
equally achieved through the party agency. There were strong
objective reasons for the absence of a mass autonomous
women's movement, but after 1917 it was also a political
choice. As a result there was a strong ambivalence in Kollontai's writings. On the one hand she stressed that "the
followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a
special woman question separate from the general social
question of our day". On the other side she recognised the
specificities of women's oppression: "woman is oppressed
not only as a person but as a wife and mother." It was her
historically and politically structured inability to theorise
the links between the specific oppressions (of Patriarchy)
and the "general social question" that lay at the heart of
her political failure. What Holt calls her "passive resistance".
her silent acquiescence to Stalinism, becomes an apt commentary on this failure. So we note her theoretical reliance on
the work of writers like Havelock Ellis and German writers
on sex, all still within a liberal problematic; her inability to
completely transcend the traditional sex roles, especially on
child care; her retention of a conception of a "maternal
instinct". We observe her vital recognition that child bearing
must be conceived as a social concern not a private matter
for the mother alone. But there is also the half thought out
willingness to subordinate reproduction to the needs of
society, which already prepares the way in the 1920s for the
retreats on abortion, divorce, the family, homosexuality, in
the 1930s and 40s.
But what strikes the reader most movingly today is not
so much the inadequacies as the courage of the effort to
confront what she called "an awful sexual crisis." Immediately after the revolution Kollontai was in tune with the
Communist Party in confronting the issues on sex, the
family, gender relations, morality . The Party gave it, perhaps
under the impact of civil war and imperialist intervention,
a fairly low priority; but there was an open debate, in
which Kollontai played a leading role. By 1923 or so,
however, she was already on the defensive; a new conservatism was already concerned with-the breakdown of the
family, and the need for a stricter morality, subordinated to
the needs of production. By the 1930s the battle was lost.
Her last intervention in political debate was a paper on
"Marriage and Everyday Life" in 1926. In the discussion her
own isolation was the index of her now total political ineffectuality. The crisis in the Soviet economy and state meant
that sexual reform was buried beneath a mound of other
concerns. Thereafter Kollontai confined her views to her
private (and still unpublished) diaries.

LESBIAN LEFT
Lesbian Left hold an open meeting once a fortnight when we
talk about topics relevant to both the Women's Liberation
Movement and to Socialism. Some of these have included
pornography, the Socialist Feminist Conference in Manchester at the end of January, rape and violence against women,
the possible formulation of a seventh demand of the W.L.M.
on the latter at the National Conference after Easter, the
A.I.D. for lesbians issue, feminist avant-garde film and sexuality in China.
Also once a fortnight two smaller groups meet. One is
producing an entertainment for the National Conference. The
other is a history (herstory) study group which is discussing
several topics including theories of sexuality, the lack of
concurrence between the lesbian role in history and
of gay men, the new role of women in the W.L.M., stereotypes of lesbians, and possible connections between popular
images of gays and notions of decadence in art.
For further information about Lesbian Left meetings
telephone 01-836 6081 (A Woman's Place. 42 Earlham St,
London WC2.)

Jacky Plaster

Gay Left 29

Fighting Fascism
An Open Letter
by John Shiers
Dear Gay Left,
I was glad to see Bob Cant's article "Gays and Fascism" in
the last issue. However it worries me that despite all the talk
about the dangers of the rise of fascism and the need to
oppose organisations such as the National Front, the Left has
actually thought very little about how most effectively to
build a mass based anti-fascist movement and what tactics
are most appropriate to use in the current situation. If you
are serious in wanting to prevent the National Front growing,
so the argument runs, you have no alternative but to get out
there on the streets and stop them marching. After all, Hitler
himself said that the only thing which would have stopped
the Nazis gaining power would have been to crush them early
enough "with the utmost brutality". And we all know, don't
we. what an authority on correct socialist strategy Hitler is!

The need to evaluate the current anti-fascist strategy

I believe that it is urgently necessary for socialist activists,
both inside and outside left groups, to reconsider our whole
approach to the question of how to curb the growth of
fascism and the authoritarian right in general. Quite rightly
we are revolted by fascist ideas, literally worried about our
own lives in the advent of a fascist victory and determined
that fascism will not triumph again. But a crude economistic
interpretation of the causes of the rise of fascism in Italy and
Germany, coupled with a grossly over-emphasised notion of
the importance of Cable Street in 1936 in preventing the
further growth of the British Union of Fascists and a determination to smash the faces of any N.F. member who dares
to walk down the streets, does not constitute grounds on
which to base a serious anti-fascist strategy.
Groups like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) seem to
regard any disagreement with "the line" on physical confrontation with fascists as heresy: that socialists violently
attack fascists is as much a matter of self-evident (and therefore undiscussed) principle as is worker control of industry.
To doubt this raises questions about the depths of one's
socialist commitment. There has been so far no National
Conference of Anti-Fascist Activists to discuss the nature of
fascism and the threat that it poses in Britain today. Neither
has there been a democratic decision that tactics based on
physical confrontation are the most appropriate ones. It is
all assumed --and you either go on NF counter demonstrations "knowing" that "everyone accepts" a punch up with
the NF (and with the police in order to get through to the
NF) is the goal if there is enough of us--or you stay at
home.
I feel both personally and politically concerned about
accepting these terms. Personally because I want to go on
anti-fascist marches as a socialist and not be committed to
having to attack the police or the NF; politically because I
believe these tactics are both wrong and counterproductive.
I'll briefly explain why I feel this.

"Personal" hassles about violence

Firstly the "personal" bit which is also "political" because I
don't think it is possible to divorce personal feelings from
assessments of political strategy. The orthodox left has tried
to do this by speaking in terms of there being an (objectively?) "correct analysis" of a situation which should guide
our action. One of the things gay liberation has taught me is
that when I think "politically", I am also expressing myself
"personally"; left debate tries to exclude feelings from
discussion but it is feelings that actually determine, at the
end of the day, what I do. Whether I am a Leninist or a
libertarian: whether I join SWP, International Marxist
Group (IMG), the Communist Party (CP) or remain
Gay Left 30

"independent": whether I find the use of political violence

exciting and purifying or whether I am sickened, revolted
and scared of it. So before I go any further let me come
clean. Physical violence absolutely terrifies me. I can just
about cope with the idea of defending myself when attacked
(but have miserably failed on the three occasions it has so
far happened to me) but to actually initiate physical violence
totally freaks me out. I cannot justify it or cope with it. My
apparently "political" objections to current anti-fascist
strategy are, of course, intimately shaped by this and some
people may choose to read them as simply the reflections of
a cowardly liberal. If they do, however, I am equally interested in what they feel about initiating violence. Does it
suddenly become all right when it is a fascist who is being
blinded by a piece of a broken bottle thrown on a demonstration? Is it exciting to fight when it can be defined as in the
"objective interests" of the class struggle? Is it ever a sexual
turn on to "smash the scum"?
Having got that out of the way onto the "meat" (what do
feelings matter, after all, when there is a war on). Initiating
violence against the NF raises questions of both principle and
strategy. Principle in that it forces us to ask the question of
the contexts in which the initiation of violence is a legitimate
socialist tactic. Strategy in that it may well be that the consequences of its use are to contribute towards the growth of
the authoritarian right, rather than to turn people off when
they see that socialists are bigger, stronger, tougher and more
"in control of the streets" than fascists are.

The principle of using offensive violence

On the matter of principle, surely in the light of past
experience we, as socialists, must be very careful about
initiating violence to achieve our ends. Violence spirals into
more violencewhere does it stop? If you start off with fists
how long does it take before it becomes milk bottles and
smoke bombs? (We've already got there now.) Then molotov
cocktails and hand grenades, and when the police start using
tear gas and water cannons to "disperse" demonstrators,
when do the guns start coming out? If we fight on their
terms then we soon become like them psychologically: we
have to in order to survive. Machismo rules OK- -not OK for
me anyway.
It is quite true that the State is built on institutionalised
violence but can the planned use of street fights and riots
transform that? Surely we have to examine clearly how in
our specific historical context we can best advance socialist
and feminist goals. Violence in self-defence when under
attack is obviously both legitimate and necessary, and it is
inevitable that violence will develop in societies where the
freedom to organise politically is banned: there it is selfdefence against the State's initiation of violence (which does
not mean to say it should be romanticised or glorified). In
Britain at present it is not illegal to organise ourselves as
socialists and anti-fascists. Our weapons should not therefore
be guns, smoke bombs or fists. They should be words and
actions; utilising the opportunity we have to change
consciousness and build a mass movement. If the NF, the
police or anyone else attacks us in doing this, we have to
defend ourselves, But defensive violence is a world apart
from offensive violence. The use of offensive violence by the
Left against the police and the NF just serves to reinforce the
fears of large numbers of people that the Left is as brutal and
authoritarian as the Right. It does nothing to encourage them
to come out and join us. The Right will be defeated not
when the Left "control the streets" but when the mass of
people in society control the streetsand their own lives.
There is no process in which a left vanguard can short-circuit
this. The orthodox Left is masculine defined in both its
theory and practice: even its metaphors of victory are related
to offensive violence, which is about asserting and celebrating
power over others; domination; making the enemy grovel.

That is why most Leninists will disagree with what I've just
written; they have no analysis of the linkage between
violence, power and the male role. All too often they portray
women's liberation as women becoming liberated from
"femininity" (thus behaving like "Men") rather than the
ending of male power by the transformation of the male role
and of "masculinity" as the governing principle on which
society is based. A feminised socialism, which is presumably
what gay socialists alongside the women's movement are out
to achieve, surely needs to work out how to be militant and
assertive without falling into the male trap of defining victory
in terms of obliteration or domination of opponents.
Because offensive violence and male power seem to be so
interlinked, I cannot see how a feminist perspective can
possibly justify the use of physical violence except when it is
necessary for self-defence.
But, as Bob Cant rightly points out, the NF does use
offensive violence. They beat up isolated gay people, black
people and socialists. The point, however, is that this is part
of their private not their public face. Publicly they present
themselves as having total respect for "law and order",
merely demanding the right to walk the streets freelyrights
which they portray the Left as threatening. By attacking
them at the point they are publicly seen to be being "peaceful", the Left is playing into their hands. They can pose as
non-violent demonstrators; we as the violent attackers, the
people to be frightened of. We must expose the hypocrisy of
the NF in claiming to be a peaceful, law abiding political
party and we must defend ourselves from attack. None of
this, however, entails initiating violence towards them on
demonstrations.

tainment of mass demonstrations.

I think it is true that in the short term threatening fascists
with physical violence can make them frightened to go out
on demonstrations (at the moment there's more of the Left
than the Right on demonstrations. What about if the tables
are ever turned?). It may also make some people more wary
of voting for or joining the NF. But in the long term it is
merely reinforcing the attitudes which lead people to be
attracted to fascism because fear never changes minds. The
authoritarian Right whether it is directly fascist or not, will
gain ground if it is able to capture the feelings of large
numbers of people whose lives have been made insecure by a
severe, long term crisis in capitalism and the slow decay of
the existing social order. It is a dangerous illusion to think
that getting the State to ban NF marches is doing anything to
curb the growth of racism, sexism or fascist solutions. It can
make us complacent enough to devote more time to stopping
fascist movements marching than in defeating fascist ideas.
The NF may lose votes; may even be banned, but if this
happens as a result of the fear of Left violence, fascism may
well emerge stronger than ever in the end.
We have to get out of our heads the idea that there are
"fascist solutions" to the defeat of fascism; that being tough,
hard, brutal, unfeeling, "male" is the way forward. As gay
people who have suffered so much from a male-defined
world, we alongside the feminist movement, ought to be in
the best position of any on the Left to realise this.

But are there any alternatives?

So what do we do? It sounds very weak but I'm sure, as I
mentioned earlier, that we need to begin to talk about the
whole issue of opposition to fascism. We need not just a
conference about it, but some kind of machinery in which
the anti-fascist movement can democratically decide its
strategy on demonstrations. Where people in SWP can put
their views and people like me can put mine, and where
people who choose to march under an anti-fascist movement
banner would respect the democratic decision on strategy
made. The whole issue of what slogans to use and what
demands to make (e.g. whether or not to demand that the
State ban the NF) can be fully discussed there.
My own feeling is that we must work through whatever
channels are open to us to expose the danger fascism and the
authoritarian Right poses to almost all of us in this society.
In terms of counter-demonstrations I think we should work
on a "community base" model in which we seek to involve as
many individuals and groups as possible in peaceful processions (i.e. processions where we do not seek to initiate
violence on anyone) rather than simply trying to mobilise the
few who are already committed Left wing or trade union
activists for a physical confrontation. If the NF are holding a
public meeting, a rally on common land or marching down a
street, we should be demanding the withdrawal of that
facility from them and encouraging trade unionists to strike
against any body (public or private) which allows fascists
access. Imagine the effects of a week long strike of all local
government workers in an area where the local authority
allowed a public hall to be used for an NF meeting; or a rent
and rates strike by tenants and residents in an area where the
NF has been allowed to march.

The question of an appropriate strategy

This last point leads on to strategy. It seems to me that we
are falling right into the NF's hands by fighting them, or
rather the police, in the streets. They are defining the terms
for our protests. They want us to be seen to be the sources of
disorder and chaos so that they can pose as the party which
will restore law and order; stamp out (literally!) violence
from the streets. Added to this, the police are also able to
hide their true function by presenting themselves as neutral
law enforcers, just "doing their job" of protecting the rights
to demonstrate freely. Because they can always muster
enough strength to "protect" the NF, we are seen to be
attacking them directly. This further distances us from the
mass of people in society who we want to be actively
involved in the anti-fascist movement. An additional bonus
for the police is that they learn new techniques in the con-

All this may sound a bit utopianwe don't have that kind
of support. But surely if we really do believe we can defeat
the Right, and are not just trying to live out romanticised
versions of street battles of the past, we have to be getting
exactly "that kind" of support. For it is going to be the
actions of the mass of ordinary trade unionists and members
of the community: women and men; adults and children;
black and white; gay and straight; that will determine the
direction our society will take in the future. To believe that
"the Left" can, in itself, stem the growth of fascism and the
authoritarian Right is a false road to take. The use of offensive violence against the NF is doing nothing to encourage the
self-activity of the mass of people and their own, conscious.
participation in curbing the fascist cancer. On the contrary, it
only glorifies machismo.
With gay love and solidarity,

John

Shiers.
Gay Left 31

GAY SOCIALIST CONFERENCE 78

A number of gay socialist groupings are organising a
conference to take place in London in November. The
planning group feels that current theories of sexual politics
have reached an impasse and that the conference should
therefore focus on developing a theory of sexuality, power
and 'homosexuality', and the relations and differences
between gay women and gay men in the gay movement.
Details from Gay Socialist Conference 78, c/o 38 Chalcot
Road, London NW1. Please enclose a stamped addressed
envelope.
READERS' MEETING
There will be a readers' meeting from 2.00 pm on Sunday
18th June at the Oval House, Kennington. (Next door to
Oval tube station) We would like to concentrate on the
questions raised by our collective article 'In the Balance'.
Lunch is available there from 1.00.

EDITORIAL NOTES

In The Balance ...................................................................................

The State, Repression and Sexuality .........................................
Lesbians SplAID ...............................................................................
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back .........................................
Julia .......................................................................................................
Homosexuals, Children and Violence ........................................
Looking at Pornography ................................................................
Working Class Lesbians ..................................................................
Clienting ...............................................................................................
Gays At WorkBoxed In ...............................................................
A Cure For Psychiatry ....................................................................
Motherhood .........................................................................................
Jubilee ..................................................................................................
Kollontai ..............................................................................................
Fighting Fascism ...............................................................................

2
4
9
10
13
14
16
21
22
24
25
27
28
29
30

THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Derek Cohen,
Emmanuel Cooper, Richard Dyer, Simon Watney, Jeffrey
Weeks, Nigel Young.

This issue of Gay Left is by nature of a stock taking,

attempting both to grasp the general situation facing gays
during this peculiarly confusing period, and to explore
individual experiences of eight years of gay liberation. In the
next issue we hope to be able to take up again some of the
major issues raised here, both explicitly and implicitly. To
help us to do this, we would welcome contributions of any
length or kind on these issues.
US Distribution: For the past two issues we have been distributed in the USA by Carrier Pigeon, 88 Fisher Ave.
Boston, Mass., USA 02120. American readers who have
difficulty in obtaining copies are urged to contact Carrier
Pigeon, and to inform their local bookshops of Carrier
Pigeon's existence.
New Address: Finally, please note our new address:
38 Chalcot Road, London NW1.

ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FASCIST CONFERENCE

A national delegate conference is being organised by the
Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Co-Ordinating Committee to
discuss future strategy. It will take place in London on June
3-4. Further details from the Conference Secretary, Box 53,
182 Upper Street, London N1.

CONTRIBUTIONS
We always welcome contributions on any topic and of any
length. Articles, letters, reviews, cartoons etc. are all equally
welcome, and they do not have to be long or 'heavy'.
For our next issue we are particularly looking for contributions in three areasresponses to the issues raised by the
collective article on the current direction of the gay movement; contributions to our series 'Gays at Work'; and articles
on any aspect of gay culture, a topic we hope to feature in
Gay Left No. 7.

BACK ISSUES
Gay Left No .3
Women in Gay Left, Gays and Class, IS Gay Group, Gay
Workers' Movement and much more.
Gay Left No. 4
Love, Sex and Maleness, Communists Comment, Lesbians
and the law, Darwinism and sexuality, reviews etc.
Gay Left No 5
Why Marxism, Images of Homosexuality in Film, Lesbian
Invisibility, Gays & Fascism, Gay Theatre Past & Present,
Politics & Ideology, Gay History, Future of the Gay
Movement.

GAY LEFT RATES

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Gay Left Collective 1978

ISSN: 0307 9313
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Gay Left 32

Why Marxism?

by the Gay Left Collective

Two years ago, in our first collective statement, we put

forward our aim:
"First, we hope to contibute towards a Marxist
analysis of homosexual oppression. Secondly, we
want to encourage in the gay movement an
understanding of the links between the struggle
against sexual oppression and the struggle for
socialism."
We hope that the issues of the journal we have produced
and our participation as socialists and gays in political
activities have furthered both our own development and
the aims we put forward. But we are engaged in an ongoing
theory and practice, and have always rejected the notion of
having a finished or completed position. We have learnt,
and are learning, from our continuing practice and
theoretical debate. While on the one hand we reject the
idea that a "theoretical practice" is a sufficient basis for
our political activity, we also reject the notion that activity
must always have a higher priority than theoretical
discussion. A solely "activist" position ignores the insights
for practice which can be gained from these theoretical
debates. In restating in this article our belief in the necessity
of a Marxist politics, we both sum up the changes we have
undergone and outline some of the areas which still need
clarification in the debate on gay liberation and socialism.

AGAINST REFORMISM

Why do we think a Marxist analysis is necessary? Since the

early 1970s there has been a widespread movement towards
Marxism amongst feminists, gay liberationists and others
who participated in the post-1968 would-be revolutionary
euphoria. Many individuals joined established socialist
groupings. Others have contributed to the creation of a
socialist current in the women's movement and the gay
movement. This move towards Marxism implied a rejection
of the spontaneist and counter-cultural stress of the early
sexual liberation movements and a search for a politics that
could more effectively link our particular concerns with

wider political struggles against class exploitation,

patriarchy and racism. Marxism offered a politics, a theory
and practice, a history of class struggle and struggle against
oppression with which we could identify. What does this
mean practically?
Firstly, as Marxists, we reject reformism the belief
that all we socialists and gays desire can be attained within
the confines of existing society. This does not mean that
reforms are impossible within capitalism. If we believed
that, we could make no sense at all of changes that have
taken place. Neither does it mean that we should not
struggle for further reforms, such as abolishing an absurd
age of consent, and for the protection of lesbians and gay
men against the police and the courts. The struggle for
reforms can, indeed, have a vital mobilising effect, both in
drawing in hitherto unpoliticised layers and in developing
within us self-confidence and awareness. What a rejection
of reformism does mean is recognising clearly what can and
what cannot be attained within a patriarchal-capitalist
society. An awareness of the endemic nature of sexism and
patriarchy in our society will inevitably lead one to a
rejection of reformism.
The changes of the past decade have revolutionised the
possibilities of leading an openly gay life. But it is, as
David Fernbach once put it, "Liberation, Capitalist-style".
The major thrust of the development of attitudes within
capitalism has been the acceptance of homosexuality but
only within the confines of a patriarchal and familial
framework. There has been a sustained, if unconscious,
effort at containment, testifying to the overwhelming
strength of exclusive heterosexual norms which express the
i mbalance in the social/sexual relations between men and
women; an imbalance which simultaneously contributes to
the orderly maintenance of capitalism.
There has been an extensive overlap between the values
of the gay sub-culture and the heterosexist culture (in
clothes, consumerist values, disco culture etc). At the same
ti me our separateness as people is confirmed by continuing
and increasing state harassment; by media attacks on other
minority sexual preferences such as paedophilia; by the
differential treatment of lesbians and gay men, with the
former still treated as a subject largely for male titillation,
while for men in certain circumstances it is tolerable, even
modish. Our aspirations as socialists must be to change
more than this. We must oppose exclusive heterosexual,
male-dominated norms, enshrined in the family, backed by
Church and State.
Secondly, Marxism involves an identification with a
revolutionary tradition of struggle against capitalism. This
i mplies a recognition that there are objective barriers
within capitalism to the full development of the forces of
production and the release of new social energies. The
development of a socialist society will provide the
economic and social conditions for the full equality of the
sexes, the necessary condition for the final downfall of
patriarchy and sexual oppression. As a revolutionary
politics Marxism provides a framework for an analysis of
the ways in which the exploited and oppressed can struggle
against capitalism and its attendant oppressions. The precondition for economic and social change then is the
winning of political power from the dominant classes; the
employment of this new power to begin the destruction of
old attitudes and ideas; the creation of new forms and
relationships. The working class, rooted as it is in the major
centres of production, has to be the material basis for this
revolutionary struggle.
But, thirdly, our acceptance of Marxism does not
preclude a critique of the Marxist tradition in order to
reject its deformations. In particular the anti-sexist movements have revealed new areas of struggle against patriarchy
and capitalism to which Marxism has to respond. We
reject, however, the concept of a "Gay Marxism" as a
special variant. We are anxious, on the contrary, to
identify certain absences in the Marxist tradition as it has
developed and to attempt to remedy them.

Gay Left 2

ABSENCES
Marxism is a tradition of revolutionary political struggle by
the working class for socialism. As a corpus of theory it
embodies the tradition of struggle, the lessons of success
and failures; and as a theoretical expression of that
tradition is a guide to present and future action. It is in this
context that Marxism is also a theory of history, an analysis
of the workings of a capitalist economy, a science of
society. As a science of revolutionary politics, it has to
learn all the time from its testing in experience. But as a
wider science of society it is still greatly underdeveloped,
not only in crucial areas such as ideology and the state, but
also in specific areas such as psychology and sexuality. A
Marxist method, we believe, can contribute to an understanding of these areas. Hitherto it has been left to
bourgeois ideologies (biologisms, eugenics etc.) to fill the
gaps in Marxist theories. The whole area of sexuality is an
example of such an absence. This does not mean that
socialists generally have not been concerned with questions
of sex and gender roles. But there has not, we argue, been
a properly Marxist understanding of sexual oppression, nor
can we claim at this stage to have one ourselves. The
interactions of patriarchal structures and capitalist social
relations are so complex that we are only at the beginning
of understanding them. Such an understanding, we suggest,
lies in grasping the relationship between the economy,
ideology and culture, and the insights supplied by recent
developments in the study of sexuality.
This approach implies and demands a rejection of
economism, a deformation to which Marxism has been
particularly prone. Because Marxism is a materialist
theory of society it has been too easy to understand this
in purely economic terms. As a result, in some Marxist
texts, the economic has often appeared as a piece of
clockwork, inexorably and inevitably striking the death of
one mode of production and the appearance of the new,
with scarcely the appearance of human agency. Socialism
is seen as the inevitable product of a capitalism which must
perish by its own inherent contradictions. This makes for
passivity and reformism.
Even when activism is stressed it can still suffer from
economism; for if the stress is placed entirely on the
economic as the motor of historical change, then struggle
can be conceived entirely in economic terms. Workers'
struggle is not limited to a fight for better wages and work
conditions. A worker's position is also a result of a
structure of social relations which are initially inculcated
through the family and reinforced through bourgeois
ideology. Thus gender roles as defined in the family are
central to the male/female dichotomy of work relations.
Economism ignores this whole dynamic and suggests that
social relations will be naturally transformed in a postrevolutionary situation. The experiences of 'socialist'
regimes throughout the world suggest this is unlikely to
happen. Thus state ownership of the means of production
has been achieved, though without workers' democracy,
whilst the ideology of the family and the social relations
which stem from that ideology remain and these are
similar to those in Western capitalist countries.

metaphor "the base/superstructure". In recent years the

revival of Marxism as a creative guide to political action and
social analysis has led to a recovery of the insights of those
earlier Marxists who rejected economism especially
Antonio Gramsci. A creative debate has developed within
Marxism, concentrating on the different levels the
economic, the ideological and the political and their
complex articulation within the mode of production. The
major insight which is relevant here is that the ideological
is itself a material factor in society, not, as long tradition
suggested, a simple reflection of the "base". Ideas are not
a product of simple illusion or false consciousness but as
acted on can become real material forces in helping to
shape social practices. Societies are not pieces of clockwork
but are multilayered formations in which the economic is
mediated through complex social relations, ideological
forms and political practices. The basic reality is of class
conflicts taking many different forms from struggle on
the shop floor through constant ideological and cultural
battles to the supreme conflict at the level of state power.
In Britain, over the past few years, (and this is the
product of a complex political situation) a major development has been in the effort of Marxists to understand the
forms through which bourgeois hegemony has been
maintained, and in particular the role of ideology. We
define as hegemony those forms of ruling class supremacy,
leadership and influence which are outside the formal
repressive structures of state power, eg education, cultural,
political and social ideas.
This is relevant to the struggles of feminists and for gay
liberation because it is at the ideological level that most of
our oppression as gays is expressed, and not on the
economic level. This is more true for gay men than lesbians.
The oppression of women has a dominant economic
expression as the theorisation of the role of domestic
labour under capitalism has attempted to grasp. But there
is also an increasing awareness that the questions of gender
and sexuality cannot be simply derived from capitalism.
Hence the recent debate on patriarchy and the articulation
between capitalism and patriarchy.
One avenue, much pursued of late, has been that of
psychoanalysis, conceived of as the "science of the
unconscious". Despite a high degree of obscurity, the
reassessment of Freud, especially through the work of
Jacques Lacan and the debate stimulated by Juliet
Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism have as their
common aim the attempt to grasp how we become social
beings, as "men" and "women". As it has been put, this
work:
"Opens the way to a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis
as a theory which can provide scientific knowledge
of the way in which patriarchal ideology is maintained
through the formation of psychological "masculinity"
and "femininity". Such knowledge is obiously a pre-

This sort of approach leads to the neglect of ideological,

cultural and above all political struggle. Even Lenin, who
in practice (and polemically) rejected economism, never
entirely abandoned it in his theoretical asides, and
Trotskyism, which in many ways has attempted to keep
alive the tradition of activist revolutionary socialism
through many dark decades, has as its theoretical basis
another form of economism in its "concept of the Epoch"
the idea that we live in an age of "capititalist crisis, war
and revolution " , so that the only question confronting the
working class is that of a correct revolutionary leadership.
The consequences of this brand of Trotskyism has been
major sectarian battles among rival Trotskyist groups as to
who constitutes this leadership.
At its heart is a too narrow interpretation of the
"economic base", and a subordination of a full scientific
understanding to what is essentially a topographical
Gay Left 3

condition of any successful cultural and political

struggle against patriarchy the point being not
merely to understand the unconscious but to change
it."
(Randall Albury, Two Readings of Freud, Working
Papers in Sex Science and Culture 1, Sydney,
Australia)
There are problems in this route. Psychoanalysis has the
advantage of taking us beyond the purely descriptive and
classificatory, which has been the chief contribution of
the dominant tradition in recent English discussions of sex,
symbolic interactionism (as in the work of J.H. Gagnon and
W. Simon, Sexual Conduct, and in K. Plummer's Sexual
Stigma) which influenced us in our last editorial, Love, Sex
and Maleness. But the pursuit of the truth of psychoanalysis can lead to a sort of despair of political action or
any wider social or collective activity, and to an indulgence
in theorisation for its own sake.
Psychoanalysis and the debates on ideology provide a
theoretical basis for the continuing struggles of women and
gays against patriarchy. For if the capitalist social
formation is a combination of levels, there are similarly
different levels of practice and struggle, though they must
not be artificially separated. As gays our specific struggle is
ideological, though as socialists we fully participate in the
necessary economic and political struggles against
capitalism.

THE FAMILY
In previous issues of Gay Left the heart of gay oppression
has been located in the family and we have attempted to
explain why this should be so. In retrospect we probably
overstressed the purely economic aspects of the family and
mechanically assimilated homosexual oppression to it. But
the stress on the family must still be central for it is here
that in each generation the boy-child and girl-child enter
into the rules of social life. Here also is where the
dominance of reproductive sexuality is maintained. In our
culture these rules closely relate gender-identity to a
particular form of sexual expression. Male homosexuality
has until recently been interpreted in terms of having
"undesirable" social characteristics such as effeminacy, or
in terms of a pervasive disease sickness model.
Lesbianism, scarcely defined at all, has suffered from the
general ideological stress which has equated female
sexuality as secondary, responsive and maternal. The ways
in which male and female children enter the social, with
all its attendant expectations, are not yet clear, though
psychoanalytic theory may be able to help our under-

Gay Left 4

standing. The usefulness of such an understanding is that

it transcends essentially social and historical divisions of
sexuality into heterosexual (good) and homosexual (bad),
and strategically links the struggle against homosexual
oppression in our culture with the struggle against
patriarchy and , for women's liberation. The fight for gay
liberation is thus an aspect of a wider struggle against male
domination.
But having recognised that, and the need to work closely
with an autonomous women's movement, there are specific
areas where homosexual self-activity on the largest possible
scale is vital.
(A) in the defence of gay rights, especially when, as at
the moment, they are threatened with erosion by court
and police pressure, and by public prejudice in this period
of economic decline.
(B) in struggling for further gay reforms for the
rights of lesbians and male homosexual parents; against
the age of consent; for extension of civil rights to all
homosexuals etc.
(C) in the development of a theoretical and practical
awareness of our situation.
(D) for lesbians and gay men, independent struggle for
the development of our own non-oppressive community,
leading to the articulation of a positive identity; including,
in this, discussions of central areas such as the nature of
relationships, sexuality and role playing.
The gay movement is wider than any specific
organisation. Indeed we can argue that the movement as
such can have no single organisational form; gay liberation
is the self-defined activity of gay people fighting to gain
control of their own lives and destinies. This struggle has
to go on under capitalism and socialism. The struggle for
sexual self-determination will not cease because a society
calls itself socialist as the gruesome experiences of
homosexuals in many of the self-described socialist
countries of the world today testify. The transition to
socialism will not obviate the need for an autonomous
gay movement or feminist movement; they will in fact be
more essential, for in the struggle to determine the form
of a new society, the activity of oppressed groups and
identities will be decisive. But the essential precondition
is our self-organisation now.

AUTONOMY AND PARTY

In the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism, a vital
task of gay socialists must be in the ideological and cultural
spheres. This includes exposing the oppressive nature of
bourgeois familial forms, questioning the dominance of
heterosexual norms, exploring forms of relating which can
go beyond compulsive coupledom, developing a critique of
the various forms of patriarchy and sexism, and striving for
a theory and practice now which can begin to challenge
bourgeois hegemony. The socialist current in the gay
movement has an important role to play in this work.
This poses acutely the relationship between the gay
movement, the wider revolutionary movement and a
possible unified revolutionary socialist party. We believe
an autonomous gay movement (as an autonomous women's
movement) to be essential, and reject any effort to
subordinate the movement to any one political sect.
Political militants of various left tendencies will and
should contribute their ideas to the gay movement, but
it is foolishly self defeating to offer a purely organisational
answer to gay socialists seeking political leadership "the
answer, comrades, is to join the party". A major weakness
of the British left is its sectarian fragmentation; for any one
political sect to arrogate to itself leadership as the revolutionary party is an extension not an abandonment of
sectarianism. While supporting the existing work of
comrades in left organisations we believe that as a long
term aim, the realignment of revolutionary forces is
essential as the only basis for the building of socialism.

and with other social movements. The two points are not
necessarily exclusive. The forces making for socialism in the
West are wider than any single political form at present
could embrace and, as we said above, any attempt to
incorporate all such forces into one party form will be
self-defeating.
The distinction between party and movement is one
issue; the other is the form of the party: is a Leninist
organisational form necessarily the correct one? Is a
vanguard party necessary in advanced bourgeois democratic
societies? Is the Bolshevik model of the "siezure of power"
the one we should work on here? There are other questions
that might be asked but it is clear from the disarray on the
left that the answers are not preordained.

But what does this concretely mean? Sheila Rowbotham

in a recent issue of Red Rag (No 12) questioned the whole
Leninist tradition for its hostility to a broader socialism,
and wondered whether a party form which demands
democratic centralism and elitism can incorporate the sort
of changes that the women's and gay movements have
illuminated. J Ross on the other hand, in a recent Socialist
Woman (No 6/2) has made a radical distinction between
political leadership, which has to be organised through a
Leninist party, and social movements, guided where
appropriate by the insights provided by Marxism as as
revolutionary science, which have to organise autonomously, in a complex dialogue with the political organisation

But the separation we have suggested between party and

movements implies the need for some sort of revolutionary
working class party to the building of which we want to
contribute: revolutionary because it is only a break with
capitalism and reformism which can remove the blocks to a
socialist advance; working class because it is only the
proletariat ("traditional" and new) which can provide the
material base, in its collectivist strengths and traditions, for
a socialist society; party because it is only a political
formation of the working class and other revolutionary
forces that can finally organise against the political strength
of capitalism centralised in the state. Social movements
such as the gay movement can contribute through
ideological struggle to the undermining of bourgeois
hegemony; but the struggle for power, in the last instance
has to be on the political level. Nevertheless the nature of
the political formation has still to be determined through
actual political practice.
The struggle for socialism will be a long and arduous
one; but it is only in that struggle that a meaningful end to
restrictive definitions of sexuality will come in this
process the very concepts of "heterosexuality" and
"homosexuality" will be challenged. It is foolish for
anyone to claim full knowledge of the processes and
changes that this will involve. What we continue to need is
both theoretical clarification and the constant testing of
theories in practice.

Gay Left 5

Here We Stand
We're Here: Conversations with Lesbian Women
by Angela Stewart-Park and Jules Cassidy
( Quartet 1.95)

Reviewed by Sue Cartledge

'This book is not trying to prove anything about lesbians,

it's just to say "We're Here".' So the authors introduce this
book of interviews with twelve lesbian women. We're Here:
the message is addressed to a world in which lesbians are
still hidden; from their parents, fellow workers, and even
each other. The well known folk-myth of our escape from
repressive legislation because Queen Victoria refused to
believe such a thing could exist is echoed by the stories of
gay women themselves in the book:
"What would happen to the family, what would
happen to me and people finding out about this
awful thing? But I didn't know what awful thing I
was because, apart from her who I adored, and she
did adore me, I hadn't met any other lesbians that
I knew about or saw. So it was this terrible myth,
ignorance, social conditioning."
So an isolated lesbian (and in the nature of things most
lesbians start out isolated) suffers from the absence of any
i mage from which to forge an identity.
Where lesbianism has struggled into print, it had been in
one of three main ways. First, as part of a male sexual
fantasy when the 'lesbian' element is merely there to add
a frisson of novelty to a jaded but always overriding heterosexuality. This genre, product of the self-delusion of overgrown kids who refuse to believe nobody wants to play
with them, has nothing to do with the realities of lesbianis m. Secondly there are the 'scientific' or 'scholarly'
analyses, which discuss lesbianism as a sexual or psychological deviation, and whose main concern is to probe the
causes of this departure from the 'normal'. Even a
sympathetic analysis, such as Charlotte Wolff's Love
Between Women, talks in terms of case-histories, and has
chapters called A Theory Of Lesbianism and The
Characteristic Lesbian. In contrast the authors of We're
Here explicitly disavow any intention to "say anything
about lesbians in general. All that one can accurately say
about lesbians in general is that they exist".
Thirdly there are the polemical writings, mostly
American, appearing as smudgy pamphlets and subsequently
in heavy gay liberation anthologies. While undeniably right
on politically, these broadsides usually preach only to the
converted, and seldom reach the closet lesbians, confused
and fearful adolescents, and indifferent or hostile heterosexuals. Moreover, polemics can overawe with their
confidence or intellectual skill. They can increase the
isolation of a lesbian who would feel that such an assured
and glitteringly militant world could only exist on another
planet. And it is this woman that the authors say they are
trying to reach:
"Both of us are nearly thirty, both of us wasted a lot
of years as isolated lesbians trying unsuccessfully to
be straight. If the women's movement had been as
strong then, we could have found a lot about ourselves and had the support of other women. If there
had been a single book that showed us other lesbians
and talked about them and us and about our
sexuality, it would have made us feel less alone, less
lonely."
Beyond Isolation
The chosen method of breaking down this loneliness is
interviews with twelve different lesbians, illustrated by
excellent photographs which manage to convey the
women's personalities without making them into freaks,
stars or sex-objects. it is a simple approach. The authors
' meet' the women and allow them largely to speak for
Gay Left 6

themselves. They do not analyse them; they are not

conducting research into lesbianism. They ask questions,
but the questions are fairly diffuse, encouraging rather
than guiding the conversation. This diffuseness allows the
subjects covered to range from vegetarianism and astrology
to prison life and the medical establishment (though of
course certain major themes emerge; of these more later).
Given the social invisibility of lesbians, and the dearth of
books where we speak for ourselves, this simple approach is
justified. The reader also 'meets' twelve different open
lesbians which as things are is about eleven more than most
people can expect to meet in the course of their lives. This
in itself makes the book a useful political statement.
But as a political document We're Here goes further than
this. Both in the choice of women interviewed, and in the
questions asked, the authors belie their own rather
disingenuous statement of intention "to show some
ordinary lesbians to the world in an open and honest way."
Of the twelve women interviewed no less than ten are
involved in CHE or the women's movement or both; and
another (Pat Arrowsmith) is a seasoned pacifist campaigner.
Large parts of most of the interviews cover themes such as
coming out, views on feminism, and the politics of personal
relationships. This feminist and gay political slant raises the
book above the level of those lousy Gay News "Living
Together" features which take us from the washing up to
the wire-haired terrier via who pours the cornflakes, and
leave us with a resounding message that gays are just like
everybody else only more so.
Other than their tendency to some political involvement,
the women interviewed vary quite widely. They range in
age from 21 to 50, in occupation from a nurse and a clerk
to an ex-actress and an ex-company director. Five have been
married, while three have had no sexual relationships with
men. Four of them have children, while Pat Arrowsmith,
who has none, explains why: "They break things, they pee
all over the place. They are like great lumps of sour

anthropomorphic ice-cream." Some of them have lived with

one lover for years; others have a succession of short affairs.
This no doubt deliberately broad selection should help to
dispel the myth that lesbians are flat-footed, flat-chested,
man-hating butches, or fluffy but devious femmes who
hang out in the seedier parts of the world's capitals but
never in your own office, factory, street or even family.
Through the work of the women's movement and the
gay movement the world is changing a little for lesbians.
This book charts the shift from Jackie Forster, now 50,
who thought she was the only lesbian in the world, to
Debee Moskowitz, now 21, who was listening to feminist
radio in New York at 15 and was ready to 'come out' a year
before she did. But for most of these women the initial
reaction to their own lesbianism was bewilderment and
repression; "I thought, don't be so bloody silly, you can't
fancy another woman, it's ridiculous." "I'd had affairs with
four women before that, but each time I hadn't really
thought about it in terms of being a lesbian I just
thought it was a kind of freak experience."
As well as their own bewilderment, lesbians who come
out usually have to deal with the hostility of family and
friends: "As far as my in-laws are concerned, I'm dead and
buried, and a lot of my friends." Veronica Pickles, who
became a cause celebre when she was sacked from her
midwifery course for being gay, describes how even other
lesbians she had worked with hastened to dissociate themselves from her: "And the gay women there spent the
whole time saying 'It's not the Veronica Pickles we know.
You mustn't jump to conclusions, it might not be that poor
girl. I mean she was such a nice girl, I'm sure it couldn't be
her.' " Repression and discrimination, direct and indirect,
flourishes. Pauline Heap describes her fight for custody of
her children her husband would rather see them in care.
Veronica Pickles is sure that her open lesbianism will block
any career advancement.
Love, Sex and the Women's Movement
In Love Between Women Charlotte Wolff argues that
'homosexual' is a misnomer for lesbians: "It is not homosexuality but homoemotionality which is the centre and the
very essence of women's love for each other." One danger
of this statement is its implication that sex is less important
for women than for men; a traditional belief that feminists
and many lesbians reject. Sexuality is central to most
lesbian relationships; and most lesbians find making love
with another woman exciting and satisfying more so
than sleeping with men. Indeed, according to a review of
the findings of sex surveys, published in a recent issue of
Lesbian Tide, on a crude orgasm count lesbians have a lot
more fun than heterosexual women, which isn't surprising
in view of the physical and psychic differences between
men and women. As one of the women in We're Here puts
it: "You understand each other more. It's much more on
the same wavelength." But there is an element of truth in
Charlotte Wolff's satement. Sexuality for lesbians perhaps
more so than for gay men is expressed in an emotional
context, in the context of loving another woman. And for
lesbians it is often precisely this emotion, rather than the
physical acts, which makes sleeping with another woman so
different from sleeping with a man. Jackie Forster describes
the feeling of bareness when this context is missing: "I've
had sex for its own sake, and it was just like having it with
a man and so isolated at the end of it because there was no
emotional thing taking over."
Of course alienated sex exists among lesbians. In the
book Luchia Fitzgerald describes her five years on the
straight gay scene. "It was one after another. Living with
someone, shacking up for a short time, then breaking up ...
I was as miserable as fuck." But where the women in We're
Here talk about their relationships with other women, brief
as well as long-lasting, unhappy as well as happy, the
strongest impression is of love for another woman, as a
woman: "the whole thing of being with women and loving
them is that I'll be friends with them first and the friendship will be really the most important thing and making
love will be an extension of that."

The women's and gay liberation movements have given

love for other women a wider context than that of the
individual romance. The ideology and at times reality
of loving women as friends and sisters enriches lesbianism:
"it wasn't until last year when I found my gay identity that
I thoroughly knew that I loved women and not just one
woman." Sisterhood can break down the barriers even
between mother and daughter: "Since she came to the
Women's Centre we talked and talked and different things
and me and my mother are like sisters now. That's the only
thing I wanted in my life for me and her, you know, to be
the best of friends." Many lesbians, including some in this
book, have come out after joining the women's movement,
while others embrace feminism as a natural extension of
their commitment to other women: "Do you think
lesbianism and feminism are always compatible? You know,
necessarily so intertwined? They are intertwined for me.
I mean, I can't separate my politics from my emotional
feelings and my even my physical attractions."
Lesbians who are feminists (and of course many are not)
are fortunate in that the women's movement can give their
love for other women a political meaning. It can take us
out of the ghetto, enable us to turn our oppression back on
the oppressors, and make the connections between hostility
to lesbians, the denial of women's sexuality, and our
relegation to 'secondary' roles as wife, mother and sexobject. There are many strong feminist statements in We're
Here from Veronica Pickles' views on male doctors: "Pigs,
butchers, sods, bastards, that's what I think", to Monica
Sjoo's description of her reaction to the outcry about her
painting God Giving Birth: "I would have liked to stand up
in court and first of all ask whether the image of a woman
giving birth to a child is an obscenity, and secondly, what
do they think about all those degrading images of women
they see all around them to me that is an obscenity."
Roles
Staple gay liberation themes, such as the importance of
coming out, and criticism of stereotyped roles, recur in
many of these interviews. Interestingly, the one 'nonpolitical' woman in the book experiences this as clearly
as the militants: "I'm begining to believe there's no such...
.. that there shouldn't be a thing of butch and femme like
and all the rest of it. Of course a few years ago I would
have classed .... I always liked to go as the butch. Now I
just feel ordinary." Other women criticise role-playing from
a feminist standpoint: "If women are going to ape all the
worst characteristics in men and simply become male
chauvinistic pigs themselves in their butchness, then that's
wrong. If one isn't going to accept it in a man then one
surely isn't going to accept it in a woman." For anyone
who wonders why lesbians tend to work with other
feminists rather than in mixed gay groups, that which
divides us from many gay men is expressed as well as
that which unites us: "It's so male dominated I feel
overwhelmed I tried to talk about women's rights and
got shouted down by the men." Even with gay men who
are too polite, sympathetic or politically aware to shout
women down, many lesbians simply feel a lack of identification which Jackie Forster expresses: "I just found I was
having to put the brakes on in the male gay movement and
Gay Left 7

I wasn't having to put the brakes on with the straight

women and I just knew my identity was with women."
Lesbianism and Socialism
No doubt by now some Gay Left readers are glancing at
their watches and wondering when socialism and capitalism
are going to get a mention. Mandy Merck, in her review in
Time Out accurately described the political line of the
book: "the authors have quite reasonably chosen many
interviews which take positions they themselves support;
broadly a libertarian lesbian feminism which asserts
personal change and the creation of an alternative feminist
culture as urgent political tasks for women." While those
of us who are trying to make links between feminism,
lesbianism and socialism might wish to see more explicit
'left-wing' analyses in the book, it is fair to say that the
politics expressed in We're Here reflect the politics of
most lesbian feminists at present. And this politics, though
many of us criticise its gaps and none of us think it has
'arrived at a final solution', has evolved from some years
of experience:

"When I came into one of these left-wing groups, my

experience had been of marriage for eight years,
two kids and feeling completely oppressed, my
mother dying in poverty, and I said, 'What are you
talking about? How does that relate to either mine
or my mother's experience? Nothing, nothing at all.'
So I thought there was a huge lie there somewhere.
This is why I was never willing after that to work in
a mixed group again."
The message of this book is far stronger than the simple
We're Here. Its overwhelming message is the enormous
i mportance of the women's movement to lesbians as to
all women; not only in our political statements but in the
fabric of our lives. Luchia Fitzgerald:
"I'll tell you something now. I literally had a hump
through oppression What, a humped back? -- Yeah,
I was gone right down like that, if you know what I
mean, and the longer I was in the Women's Movement,
the more it seemed to straighten itself up. That's the
gospel truth that, that's really true."

A Breathtaking Sweep

Femininity As Alienation
by Ann Foreman
(Pluto Press 2.40)

Reviewed by Keith Birch

In this book Ann Foreman goes through a very wide
ranging look at the different concerns of the Women's
Movement and the various causes of women's oppression.
She begins by looking at traditional Marxism and
Psychoanalysis and the attempts to combine them. This
leads to a discussion of women's changing social role with
the rise of capitalism and it centres on the concepts of
alienation and reification brought about through generalised commodity production and the corresponding changes
in familial relationships. She links Marx's concept of
alienation to that of De Beauvoir and Sartre within the
existentialist tradition, and goes on to describe how it is
not just a feature of the production process but is central
to women's relationships within the family and the roles
of femininity and passivity. The book rounds off with a
critical overview of the domestic labour debate, an outline
of the relationship of the Trade Unions and Labour Party
to women at work and in the family and finally a
discussion of the possible way forward for an autonomous
women's movement in the struggle for socialism.
This breathtaking sweep through so many issues is well
written and drawn together but all this crammed into 150
pages means that some issues are merely skimmed or
dismissed in a page.
Ann Foreman's view of Psychoanalysis is largely
negative and she sees little of value in the attempts at
fusion with Marxism. Her critiques of Reich and Marcuse
concentrate on the difficulties of their syntheses caused
by their basis on the libido theory. The criticism of Juliet
Mitchell's book follows from her own concept of the
unconscious and her analysis of Freud's theory as one
which is in opposition to revolutionary social change. This
section is summed up with the statement that "to
synthesise marxism and psychoanalysis was an impossible
task". In the case of Freud himself Ms. Foreman dismisses
any theoretical implications that psychoanalysis may have
for feminism and marxism in her concentration on aspects
of his work which stress the biologism and ideological
li mitations that it contains. The only significance given to
Freud's work is the emphasis it brought to sexuality.
Ms. Foreman's main concern is with the concepts of
alienation and reification in Marx's work and how this
relates not just to the sphere of commodity production
under capitalism but also to the relationship between
Gay Left 8

women and men in the family. The alienation felt at work

meant that the importance of the personal/familial aspects
in the lives of male workers their sexual and emotional
relationships with their wives became even greater. This
attempt at individual fulfilment and self-confirmation by
men involved the use of women as objects and women's
experience of this was one of alienation tied to dependence
and the growing stress on femininity and passivity "While
alienation reduces the man to an instrument of labour
within industry it reduces the woman to an instrument for
his sexual pleasure within the family".
The use by Sartre and De Beauvoir of the concept of
alienation in interpersonal relations is considered in this
context and Ms. Foreman, while seeing this as a positive
step forward, criticises Sartre for the way in which he
applies the term ahistorically and De Beauvoir for her
description of women as having been always 'the Other'
in regard to men's attainment of self-confirmation. She
identifies this alienation specifically to the rise of capitalism
and the separation of family and production.
Although this thesis is interesting and partially true, I
feel that it offers an inadequate and idealistic analysis of
this complex question. Her idealism seems much influenced
by the work of Lukacs, particularly in her use of the
concept of reification the way in which social relations
appear as relations between things, facts, outside human
control. On this she bases a theory of ideology which she
opposes to traditional marxist ones of reflection of
economic relationships or false consciousness. Rather,
ideology is a result of reification within capitalism which
structurally excludes a level of reality from thought or is
real experience only partially understood. Tied to this,
the unconscious becomes merely the repression of a level
of reality from thought through reification.
As with Lukacs, the move towards socialism comes with
the working class and women gaining the conscious
realisation of self-alienation. This is because "capitalism
reveals, without being able to resolve, people's potential
for realising themselves in sexuality as well as productive
activity" and socialism will bring "the final supersession of
alienation and reification enabling human beings to become
for the first time the conscious authors of the social
process" accompanied by "the replacement of genital
heterosexuality by polymorphous sexuality".
While disagreeing with these propositions and her
conceptions of ideology and the unconscious, Ms.
Foreman's book is an interesting intervention in the current
debate.

Beyond Privilege
The Limits of Masculinity
by Andrew Tolson
(Tavistock Publications, Hardback 5.50
Paperback 1.95)

Reviewed by Tom Woodhouse

The Limits of Masculinity comes out of four years involvement in a Birmingham Men Against Sexism group. Andrew
Tolson speaks from his experience as a heterosexual man
from within a group of heterosexual men. It is important
to note the author's heterosexuality because many of the
problems discussed (Sexual Relations Between Men and
Women, Fatherhood and Childcare within that context)
relate specifically to the problems of being male and
heterosexual. The problem of masculinism is equally
i mportant, however, to both gay and straight men because
there is a large area of shared experience/conditioning and
we should not assume that as homosexual men we are any
less sexist or any less a threat to women: we are all as men
the agents of Patriarchy.

The major part of Tolson's account is based on showing

that masculinism is strongly linked to the means of
production and to the workers' position within that system:
"In Western industrialised societies, definitions of
masculinity are bound up with definitions of work ...
the qualities needed by the successful worker are
closely linked to those of the successful man."
He identifies three types of masculinism, that of the
working class male, that of the middle class male and that
of the "progressive" middle class male. Although I see that
it is important, especially for Marxists, to be able to view
many problems from the point of view of class, I do not
see that it is particularly useful or relevant when discussing
masculinism. Aspects of masculine expression may vary
with class, i.e. there is an observable variation between
certain aspects of working class and middle class male
chauvinism, but those variations are minimal and to
concentrate on them is to some extent to confuse the issue.
From reading Tolson's book it is very easy to think that he
is saying that masculinism is a product of class rather than
that class is a product of hierarchy, which is the inevitable
outcome of a power-based patriarchal system.
When discussing the working class male Tolson becomes
a little confused as a result of his class analysis of
masculinism. There is some conflict between the view of
the working class male as an oppressor because he is a man
and as oppressed because he is a proletarian. This leads
Tolson to say with reference to car workers:
"In this situation a seemingly anachronistic working
class masculinity continues to have a vital political
role. Because it provides a basis for collective solidarity
the culture of the work group acts as an important
form of resistance ..." and "In this context working
class male chauvinism is part of an elaborate symbolic
world; and in the age of mass production is a vital
cultural defence."
I do not see the relevance of defending working class
masculinism as a reponse to bourgeois exploitation, when
both bourgeois exploitation and working class chauvinism
are variants of a masculinism based on the oppression of
women, something that Tolson never actually comes to
grips with.
Tolson's emphasis on the relationship between work and
masculinism continues in his discussion of the middle class
male. The rise of the meritocracy and its subsequent crisis
of confidence in the 60s and 70s is linked to the middle
class crisis of masculinism and its reformist solutions such
as the "open marriage" and "marriage as a mutual
contract". He seems to see the middle class male as very
much under attack and in many ways losing ground from
the onslaught against Patriarchy.

"Both classes of men have inherited the patriarchal

culture of the past and both experience the erosion
of patriarchal privilege by capitalist expansion ...
Today's teacher lives out directly, in the classroom,
the ideological contradictions of a decaying imperialist,
class ridden society."
I disagree that Patriarchy is being eroded except in the
sense that the individual capitalist-patriarchs are being
replaced by the bureau-patriarchs of modern capitalism;
hand in hand Patriarchy and capitalism are neither decaying
nor being eroded as much as we would wish they were. The
links between masculinism and work begin to break down
when Tolson introduces his third category, "the progressive
middle class male", a loosely defined group which
presumably includes Men Against Sexism. No explanation
of the group is put forward in terms of differing work
experience: "the 'class fraction' includes some teachers,
social workers, journalists and creative artists.".
Without doubt there are men who are beginning to
explore their masculinism and are attempting radical
alternatives to traditional monogamous heterosexual or. for
that matter, homosexual relationships, but I feel that
within the logic of Tolson's theory of masculinism based as
it is on class/work,they ought not really to exist.
While I agree that a man's position within the male
hierarchy, as symbolised by his job or, in the case of the
middle class male, his profession, is important when we try
to look at the ways in which we as men oppress each other
and women, this is only one aspect of masculinism, albeit
an important one. Masculinity ultimately derives from our
power as men over women's bodies and over the means of
reproduction. Homosexual men are not denied the ever
present possibility of dominating women's bodies and in
many ways symbolically work out dominant/submissive,
male/female heterosexual parallels in relationships with
men. Tolson fails to analyse men's physical power over
women and women's bodies. It is this initial division of
the means of reproduction into a power relationship which
we as men should try to understand and analyse: only
through an understanding of that power can we hope to
develop an overall understanding of Patriarchy, Sexism and
Hierarchy.
In conclusion Tolson relates in some detail his
experience in an all male heterosexual C.R. group. This is
by far the most interesting section of the book and
although it is less detailed it rivals Sue Bruley's account of
a women's C.R. group. He sees C.R. as a limited (limited by
masculinity) but extremely useful tool for the creation of
an awareness of one's own masculinism and as a means to
combining the personal with the political.
As to the political, Tolson believes that men should
become supporters of the Women's Movement:
"As men as agents of a patriarchal culture, we
remained the dominant gender. In a certain sense, we
were imperialists in a rebellion of slaves concerned
defensively about the threat of our privilege ... Men
can, I think within a limited sphere, develop a
supportive role which does not 'incorporate' feminist
and gay initiatives. It is important that men should
continue to participate in childcare and nursery
education where their very presence challenges sexrole expectations.".
I partly agree with this point of view in that it appears
to be very difficult for men together to do much more than
reinforce our own masculinity, but we should not lay the
burden of leadership or guidance at the feet of women for
that is a misunderstanding of feminism. It is too early in
the struggle for men together to cease looking for ways to
combat masculinism within ourselves. I would recommend
this book as a much needed contribution to the theory of
masculinism, but one to be read critically.
Gay Left 9

Politics and Ideology

by Keith Birch
An Introduction to Althusser, Mitchell and Lacan
Over the past few years there has been little theoretical
discussion within the Gay Movement, partly as a result of
the fragmentation and stagnation that occurred and the
main preoccupation of the socialist current to the
traditional Left groups. On a practical political level some
advances have been made in Britain within the major parties
of the Left. Gay groups in the Communist Party and the
Socialist Workers Party have been formed and both parties
have, like the International Marxist Group, issued statements in support of gay civil rights as well as making noises
about the struggle against sexism, although discussion and
action throughout the membership on these issues has been
limited.
The theoretical impasse that has come about in the G.M.
in this country leads to major problems that we are now
confronted by and which fundamentally affect our practice.
Added to this, the dominance of an economistic perspective
on the revolutionary left despite broader theoretical
analyses in some cases tends to limit the issues raised by
the Women's Movement and G.M. to ones of reformism and
civil rights. For instance, the campaign around the defence
of abortion rights suddenly became important to some of
the left groups, but while defending abortion as a fundamental right of women, the wider issue of sexuality is not
confronted and propaganda and action is often reduced to
solely economic questions, and thus abortion rights will be
automatically attained under socialism. Likewise, the issues
raised by the G.M. can be treated as civil rights for yet
another minority group which can be integrated now into
the Party by issuing statements in support of gay rights and,
come the revolution, by legal changes.
Support and integration in this partial way results from
the inadequacy of our theory, activity and demands. Within
both the W.M. and Marxism important advances have been
made concerning ideology and sexuality, the areas of
specific relevance to the G.M. in any analysis we wish to
make of our oppression under capitalism. The G.M. should
be open to and involved in these discussions so that the
socialist movement must face up to the question of
sexuality and so that we may have the means of fighting
our oppression more effectively. We still live with the
concepts borrowed from the W.M. of the early 70s and
though they gave us valuable insights into how gay
oppression is related to the exploitation and oppression of
women and non-reproductive sexuality in general, it fails to
account for and make links with the way in which capitalist
society reproduces itself as a totality, not only labour
power but also its relations of production and ideological
forms, and how the subordination of women fits into this
structure.
An Economistic View of Gay Oppression
In our first collective editorial we stated the need for a
materialist analysis of gay oppression. We centred sexual
oppression on the role of the family under capitalism and
the subjection of women within it, pointing out both the
economic and ideological aspects of this. On the economic
aspect, we discussed the role of women in the domestic
sphere, labour and reproduction, and their use as a cheap
source of labour in the economy, thus reinforcing their
economic subservience. The ideological role of the family
was concerned with reproduction and the socialisation of
children, especially into their sex roles. We did not place
gay oppression concretely within this framework but by
extension saw that it was the general result of sexism and
the need to control sexuality. The implication being that
homosexuality threatened the family as the most obvious
form of sexuality for pleasure outside the straight-jacket
of reproduction and thus social and legal prohibitions were
i mposed on it.
Gay Left 10

Our account tended to reduce gay oppression to an

almost immediate response to the economic needs of
capitalism. At the same time the central debate amongst
socialist-feminists and the left concerned domestic labour
and women's role in the labour force under capitalism. The
argument ranged over different interpretations of Marxist
economic categories of productive and unproductive labour
and whether domestic labour contributed to the creation of
surplus value and the relationship between women's two
roles, in the family and in the industrial labour force.
However, the attempt to fit an analysis of women's
subordination solely within an economic framework in the
traditional manner of socialist economics fails to take
account of the ideological and cultural aspects of
oppression that result from a patriarchal form of society or
to recognise other areas of struggle that are necessarily
outside of the immediate economic sphere. Work in the
W.M. is now concerned with both the political economy of
women, entailing consideration of women's specific
exploitation under capitalism and the role of the family and
reproduction, and an analysis of its complex relationship
with patriarchy and ideology.
An analysis of gay oppression cannot simply be fitted
into a discussion of economic categories. It cannot be fixed
within an account of economic exploitation beyond the
links to the oppression and control of female sexuality
within production and reproduction. Gay oppression is
now largely located in the sphere of ideology and its role
in the general reproduction of the relations of production
and the patriarchal social formation. What we need is a
theory of sexuality, not specifically of gayness, and to see
the way in which sexuality is socially constructed. Gays as
a social minority may be able to gain some liberal reforms
within capitalism and the containment of homosexuals as a
minority group poses little threat to the present social
order. It is the wider questions of sexuality and sexism that
pose a threat by confronting the basis of current social
relationships.
The Role of Ideology
The role of ideology has been a much neglected area within
the Marxist tradition but this state of affairs has been
changing. This is the result of several factors; the lack of
any revolutionary breakthrough during the last decade of
economic crisis, the influence of the Cultural Revolution in
China and the spread of the work of Gramsci and Althusser.

The ideas of Gramsci, as interpreted by the EuroCommunists, and their concern with the struggle for
socialist hegemony by building 'broad democratic alliances'
around the working class has given greater stress to the role
of ideology and culture in the way bourgeois domination is
continued. Also central to the new thinking about
ideology has been the work of Althusser and his critique of
previous Marxist conceptions in this area.
At the same time, discussion in the Women's Movement
was facing similar problems. The economic analysis, though
of course basic to an understanding of women's oppression,
was not enough by itself. The knowledge gained by the
W.M. about women's subordination under patriarchy
showed that one's socialisation could not be overcome just
through an awareness of one's situation and the removal of
a 'false consciousness'. It was clear that formulations of
ideology which pose it as 'false consciousness' or as simply
the reflection of one's position within economic relations
were inadequate to explain the needs and desires that are
concrete forces in people's lives. They cannot be swept
away simply by consciousness raising groups however
valuable they may be at some levels. Within the G.M. the
vision of our self-oppression is very strong and exhortations
for everyone to come out and throw off this oppression
through efforts of self-will are, besides being idealist,
lacking an understanding of the real forces which lead to
our oppression and the much deeper foundation of the
socialisation process. The tendency is to see the individual
as an already constituted rational being who is filled with
the accepted social attitudes and knowledge through socialisation and so can be changed on being confronted with
'the truth' of her/his situation and the reality of their social
relations. However, the forces which mould our character
structures and our existence as sexed beings within the
social formation are much more strongly embedded in us
and in the ideological and economic relations in which we
live.
The discussion around ideology is of great importance to
the G.M. and should not be dismissed as idle talk amongst
left theoreticians. First of all it entails a critique of the way
the socialist movement has operated, and still largely does
so, similar to some of the criticisms that the W.M. and G.M.
have made of it. That is to say, against the left's reduction
of all analysis and struggle to the economic and the
concentration of activity at the point of production to the
detriment of any other area of life. Secondly, the
recognition of ideology as an area with a relative autonomy
from the economic opens up the possibility of it being an
area for struggle by the left as well as by the W.M.,
challenging and exploiting the contradictions that arise
there. Thirdly, it concerns the way in which the individual
enters and exists in social relations, the way in which we
become sexed subjects the subject being the term used to
describe the individual in its social relations as opposed to
the bourgeois notion of the individual as the centre of
purposive action. This includes how we learn our femininity
and masculinity and how we carry the ideology necessary
for the reproduction of social relations under capitalism.
These new conceptions that are being advanced and the
wider scope of activity that they envisage may help to move
us on from the 'personal is political' debate that we have
with the left.
An important aspect of this analysis of the role of
ideology is the renewed concern with Psychoanalysis and
the formation of the unconscious as the way in which a
human being enters the social order and takes her/his
determined position there.
The rest of this article is concerned with giving a brief
outline of some of the work being done in this area;
Althusser on ideology, Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and
Feminism and finally a discussion of work in progress by
marxist-feminists developing from this.
Althusser
The part of Althusser's work with which I am concerned is
his conception of ideology and the Ideological State

Apparatuses essay. His starting point is a critique of the

economic determinism of the socialist movement and its
view of the social formation as that of an economic base on
which is built a superstructure of the political and
ideological levels. Traditionally, from this starting point,
socialists had merely reduced the ideological level to a
reflection of economic relationships. As a consequence, all
analysis was focused on understanding the economy and
activity was limited to the economic struggles of the
working class. This can be seen in the reformism of the
Second International and their belief in the inevitable
transition to socialism because of the internal contradictions of capitalism and in the idea that revolutionary
change to a socialist economic base and relations of
production would automatically bring similar change in all
other social relations, ideas and culture after an unspecified
length of time.
This position is challenged by Althusser who describes
the social formation as being made up of three levels the
economic, political and ideological, in which both the
political and ideological have a relative autonomy from the
economic which does, however, remain determinant in the
last instant. In different modes of production any of the
levels may be dominant in the social formation, their
position being determined by the economic. All of the
levels exert influence on one another so that instead of the
economic simply determining ideology it is, in its turn,
acted upon and changed by the other levels. Althusser
describes ideology as having a material force, the ideas and
values that people live by lead them to take certain actions
which have a material effect on the other levels of society.
Thus ideology is not a simple reflection and does not have
an immediate correlation to the economic. It has a relative
autonomy and may have contradictions both within itself
and towards the other levels. The importance of this
redefinition of the social formation is that capitalism
survives on the ideological level as well as the economic and
these formulations may help us to gain a better understanding of capitalist relations.
In his Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) essay,
Althusser suggests that the analysis of the ideological level
should be taken from the point of view of the reproduction
of the conditions of production, in particular the existing
relations of production. He identifies two aspects which
maintain the reproduction of the relations of production,
the repressive State Apparatuses, such as the police, army
and courts, which function largely through force, and the
ISAs, such as the family, education, culture and religion,
which function in the main through ideology, though they
may be backed up by force. Under capitalism the most
important of the ISAs are the education system and the
family. Althusser stresses the role of education which takes
us all and teaches us skills and values and develop es the
division of labour in order for us to take our places in
society. At the same time it reinforces the sexual roles
which we have been given. However, much of this is only a
secondary stage of socialisation which reinforces what has
already been formed within the milieu of the family. The
school "teaches 'know-how' in forms which ensure
subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its
practice". The family is more important in that it
constructs people as agents of production and reproduction
and instills the forms of domination and subordination. It is
in the family that the oppression of women and gays is
initiated and it is also within familial relationships that the
genesis of the individual as a sexed subject within ideology
takes place. Althusser says "Ideology constitutes concrete
individuals as subjects" and it is in the family where the
individual exists as an always-already constituted subject,
taking up a specific position and becoming a sexed subject,
taking on the aspects of femininity and masculinity that
this society demands.
Central to Althusser's theory of ideology is the work of
Lacan in the field of psychoanalysis. This is true both for
his formulation of ideology as not being false consciousness
but as representing "the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of-existence" and in his
Gay Left 11

notion of the process in which ideology constructs

individuals as subjects. There are difficulties in both of
these formulations. The use of the term imaginary comes
from Lacan and his theory of the pre-Oedipal or "Mirror"
stage of the infant and it relates to the misrecognition of
reality, though Althusser stresses that it is not false, and
through the subject acting on this misrecognition it has
material consequences. The complex relationship between
ideology and the concept of the subject is expressed by
Althusser in that ideology only exists in and for subjects
but at the same time it constitutes them. The circularity of
this argument is apparent and presents difficulties by
making the social formation a closed system. A similar
problem arises in his conception of the ISAs which he sees
as unified by the ideology of the ruling class so that the
trade unions, for example, are part of this totality. This
view tends to dismiss the actual and possible gains made
through class struggle in many areas.
Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism
Juliet Mitchell's book takes up the relationship of psychoanalysis to the modern feminist movement. It shares with
Althusser a use of Lacan's reading of Freud. Mitchell says
that the rejection of psychoanalysis by the W.M. is
mistaken and results from a misunderstanding of its
possible use; a result of the way it has been used by
bourgeois psychology as a tool for defining and enforcing
normality. Likewise, in the G.M., discussion on Freud has
centred on whether psychoanalysis is an enemy, classing
gays as sick and proposing cures and slotting us back into
society as 'healthy individuals', reinforcing the idea of
individual failings rather than the outcome of problems
which are social in origin. The arguments in defence usually
stress the breakthrough that Freud made in the theory of
sexuality polymorphous perversity, childhood sexuality,
the wide spectrum of possible sexual object choices. They
also refer to the various statements that he made of the best
liberal kind "homosexuality is not a sickness, only a
social disadvantage", "homosexuals should have full civil
rights". However, for those who have not rejected psychoanalysis as an obstacle to sexual liberation there has been a
tendency to dismiss Freud's work in favour of Reich, Laing
and varied techniques of group therapy. As Mitchell
describes it, whatever importance they may have had for
the W.M. and G.M. the stress on sexuality, and relations
in the family their work is not of the same value as
Freud's.

What Mitchell proposes is the status of psychoanalysis

as a science, one which can be made use of "not as a
prescription for a patriarchal society but as an analysis of
one". It is not only important for our understanding of
patriarchy but also of ideology, the construction of the
subject, femininity and masculinity and sexuality.
Psychoanalysis is the science of the unconscious and it is
at the level of the unconscious that we acquire the
character structures which reproduce the social and sexual
relations necessary for the reproduction of the present
social formation. Mitchell, following Lacan, distinguishes
the scientific concepts which form the basis of Freud's
work from the cultural and theoretical limitations in which
he operated and its degeneration into the present practice
of bourgeois psychology. This involves a re-reading of the
theories to free them from their biologism and the
terminology in which Freud had to think them.
The Oedipus Complex
From the basis laid down in Lacan's interpretation, psychoanalysis can help to reveal the way in which human beings
enter the social order and take on their sexed identity and
their respective roles in the patriarchal order. This entry is
achieved for both sexes through the Oedipus Complex
which is also central to the taking on of femininity and
masculinity and the choice of sexual object. As described
by Freud, the Oedipus Complex for the boy involves
competition with the father for the love of the mother and
a wish for his death. However, the fear of castration, which
is made real by the sight of a 'lack' in girls of a penis, and
the desire to preserve his penis, the centre of his pleasure,
means that he gives up the claim on his mother and instead
identifies with his father and the future power of this role
with the reward of a wife of his own. The Oedipus Complex
is smashed.
For girls the process is much more diffuse and Freud
only considered it independently late on in his work. It
involves both the attainment of femininity and passivity,
through recognition of 'castration', and the transference of
the love object from the mother to the father. The
recognition of the 'lack' of a penis precedes the Oedipus
Complex and leads to a rejection of the mother for not
giving her one and eventually to the transfer of love to the
father, through the equation of a penis with a baby, which
the father can give to the girl. The sense of castration leads
to the giving up of clitoral sexuality and the entry into a
period of passivity before the erotogenic zone transfers to
the vagina.
In the work of Freud, the anatomical differences
between the sexes largely contributed to their respective
social roles and characteristics. This, and the denigration
of women ("lack of penis", "castrated", "less developed
super-ego"), has led to the wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis. But it is this very subordination of women and
their sexuality through the structuring of the unconscious
within the patriarchal order that it can help to explain.

Gay Left 12

Lacan's reading of Freud makes use of those concepts

which relate closely to those of the science of structural
linguistics rather than the elements of instinctual theory
which are present, so that he says "the unconscious is
structured like a language". One enters the social order, the
Symbolic, through one's entry into the order of language.
Entry into the social order occurs through the Oedipus
Complex which Lacan, in keeping with Freud, sees as
universal and ahistorical phenomenon. Here the relationship of the child to the mother is broken by a third party,
the Father. Mitchell equates this with the move from the
closed relationship of nature, the mother and child, to that
of culture where the child takes up its social position. For
Lacan, the Phallus is the universal signifier, the emblem of
the Father and of social order, which ensures through the
acquisition of language, the entry of the child into society
and its appropriate sexual identity. The Phallus is the
signifier of power and it is this symbolic 'lack' that is forged
on the unconscious through the Oedipus Complex in the
attainment of femininity which contributes to the
maintenance of the subordination of women.

Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has described homosexuality as a fixation of
object choice at a certain stage of development. In the work
of Freud are identified several different factors which lead
to a predominant choice of sexual object of the same sex.
These include, for men, the identification with the mother
and passive attitude towards the father, fear or regard for
the father resulting in the avoidance of rivalry, and the
denigration or fear of women. For women Freud attributed
it to a masculinity complex and the refusal to recognise
'castration' although he felt bisexuality was much more
widespread amongst women because of their first love
object being of the same sex.
What the reinterpretation of the Oedipus Complex by
Lacan as the means of entry into the social order implies,
in relation to homosexuality, is still an open question.
Some have posed women's entry as being a negative one in
their relation to the Phallic signifier and their position of
social subordination but in what way can it be related to
homosexuality? Deleuze has described it in terms of a
refusal, reminiscent of Marcuse's view of homosexuality in
the 1960s. We have as yet to see if any useful knowledge
can be gained in this respect.
Problems of Mitchell's Approach
Although Juliet Mitchell's book is an important opening up
of this area there are major criticisms that must be made of
it. A central fault is the way in which she poses psychoanalysis as a distinct science with a completely independent
field of study to historical materialism. She describes
Marxism as having to deal with the economic and class
struggle while psychoanalysis is concerned with the analysis
of ideology and sexuality under patriarchy. This false and
dangerous distinction leads to her proposing that it is the
working class that is the bearer of the fight against
capitalism and the W.M. in the separate cultural struggle
against patriarchy and ideology. This is the very dichotomy
that marxist-feminists are trying to overcome rather than
the proposal for the way forward.
The other main fault is the way in which she tries to
integrate the theories of Levi-Strauss to explain the cause of
patriarchy and to show the universality and ahistorical
nature of the Oedipus Complex. This notion equates the
exchange of women between men or kin groups with the
inauguration of 'culture' from 'nature'. This exchange is
necessary because of the basic need for communication and
reciprocity. It is the start of social intercourse and binds
society together, breaking out of the closed, incestuous
nature of the kin groups. The fact that it is women who are
exchanged as signs between men is thus attributed to a
necessary, though unexplained, move from 'nature' to
'culture'. Thus, all societies have been patriarchal and have
an incest taboo to ensure this exchange. Mitchell gives us
this idealist theory instead of attempting to make a
materialist analysis of women's role in production and
reproduction in the kin groups which may explain their
subordination and exchange between men.
Work in Progress
The problems raised by the relationship of patriarchy and
ideology to capitalism are very complex and much of the
present work involves a critique and clarification of the
insights gained from the work of Althusser, Lacan and
Mitchell. It opens up the possibility of making a materialist
account of the functioning of ideology and the construction of the sexed subject within social relations as opposed
to the notion of some pure essence being at the heart of
each individual which is capable of being set free under
socialism.
Some of the most interesting work has appeared in the
journal Working Papers in Sex Science and Culture. One of
the central issues raised here has been the relationship
between psychoanalysis and historical materialism. In an
article by Jane Bullen, it says "psychoanalysis cannot
explain the relation patriarchy has with social and economic
forms, nor can it analyse the social conditions in which it
arose. Psychoanalysis as a science explains what goes on in

the unconscious of male and female children to produce

' masculinity' and 'femininity' as we know them".
However, the articles by Mia Campioni et al stress the
need to ground psychoanalysis within historical materialism
for the study of ideology and the unconscious in relation to
the mode of production. Campioni says that psychoanalysis
cannot be autonomous, the unconscious can only be
thought as an effect of the social in its historical context
and she "attempts to place Freud's theory of the origin and
function of the Oedipus Complex within the marxist theory
of ideology in order to find the connection between
sexuality and the class struggle."
Within this project there is the beginning of a materialist
analysis of the relation of kinship structures and the family
to the mode of production. An important aspect of their
work is a critique of the phallocentric and ideological bias
of the theories of Freud and Lacan. Factors central to their
theories such as the Oedipus Complex and the Phallus as
signifier of social order are taken as neutral whereas they
should be seen as ideological constructs of patriarchy. This
bias within Lacan's reformulation of Freud poses
difficulties for the way in which his theories can be used.
Similar concerns are raised in the Papers on Patriarchy
from the conference that was held in London in 1976 while
in another short paper Mary McIntosh questions the way in
which the W.M. and G.M. have seen sexuality and talked
about its oppression as if there was a true essence. She
shows the complexity of the problems in thinking about
sexuality, given that it is not an innate characteristic but a
culture specific phenomenon which raises the issue of the
social context and structuring of sexual behaviour in our
society.
A Way Forward?
It is as yet unclear what this work may provide. It shows a
move away from much of the simple economism of the left
and the need for ideological struggle and transformation as
being central to the socialist movement. Of course, the
Gay Left 13

economic demands of capitalism are central to the

oppression of women but it is through ideological practice
within the family that women and gays experience much of
the oppression of their social relations. As an essay in the
Papers on Patriarchy says "Any analysis of how the family
functions to enforce the divisions between relations of
production and relations of reproduction has to take
account of the specific ideological function of the family".
It must be recognised that sexuality exists within the
context of human culture and is not a pre-given essence or
instinct.
The recent debates in the socialist and women's
movements which stress the material reality of the ideas
that people live by in society points to the need to .
challenge and remove them as obstacles to change. The
ideological struggle is important in loosening the hold of
capitalist values and relationships in the process of building
oppositional forces and it will be just as necessary in the
transition to socialism. There will be a continued need for
autonomous women's, black and gay movements to
confront racism and sexism and fight against all aspects of
oppression.
There are however dangers which must be faced in this
renewed emphasis on ideology. We should not follow
Mitchell's split of the economic and ideological struggles to
the working class and W.M. respectively. There are
problems in the attempt to bring an analysis of the
individual within the framework of Marxism. Previous
attempts at combining psychoanalysis with Marxism to
meet this need have largely failed and there are many
difficulties to be faced in any appropriation of Lacan's
work.
These areas of theoretical work may help to validate the
current practices of the W.M. and G.M. within the socialist
movement and in time give insights into how the struggle
against patriarchy may be carried out more effectively.
However, in the struggle against bourgeois and patriarchal
hegemony at all levels of our society, we should not ignore
the true nature of State power which lies behind it and the
determining role of the economic. These will have to be
confronted before any transition to a socialist society is
possible.
Bibliography
Lenin and Philosophy Althusser (contains ISAs essay & Freud
and Lacan.

Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture, 1 and 2.

Ideology and Consciousness
Papers on Patriarchy (1976 Conference)
Psychoanalysis and Feminism J. Mitchell.
On Ideology Centre for Cultural Studies No. 10.

Another
Patriarchal
Irrelevance....
The Homosexual Matrix
by C.A. Tripp
( Quartet Books 5.95)

Reviewed by Phil Derbyshire

Gays have long been the objects of bourgeois social science,
and it is not surprising that Tripp's book, so firmly
grounded in that tradition, should turn out to be another
monumental inconsequence. It is to be hoped that the
works of the French Marxists Deleuze and Foucault will
soon be available in English, so that we can dispense with
reading historically naive accounts of sexuality, and begin
to supersede the tradition that so mechanically produces
them.
The Homosexual Matrix is a liberal tour through the
domain of homosexuality. Its author is a well intentioned
patriarch, offended by the taboos on homosexuality, but
unable to see the structures of sexism that support those
taboos: indeed he is incapable from his individualistic
psychology to even conceive of the possibilities of such
structures. Homosexuality is for him a unitary and transhistorical category, ie it is the same 'thing' for men and
women and has existed in the same way throughout
history. That he is conceptualising homosexuality through
the ideological forms of advanced capitalism cannot occur
to him, yet significantly most of the examples he uses to
illustrate his various discussions are drawn from contemporary American gay male culture, with occasional bracketed
addenda for lesbians. To that extent he is remorselessly
sexist and whilst he nods at the possibility of non-phallic
sexuality amongst lesbians, he fails to use this as a clue for
the re-interpretation of male sexuality, but rather sees male
and female sexuality as biological givens, whose differences
are founded in 'neurological substrates'.
His devotion to biologism is apparent in the chapter on
'Inversion', where he legitimates gayness by reference to
rats and dogs; occasional taking up of the 'opposite sex's'
behaviour is legitimate, indeed a measure of sexual
capacity, because lower mammals do it. Yet simultaneously
he accepts gender roles and the active/passive division
between men and women as absolute! But then again the
account of protozoan reproduction as a valid model of
sex (p.115) shows a quaint distortion of thought.
The oppression of gay men and lesbians is explained by
the usual liberal cliches of prejudice, ignorance and the
residuum of the Judaeo-Christian heritage; hence his politic
is the familiar demand for education, and the slow
acceptance of homosexuals who are "just like everyone
else" within capitalism. The alternative accounts of
Feminism and Marxism are not mentioned; the Women's
and Gay movements are only obliquely and snidely
mentioned and dismissed. "The Politics of Homosexuality"
for Tripp are the activities of faggots in the CIA and
American Federal politics!

Gay Left 14

I suppose that one can thank this slightly anachronistic

Enlightenment rationalist for not producing another attack
on homosexuality, but the mass of ill-sorted and
untheorised data in this book can only provide material for
the ongoing project of developing a Marxist theory of
sexuality: the book itself does nothing to help that project.
It is a humorous irrelevance and at 5.95 very dear.

Crossroads - which way now?

by Nigel Young
"I'm a lesbian, a socialist and an alien. If I were to come
out in my union branch at school as a lesbian, the Headmistress would love it I'd get the sack. On my own I
don't feel I should risk the work I can do as a woman and
a socialist."
"If I were to come out in my union branch as a gay man,
I feel I'd be jeopardising the struggle of my party against
cuts, unemployment and racism."
These are just two of the many personal comments I
have heard over the last year from lesbians and gay men
who work in their unions as socialists but feel unable to
raise the issue of gay rights as part of their struggle as
committed socialists. Some people may raise their eyes in
horror at such "closet" gays, but this misunderstands the
real issue of the continuing oppression which lesbians and
gay men face in their battles against sexism in their union
work.
As far as gay rights are concerned we are still too often
confronted by the simplistic historical legacy of the gay
liberation movement. This saw the struggle against sexism
as an end in itself and saw the battleground defined as
come-out gays smashing the barriers of sexism through
their demands for gay rights. Perhaps in the 1960s we may
have been forgiven for such optimism and naivety. But a
decade later the battle against sexism is nowhere near over
and in some places the battle hasn't even begun. At the
same time we are confronted with high unemployment,
falling standards of living and a backlash against the
permissive society of the "swinging sixties", factors which
make our cries for gay rights seem like an even smaller
voice in the hurricane.
Gay Rights' Struggles The Problems
Problems inherent in gay rights' struggles have been
submerged by the energy and commitment we have placed
in coming out in our unions. In practice few people have
raised the gay issue in their unions and those of us who
have often did so in response to victimised gay workers
rather than as an issue we have the right to raise at all times.
The practical problems in this area are common. First,
most of us working in our unions have had to struggle
against isolation. One or two caucuses exist, but most of us
have to carry out our gay battles in isolation. There comes
a point when you can not bear being the token gay
assuaging the consciences of other branch members too
many times a year. Secondly as there are small numbers of
open lesbians and gay men scattered throughout many
unions the problem of organising effectively across unions
is almost impossible.

A final problem in this area relates to the programme

we wish to put forward. In the gay workers' movement we
started out with a Gay Rights Charter which ended up as
a huge list of individual campaigns, many of which were
unrelated to the needs of lesbians. A proposal for a sexual
rights charter was never discussed. I think the "movement"
already sensed it had neither the direction nor power to
raise the issue of sexual rights in our unions. Today we are
left with a frustrating vacuum where those of us who are
outside of political groups wonder what direction to take
in the battles against sexism, racism, fascism and economic
chaos.
Is There A Gay Politics?
The difficulties confronting us in our political work reflect
the problem of identifying what a gay politics is. In certain
areas there is still an obvious need for what we might
consider conventional gay work such as counselling and
befriending services, consciousness raising groups and social
groups. However if we wish to extend our practice towards
a wider political framework, we must examine present
political activity and reassess the role and value of a gay
politics in relation to that activity.
Political struggles have occurred in which lesbians and
gay men have taken and continue to take a positive role
and, at the same time, make important statements about
gays and politics. Several examples spring to mind. The
Trico strike of women over equal pay in 1976 involved the
women at Trico mounting 24 hour pickets for many
months. Groups of lesbians and gay men went to the
pickets several times and though there was some reticence
shown by the Trico workers, it must have been the first
time for most of them to be confronted by open gays, who
showed their solidarity over many weeks by helping out on
the picket lines.
Lesbians and gay men have also been in much evidence
at the Grunwick strike this year, which not only gives us
a feeling of mutual solidarity but also shows other workers
our presence. As the Gay Liberation Movement has always
asserted "coming out" is a life time process which can be
done in many ways.
Finally at the battle of Lewisham this August against
the fascist National Front, large numbers of lesbians and
gay men were in the forefront of the struggle which forced
the fascists to scuttle along the pavements rather than
marching down the roads with their disgusting banners.
The unifying factor in all of these actions is that large
numbers of us have been able to show our solidarity with
oppressed and exploited people by our group presence.
This seems to me a more positive way of raising gay and
non-gay consciousness at present than placing an
intolerably heavy burden on isolated gays to "come out"
in their unions when they have no group support.

Gay Left 15

Ideological Work
The second area in which we need to reassess our position
relates to work on the ideological level. Gay community
centres, gay caucuses in unions, and gay groups generally
have an important role to play. They challenge bourgeois
norms and values about the way we live together and the
types of relationships we develop in the wider community.
At the same time such organisations bring to the fore
extremely important organisational criticisms of bourgeois
structures and in so doing encourage much wider rank and
file involvement in the development of these groups. These
developments need to go on side by side with our traditional
political activity. Otherwise we will find ourselves in the
dangerous position of having a lop-sided elitist movement
addressing all of its actions towards other radical gays and
committed socialists.
Work on the ideological level is also important because
it represents socialism as a qualitatively different experience
to capitalism whilst at the same time it enables us to view
our activities in these areas as legitimate fields for
revolutionary struggle. We are no longer being solely
confronted by the message that the only "good
revolutionary" is for example, a dock workers' shop
steward and male at that. Thus the success of any
revolutionary practice begins to be seen in the perspective
of gaining support through challenging all the bourgeois
capitalist dominated structures; in the ideological and
political as well as the economic spheres.
Lesbians and Gay Men
The relationships between lesbians and gay men, even
when we define ourselves as socialists too, have often been
an explosive issue. In the early G.L.M. lesbians and gay
men found it increasingly difficult to work together and
the need of the lesbians for a women-defined situation
took them out of the G.L.M. and into the women's movement. Today, though, even if some areas of our personal
lives remain separate our common areas of struggle as
socialists draw us together. There is a pressing need to
begin to share experiences of our oppression in relation to
dominant ideological areas, in relation to our work
situations, and finally in relation to our practice as rank
and file unionists. Out of these discussions it may even be
possible for lesbians and gay men to start to tread gingerly
into the explosive arena of discussions around sexual
practice and personal relationshiops.
Lesbians will continue to organise autonomously, but
I feel it is important that there be a working relationship in
limited areas as a means to unifying and strengthening the
gay movement in its struggle against sexism and for
socialism. However, to call at the present time for large
scale joint conferences and campaigns in the hope that a
basis will be laid for lesbians and gay men to work together
seems out of touch with current needs or possibilities. By
the end of all past conferences it became apparent that
lesbians would continue to work in the women's movement.
In reality we have never been able to define areas of
activity, on a large scale and in the long term, which were
relevant to all of us. Consequently these events have tended
to separate us the opposite of their intention.
Lesbians and gay men can work together in a practical
way. For instance both groups have been involved in Trico,
Grunwick and at Lewisham. In the latter case many gay
men took their lead from the women's group which was
well stewarded, highly disciplined and sang the best songs
throughout the march and demonstration. Through these
joint activities we are more likely to be able to explore
common areas of concern whilst at the same time
developing contacts between the two groups. It is
i mperative, therefore, that gay men should participate in
particular struggles of the trade union movement against
racism as well as carrying out their day to day union work.
Parties and Movements
The way in which we carry out our political activity leads
to all sorts of agonising questions about whether we can
best work in an autonomous group or whether we should
join a political party. Party activists often say that it is up

Gay Left 16

to us to change the party by working in it. A heavy task

build a new revolutionary party and smash capitalism at
the same time. This attitude tends to deny the role and
i mportance of autonomous movements.
It needs to be stated quite categorically that such
movements have a vital role to play in extending any
revolutionary struggle. They reach many groups of people
in an explicitly political milieu who for quite valid reasons
are unwilling to join a particular party. Simply put, the
role of an autonomous movement is to organise
independently around issues affecting that group. What
has been vital in the development of the gay movement is
that it has been able to explore the personal in a framework
which does not exist within a formal party. It has been
able to draw into its movement sections of society who
are oppressed yet are unable to explore that oppression in
a party. This does not mean that the gay movement is not
political or is not struggling for revolutionary change. Out
of the movement have sprung activists, theoreticians and
some who have moved into parties. At the same time the
gay movement has often provided support for many of us
to become actively involved in wider political work. What
the gay movement has been able to do, therefore, is raise
the consciousness and political awareness of its own
members. At the same time it has taken issues outside to
the public and the revolutionary left which were never
raised before the growth of autonomous movements.
This growth has called into question many of the sacred
cows of left parties' practice and dogma. This is especially
true concerning vital questions relating to the organisation
and programme of left groups. A small section on the left
has just begun to debate the shortcomings of democratic
centralism and in what ways Leninist theory and practice
has to be related to present day needs.
These discussions are not only important to those of us
outside of parties, but must form the basis of an on-going
critical examination by those already in left groups.
Principles of Leninist organisation cannot be taken as
i mmutable. The complex relationship between those
outside the parties, the rank and file of any party, and the
leadership of that party cannot be ignored. A discussion
around these difficult areas would help to suggest to those
of us on the outside that both sides of the democraticcentralism equation were in balance. At present there is
a grave suspicion that we have a little too much centralism
without the corresponding democracy.
The relationship which the gay movement can have
with the left is also determined by the movement's ability
to respond to the left's organisation around areas of
struggle in which the movement can be supportive. It
would be naive, for instance, to pretend that the gay
movement could have organised the mass struggles at
Grunwick or Lewisham. We did, however, help to shape
these events by our presence, for instance, on organisational
committees at Lewisham, whilst the events of the particular
day were determined by the interplay of all the non-aligned
groups with those in parties. Members of parties should
accept, therefore, that the presence of large numbers of
non-aligned groups is just as important as aligned ones.
Both groups can gain from the solidarity expressed on such
occasions.
Sometimes one feels, though, that an open gay presence
is not always seen as particularly useful when it comes to
converting workers to socialism. But the purpose of activity
is not solely an issue of smashing capitalism; it is equally
related to the development of consciousness and the
breaking down of myth and prejudice. All comrades on the
left have an absolute political duty to break down
oppression wherever it exists.
The Individual and Political Practice
Whatever the nature of our political work, whether it be
within a party or in an autonomous movement, we have to
translate our theory and practice at our workplace and in
the community. It is in this milieu, away from the glasshouses of campaigns and conferences, that lesbians and gay
men can work individually and politically. On an individual

basis we can relate our experiences of oppression to others,

whilst at the same time it is possible to talk about the links
between the personal and the political. This is one very
i mportant way of drawing people into a political process
who would otherwise find conventional political meetings
alienating. As a part of the same process we can begin to
show that the struggle to control our own lives, whether it
be at home, at work, or with friends, is an intensely
political process which will help us to look at the way
bourgeois norms and values can be instrumental in the way
we live our lives.

The value of this type of activity is that it enables

thousands of people to be reached who are not involved in
conventional political struggle. At the same time it enables
us to break down much of the mythical propaganda about
"lefties" who are often solely presented and perceived as
terrorists, students or middle class academics removed from
the realities of everyday living.
This type of politics is important because it gains vital
support for socialist ideas which is the first step towards
involving people in the struggle for socialism.

How Time's Gone By

A Review of Gay Theatre
by Derek Cohen

In March 1975 a series of plays opened lunchtime at the

Almost Free Theatre in London's West End under the
general heading of Homosexual Acts. These plays dealt in
some way or other with homosexuality and the company
that performed them was called Gay Sweatshop forerunner of the present day Gay Sweatshop companies. In
September this year the men's group of the present Gay
Sweatshop unveiled its latest production As Time Goes
By. The two reviews below show that gay theatre has come
a long way. It is no longer enough to have plays which just
show the daily lives of lesbians and gay men TV soap
operas can do as much. It is not even enough to include an
appreciation of our oppression. Gay theatre now seeks to
remind us of our history; we are encouraged to recognise
the patterns in our lives to see that unless we act together
to change its direction, history will surely repeat itself. Gay
theatre has become a conscious political medium.

Homosexual Acts
The plays from the 1975 lunchtime season, together with
a longer evening production, have been reproduced in a
book called Homosexual Acts after the series. There are five
plays in the book One Person, Fred and Harold, and
The Haunted Host all by Robert Patrick, Thinking Straight
by Lawrence Collinson and Ships by Alan Wakeman.

For me the best play in the book is Thinking Straight by

Lawrence Collinson. It concerns a playwright, Lawrence,
who is rewriting an autobiographical play in its original gay
setting as opposed to the heterosexual love affair he felt
obliged to couch it in ten years previously in order to get
it shown on television. On the stage he is confronted with
two examples of himself the female character who took
his part in the heterosexual version and the man who he
was in the actual situation. During the play the author is
confronted over and over again by his male self about the
way he fitted gay relationships into heterosexual moulds.
He is challenged about how, despite the transformation
from a heterosexual relationship into a supposedly more
honest gay one he is using the same cliches about romantic
love, despair, disillusionment, sacrifice, jealousy and
fidelity. He is reminded by The Man that "... a gay man or
woman has to consider his or her sexuality in far wider
terms than straights think about theirs." He is confronted
about his own double standards that on the one hand he
claimed not to "go to bed with anyone unless I really love
him" but was content also to have a series of "brief
encounters" on the side. Lawrence didn't even believe,
himself, in the values he presented in his play. This play

When I saw the lunchtime plays two years ago I felt a

rush of enthusiasm for them here were theatrical events
that related in some way to something that was part of me
my homosexuality. It was gladdening to be able to take
friends to these plays and show them that not all theatre
was about heterosexuality, but that gay people too also
had a place on the stage (or floor as the Almost Free
Theatre stage tends to be). Reading through those same
plays now in a block I find myself viewing them differently,
not just across time, but from each other as well. By
reading them together the biases and inferences, the less
obvious messages that the plays and the characters in them
convey, became more apparent.
Gay women and men are, on the whole, isolated and
invisible. This means that images of gay people in the media
are that much more valuable to the public and to ourselves
as guidelines; theatre companies presenting 'gay theatre'
and those writing for such a theatre have a special
responsibility not incumbent upon more traditional theatre.
In presenting a number of plays under the banner of
Homosexual Acts the audience will consciously be
expecting to see realistic images of gay people. Because of
the way the Almost Free Theatre presented the plays it
would seem fair to assume that gay people, or at least those
connected with the company, approved of the images being
presented. I am not here denying the difficulty there has
always been of finding good gay material for the theatre or
of getting that material produced. But in agreeing to put on
the plays reprinted in the book there was a collusion with
their images.
Gay Left 17

well illustrates the dangers of applying heterosexual norms

about relationships and sex to gay relationships: one cannot
si mply turn a he into a she or vice versa and have a gay as
opposed to a straight play. As The Man says ".. . we don't
have to commit adultery; we don't have to be promiscuous.
All these are hetero concepts based on the nuclear family
tradition. We can have one lover or we can have ten or we
can have a thousand . ..".
It is a pity that Robert Patrick didn't see or read
Thinking Straight before writing his plays. It is a pity that
the theatre company did not apply the principles of
Thinking Straight to their own productions.
One Person concerns the social life and relationships of
a man, his difficulties in relating other than from behind a
thick veneer of joviality and outrageous humour. In essence
he is a very lonely man who takes the opportunity during
the play to reminisce about his relationship with someone
supposedly in the audience. Fred and Harold concerns two
men trying to relate to each other sexually and emotionally.
The play lasts ten minutes and we are presented with a brief
slice of their lives no past no future perpetually
trying to get close but at the same time keeping themselves
apart. The Haunted Host a much longer play than the
rest concerns, like the other two, the difficulty a gay man
has in relating to another man. In this play a rather manic
playwright tries various ploys to entrance and yet at the
same time repel a new friend who is the split image of his
previous and now dead lover who still haunts him.
That any of the plays by Robert Patrick was in this
season seems to be because the characters in them are gay.
Yet all of them expect us to accept the characters just as
they are, normal hung up men having difficulties getting on
with other people who happen to be men. There is nothing
else in them that marks them out as being gay, and this is,
I think, because they are essentially plays about heterosexual relationships. Seen in this way the feelings and ideas,
the ways of relating all become immediately much more
understandable. The jealousy and possessiveness, the
preoccupation with relating to one other person in a
monolithic relationship are easy to understand in the life
history of heterosexuals, yet they are presented in these
plays as something normal and to be accepted without
question in the lives of gay men. Yet there is no need for us
to relate in this way. As I have said one does not get a gay
plot merely by changing the sex of one or more of the
characters. Having Juliet fall in love with another woman
does not make Romeo and Juliet a lesbian play; turning
Ophelia into a man doesn't make Hamlet a play about gay
men. These examples should make the point clear. To
present gays as being no different except for what we do in
bed is not only irresponsible but totally inaccurate. Where
in these three plays is the oppression self and external
that affects all gay men? Nowhere does he show why these
characters seek the sort of relationships they do modelled
on heterosexual norms. As I have said I think the reason is
that primarily these plays are about heterosexuals who are
passing as gay. The reasons are beyond me.
Ships, the remaining play in the book, is a series of three
linked scenarios about "... chance encounters with
strangers ... every such chance encounter could still be
the start of a marvellous adventure". In this play selfoppression, repression, isolation are presented. Though
li mited, that this play does at least acknowledge these
forces in our lives makes it much closer to 'gay theatre' as
it should be.
For the first time in 1975 theatre audiences in London
were given the chance to see some plays self-identified as
about homosexuality. The selection they got is something
we should be ashamed of. They lack any depth, not about
people, but about homosexuality. They ignored lesbians,
contributing further to their invisibility. Largely, they
showed gay men failing to relate easily to each other. That
these men failed is certainly due to their trying to do so on
the basis of heterosexual norms. Yet the audience is not
helped, apart from in Thinking Straight, to question these
norms and can easily come to the conclusion that it is
Gay Left 18

because the men are gay that they fail, that tragedy is the
logical outcome of being outside the norm, and that if only
they were better at relating like heterosexuals they could be
happy. In order to be useful gay theatre must question, it
must show what is different about being gay; it must show
our difficulties and our joys in a context the context of a
heterosexually dominated society with heterosexual norms
about relationships. Where these norms and pressures go
unchallenged, maybe not even acknowledged, gay plays
like these become a series of heterosexual acts.

As Time Goes By
As Time Goes By, the latest Gay Sweatshop production is
an excellent play. Not only does it have a tight script
enacted with flair and inspiration but it also succeeds in
presenting some essential points about the political
situation of gay men, both in relation to each other, and to
'straight politics'.
The first section of the play centres around a male
brothel in 1896, the year after the Oscar Wilde trials. We
watch the tensions mount between the brothel keeper and
his 'boys' as they strain under the pressure firstly of their
aristocratic customers and secondly the Law. The
aristocrats too have to react to the increasing repression of
homosexual activity and the only characters who seem
unscathed are Edward Carpenter, sexual reformer and
Utopian Socialist, and his lover who lead an idyllic life in
the country. When the repression starts biting the brothel
inhabitants receive the full weight of the Law's retribution
while the rich customers have their wealth and power to
support their escape to less oppressive parts abroad, beyond
the Law's reach. In the face of oppression the gay men
divide along class lines fighting each other. Meanwhile,
outside the hurly burly of the city, Carpenter and lover
read about the events from afar, but are unaffected and so
can kiss and cuddle in the fields, tell the local cleric to
mind his own business and generally avoid the consequences of their homosexuality by isolating themselves.
Thirty five years later we see a different group of gay
men earning their daily bread in Berlin. The men are more
filled out as characters, two drag artists, a club owner and
Hans a communist from Bavaria who comes to Berlin to

find the bright lights and sets up home with one of the drag
queens. Their show business lives take place against a backdrop of ever nearing fascism in Germany and the return of
laws governing sexuality in the USSR. While presenting his
analysis of the rise of fascism (unemployment, inflation)
and the importance of the fascists own men (the stormtroopers) taking to the streets, Hans has to admit that
socialist practice does not seem to have the answer either.
The others put their faith in the number of homosexual
men among the fascists, believing that as long as the homosexual Roehm had control they would be safe. When he is
shot the repression increases and they all need to flee.
As in the earlier period wealth threatens to divide the
men, the moneyed club owner vs the poorer staff. Meanwhile Magnus Hirschfield, theoretician, founder of the
Institute for Sexual Science, and a direct influence on these
men is out of the country and we see him and his lover in
Paris reading about Roehm's death and the rising campaign
against homosexuals (see photo). Safe in Paris he fails to
grasp that his Institute and all his records have been looted
and burnt. Those records include some on Lenny, one of
the drag stars, and we leave the period as the Nazis roam
the streets looking for him. Theory and practice are
countries apart.
The third period is set in a gay bar on Christopher Street
in New York in 1969. We are shown how diverse the gay
men are, each soliloquising (in one case silently) about his
own experiences, for no-one is listening. Many stereotypes
are represented the drag queen, the leather man, the
college socialite, the liberal businessman. Yet in the face of
harassment these men do not become split, they transcend
their differences and achieve cohesion in action, changing
themselves in the process.
What is most beautiful about this play is the very many
parallels it draws. Sometimes these arise because past events
are described that are ever present to us now the
unemployment, inflation and it becoming 'almost respectable' to beat up Jews in the streets in the 1930's tallies

closely with our present economic position and the attacks

on gays in the streets and courts. Sometimes the parallels
are internal to the play in the late 1920's fascists used to
wear identifying badges under their lapels guess where
the New York policeman wears his. Often the parallels are
with issues as vital to gay socialists now as then. The way
that gays were split along economic/class lines bears strong
resemblance to the situation that many gay socialists find
themselves in today. We could learn a lot from the discussions in the play about the abuses of scientific methods and
the danger of using scientific evidence to support political
theory. If they identify Jews by the shapes of their foreheads and noses might they yet try to identify gay men by
how broad our hips are?
This play suceeds because it presents a historical account
of gay oppression which we can extrapolate to our present
day situation. The parallels are there with the events and
relationships of 1896 and the 1930's. We certainly need
more of the spirit that emerged in 1969 in New York. But
this is not enough. More than being shown how gay people
can be split in the face of oppression we need an analysis of
why gay women and men have been oppressed since the
middle ages at least. We see gay men questioning other
people's explanations of their condition illness, third sex
or whatever. It is commendable to start the chronology of
gay history in 1869 when Benkert coined the term 'homosexual'.But we never see any of the characters, whatever
their status, questioning this definitional constraint. Maybe
it never happened and would be unhistorical to include it
in the play.
Despite these shortcomings As Time Goes By presents
more about gay politics than practically any other gay
cultural event to date. It is entertaining. It is informative.
It is stimulating. It works. As Time Goes By will be touring
around the country for much of 1977 at least. Go and see it.
Homosexual Acts is published by Inter-Action Imprint
price 1.20

N.O.O.L.
The National Organisation Of Lesbians
250 women crammed into a hall in Nottingham on Nov 5
for the first conference of the National Organisation Of
Lesbians. We decided almost unanimously to use 'lesbians'
instead of 'gay women' in the title because 'lesbian'
is used to frighten and repress any woman who steps
out of line, and for us not to use it would be a collusion
in this repression and in our own invisibility.
In the first session our two aims became very clear: the
need to break down the isolation of women approaching
lesbianism, but also to go out and smash the negative image
of lesbians, through political action such as pressure groups,
public education etc. These two aims may appear separate,
but they 'are closely interlinked until we publicise and
take action against the very real discrimination against
lesbians eg. in child custody cases, in sackings and a forced
`closet' existence at work, in the lack of information on
homosexuality in sex education etc etc, isolated women
will continue to be forced to hide their lesbianism, someti mes even to themselves. During the conference we were
reminded of what we are up against: the London bus's
windows were broken, a brick landed on one woman's neck,
women wearing lesbian badges were insulted in a pub and
told they were not 'real women' and a crowd of kids and
youths hung round the doors all evening, pestering the
women going in and out. The only way we can say 'Yes I'm
a lesbian and proud of it' is to join together and support
each other in taking action against this and all the other
types of oppression.

We decided that NOOL will be an autonomous organisation and not affiliate to any other body. We agreed that we
do not want a hierarchical organisation but after much
discussion decided to have another conference at the end
of February in York to deal particularly with the issue of
structure. Until then we are concentrating on local
organisation: a telephone contact list is being drawn up and
existing switchboards asked to have women only services at
certain times (any woman interested, contact the newsletter
committee). A telephone tree for quick mobilisation on
national issues is being set up. A newsletter with reports on
this conference, a contact list, and material for the York
conference will come out in January. Anyone interested in
working on the following pressure groups, contact the
newsletter committee: lesbian custody cases, sex education
in schools, lesbians in the armed forces, aversion therapy
and discouragement of lesbianism in psychiatry,
discrimination at work.
Two treasurers have been appointed (we have 200 so
far) and until the next conference all donations etc should
be sent to the National Organisation Of Lesbians, c/o
Maureen Colquhoun, the House of Commons, London SW1.
The February conference organisers need help NOOL
conference, c/o York Women's Centre, 32A Parliament
Street, York, Yorks.
Newsletter committee (deadline: Jan 7th) c/o Su Allen,
38 The Chase, Clapham SW4.
Helen Bishop

Gay Left 19

Notes on the National Film Theatre Season of Gay

fil ms, July 1977 by Paul Hallam and Ronald L.
Peck.
Despite attempts by the Festival of Light to stop the gay
season at the National Film Theatre, and the consequent
low profile the season got within the NFT itself (no display
or stills, just a stark list of titles), the season afforded gays
in London their first real opportunity to confront images
of themselves in films ranging from 1924 to the present.
The films were from a number of different countries
Belgium, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Canada, the
United States and Hong Kong and represented different
areas of film activity, from commercial mainstream cinema
(thriller, melodrama, social realist drama, comedy, horror,
kung fu, 'soft' pornography) through to documentary,
independent and avant-garde cinema.
There were inevitable disappointments and gaps all the
same: the distributors of A Very Natural Thing refusing to
allow the NFT a single screening; the inclusion of some
easily accessible films Satyricon, A Bigger Splash at the
expense of less available ones, like Saturday Night At The
Baths; the exclusion of Warhol (The Couch, My Hustler and
Flesh being particularly relevant to the season); the exclusion of any 'hard' pornography (a BFI ruling), despite the
proliferation of gay porno cinemas, and the well-known
existence of gay porno 'classics' like Boys In The Sand,
Pink Flamingos and Pink Narcissus; the exclusion of any
current avant-garde work (for that one had to go to Bristol,
where Super-8 work was shown in the context of a lively
and provocative discussion); and perhaps the cultural range
was not as large as one might have hoped, being almost
exclusively North-west European and American. But it was
a pioneering season that introduced a lot of scarcely-known
films and reintroduced others that were out of circulation.
It is important to see the season in the context of recent
developments in the cinema generally. We have moved on
from the time when gay characters were simply absent from
the screen to a time when they are almost obligatory. Mean
Streets, Carwash and The Pink Panther Strikes Again all
have their token gay characters. And in Dog Day Afternoon
and The Ritz, they are central to the action. And this does
not include independent films like Sebastiane, which was
sold almost exclusively on its claim to be the first truly gay
fil m. But "more" clearly doesn't mean "better". The
representations of homosexuality in The Ritz and The Pink
Panther Strikes Again are as objectionable as any in the
cinema. Like one of the more recent films shown in the
NFT season, An Investigation of Murder, the gay world is
invaded for easy laughs. In the case of Investigation . .
being in addition lumped alongside uncomplicated pictures
of drug addiction, prostitution and violent crime part of
the seamy underside of the city, seen from a very sure, and
straight, point-of-view, usually that of the star character
(Walter Matthau) or his sidekick (Bruce Dern), located
firmly in the norm (however broken or shattered) of
suburban family life.
It is an understanding of this perspective that of the
norm that perhaps supplies the best introduction to the
films shown in the season. In varying degrees, a consenus
notion of what is usually understood by "normality" is
present, even if present-through-being-absent; in all of the
films, sometimes re-enforced, sometimes questioned, and
sometimes rejected for a new notion of normality.
In relation to the films discussed in this article, we have
asked two fundamental questions:
1. What is the presumed notion of normality in the film?
2. How is homosexuality shown in relationship to it?
We have centred the discussion on five films from the
season The Third Sex, The Loudest Whisper, Victim,
Sunday Bloody Sunday and Some Of My Best Friends Are.
all of them arguably negative films about homosexuality,
ending as they do in a miraculous conversion to heterosexuality, suicide, reaffirmed marriage, loss, and bolted
doors between lovers, but which seem to us to be important
stones in complicating popular notions of what
Gay Leftstepping
20

homosexuality is. All of the films shown in the NFT season

need writing about, but these five seemed to us to be the
most exceptional in respect of the above questions, whilst
at the same time reflecting, in their chronology, the progressive attitude to homosexuality in the West.
The Third Sex
Produced in Germany in 1957, The Third Sex (formerly
entitled Different From You And I) is ostensibly about a
late adolescent boy's 'rescue' from homosexuality and
'conversion' to heterosexuality.
The film's frame of reference is the courtroom; which
opens and closes the film. There, the boy's mother is on
trial for her role in exploiting a servant girl in her effort to
'normalise' her son. Given the terms in which the film
apparently presents homosexuality, as dark, corrupting and
introverted, and the actual celebration of the boy's moment
of conversion, it puts the film peculiarly out of joint that it
is the boy's mother, and not, for example, Dr. Winkler, the
homosexual 'corrupter of youth', who is, from the very
beginning of the film, on trial. The mother is not on trial
for wanting to change her son (that much the court understands) but for the means she chose to do it. Nevertheless,
it throws the film against itself, for the mother, as part of
the family, is otherwise to be seen as embodying values that
the film sets against homosexuality.
Once the narrative proper begins (the story of the boy as
told by the mother), the heterosexual and the homosexual

A shot from a sequence later in the film places the friend

against the night sky, outside a garden gate, intercut with
his point-of-view of a brightly lit scene of boys and girls
dancing together under the approving eye of one of the
girls' fathers. Interestingly, whilst the main character is
shown to be capable of normalisation later in the film, the
friend is shown to be unredeemable and one can't help
feeling that a small scene in which it is disclosed that he
has been brought up by his mother alone, and that his
father was a dancer, is meant to explain that. The terms of
the relationship are to be understood then as that of the
innocent waylaid by the corrupted, of the 'realistic'
business world temporarily subjugated by the fantastic
world of art.

worlds are increasingly clearly circumscribed, the homosexual world being seen as a threat and a danger 'out there'.
The central setting of the film is the family living-room,
dominated by the image of the father, who is often shown
sitting at his desk. A successful businessman, he dresses
with conventional respectability (a dreary suit linking him
with the business world at large) and speaks and moves with
an uncompromising stiffness. The image of Marlon Brando's
Major Penderton, in Reflections In A Golden Eye, whose
homosexual feelings are disguised by the clipped military
manner that serves as the norm in the stricter circumference
of a military base, is only an extension of the image of the
father. The mother, by contrast, is presented as the archetypal complement: softer, kinder, more relaxed, more loving,
connected with the 'outside' world only through her
husband, the home-maker, the refresher, the ultimate attractive decoration. In these two and the 'balance' between them,
the stable values of family and business life are embodied.
From the start, the son is shown to be 'divorced' from
the family, repudiating the authority of the father and
preferring art to business. He spends all of his free time
with a friend, who stimulates this preference for art with
readings from a novel that he is writing, with literary
discussion, and with listenings to recordings of `musique
concrete' ... The relationship is presented as lively,
physical, inquisitive and creative, but is referred to by the
parents as something unnatural and wrong. The friend is
seen as a bad influence and the son ordered not to see him,
even on one occasion being locked in his room.

The homosexual milieu is most fully expressed in a

setting clearly dramatised as the classical opposition to the
boy's family home: Dr. Winkler's home. It is dark and
expressionistically lit where the family home is dully and
evenly bright. There are the curves of nude male statuary
and abstract painting as against the linearity of the desk
and the rows of encyclopaedic volumes (in which the father
and mother pore over the definition of "the third sex").
Dr. Winkler is the alternative father, an artist who dresses
casually and moves gracefully, who is surrounded by
beautiful things and beautiful people. His home is a nighttime gathering place, with erotic entertainments (art having
the strongest link in the film with Eros) ... semi-nude
youths wrestling on the dimly-lit living-room carpet,
accompanied by music (compare the opening sequence
from Sebastiane, which uses similar imagery to describe
decadence).
We are aware that homosexuality is 'other' from the
start, when the homosexual friend is attacked at school,
and throughout the film the house of Dr. Winkler is
understood as shut away from view, 'underground', selfcreated and operating under different norms. There is an
i mportant part in the film where the boy's father, in the
company of a friend, leaves his house and the world he is
sure of to seek out the world he believes his son to inhabit.
It is a journey through opinions and alternative points of
view that started with the seeking out of the authority of
the encyclopaedia. A psychiatrist is consulted, the mother
of the homosexual boy questioned and a cabaret with a
drag artist visited, the last-mentioned making the father
particularly edgy and uncomfortable. He ends up at Dr.
Winkler's, where he is refused admission. But later in the
film, when Dr. Winkler is out in the streets, he is stopped
by the police.
The actual conversion of the son carries no conviction
whatsoever ... the sight of the servant girl's naked body
and the reassuring strains of a classical piece of music
driving him to the point of taking the woman in the 'masculine' manner (pinning her to the garden lawn outside the
house), which she, in the classical 'feminine' manner, resiststhen-embraces, thereby discovering the joys of the heterosexual relation (celebrated by a soaring musical theme faraway from the musique concrete of Dr. Winkler's), and
thereafter rejecting his friend's company and Dr. Winkler's
house. He becomes the model of his father and the servant
girl the model of his mother, taking possession of the house
for the brief time that both parents are away (part of the
mother's strategy).
Since the episode of the son's conversion is so weak and
unconvincing, even as 'plot', one is left with the structural
opposition of the heterosexual and homosexual worlds.
There can be no doubt at all of the film's intended meaning:
the dissolution of Dr. Winkler's evenings and the son's
healthy restoration to the family fold are triumphantly
related. But the dullness and stiffness of the family in no
way compensates for the excitement and eroticism of the
gayworld; and the hindsight with which one views the film
today only exaggerates further the 'seriousness' of the one
and the 'playfulness' of the other. It looks rather like the
biblical epics of the fifties and sixties, where the oppositions are similarly caricatured and resolved. The images and
the associations of homosexuality (particularly with art)
are sufficiently strong in the film, even today, for the film

Gay Left 21

to have an ambiguous effect. And it is an effect that is

strengthened further, as indicated earlier, by a narrative
structure that has the mother on trial for manipulating the
situation with the servant girl, thus throwing the authority
of the heterosexual norm itself into doubt.
The Loudest Whisper
The Loudest Whisper was made four years later (1961) in
Hollywood with two star actresses, Audrey Hepburn and
Shirley MacLaine, playing two teachers who run a small
rural school for girls. Based on Lillian Hellman's The
Children's Hour, it dramatises the effect of a maliciously
circulated rumour "the loudest whisper" that the two
teachers are enjoying a lesbian relationship. Unlike The
Third Sex, there is no structural opposition between heterosexual and homosexual worlds, indeed the implicit tragedy
of the drama (though it is one that the film itself seems to
impose) is that there is no alternative to the heterosexual
world; there is no place for the homosexual to go.
In the opening scenes of the film, the 'normality' of the
world is all-pervasive. It is Open Day at the school and
parents and children alike enjoy the freedom of the school
and the gardens, where refreshments are served by the
young teachers in the sunlight. It's a mood of gaiety and
expansiveness, confirmed even by the accounts, which
balance for the first day since the school opened. As the
film develops, the images become tighter, darker and colder,
never recovering the easy spontaneity of the opening.
Even at the beginning of the film, though, there are
clues that the equilibrium is precarious. The two teachers,
Karen and Martha, are involved in very different relationships: Karen is engaged to be married to a young (and
curiously dull) doctor, connecting her to possibilities outside the school; Martha is 'stuck' with her Aunt Lily, the
temporary guest who never departs, pulling her into the
school further. It is a row between Martha and Aunt Lily,
overheard by the monstrous child-agent of the film, that
starts the rumour. Martha's apparent jealousy of Karen's
relationship with Joe is called "unnatural" and strange. The
same child, Mary, later catches sight of Karen and Martha
embracing. Seeking revenge out of all proportion for a
justly given punishment, Mary tells her grandmother that
the two teachers are lesbians. The grandmother removes her
at once from the school, and very quickly all of the other
parents have done the same, leaving the school empty. The
delivery boy refers slyly to the relationship when he drops
in the groceries. Cars begin to pull up in the road at the
front of the school, and fingers to point, making it
i mpossible for the two teachers even to take a walk in the
gardens. Even Karen's fiance expresses doubt as to whether
the two women are homosexual or not.
For most of the film, the drama hinges on the apparent
injustice of the rumour. The audience is encouraged to
think of the rumour itself as vicious and untrue, referring
to something so hideous it is even unspeakable. The actual
scene of Mary whispering the rumour to her grandmother is
dramatised in a way that strongly endorses this impression,
the audience hearing none of the words but catching their
effect on the close-up contortions of the grandmother's
face. In that close-up, the film produces its strongest image
of the conventional response to the idea of lesbianism. As
the effects of the rumour escalate, the desire is to see the
child repudiated and the effects undone, the equilibrium of
the opening scenes restored. To that end, Karen and Martha
seek to clear their names.
It is easy to take away the impression that Mary is the
villain of the piece. Certainly she is presented from the start
as the monstrous child, exceptional in her self-centredness,
and a terrifying bully. But the extent of the damage done
by the rumour is only possible because of the general consensus of opinion in the film that such behaviour between
women is strange, wrong and "unnatural". For the child,
the authorisation of this point-of-view is to be found in the
adult world. It is Aunt Lily who harangues Martha's
behaviour as unnatural and it is the action of the girl's
grandmother, in removing her from the school, that compounds the sense that it must be very awful behaviour

Gay Left 22

indeed. The fact that every child, without exception, is

removed by its parents, stresses the community consensus
on this. Even Martha and Karen share this viewpoint,
wanting more than anything else to clear their names, to
prove that they are not really lesbians at all. In their isolation, they both learn however what it would be like if they
were lesbians. It is a common indirect approach to 'problem' areas in the Hollywood cinema. In Gentleman's
Agreement Gregory Peck learns what it's like to be a Jew,
without being a Jew. In Pinky Jeanne Craine, as a halfcaste, learns what it's like to be both black and white,
without being either. The Loudest Whisper, for most of its
length, guarantees the audience the security of knowing
that these two teachers are not really lesbians. Whatever
prejudices the audience brings in with it will be exploited
further by most of the film, confirmed in the manner in
which everybody within the film wants to disassociate
themselves from lesbianism.
Once the rumour has been exposed as untrue, the grandmother, the pillar of the community, humbles herself and
apologises to the teachers, promising compensation and
restoration. But the drama is not, after all, resolved. The
isolation of Karen and Martha has had its effect, in its
completeness bringing them much closer together than,
say, Karen and Joe were ever together (the earlier romantic
interlude between them seeming very lightweight by the
end of the film).
The last section of the film is unexpected and challenges
the audience at the very point when the plot seems to have
worked itself out. Left alone in the school building after
the grandmother has made her apologies and left, Martha
'admits' that she does have homosexual feelings for Karen
after all. It's as if she had never allowed herself to explore
that possibility until this moment, either not knowing
about these feelings at all or, knowing about them, but not
being able to express them. There's no reproach from
Karen, only warmth and friendliness. She suggests they
take a walk, something they have not been able to do. She
talks of her and Martha and Joe all going away together and
starting afresh in another place. Even within the film, it's
seen to be a naive solution. Having 'come out', Martha can
hardly 'go back'. She hangs herself. The film presents this
as inevitable action, having offered no way out for her
other than continued self-oppression.
But at the same time the film implicitly condemns the
community that excludes any kind of self-realisation for
the homosexual. It makes the film finally very confusing.
For although Martha is represented 'sympathetically' and
Karen's marvellous gesture at the funeral of passing everybody by, including Joe, out of love and respect for Martha,
is emotionally very strong indeed, Martha's case remains an
isolated one, a sad, sorry tale that could not have ended
otherwise. She was a victim of a quirk of nature.

In the end, for all the shock of the discovery of Martha's

body, it is the strength of the relationship between the two
women that one remembers. It is the one decent, open,
honest and deeply loving relationship in the whole film.
Karen's walk past the mourners, her head high, ennobles it
further, and sets it apart from the community.

Victim

Victim begins where Loudest Whisper ends, with the suicide

of a gay character. Released the same year as William
Wyler's film (1961), it goes much further than that film in
its acknowledgment and considerable understanding of the
existence of a homosexual milieu, even if it lacks the
other's passion and intensity.
Victim is basically a thriller with social realist pretensions. It starts by following a construction worker mysteriously on the run, moving from one location to another,
seeking help from different men, including a car salesman,
an antiquarian bookseller and an eminent barrister whom
he intermittently calls. Each man rejects him and he ends
up alone in a roadside cafe, trying to dispose of the
contents of a parcel by flushing them down the toilet. He is
caught by the police and the papers he was trying to
destroy are pieced together again and turn out to be part of
a dossier of paper cuttings on the barrister, Melville Farr.
Farr is summoned to the police station where he is told
that the construction worker hanged himself in his cell. We
learn that the dead boy was homosexual and that Farr was
friendly with him, giving him lifts to and from his place of
work (their respective working environments having earlier
been juxtaposed, suggesting the social distance between
them).
The shock of the boy's death, the knowledge that he
was being blackmailed for being homosexual (he was trying
to leave the country at the start of the film) and a renewed
appeal to Farr by the boy's best friend, who calls on Farr in
his chambers and urges him to do something about the
blackmailing, initiates the main action of the film, which
has Farr taking on the role of private investigator and
trying to break the blackmailing ring by seeking out some
of the "victims" and offering himself as one. Farr is the
hero, the individual with guts acting for the cowering
oppressed homosexuals, risking home and "brilliant" career
(a promotion is expected any day), in order to see justice
done.
If the film is much-criticised today for its dubious
realism, for marrying the social problem movie to the
thriller and for the compromise of its conclusions, its
i mportance for homosexuals, especially in the preWolfenden days, should not be underestimated. It remains,
still, in many respects, a brave film to have made and
perhaps the only record we have on film of how dark and
repressed the situation of most gays was before 1967.
Most importantly, the film presented the hero as homosexual. Farr is not presented as the straight barrister taking
up the wrongs of the suffering homosexual; Farr is homosexual, even if he is married and acknowledges his homosexual feelings as belonging more to his past than to his
present. Farr is played by Dirk Bogarde, who, in 1961, was
already at the peak of his popular career as a matinee idol,
but, contradictorily, has the reputation, amongst gays, of
being a gay actor who has not publicly come out, and
tnerefore a homosexual who is not homosexual. Two years
after Victim he made The Servant for Joseph Losey and
thereafter became the actor-as-artist, only intermittently
returning to his matinee roles. The period 1961/63 is
therefore the pivotal one in Bogarde's career and Victim
rather than The Servant is arguably the turning point.
Certainly, he risked losing his popular audience by playing
a homosexual, and his image has been sufficiently ambiguous since then to gain him a gay following. Whether he is
gay or not, Bogarde has come as near as the popular cinema
has ever come to providing gays with a star-identification,
which, when the star-identification system is so manifestly
heterosexual, is important. Gays have almost always been
excluded from simple star-identification, their idols always
being somehow ambiguous or confused ... James Dean,
Montgomery Clift, David Bowie, Elton John, David Cassidy

and Dirk Bogarde. Are they gay or are they straight?

Within Victim, Bogarde as Farr is located as a family
man, and, as in The Third Sex, the family home becomes
the film's central image of stability and equilibrium. But it
is a family without children, which the film implies is an
absence (see the scene with the wife working with young
children in a school), an adequate enough symbol for an
arrested marriage. At the start of the film the wife knows
nothing of her husband's relationship with the construction
worker and the calls the boy makes both to Farr's home
and his office are ignored, shut out. When he is later
detained at the police station and told of the boy's suicide,
it becomes clear that this stifled aspect of his life is going
to have to express itself in his home. His wife becomes
suspicious and when they row, Farr 'confesses' all. The
disgust of the wife never really leaves the film and a good
part of the last third of the film is taken up with her
dilemma, as the 'wretched' wife of a homosexual. When
they close together again at the end of the film, we are
meant to assume, plainly, that both will do their duty and
stand by the other in the struggles to come, in which Farr
warns his name will be dragged through the mire. The death
of the construction worker is a dark shadow hanging over
their past and there is no guarantee that Farr will not get
similarly involved again. But there is a sense in which Farr
is 'out' of it. Although he has the public struggle in the
courts to go through, he will be fighting the case not simply
as one of the victims but as a married man. The marriage
has somehow come 'through' it all, proving the strength
through adversity.
The homosexual milieu is to he understood as very much
outside the home ... centrally located in a gay pub (The
Salisbury). But gays are seen in their places of work also, in
a bookshop, a car showroom, a hairdressing salon, a building site, and Lincolns Inn, and in their homes. There should
be nothing remarkable in that, but it is very rarely indeed
in a film that any attempt is made to indicate, even sketchily, the 'full life' of the homosexual.
Boys In The Band, for example, throws away all of the
'background' information on its principal characters in the
credits sequence, removing them from their working lives
so that they are free to act out their angst in the vacuum of
a studio apartment for the rest of the movie. Victim gives a
good sense of gays actually rooted in complex lives outside
the gay pub, involved in relationships and activities that in
no way connect with the essential narrative of the film. In
fact, the film impresses the notion of separate, largely
unconnected lives, in which the gay pub plays no major
part. Nevertheless, the gay men in the film do know each
other, and the film does not enter into the ways and means
by which these people met. Farr says that he met the
construction worker when he was driving; the boy was
thumbing a lift (the opening sequence of L'Homme de
Desir). Perhaps Farr was cruising furtively, or maybe he
really met him in The Salisbury, or another pub, or a

Gay Left 23

cottage. The film does not explore these links, but merely
asserts that they exist ... somehow a construction worker
and a leading barrister knew each other as homosexuals and
met each other, whilst at the same time the barrister was
unaware that certain of his colleagues were homosexuals.
For all the 'ordinariness' of the gayworld of the film,
which is what the scenes from working and social life assert,
it is still shown as exploitative (the toughest blackmailer is
himself associated with gay iconography), violent, vagabond, inferior, unhappy, secretive and unconscious of
itself as a uniting factor. Even if we are to assume that
changes in the law would eliminate the nastier aspects of
it, there is nothing desirable about it, nothing to suggest
that gay relationships might be as valid as heterosexual
ones. In Victim, the gay world is marginal and unthreatening, irrelevant to the world of the family and the heterosexual relationship, but it is to be tolerated humanely and
sympathetically. The marriage of Farr and his wife will last
as long as further homosexual liaisons do not complicate it.
Farr does not stand on his homosexual feelings at the end
of the film, but he does, briefly, earlier, when he describes
the feelings he had for the construction worker to his wife.
"I wanted him!" he shouts. It is the film's most effective
moment and comes through with such conviction that the
reconciliation of husband and wife at the end seems completely false.
As if to clarify the lines of argument within the narrative
of the film, there are scenes throughout between the two
police officers conducting their own investigation of the
blackmailing ring. It is in these scenes where the intentions
of the film are least disguised: the older (and wiser?) officer
arguing that the laws against homosexuality must be
changed, that the old laws are charters for blackmail; the
younger (the one most afraid of the homosexual inside
him?) arguing against degeneracy, wondering where it will
all end if homosexuality is sanctioned. There is no doubt
that the film as a whole is to be taken as illustrating the
older officer's argument, the younger officer's fears being
sent up ludicrously (but frighteningly) in the shrill outburst
("Blasphemy!") of the woman blackmailer arrested at the
end of the film, sufficiently close to the initial response of
Farr's wife to be considered the 'normal' view.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Ten years after Victim, in 1971, Sunday Bloody Sunday
brought the 'civil rights' attitude to homosexuality to its
logical conclusion, apparently equating the heterosexual
and the homosexual relationship by exploring one man's
relationship with a man and with a woman. In the earlier
films, however subverted, there had always been a defined
notion of normality, one that moved from intolerance to
tolerance of homosexuality. In Sunday Bloody Sunday that
distinction has all but gone and it is not possible to locate,
with any assurance, where, if in any one place, that notion
of normality is. It is most assertive in the scenes of celebration following the Bar-Mitzva, where the Peter Finch
character, Daniel, is almost overwhelmed by his huge
family. But then that family is specifically Jewish, and
traditional Jewish, and is very different from the liberal
Hodson family, whose tolerance is the most often-referred
Gay Left 24

to joke of the whole film. But both families are seen from
the vantage point of a different kind of relationship: that
of Alex (Glenda Jackson) and Bob (Murray Head) and of
Bob and Daniel. These are the 'mature' relationships of the
film and the drama is not in justifying them or in juxtaposing them against the images of family life, but in
exploring what 'sexual liberation' can actually mean to
adults involved in relationships, problems of jealousy and
possessiveness.

As played by Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch, these are

not young lovers but middle-aged people who have chosen
not to marry and settle down into family life; only Bob is
still very young and only he seems capable of shifting easily
between relationships, and of being alone. The film does
not explore Bob very far. It never enters into his point-ofview or shows him in scenes apart from Alex or Daniel, who
are the real subjects of the film. The film is about their
dilemma: going along with the 'sexual revolution' and
' making do' but suffering as a result, wanting, each of them,
Bob around all of the time, but not able to admit that
freely, frightened of expressing that and thereby losing the
little that they have, and therefore compromising what
they want on the basis that half a relationship is better than
none. There are no big, passionate scenes ... everything is
buried, becoming a struggle within the heart and mind.
There is no attempt to suggest that the relationship
between Bob and Daniel is any more complicated than that
between Bob and Alex. The general sense of the film is that
these are equally valid relationships, neither of them better
or worse than the other, and that all of these people are
'equal'. Only once does the film seriously suggest that
beneath the surface there is real difference, and that very
briefly, when Daniel by chance runs into an old pick-up in
Earls Court. The film largely achieves its balance by crosscutting 'matching' sequences in the lives of Alex and
Daniel. One sequence has Alex having a fling with a man
she is helping in her work. It is a small satisfactory experience. The 'matching' sequence in Daniel's life is entirely
unsatisfactory, the confrontation with the pick-up in the
street being violent and unsought. It is as if Daniel wants to
forget not just that particular relationship, but what the
man suggests of another way of life. Unlike Bob, who is an
artist, this man is altogether from another sphere of life,
rougher, and drunken. The disruptive effect he has on
Daniel is compounded by the scene linked with it in which
Daniel visits the all-night chemist in Piccadilly Circus,
populated with 'grotesques', and has his status as a doctor
questioned by the counter assistant. When he returns to the
car, where he had left the man, the man is no longer there.
In providing only this episode as a clue that there is a
gayworld in which people from different social groups can
run into one another, the film does avoid really confronting
what it is to be gay, just as it also avoids exploring Daniel's
Jewish family life very far, the pressures upon him to conform, to play the heterosexual man. Of course, these
avoidances can be said to be the very avoidances of the
Daniel character himself, in which case the limitation of the
film is the limitation of the character. Daniel inhabits a very
small stratum of society, of which the picture of the

Hodson family is indicative if not typical. Within the

Hodson household pretty well anything goes: the children
take dope, the parents go away at weekends without their
children, the children are sophisticated in matters of sex,
In
and there is a black academic staying in the house .
this all-tolerating environment, it is not difficult to absorb
both Alex and her lover and Daniel, the homosexual.
The general effect of the film is to suggest that homosexuality is ordinary and can be easily normalised. The
scene at Earls Court is the film's only real concession to the
view that it is normalised only within a certain class of
society. It would be an easier film for most gays to relate
to if the parameters of Daniel's life had been explored more
fully. One cannot help coming away from the film with the
feeling, 'Well, of course, he is a private doctor . . . he is
comfortably off. No wonder he doesn't have many problems ..."
Some Of My Best Friends Are ...
If Sunday Bloody Sunday concludes one line of approach
to homosexuality, that which plays down, avoids, or even
denies any real difference between homosexuality and
heterosexuality, Some Of My Best Friends Are . . . (1971)
concludes the separatist line, ignoring possibilities of integration and normalisation in the 'real' world and instead
asserting the possibilities of an alternative world, selfcreated, with an alternative notion of normality. They are
t wo distinct lines that find their expression in the gay
movement itself and other films in the gay season fall into
one or the other: A Bigger Splash confirms Sunday Bloody
Sunday; Fellini's Satyricon, Kenneth Anger's work, Genet's
Chant d'Amour and the documentary The Queen reject
conventional reality and the dramatic dynamic of opposing
and contrasting the 'real' and the 'fantastic'.
Some Of My Best Friends Are . . . is set in a gay bar in
New York on Christmas Eve. What makes it particularly
interesting is that the film-makers do seem conscious of the
fact that the barworld it describes is one not absolutely
self-created, but one from time to time taken over in a
situation of real repression. There are very brief scenes at
the beginning and end of the film that show, in the opening
and closing of the bar, that straight interests control it. And
the bar's importance in the lives of the people it describes
is stressed; as one character says, "Where else can a fairy
go?"
It is this locating of itself that contextualises the
indulgent proceedings of the evening. And even if the bulk
of the film overthrows conventional normality with the
normality of the barworld, 'reality' occasionally intrudes,
as in the scene where
a mother comes to reclaim her son.
w
The scene is played for laughs (in a send-up of 'realistic'
melodrama) and the mother is sent packing, leaving the
barworld unrippled.
The bar functions as a warm refuge from the cold 'outside' for the gays who have nowhere else to go. All human
life is there. Apart from two friendly woman cloakroom
attendants (one of whom thinks of the place as her home)
and a straight black piano player (who has been 'normalised' within the bar), there is the middle-aged married man,
the Swiss-French skier, the Rechy-styled hustler, the older
man taking his 'nephew' to Europe, the transvestite, the
camp waiters, the naval officer, the actor, the priest, the fag
hag and the young innocent who has never been to a gay
place before ... The film-makers have crammed in as many
contradictions and types as possible. There is no central
character in the film, no hero ... Rather than identification, there is involvement in a mosaic of different
situations, all of them caricatured to the point of absurdity,
and therefore not to be taken too seriously, and yet not to
be taken not seriously.

by a very different kind of man. Later she is savagely

beaten up, which is played both for laughs (the excessive
make-up) and seriously (no-one intervenes), and is rounded
off with the archetypal comic situation where she is on her
hands and knees looking for a contact lens.
What most seriously weakens the film is that it seems to
accept and indulge in its relationship to the outside world.
The characters are mostly making the best of a bad time,
laughing at each other, fooling around, play-acting in
histrionic Hollywood fashion, indulging fantasies, holding
together in the teeth of Christmas, all of which one is able
to enjoy and to understand, but it is possible only by
shutting out the external reality. When the mother storms
in and demands her son, there is a solidarity that makes it
possible to deal with her not on her terms but on theirs.
But this does not extend beyond the bar and no-one seems
to want it to. There is a resignation about the characters
that makes them weak.
In the end the film does not sufficiently locate the bar.
The film breaks down into a series of comic situations and
one-liners that are introverted. The gayworld ceases to be,
as it was even in The Third Sex, in any way provocative,
threatening or undermining. It is 'only' a tolerated,
exploited pocket in the cellar of an office block, inwardlooking and largely unrelated to a wider sexual-political
world. A film by gays for gays ... the epic home-movie.
The questions remain
There is no doubt at all that the NFT's gay season should
make us angry. Hardly any of the images of homosexuality
were unequivocally affirmative, liberating or ... angry,
though many of them were strong, exciting and passionate
and, as we have tried to suggest, more complex than they
might at first appear.
A season like this leaves one with two further questions:
1. If these are the only widely available images of homosexuality, what must be their effect on homosexuals?
Although many film-makers are breaking away, even
destroying traditional narrative techniques (see particularly
the work of Ron Moule, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey),
they are doing so, in the area of gay cinema, before the
popular cinema has provided any satisfactory narrative
cinema relating to gay people. Narrative identification, for
example, is being rejected by the avant-garde (perhaps
always has been to some extent) at a point in time when
gays can claim they still have not had it.
An initial period of identification is important to a
repressed group that has never had adequate self-images.
Gays have tended to identify with images of themselves
that others have produced to suit their own purposes
(rather as John Berger argues that women have), images
generally weak, pathetic, comic, at best ambiguous, which
have been addressed to presumed heterosexual audiences.
One reason that gays still have poor images of themselves is
that the screen mirrors throw back these distortions and
confusions.
2. What is their effect on heterosexuals? For all their
opposition to the season, the Festival of Light would surely
have found their opinions largely confirmed in the films
shown ... unhappiness, suicides, violence, healthy rebirth,
separateness ...
Most disappointingly, there was almost nothing that
challenged the heterosexual world view openly. At the same
time, family life, marriage and the 'realistic' workaday
world has rarely seemed so dull and predictable set against
some of the passionate and fabulous images of the gayworld, never more exotically embodied than in Delphine
Seyrig's lesbian vampire, in Daughters of Darkness.

What is very funny (and much of it is hilariously so) is

also tragic, or has its serious side. There is much fun at the
expense of the transvestite, for example (not particularly
so, for every 'type' is a target). The film enters into 'her'
romantic fantasies in which 'she' sees herself in the style of
a Cyd Charisse musical. But the reality has her being groped
Gay Left 25

Gays and Fascism

by Bob Cant
Fascism is a vicious and destructive form of government
which has menaced Europe and, to a lesser extent, other
parts of the world over the last 60 years. It became
i mportant after the Russian Revolution when the European
ruling class was struggling to resist the spread of
Communism. Its importance lay in the fact that it was
apparently an all-class movement. It was, in fact, simply
a new means of making the working class of Europe accept
the continuing domination of the capitalist class by a
mixture of force and propaganda. It portrayed all other
organisations as contrary to the national interest and, with
the aid of its own mass movement, smashed them.
Fascism appeared, however, to have been destroyed as
a significant political force in Europe by the Allied victory
in the Second World War. There were fascist governments
in Spain and Portugal but they were more intent on
survival than expansion. Handfuls of people in this country
celebrated Hitler's birthday every year but they were seen
as irrelevant anachronisms.
These anachronistic Hitler-lovers are now, however,
among the leadership of the fascist groups in this country.
They run candidates in many local and parliamentary
elections and their demonstrations provoke street-fighting
not seen on mainland Britain since the 1930s. They are the
most frightening political force in the country today
because of the threat they represent to all collective life,
including both the labour movement and the organisation
of all oppressed groups. In this article I will attempt to
explain the nature of fascism both in the past and today
and to argue a case for gay involvement in anti-fascist
struggle.
Fascism in Italy
A fascist regime was first set up in Italy in 1922 and then
in Germany in 1933. In Britain the British Union of
Fascists was led by Oswald Mosley, an admirer of both
Mussolini and Hitler. The countries which had fascist
regimes or strong fascist movements had all undergone
economic turmoil, had been governed by divided and
confused governments and been faced by the presence of
a strong, but nonetheless divided, left.
The Italian economy had not recovered from the effects
of the First World War, and there was a consistent series of
strikes and factory occupations in 1919-20. Representatives
of the major trade unions and the Socialist Party met
during the occupations of 1920 but they decided by
591,245 votes to 409,569 not to stimulate the development
of the situation into a revolution. By restricting the
occupations to an industrial dispute, the left lost much of
its initiative. The whole country was confused and the
working class was effectively leaderless. Mussolini proposed
a nationalist solution which won the support of the
Southern landowners, some of the Northern industrialists,
the peasantry, the King and, eventually, the Church. His
solution was to concentrate all political and economic
power in the hands of the Fascist party. All other
independent political parties and trade unions were
abolished and anyone who resisted the Fascist plan, such
as the Communist leader, Antonio Gramsci, was imprisoned.
Many other anti-fascists were killed.
At first, the upper classes had been rather shocked by
the thug tactics of Mussolini's fascist gangs but as they
realised that the traditional bourgeois democratic governments of Italy could not control the workers, whereas the
fascist gangs could, they increasingly took an interest. For
the important thing was that although Mussolini's fascists
were not of the bourgeoisie they were able to make certain
Gay Left 26sections of the workers act on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

The mass nature of the fascist movement distinguished it

from other right-wing parties and enabled it to succeed
where they had failed.
Nationalist ideology was one of Mussolini's important
weapons. He argued that Italy had been betrayed by her
wartime allies; that Italian territory at Trieste, occupied by
an independent Italian force, had ceased to be Italian only
through the cowardice of the Italian government; that the
Italian left were Russian-backed foreign agents; that there
was a need for a restoration of law and order and, later,
for the values of the Church. All these things were possible,
he said, under the total authority of a fascist regime. The
rallies at which he screamed and shouted his ideas were to
be an important vehicle for his accession to power and,
later, his continued hold on it. He reached at deep-seated
fears of confused and unorganised sections of the Italian
people and inspired an irrational devotion to his cause.
The Rise of the Nazis
The victory of German fascism over ten years later is better
known but it shares many of the same features of the
Italian experience. The economy was in total chaos six
million unemployed, a bankrupt lower middle class, withdrawal of American investment. The government was weak
and increasingly resorted to rule by decree since democratic
agreement was impossible. The left was divided between
the more constitutionalist Social Democrats and the then
ultra-left Communist Party which branded the Social
Democrats as social fascists. As the situation worsened the
Nazis won more and more support for their fascist solution
from the peasantry, the lower middle classes, the Prussian
junkers (landowners), sections of the military and a few
industrialists such as the steel boss, Thyssen. The methods
of thuggery were similar to those of the Italian fascists. The
S.A. roamed the streets beating up their opponents,
particularly Communists. Many unemployed workers, no
longer under the influence of a trade union, joined the S.A.
which, after all, provided them with clothes as well as a
sense of purpose. This created an atmosphere of fear which
spread through the whole population.
The ideological weapon was used even more extensively
by Hitler than it had been by Mussolini. The concept of
blood became for the Nazis a mystical and unifying force.
It was not enough to preach a nationalist doctrine which
denounced the treatment of Germany at the Versailles
peace settlement, the menace of Bolshevism and the
international Jewish conspiracy. Hitler extended nationalist
ideas even further and said that German nationals could

only be of the Aryan blood. All who endangered the purity

of the blood whether they were Jews or homosexuals or
gypsies or physically handicapped must be exterminated.
The superiority of the Aryan blood was to be made
manifest in the German nation under Hitler and its
continuation guaranteed through the family.
The family was an essential social unit in the Nazi vision.
The Aryan woman's major task in life was to marry an
Aryan husband and produce as many children as possible.
She was to be a machine for reproduction and also the
installation of Nazi ideas into her young children.
Obviously any open assertion of homosexuality could
represent a danger to this programme. For that would
suggest that sexuality might have other purposes than
procreation and that was tantamount to treason. It was
largely for these reasons that tens of thousands of homosexuals were sent to concentration camps and forced to
wear pink triangles to identify themselves. The number of
homosexuals who died in these circumstances will never be
known.
The Nazi solution to Germany's problems was barbaric
in a way that few thought possible in an allegedly civilised
European country. Once they had taken power they
dispensed with the parliamentary process and Hitler ruled
by decree. All other political parties and unions were
abolished and the leaders who did not escape into exile
were sent to concentration camps. Cultural life ground to
a halt and all forms of art (films, literature, painting)
became vehicles for the expression of Nazi propaganda.
Jews were debarred from holding certain jobs and from
inter-marriage with Aryans; their homes, shops and
synagogues were attacked and destroyed; they were moved
into ghettoes and then into death camps. Six million died.
Hitler did provide full employment but only in the
construction of a war machine which was to be a factor
leading to the Second World War.
But most frightening of all is the fact that this regime
came to power not only through terror but partly by the
consent of the German people. Its emotive attacks on
monopoly capital combined with its conservativelyreassuring nationalism struck a chord with many confused
and impoverished Germans. Its message was rooted in
irrationality and succeeded in offering both change and
stability. But this miracle could only be achieved by faith
faith in Hitler and faith in the Nazi Party. Through this
mystical process of sacrifice and suffering the Superman
qualities of the German race would emerge and restore it to
its former greatness. It was only shortly before he came to
power that the German business community began to
appreciate the value of Nazi mystical anti-capitalism in
defending themselves against the concrete anti-capitalism
of the left. Their sacrifice was to concede control over the
form of their products. Their control vanished into the
hands of the Nazi State but their profits remained.

The National Front

Britain today is hardly on the verge of such a collapse but
it is certainly ripe for the propaganda of fascist groups.
Inflation is still high, unemployment has soared over 1
millions and the government is weak. (Although the Tories
may well be returned with a large majority at the next
election Thatcher's attitudes to, particularly, trade unions,
i mmigration and the social democratic under-pinnings of
our society make it unlikely that she will be able to govern
any more effectively than Callaghan.)
The fascist group which is manipulating the situation
best is the National Front. It was formed as recently as
1967 by an amalgamation of small right-wing and racialist
groups. The fact that they were able to run so many
candidates in local and parliamentary elections suggests
that they receive financial backing from some section of
big business, in addition to their members' subscriptions.
The actual activists in the NF do not appear to be many
but they have enjoyed some electoral success recently and
in several places have pushed the Liberals into fourth place.
Their major successes have been in the inner cities suffering
the effects of long term neglect of housing, education and
social services and also of the departure of industry for the
suburbs. Most of these voters have been Labour supporters
in the past but they have become increasingly disillusioned
with the failure of their own allegedly working class party
to improve their lot. These factors along with the cultural
crisis of multi-racial living have been well exploited by the
NF. There are also voters who have traditionally right-wing
views and are both strongly racist and anti-union who
might be expected to be in sympathy with the NF, but for
the time being such people, more middle class and based in
smaller towns and suburbs, keep faith with the Tories. But
it might only require something like a Tory failure to end
all i mmigration or to destroy the closed shop to push them
on to the fascist road.
The NF concentrates for the moment, however, on the
working class discontent with the decline of the inner cities.
They have depicted the immigrant and indigenous black
communities there as responsible for all the social ills of
these areas and have begun, very effectively, to separate
white worker from black worker. They now feel so
confident about this line that during the Ladywood byelection in August 1977 one of their widely used posters
read 'The National Front is a racialist front'.
This anti-black propaganda also inspires attacks on
individual blacks, black shops, houses, places of worship
and other meeting points. The spread of such racism has
assisted the movement of both major political parties to the
right in their attitudes to immigration and both now accept
the idea that a limited number of immigrants is A Good
Thing. This atmosphere of fear combined with low wages
and sub-standard homes makes life increasingly unbearable
for most immigrants.
The links between the NF and these brutal attacks are,
of course, difficult to prove and some liberals argue that
such occurrences are just unfortunate. But if anyone doubts
that the NF is fascist one has only to look at some of the
statements they made before they became involved with
electoral politics and hence with the creation of a
respectable image. In 1962, Martin Webster, now the
National Organiser of the NF wrote in the National
Socialist Magazine an article entitled Why I am a Nazi
which included the following statement.
'After visiting the HQ of the National Socialist
Movement I became convinced of the correctness of
the Nazi ideology ... Not a day goes past without
some act of stupidity by the Jews and their allies
coming to light ... acts of foolishness brought on by
the chill North wind flaunting the swastika banner in
the sky ... In every White land in the world Nazi
movements have been formed and we join with them
in the historic Nazi battle cry. Victory Hail! Sieg
Heil!'
Or one can look at the programme of the Greater Britain
movement founded in 1964 by John Tyndall, now
Gay Left 27

Chairman of the NF.

'For the protection of British blood, racial laws will
be enacted forbidding marriage between Britons and
non-Aryans. Medical measures will be taken to
prevent procreation on the part of all those who have
hereditary defects, either racial, mental or physical.
A pure, strong, healthy British race will be regarded
as the principal guarantee of Britain's future.'
A statement hardly designed to inspire confidence in gay
activists!
Perhaps both these men would publicly repudiate such
statements now. But if one looks at the policies of the NF
one is hard put to find anything concrete but race hatred.
Their public presence is only too reminiscent of that of
Hitler's SA; a report in the Hornsey Journal about their
demonstration in Lewisham in August 1977 reads as
follows.
'I saw the protective umbrella of police marching
next to NF members who were carrying pick-axe
handles with nails driven through one end; another
was swinging a bicycle chain over his head.'
The media, however, has generally kept quiet about this
and the NF are having some success in presenting
themselves as victims of unprovoked left-wing violence.

Supportive Factors in Britain

Although the NF is the best known fascist group there are
others who assist the move to the right in the public
consciousness. The National Association for Freedom,
Mary Whitehouse and Enoch Powell all deny that they are
fascists and quite correctly in my opinion. But their
politics give an added respectability to the politics of
hatred so crucial to a fascist upsurge.
NAFF is currently concentrating on weakening the
power of trade unions to take any form of action. They
are best known for their support of George Ward, the
Grunwick boss, against the year-long strike by his
employees and also for their legal intervention when the
Union of Post Office Workers planned a temporary
blacking of mail to South Africa. Their success in both
cases has increased the confidence of employers who feel
inclined to oppose trade union demands and thereby
endanger all forms of workplace organisation.
Mary Whitehouse's recent successful prosecution of

Gay News on a blasphemy charge represents a major attack

on the organised gay community. The conviction of Gay
News and its editor no doubt gave a certain respectability

to expressions of anti-gay feelings and in the weeks after the

trial there was an increase in queer-bashing in London and
one man was actually battered to death as he left a gay
club. Similarly, in the summer of 1976, the speeches of
Enoch Powell on race and immigration were followed by
vicious attacks on black people and several murders took
place.

Gay Left 28

The importance of the activities of NAFF, Mary

Whitehouse and Enoch Powell is not lessened because they
all deny they are fascists. For their activities encourage the
feelings against trade unions, against gays and against blacks
that feed the growth of fascism.
Many gays feel angry about the prosecution of Gay
News but would deny any links between that and the rise
of a fascist movement in Britain. Such a view ignores the
overall situation in Britain. The government is weak and
the economy in chaos. Traditional capitalist solutions are
being used which are aggravating existing social problems
such as unemployment, lack of decent housing, an
inadequate health service and so on. When these solutions
fail as seems almost certain they must, other solutions,
not traditionally considered in Britain, must be used.
They will either be to the left or to the right; the status
quo will be unable to continue. A fascist takeover is
unlikely in the short-term but some authoritarian government, with a measure of NF support, but preserving a
democratic facade along Gaullist lines, is far from
i mpossible.

Sexual Politics and Anti-Fascist Activity

It should be clear to gays that only a socialist solution is
acceptable. The economism of the left and its consequent
lack of interest in gay politics has inspired little confidence
among gays. Despite the formal adoption of support for
gay politics among many revolutionary groups their
practice often remains different. The chanting of the
slogan 'Tyndall is a poofter' by so-called revolutionaries
outside an NF meeting during the Becksfield local byelection (October 1977) is by no means an isolated case.
The left, despite this, remains open to persuasion and the
existence of a gay movement has had an effect on the
consciousness and practice of some parts of the left. Such
persuasion is an impossibility with fascists. Opposed as
they are to all forms of independent organisation they
would doubtless close all gay centres, clubs and meeting
places, and disband gay groups of every kind. The very best
we could hope for would be survival in the closet. A far
more likely fate for those who asserted the values of a gay
life-style would be similar to that of the German homosexuals in the death camps of Hitler.
It may be argued that many homosexual men are drawn
towards fascist organisations, and that should guarantee
some kind of homosexual freedom. But such a nonsensical
argument fails to recognise the elements of masculine roleplaying in this particular phenomenon. The public
aggressive nature of fascism both relies on and fosters
authoritarian male behaviour. Emotions and sex are not
publicly seen they are designated to the area of the
home. The public world is a man's world and the selfhatred of such homosexual fascists can be apparently
overcome through the common bonds of the uniform and
the mass rally. Women play no part in this public world.
Their role as housekeeper and child-breeder ensures their
dependence on and subordination to men. There can be no
gender confusion in this system. The male brotherhood of
the fascist movement can enable some homosexual men to
ignore questions such as their own sexuality and their
relations to women. They can believe that they have
become 'real men'. But such a desperate strategy of
physical survival is far from any concept of gay liberation.
In a situation where fascism is considered as a possible
form of government any gay who wishes to reconsider
gender roles, to explore new non-oppressive life styles or
even to live as a couple with someone of the same sex must
associate with the left. Change must come and only a
victory of the left can provide the possibility of moving
towards gay liberation.
Such an association with the left is not easy in view of
not only their indifference or hostility to gay activism but
also their own lack of unity. The Communist Party, the
Socialist Workers' Party, the International Marxist Group,
Big Flame and some of the Marxist-Leninist groups are
committed to the struggle against fascism but none of them
can honestly be said to be the socialist vanguard. It must

also be said that some constituency Labour Parties have

participated in anti-fascist campaigns. Gays will, doubtless,
join these groups and operate within them but many more
will probably join nothing.
Such gays can probably learn a great deal from that
section of the Women's Movement which has formed a
group called Women Against Racism and Fascism, and
mobilised very impressively for several anti-NF
demonstrations. Feminists who picketed at Grunwick
have written in Spare Rib 61 of the sense of solidarity and
discipline they found among male trade unionists on the
picket line. While sexism did not totally vanish, the fact
that they were involved in a common struggle together
opened up whole new possibilities. An organised gay antifascist contingent would doubtless have similar experiences.
I am not arguing for the formation of a gay group that
concentrates on street fighting to the exclusion of all else.
Street activity is only one part of the anti-fascist struggle.
But the consciousness of that part of the gay community
that responds to the cultural focus of the Tom Robinson
Band and Gay Sweatshop needs a more coherent form.
This is particularly true of gay men. Attempts must be
made to form a gay anti-fascist movement (as opposed to
a committee) that will concern itself with the formulation
of a longer term strategy against fascism.
This will involve us not only in arguing for the inclusion
of gay liberation on a socialist programme but also in the
questions that concern the traditional left. We have a great
deal to learn from the campaigns for better housing, better
social services, better education and a decent living wage
as well as the campaign for workers' control over the workplace. These are after all the problems which draw many
disillusioned working class people towards fascism. A real
socialist alternative that proposed honest solutions to them
could go a long way towards diminishing the fascist
appeal. It is a framework in which we can begin to present
the politics of personal life in a constructive way.
Control of the Streets
The wider anti-fascist movement, however, is not in
agreement about how to oppose the NF in the short term.
The Communist Party, sections of the Labour Party and
the progressive wings of the churches are in favour of
peaceful counter-demonstrations against the NF and also
of Government bans on NF marches. Such proposals are
misleading for they ignore the importance of control of
the streets to fascists. Fascist regimes, on the whole, have
come to power neither by straightforward seizure of
power, nor by an electoral victory. In both Italy and
Germany the violence they engendered on the streets
created an atmosphere which enabled the fascist leaders to
intimidate the Constitutional Heads of State into handing
power over to them. It goes without saying, therefore, that
they must not be allowed such control of the streets here.
The argument that such control of the streets can be
avoided by Government bans on fascist marches is also
incorrect. Such bans may be a victory in the short-term for
the local labour movement but, in the longer term, they
contribute to an increasing level of authoritarianism_ The

police are given more legalised power to use force and a

Gaullist solution becomes a greater possibility.
The call for bans also ignores the social climate in which
fascism grows. For demonstrators and counterdemonstrators do not go on to the streets because they
cannot think of anything better to do on Saturday
afternoon. They do so because they are profoundly
discontented with certain factors in their lives and socialists
must address themselves directly to this discontent. To call
on the government to impose a ban is an abdication from
the struggle which will be inevitable in the process of
bringing about socialism.
It can also be pointed out that in some areas such as
Bradford and Leeds where there has been anti-fascist
activity support for the NF fell in electoral terms
(Guardian, August 20th 1977). This cannot, of course, be
guaranteed but it is useful counter to the liberal argument
that ignoring them will make them go away.
The position of the revolutionary left that fascists
must be prevented from marching in the streets is, therefore, the correct one. The confidence which the working
class, the blacks, the women and the gays (they are not
as separate as this formulation suggests) gain from
organising effectively against the fascists is an important
element in pushing them forward to organise for a
socialist transformation of society. Through each struggle
we learn the value of effective action.
The way that the fascists and the anti-fascists operate
on the streets is an indication of their different politics.
The fascists march with weapons ready to attack their
opponents if the opportunity arises and they march
not in a united way but as individuals bewitched by the
sound of a drum or the sight of a banner. They remain
separate from each other, united only by their
dependence on and obedience to their leader. The left,
on the other hand, links arms and learns and re-learns by
that gesture the meaning of their collective strength. We
gays, who wish to have some control over our lives, must
link arms with our comrades in the working class movement, the black movement and the women's movement
to drive the Nazis off the streets and clear the way for
a society where gay love will be a socialist necessity.
Sources referred to for the writing of this article include:
Socialist Worker, Spare Rib, Morning Star, York Feminist
News, Guardian, Hornsey Journal.
The National Front Martin Walker (Fontana)
The Mass Psychology of Fascism Wilhelm Reich
(Penguin )
Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front Leon Trotsky
The Occupation of the Factories Paolo Spriano (Pluto)
Women in Nazi Germany Jill Stephenson (Croom Helm)
For another analysis see David Edgar's article 'Racism,
Fascism and the Politics of the National Front' in Race and
Class, 9/2 Autumn 1977.

Gay Left 29

Various Routes
Approaches to Gay History
by Jeffrey Weeks
Works Reviewed:
A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History: A Study of
Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1977. 7.95.
Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
1929-1939. Eyre Methuen, London 1977. 4.95.
Jonathan Fryer, Isherwood: A Biography of Christopher
Isherwood. New English Library. London 1977. 7.50.
Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions. Jonathan Cape, London
1977. 5.95.
Arno Press Collection, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay
Men in Society, History and Literature. General Editor
Jonathan Katz, New York 1975.
Jonathan Katz, Gay American History. Thomas Crowell,
New York 1976.
1977 has been the year of the gay book in Britain. Partly
this is the result of an increasing social acceptability, on a
certain level, of homosexuality; partly too, deriving from
this, there is a new awareness by publishers of a gay market
to be tapped, an awareness already a topic of discussion in
the American publishing trade press.
It would be heartening to think that this publishing (and
preceding writing) activity was a direct result of the
political impact of the gay liberation movement, but this is
not unequivocally so. The gay movement has undoubtedly
been the stimulus and pre-condition for the present
developments but few of the books which have so far
appeared have been a direct product of activity in and
identification with gay liberation. Only three or four books
(as opposed to journalism and pamphlets) published in
Britain over the past half decade have come out of any
direct involvement with the gay movement. I can think of
Ken Plummer's Sexual Stigma, Jeremy Seabrook's A
Lasting Relationship, Jack Babuscio's We Speak for
Ourselves and We're Here by Angela Stewart-Park and Jules
Cassidy. Homosexuality has become a topic to be reviewed
in the book pages of the Sunday newspapers, but the
majority of the books on the subject are still very much
within a liberal conservative problematic.
This is especially true with regard to the historical
treatment of homosexuality, and the works under review
illustrate a number of the problems. If you believe, as I do,
that attitudes to homosexuality are culturally specific, that
very few societies have had the clear cut division between
"heterosexual" and "homosexual" that our Western society
has; that the emergence of a homosexual consciousness and
identity is a comparatively recent historical phenomenon;
and that attitudes to homosexuality can only be
understood within the framework of wider discourses on
sexuality, with their specific conditions of origin and
development, then it becomes very difficult to accept
(a) the traditional approach which sees homosexual history
as essentially a magnificent (or tawdry depending on your
position) parade of great kings and queens; or (b) the
emergent gay liberation approach which searches for a "gay
history" and identity back to the roots of time. One is in
fact the mirror image of the other. While the first sees
homosexuality as the manifestation of an inner, essential
self, product of an individual quirk, the other sees gays as
being a discrete group like a racial minority, with a long, if
hidden, history of its own. Both can produce a great deal of
fascinating detail and the second has the valuable function
of suggesting a continuity in "our" history, but I believe
both to be in the last resort ahistorical approaches, for they
ignore the very processes of historical change which have
produced modern notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Gay Left 30

Kings and Queens

A.L. Rowse's book is a classic example of the traditional
approach, and a classic example, too, of his own style of
history writing. It is essentially a series of pen portraits of
famous male homosexuals, their lives, achievements, and
loves. Apart from a brief chapter on the "Mediaeval
Prelude", the period covered is the Renaissance to roughly
post World War II, and all the expected names are here,
from Michaelangelo and Leonardo to Marlowe (but
definitely not Shakespeare), James I and VI, Bacon,
Frederick the Great, "Some Russians" and "Eminent
Victorians", Ludwig of Bavaria, and Ernst Rohm, through
Lytton Strachey and co. to Cocteau and Mishima. Little
effort is made to discuss the different cultural conditions
within which their homosexual behaviour was expressed,
nor to explicate how they saw themselves, surely a crucial
question. And the emphasis is entirely on "achievers": not
just queens of history but great queens. Running through
the book is Rowse's usual display of snobbism. Thus:
"Salai was not loyal to Leonardo as again we often
notice with inferior humans in relation to those so
much above them."
Or in defending Proust's emphasis on an upper class milieu
in his great novel:
"Such a society was measurably more sophisticated
and subtle, more intelligent and aesthetically
rewarding than any depiction of lower class life could
possibly be, simple and confined, uncomplex and
unintelligent as that is."
Arm in arm with snobbery is Rowse's usual vanity; not
once but several times he stresses his (by no means
universally agreed) "solution" to the problem of
Shakespeare's sonnets, and seems at one point to compare
himself with Newton and Voltaire (p.95). But of course
Rowse is aware of his reputation and plays to it. He
quotes Cocteau: "Whatever the public blames you for,
cultivate it; it is yourself." I think we can safely blame
Rowse for this book.
Love of the Commons Man
The memoirs of Isherwood and Tom Driberg are the raw
materials for the future gay historian rather than works of
history themselves. The writers were upper middle class
men, with privileged access to all sectors of society, and
their homosexual careers illustrate one of the most
fascinating themes of the male homosexual subculture
the search for a fulfilling relationship with a young man of
working class origins. For Isherwood, as he puts it, Berlin

meant boys; Driberg seems to have found young men to

his taste in all times and places. It was essentially amongst
middle class men that a recognisable modern male homosexual identity first began to emerge in the nineteenth
century, and yet all of the leading advocates of homosexual
love, from J.A. Symonds through Edward Carpenter and
E.M. Forster almost to the present sought that love outside
their own class. Partly this was a reaction against the
stifling mores of their social milieu. Partly a sense of guilt
about their sexual orientation (for the homosexual
consciousness was deeply fissured by guilt and self
oppression). Partly a semi-political desire to consciously
smash the class barriers. The lives of both Isherwood and
Driberg illustrate these themes. Isherwood was to find a
way out of the contradictions by moving to California and
eventual adherence to gay liberation. Driberg seems to have
had a completely split life: his fellow MPs and journalists
may have known of his homosexual life style; his
constituents in Essex almost certainly did not. His posthumous memoirs are therefore much sadder than
Isherwood's. You get a feeling, in the end, of a frustrated
life despite Driberg's determined, if separate, pursuit of his
twin passions: socialism and homosexuality.
The two themes are intertwined in Isherwood's life in
the 1930s, beautifully retold in Christopher and His Kind.
In the end Isherwood seems to have found an explicit
commitment to socialism to have been incompatible with
his homosexuality. He seems to be suggesting at the end of
his book that this is fundamentally why he cast the dust of
England off his feet in 1939 by emigrating to the USA. It
was this 'betrayal', as seen by fellow socialists, that
occasioned the one encounter between the different
approaches of Isherwood and Driberg described in
Jonathan Fryer's biography, Isherwood. Christopher wrote
a chatty and indiscreet letter to Gerald Hamilton ("Mr
Norris") in November 1939, just after the outbreak of War,
debating on the attitudes of fellow expatriates and gossiping
about his film making, his Yoga, and generally being
frivolous. This found its way to Tom Driberg, who
published it in his "William Hickey" column in the Daily
Express. The result was to fuel the flames of those who
readily saw Isherwood (and Auden) as traitors to socialism
and their country in peril. Forty years later it is still
difficult to pass judgement on this episode. Its roots, I
believe, lie deep in the homosexual experience, and we are
only at the beginning of understanding the deep
complexities of the oppressed, but resistant, consciousness
that developed. Apart from their readability and fascination
the memoirs of Isherwood and Driberg are important
documents for understanding this consciousness.
Christopher Isherwood's book is, as one might expect, the
more vivid and exciting. It is considerably more so than
Jonathan Fryer's biography which is a useful summary of
his subject's life, more detailed for earlier years than for
later. But where Fryer covers the same ground as Isherwood
himself in his two volumes of autobiography, Lions and
Shadows and Christopher and His Kind, he adds little to
Isherwood's words and the result is rather lustreless. It is a
straightforward biography and in the end fails to illuminate
contemporary attitudes to homosexuality.
New Histories
Jonathan Katz's work, a product of his commitment to the
twin aims of gay liberation and socialism is much more
significant and revealing. The Arno Series on Homosexuality
which he has edited is basically a series of reprints, though
there are one or two first publications. The material
covered is vast in range and includes works by Natalie
Clifford Barney, Romaine Brooks, Edward Carpenter,
Donald Webster Cory, Havelock Ellis and J.A. Symonds,
Benedict Friedlander, Earl Lind, Carl Heinrich Ulrich and
many others; collections of documents from the various
homosexual rights groupings from the nineteenth century,
including Documents of the Homosexual Rights Movement
1836-1927, A Homosexual Emancipation Miscellany
c. 1835-1952, Lesbianism and Feminism in Germany
1895-1910, and volumes of The Ladder, the journal of the

lesbian grouping, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine

Review, and material from the present gay movement. The
collection also includes James D. Steakley's book, The
Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany,
developed from articles which originally appeared in the
Toronto gay liberation journal Body Politic. The work is a
valuable descriptive account of the German movement
from the 1860s to the "final solution" under the Nazis. It
is full of fascinating detail and is indispensable as a source.
As the author admits, the work shows a "literary bias" and
has very little on lesbianism. But the latter point is at least
explicable in terms of the constitution of the movement,
which was male dominated. The book is about the movement, and there is little about the social and cultural
conditions which gave rise both to a homosexual selfconsciousness and a campaign for legal and social change.
Much work still has to be done on this. But Steakley's
book, like the whole Arno collection, begins to provide the
vital raw materials and the preliminary research without
which no proper understanding of social responses towards
homosexuality are possible.

Raw Materials
Jonathan Katz's own magnificent book, Gay American
History is both a concentrate of the wider collection and
goes much further, in showing the vast complexity of
attitudes and responses. It also shows the way towards a
new approach towards homosexual history. Subtitled
Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. A Documentary the
book is a collection of documents, with an Introduction,
linking commentary, and full array of notes. It covers
various themes from the sixteenth century to the present:
Trouble: 1566-1966, basically accounts of homosexual life;
Treatment: 1884-1974, dealing with the development of
the "medical model"; Passing Women: 1782-1920, about
female transvestism as a mode of gender revolt; Native
Americans/Gay Americans: 1528-1976, about homosexuality amongst American Indians; Resistance: 1859-1972,
detailing the various modes of personal revolt and public
reform activity; and Love: 1779-1932. The range of
documents reprinted is astonishing, and the notes to each
section are extremely rich in further references, details
and speculations. Although the work is a "Documentary"
and not a finished work of narrative and analytical history,
it goes further than any other work of homosexual history
I know in detailing the infinitely complex process of
definition and self-definition which has produced the
modern homosexual identity. It will be indispensable for
future workers in the field.
Gay Left 31

I want, however, to pick out two points which seem to

me to pose fresh problems. The first concerns the title. It
seems to me that to use a modern self-labelling term "gay"
to define an everchanging concept over a period of four
hundred years can suggest a constant homosexual essence
which is just not there. Katz in fact recognises this very
clearly. He makes the vital point that the "concept of
homosexuality must be historicised", and hopes that the
book will revolutionise the traditional concept of homosexuality.
"The problem of the historical researcher is thus to
study and establish the character and meaning of each
manifestation of same sex relations within a specific
time and society ... All homosexuality is situational."
This is absolutely correct and is the measure of the break
between this type of history and Rowse's. But to talk at
the same time of our history as if we were a distinct fixed
minority suggests a slightly contradictory attitude.
It poses a major theoretical problem on which the gay
movement has had little to say. Ultimately, I believe, we
can only understand changing attitudes to homosexuality
within the context of wider discourses on sexuality, but the
theoretical tools for doing this are still undeveloped.

A second problem arises from this: attitudes to lesbianis m. Katz very commendably has attempted to give equal
space to both male and female homosexuality, and although
this is impossible in some sections, overall he succeeds. But
this again suggests a problematic of a constant racialsexual identity which Katz explicitly rejects theoretically.
Lesbianism and male homosexuality in fact have quite
different social histories, related to the social evolution of
distinct gender identities, and there is a danger that this
fundamental, if difficult, point will be obscured by
discussing them as if they were part of the same experience.
In the long term, as I have suggested, the study of
homosexuality in history poses questions of the dominant
modes of sexuality at any particular period, and any selfcontained search for our history will be self-defeating. But
the recovery by gay historians of a buried experience is a
vital transitional stage. Katz's work shows that the homosexual experience was much wider and richer than the
characters of Rowse's work would suggest. It is important
that work goes on in this way, because without it we can
hardly understand the present, let alone grasp the future.
The work of writers like James Steakley and Jonathan Katz
is an essential starting point.

The Gay News Trial

ASPECTS AND IMPLICATIONS
by Simon Watney
The successful prosecution of Gay News and its editor
Mr Denis Lemon in the Central Criminal Courts this July
has been variously discussed and interpreted. I want to
begin this article by examining the poem which lay at the
heart of the trial, and to go on to consider some
i mplications of the prosecution's case, which called upon
the entire structure of bourgeois Christian morality, once
Judge King-Hamilton had disallowed any defence on
literary or theological grounds. We need to understand the
complex unity of this structure if we are to fight back
effectively in future. Our strategies will not be helped by
analyses which focus simply on the person of Mrs. Mary
Whitehouse, or which resort to vague notions of some
mysterious unnamed conspiracy against gay people in this
country.
"The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name" takes its title
and significance from an anonymous poem, containing a
celebrated reference to The Love that dare not speak its
name, which was used to attack Oscar Wilde at the first of
his trials in April 1895 1 . It is thus rooted in a specific
history of gay literature and anti-gay legislation. At the
same time "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name" is a
perfectly straightforward poem. A Roman Centurion is
describing the dead Christ:
"As they took him from the Cross
I, the Centurion, took him in my arms
the tough, lean body
of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless,
but well hung."
Left alone with the corpse, the soldier takes off his clothes
and, with more than a casual reference to Flaubert's Tale
of St. Julian Hospitator 2 attempts to warm it back to life:
"For the last time
I laid my lips around the tip
of that great cock, the instrument
of our salvation, our eternal joy."
The soldier knows that Christ had "had it off with other
men" including Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, Paul of
Tarsus, "foxy" Judas and (needless to say?) all the other
apostles:
Gay Left 32

"He loved all men, body, soul and spirit, even me."
After a rather coy moment of Fisher-King/Amfortas
symbolism we realise that the centurion is explaining,
pace Mr. Eliot 3 , how he fucked Christ's wounds, thereby
receiving consolation both physical and spiritual.
There is a play upon the notion of "kingdom come",
then, after a loosely sado-masochistic reference to
"... the passionate and blissful crucifixion
same sex lovers suffer, patiently and gladly."
the narrator is left to wait for three days outside the tomb
waiting for the resurrection and, dare one say, the second
coming.
It is a rather silly poem. It is at times an amusing poem.
It is from start to finish an extremely "literary" poem. In
fact it stands within a long tradition of Uranian 4 poetry
which turns divine imagery and language, not necessarily

Christian, to erotic ends, in order to "dignify" the theme of

homosexual love by attaching it to suitably noble and
"elevating" themes. As such it literalises with an admirable
degree of frankness one habitually neglected aspect of
devotional poetry, namely, the carnality of its imagery.
Certainly it spells out this paradox in Christian ideology
which contemporary Christians might prefer to ignore. It is
necessary to stress the term ideology since the centrality of
Christian morality to capitalist modes of production and
consciousness is often overlooked. Religion did not end
5
with Marx's words in The Holy Family ; and what is often
comfortably described as modern bourgeois morality is
heavily determined by Victorian theology/ideology,
drained of any obligation to actual religious observance,
but retaining the full force of its original metaphysical
distinctions between body and soul, man and woman, etc.
in a social vision of semi-miraculous "wealth", "enterprise"
and a commodity paradise available to all, apparently, as
the result of hard work and/or virtuous living. However
much one juggles the books, homosexuality is incompatible
with this ideology.
Mrs. Whitehouse and her Love for the Lord
It has been argued that in bringing her case against Gay
News and its editor, Mrs. Whitehouse was in some way
acting duplicitly or dishonestly, that she employed the
blasphemy laws solely "to placate the liberal bourgeoisie
and social democracy" 6 . Her real object, it has been
repeatedly claimed, was to "get gays". There is however no
reason to doubt her own words at the time that she was
acting "out of my love for the Lord" and that she quite
sincerely felt that she "could not live with herself" had
she not pressed such charges. But ideology is not that
si mple. For to see the Honorary General Secretary of the
National Viewers and Listeners Association as no more
than a cynical manipulator of the law is to leave the very
concept of law unchallenged, and also merely collapses the
complex issues of homophobia and bourgeois ideology into
facile conspiracy theory: above all it fails to consider the
tortuous and torturing rationale of prejudice. Mrs.
Whitehouse may well believe in a myth of docile masses
whom it is her mission to protect, but the left cannot
afford to. It is important therefore to neglect neither the
individuals concerned, nor those to and for whom they
elect themselves to speak. It is thus as unwise to overemphasise the specific instrumentality of Mrs. Whitehouse
herself either in her demonstration-chant persona as

'La Shitehouse", or as the affable if "extremist" creature

of the popular press as it is to completely ignore her.
She is in all probability a fairly representative English
Conservative matron.
The blasphemy law has been used very rarely this
century, which fact alone should remind us that there is no
such thing as an archaic or obsolete act of legislation. All
law is in somebody's interest. Since most statutes relating
to "objectionable" material concerning religious subjects
were repealed by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of
1967, Mrs. Whitehouse turned quite naturally to the
Common Law of Blasphemy and Blasphemous Libel
(written blasphemy), which was developed during the
seventeenth century to "protect" the Church of England
against dissenters. As Common Law it is open and inclusive
and need not work from precedent. It ironically serves as a
reminder of the legal privilege enjoyed by the Anglican
Church alongside its more immediately visible privilege in
the related spheres of finance and education. It is also
worth noting that directly after the announcement of the
guilty verdict a number of other religious groups, including
the Scientologists and the Islamic Community, began to
campaign for an extension of this existing legal privilege to
persecute in the name of defence for themselves.
Christian Morality and Middle-Class Ideology
At the trial, the Prosecuting Council, Mr. John Smyth,
assembled his arguments within the supreme confidence of
a set of shared assumptions on the part of the jury
concerning the total depravity not just of the poem, but of
homosexuality per se. His language was offensive and highly
emotive: "This poem is not about love, it is about
buggery". It is, of course, about both, but also a great many
other things, as he himself proceeded unwittingly to reveal.
It is, as I have shown, a poem which is in an important
sense about literature and homosexual themes in the history
of literature, and what matters is that Judge KingHamilton disallowed any defence whatsoever on literary or
theological grounds. Blasphemy, it was constantly argued,
is a matter of common-sense, and common-sense, it quickly
emerged, involves a more or less pathological hatred and
fear of homosexuality. This hatred and fear was rationalised
along the only too familiar lines that all gays are dangerous
pederasts, and that Gay News is no more than a fortnightly
clarion call to mass child molestation. The very existence of
gay women was conveniently and necessarily overlooked.
The popular equation between homosexuality and
pederasty which dominated the prosecution case has also
been seen as another example of the cynical manipulation
of the law. It is on the contrary, a perfectly reasonable
product of the prevailaing sexual ideology of our society.
We should not therefore waste our time in complaining
self-righteously that the poem was found to be blasphemous. That it most certainly is. We should instead seek to
challenge the entire concept of legal blasphemy and, more
to the point, take this opportunity to examine how, and on
what grounds, the middle class attacks where it feels itself
most threatened.
Mrs. Whitehouse and her allies undoubtedly conceive
the world in dangerously simplified, if not actually fundamentalist terms 7 . But politics are not, as many Marxists
would argue, simply "hidden within" the religious outlook.
Such a view presupposes the existence of some essence,
Politics, existing independently of its particular
manifestations, a notion which is clearly idealist. Religion,
like sexuality, is the very stuff and substance of politics.
There is thus no question of blasphemy being no more than
a strategy to disguise beliefs which are, in such an essentialist way, "political". Any useful analysis of the real power
of ideology must at least attempt to explain how and why
bourgeois thought requires this rigid category of politics in
order to make the rest of life seem a-political.
In this context Christian morality remains central to
middle-class ideology, "theoretically closed and politically
supple and adaptable" 8 . Hence Smyth's emotive repetitions
of the word "buggery" throughout his concluding speech,
and his dogmatic appeals to "decent", "ordinary" people,
Gay Left 33

should come as no surprise to us. As he realistically

informed the jury, it was up to them "to set the standard
for the last quarter of the twentieth century, and perhaps
beyond". This is precisely what the enforcement of law is
all about the standards and self-interest of the ruling class
and its ideology. As Mrs. Whitehouse herself observed after
the verdict, "a line has at last been drawn and a limit set".
That limit is to be defined as the tolerance threshhold of
her bourgeois/Christian view of the world. In this limited
sense then the trial may even have served some small
purpose if it is seen to illustrate the unity of bourgeois
thought and the ways in which it is able to work by
associations and connotations across a wide range of issues
and topics, including the authority of the Church, the
"rights of the individual", the sanctity of the children,
patriarchal values, and the wilful perversity of homosexuals.
In this sense we can perhaps begin to appreciate the
contingent set of beliefs and assumptions which connects
the Festival of Light organisation, the National Association
for Freedom, the Conservative Party and the National
Front, as well as the staunchly bourgeois morality which
led the picketers outside the Grunwick factory to abuse
their gay colleagues.9
The Sexuality of Christ
Gay News was an interesting target for the right to select.
Gay Left might be thought of as a more obvious object of
attack according to some ultra-leftist theory. Gay News is,
however, by far the more visible and accessible gay publiccation. In that sense, whatever one thinks of its editorial
policies and explicit sexual politics, it is the most "out"
example of gay pride in Britain. It is important to recognise
Gay News in terms of its comparative availability. At the
same time we must acknowledge the fact that it was the
poem which was on trial, and that it would be entirely
wrong to try to theoretically distinguish between the
blatantly homophobic aspects of the trial and the concept
of blasphemy from which they emerged. What so offended
Mrs. Whitehouse was the slur, as she saw it, upon the
sexual nature of Christ. Her recent actions against a Danish
film-maker who had announced his intention to make a
film in this country on the subject of a sexual relationship
between Christ and Mary Magdalen, and the enormous press
campaign which followed, illustrate her equal hostility to
accusations of Christ's alleged heterosexuality.
The sexuality of Christ has constantly posed a problem
for Christianity. His imagery has always been somewhat
androgynous, strongly erotic, yet needing to be able to
appeal to both sexes. This situation is still further complicated by Christian metaphysics, according to which He is
both God in the person of the Son, and Man as mortal
child of Mary and Joseph. In a recent article 10, Michel
Foucault has stressed once more the absolute centrality of
sexuality in Christian culture, not simply as a negative
force of proscription and repression, but as a positive
element, in so far as its active mastering is necessary to
personal salvation. Twentieth century theology, including
Anglican theology, has tended with rare exceptions11 to
re-affirm the pre-Renaissance concept of the Church as
"the mystical body of Christ" or "the Communion of
Saints". In this context the eroticising of the figure of
Christ involves the eroticising of all Christians. This is
clearly not at all welcome, although it is scarcely new,
since the entire cult of Marianology 12 was closely related to
the simultaneous sanctification and eroticisation of women
which took place in twelfth century Europe, resulting in
the ideology of courtly love. We may thus appreciate the
other side of the Whitehouse/Christian coin in recent
attempts to "humanise" Christ and bring Him "up to date",
as an entirely logical product of some aspects of the socalled sexual revolution. Predictably the Christ of Jesus
Christ Superstar is as necessarily androgynous as the figure
in Mrs. Whitehouses mind as she knelt to pray, somewhat
ostentatiously, during intervals in the proceedings at the
Old Bailey.
It would in any case be extremely naive to imagine that
the sexuality of Christ would ever be anything but
controversial, and this has always been a delicate area for

Gay Left 34

Christians to negotiate. One has only to consider the crucial

physicality of all the Christian sacraments, let alone such
comparatively obscure doctrines as the Mystical Marriage of
St. Catherine of Siena 13. I do not wish to call into question
the validity of the varieties of religious experience here,
only to point to their often strong metaphoric relations to
adult sexuality. Hence it is fascinating to see how the
Prosecution Council deflected "charges" of homosexuality
away from the person of Christ by the use of still more
"common-sense" analogies. The jury was invited to
i magine that the poem concerned somebody "universally
loved and respected" in our society, "a member of the
Royal Family" for instance .. .! If such a suggestion
shocked or offended them, the jury had no choice, it was
instructed, but to bring in a verdict of guilty. In it came.
Homosexuality and Paedophilia
Equally significant was Smyth's almost obsessive picture of
Gay News as some kind of Paedophile Manifesto, this device
being used, as in the case of the Unfortunate Royals, to
deflect the specific issue of Christ's mortal sexual nature
away to that of children and, by extension, to the whole
issue of children's sexuality, sex education 14 and the
sanctity of the family unit.
It is clear that the "de-sexualisation" of children is
necessary in our society, both for the maintenance of those
property relations enshrined within and communicated
through the family, and the maintenance of our particular
education systems. But a bizarre paradox occurs at this
point, since that same refusal to acknowledge children as
sexual beings is necessary in order to construct them within
rigid cultural conventions as "boys" and "girls". Thus
bourgeois ideology is ironically obliged to stress and
exaggerate the extreme perimeter of childhood sexuality
(homosexual molestation/rape/schoolgirl pregnancies) in
order to avoid any confrontation with the central everyday
issues of sexuality itself, and its basic function as the model
for all those hierarchical and authoritarian relationships
which the child must learn to take for granted if she or he
is to grow into a Good Citizen.
But just as it is dangerously easy to see Mrs. Whitehouse
as having single-handedly contrived the Gay News
prosecution, so we run the risk of developing a supposedly
"libertarian" theory of childhood sexuality, which only
serves to reduce what we as adults might learn from
children's relaxed and undifferentiating polymorphous
experience of their bodies, in relation to one another and
the world, to our own drearily limited categories of genital
sexuality. It is not a question of our virtuously "allowing"

children their own "latent" or "oppressed" sexuality, but

of the very slight possibility that we might learn something
from them. For, as the French theoretician Guy
15
Hocquenghem has argued , the "sexuality" which we
would "allow" children is the very means by which we
would still further guarantee their condemnation to the
ideology (real power) of hierarchical and authoritarian
relationships which so oppress us as "grown-ups".
In effect the childhood sexuality argument, which would
project adult roles and values on to children, is not
dissimilar to that of the Wages for Housework movement
amongst some women. Both would ultimately tend, if
realised, to institutionalise and reify those very sources of
oppression which they believe they are attacking. It is not
necessary for the Gay Movement simply to embrace the
Paedophile lobby as comrades by virtue of a misleading
analogy of comradeship in the face of adversity. In the
opinion of this writer, their struggle is not ours, and the
casual radicalism of such organisations as the Paedophile
Information Exchange runs the grave risk of turning out to
be as ruthlessly sentimental and patriarchal as that ideology
which has left us with all those sailor-suited ten year olds
scowling out from the family Daguerrotypes. At the same
time, it must be emphasised that we do not, unlike Gay
News, criticise P.I.E. because it damages our case.
Dirty Jokes and Bourgeois Ideology
What we learn then from the Gay News trial, and what can
hardly be sufficiently stressed, is the organic and fluid
unity of bourgeois ideology, over and above the inflexible
categories according to which it organises its own
consciousness of the world. This makes the trial an object
lesson for the entire left. There can be no such thing as a
single-issue case under bourgeois law, since all aspects of
that ideology unite in order to attack any and every
challenge to its imaginary authenticity. We should regard
the trial as an example of the way in which all the levels of
the capitalist state, institutional and ideological, converge
and function together, to constitute bourgeois reality. That
is the seminal strength of ideology, its taken-for-grantedness, its suppleness, its ability to leap across all the
pedestrian categories of traditional Marxist analysis,
arguing by subtle and not so subtle analogies and
metaphors, so that an obscure professor's dirty joke can be
used to launch a major attack upon all libertarian values,
whilst still further reinforcing the closed mirror world of
ideology itself.
NOTES

1 The poem in question, by Lord Alfred Douglas, was first

published anonymously in a privately circulated literary review,
The Chameleon, December 1894. It was in the context of this
line, referred to by the Prosecution Council, that Wilde attacked
the distinction between natural and unnatural love, a distinction
central to bourgeois morality and still enshrined in crude
sociological theories of deviance. "It is beautiful", said Wilde
in his defence, "it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection ...
The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for
it."
2 Flaubert's Tale was written in 1876. It tells the story of a
handsome young aristocrat who kills both his parents as the
result of a tragic misunderstanding. In remorse he becomes an
outcast, eventually meeting a hideously deformed leper to whom
he gives food and drink. Julian gives the leper his bed, but this is
not enough: "My bones are like ice, come here beside me."
Julian lies down beside the leper. "Take off your clothes so that
I may feel the warmth of your body." Julian obeys. "Ah, I am
dying! Come close and warm me! No, not with your hands, with
your whole body!" Julian lies on top of him and kisses him. At
which point the leper is transformed into the figure of Christ,
who bears Julian up with him to Heaven.
3 In From Ritual to Romance, originally published in 1920,
Jessie L. Weston explores the complex symbolism in European
literature of the Fisher King whose wound can only be healed by
the sword or spear which originally inflicted it. It is a major
theme in Wagner's last great Christian opera, Parsifal, named
after its beautiful young hero who heals the aged King Amfortas
with a spear identified with that which pierced the side of Christ.
It is also an important motif in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" of
1926.

4 Uranian poetry is the collective term applied to a wide body of

homosexual literature in the nineteenth century which
celebrated (in often highly comic terms) the love of men for
boys. Its imagery is predominantly pagan or Christian. See
Timothy d ' Arch Smith: Lore in Ernest.
5 In his early works, The Holy Family, and the Introduction
towards. a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx
launches his most explicit attack on the unity between religion,
the state, the family and civil society. It is in the latter work
that Marx describes religion as "the opium of the people", an
"illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not
revolve around himself."
6 I refer here to a recent International Marxist Group analysis of
the Gay News trial.
7 At a public meeting in Hackney, London, this October, Mrs.
Whitehouse referred her audience to a 1964 report put before
the United States House of Representatives which, after no less
than twelve years' research, discovered that among 40
Communist strategies designed to destroy Western Civilisation
was the plan to "present homosexual degeneracy as normal and
healthy ". Do we need further warning against the dangers of
conspiracy theories? Mrs. Whitehouse was heckled loudly
throughout her speech. See Gay News 129.
8 Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
in, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New Left Books.
London 1971.
9 At the mass picket of the Grunwick factory in North London in
July 1977 a group identifying themselves as gay workers were
abused and jostled by fellow picketers. The significance of
specifically gay interventions is too large to discuss here.
10 Michel Foucault: "Power and Sex: An Interview''. Telos
Magazine No. 32, Summer 1977.
I 1 One such exception was the French writer Simone Weil. See her
fourth letter to the Reverend J .M. Perrin, her "Spiritual
Autobiography", included in Waiting for God, a selection of her
writings published by Fontana paperbacks.
12 The term Marianology refers to a large body of legends and
doctrines concerning the life and worship of the Virgin Mary in
the later Middle Ages.
13 The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine of Siena refers to a
vision, later formalised into official doctrine, of St. Catherine's
Mystical Marriage in Heaven with Christ, a complete spiritual
parody of the earthly sacrament.
14 During the trial the English journalist Bernard Levin, called as a
defence witness together with the novelist Margaret Drabble to
testify as to the journalistic probity of Gay News as a
"respectable" newspaper, was asked if he had read articles in
various back issues, produced and named in quick succession by
number. All the issues named featured articles concerning
paedophile topics, which Levin defended as serious and
important contributions to a much tabooed subject. He was
eventually pinned down over a review of the Gay Sunshine sex
manual, Men Loving Men, which Levin quite properly defended
as a serious and necessary publication. Judge King-Hamilton
however expressed considerable surprise that anyone in our
society should need any advice or information concerning
sexuality, homosexual or otherwise.
15 Guy Hocquenghem : Le Desir Homosexuel, Editions
Universitaires, Paris, 1972. English translation forthcoming.
Gay Left 35

A Unifying Experience
Coming Out
by Jeffrey Weeks
( Quartet Hardback 8.50, Paperback 3.95)

Reviewed by Ken Plummer

In trying to situate our own gay oppression historically,
Weeks' articulate and well documented book serves as an
invaluable if incomplete guide. Quite correctly, he
refuses to impose contemporary understandings of 'the
homosexual' upon the past, distinguishing between homosexual , behaviours which may be more or less universal and
homosexual meanings which are always shaped by wider
, socio-historical situations and men and women in real
situations. Thus, his task (or one of them, for the book
overflows with ideas) is to analyse the creation and
emergence of the unique contemporary homosexual
identity and subculture (male and female) as a product of
both changes in the wider organisation of the family and
gender roles under capitalism and the specific responses and
counter responses to this of both homosexuals and 'moral
crusaders'. The connections to the latter are well drawn; to
the former, they remain glib.
Thus the book is at its best when it is teasing out the
connections between oppressive definitions and homosexual
responses from the mid-nineteenth century to the present
day. Examining the ways in which homosexuality was
turned into crime by parliamentarians and public scandals,
sickness by the medical profession and moral horror by the
puritan crusaders -- Weeks suggests not just their apparent
negative impact on people experiencing homosexuality but
also their positive face: severe oppression gave homosexuals
a "sense of self ... (which was) ... an essential step in the
evolution of a modern homosexual consciousness" (p.22).
Covert, apologetic and guilt ridden as it was, a male homosexual identity began to evolve at the turn of the nineteenth
century.
And so Weeks continues documenting in detail and
analysing carefully the hostilities and responses: the outrage
delivered on Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness helping in
the emergence of a lesbian identity and the hostilities of
legal persecution in the early fifties (Montagu, Wildeblood,
etc) precipitating law reform groups. Slowly, the modern
homosexual self of the liberated gay begins to unfold as his
analysis turns to the momentous achievements of the Gay
Liberation Front in the early 1970's. Here Weeks becomes
a "participant historian" and those of us who were there in
the early days of England's GLF will find it "exhilarating"
to read, systematically, of those early meetings, the schisms
and conflicts, and the final breakdown. No less interesting
will be the final chapters where Weeks' analyses the contemporary gay world and its symbiotic relationship to liberal
reformism and consumer capitalism sprinkling his observations with polemical remarks on C.H.E., Gay News, the
'commercial scene' and the views of homosexuality held by
contemporary "Left" groups.
Whilst, however, there is much detail and analysis of the
specific situational responses of homosexuals to their
oppression, the connections which Weeks wishes to make
to wider social changes are much more thinly drawn. The
argument made is by now well trodden. Homosexual
oppression increased in emergent capitalism because of the
need for strengthening the family and the gender system
to harness both to the needs of productivity; it decreased in
the 1970's (slightly) because of the ability of capitalism to
'commoditise' sexuality and for new homosexual markets
to be created. Homosexuals previously a threat to
capitalism - were now partially co-opted. In Weeks' book,
these connections form a massive backdrop for the analysis
(and obviously for his prescriptions for a socialist future),
but whilst they appear valid to me they are nowhere as
Gay Left 36

coherently analysed as the specific workings of reform

groupings, which constitute the bulk of his study.
This book should be read by all "homosexuals" - so
that they can grasp something of their recent history, their
oppressors, their new identity and the gains that have been
made. Yet absorbing as the book is, it could be claimed that
Weeks a Marxist historian has given us a bourgeois
history of Gay Elites. It is true that he acknowledges the
"working classes" at many points from the claim of
Symonds that "masculine love ... abolishes class distinctions" through to the Gay Liberation Front participating in
the "Right to Work" campaign. But his study is rarely
concerned with the ways in which working class groups
responded to oppression: it is persistently caught up in
middle class/elite worlds. First, it is to Forster, Symonds,
Carpenter, Radclyffe Hall and company we turn; then it is
on to the world of the British Society for Study of Sex
Psychology and the Homosexual Law Reform Society
("overwhelmingly professional middle class", p.171): and
finally it is 'the Liberationists' whose members were
drawn so rarely from the "working class", so frequently
from the professions, students and the 'drop out' sons and
daughters of the rich. The Gay World like most worlds
establishes its own hierarchies and in some ways this book
is a documentation of the creation of a new Gay Elite who
can afford to come out and a mass for whom the problems
or even possibilities of 'coming out' were and are
immense. As a "Marxist" analysis, the book would have
been improved if it could have closely dissected the class
variations in oppression and response. Is historical research
now to repeat the follies of sociological research: the denial
of working class homosexuality?
Nevertheless this is an important book and "Coming
Out" is undeniably the best title for it. All the rhetoric,
ideology, campaigning and organising that have occurred in
recent years are little compared to the immensely difficult,
often hazardous, personal political act of "coming out". It
is this which constitutes the current stage in the construction of a modern homosexual identity to experience
homosexuality, to integrate it into one's overall life, to
acknowledge it publicly and to feel no shame -- is a "new"
way of being homosexual, and a way rendered possible
only through the work of our forefathers and mothers in
struggling persistently to change laws and stereotypes. Their
road may have been long and heavy with bloody martyrdoms, and this book in one sense should document our
historical gratitude to these people. But, of course, as
Weeks persistently acknowledges the day is not over, the
struggles are not resolved. He envisages now a period
perhaps till the end of the century of a growing consolidation of gains in a piecemeal fashion; much of the latter
part of his book documents the myriad of conflicting and
competing groups that are emerging around focused issues.
What will hopefully hold these diverse groupings
together is their 'coming out'. For it is this act which alone
will ensure a place for the homosexual experience (not
necessarily homosexuals) under the socialist sun.
Interestingly, the new war that is beginning to be waged on
homosexuality now is not about homosexuality per se: it is
about 'coming out', and hence rendering homosexuality as
a legitimate way of life and as 'role models' for the guilty
hesitant. What both Anita Bryant and the National Festival
of Light seek is to drive us "back in". They have, I believe,
picked the right issues to drive us "back in" before we're
properly out. Weeks' book is timely in reminding us of
what could be lost if we should hesitate to keep our heads
up high.

Out of the Cess Pits

Socialism and the New Life

by Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks
(Pluto 1.80)

Reviewed by Sarah Benton

The world fragments us; mind from body, spirit from flesh,
reason from emotion, self from other, private from public,
personal from political, masculine from feminine. Each
society has its own conflicts, its apparent antagonisms; each
produces people so rawly aware of them that they spend
their lives trying to resolve them. Some of those people
become political; others end up social hermits trying to find
some mystical welding of their mind and body, spirit and
flesh, reason and emotion ...
Edward Carpenter (1844-1928) and Havelock Ellis
(1859-1939) had in common a profound concern about the
splits of their time, and a conviction that sexuality was a
key to mending them. They also shared a vision of the
whole person; in an integrated human society the fragmented human personality could be united, and the
essentially harmonious human nature restored. For
Carpenter, "the search is to restore this nature, to achieve a
new unity between the inner self and the outer world which
would allow a rebirth of the human spirit." For Ellis, it was
to integrate the "divine vision of life and beauty" with
science, and for individuals to create their own "unity of
pattern, rhythm, feeling and intellect," as symbolised by
dance.
Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks are equally
involved with conflicts in our contemporary personal and
public worlds. This shapes the questions they ask about the
t wo men, while allowing us to see how different was the
society of Carpenter and Ellis from our own. On occasions
it might sound demoralisingly familiar being concerned
with sex, or artistic creativity or healthy food condemned
you to the dustbin of history as far as marxist party and
bourgeoisie were concerned. Yet this book will have failed
if we imagine that these vigorous movements at the end of
the century for sexual reform, for the creation of a labour
movement, for welfare to be a state responsibility had not
helped shape our own less repressive society

Edward Carpenter appears as the more political of the

t wo sexual reformers; the conflicts he was concerned with
were broader, more socially based than Ellis's. The ownership of property, the social and economic position of
women, industrialism, unemployment, British imperialism
were among the things he wrote about as well as the glories
of love, comradeship, sex and open sandals. He was a
political activist in the public world, avoiding the isolation
and eccentricity that his social class and homosexuality
might have produced by his involvement in the local
socialist movement of Sheffield. If he gained notoriety
there for the scandalous goings-on in his house (he lived
with his male lover, the irrepressible, lusty bum-pinching
George Merrill) he also earned himself a respect approaching
reverence for his heart-felt advocation of the 'new life'.
Though his homosexuality was regarded by many comrades
as going a bit too far, his long struggle to live his personal
life politically seems to have added stature to his general
political work.
By the 1880s, the Victorians had excised sexuality from
normal human life and dropped it in a cess pit along with
everything else nasty that threatened the survival of the
British Empire. Having rolled a heavy stone on top, they
could then creep out and pull it off every now and then to
make sure this evil brew was still bubbling away down
there. Hardly surprising then that someone like the
American, Walt Whitman, whose poems pulled sex out of
the mire and held it up as something glorious, celebratory,
and part of love, friendship and the healthy human body,
should have so shocked Victorian society, inspired
Carpenter and influenced Ellis.
Fallen women, homosexuals and the criminal, insane,
deformed, syphilitic, diseased members of Victorian society
were all part of this cess pit. For if, by the end of the
century, the Victorian establishment was less confident
about its laissez-faire economy, its laissez-faire state, and its
patriarchal family, it could not bring itself to see such
people as casualties of such a system. They were, then,
casualties of their own moral degeneracy. And it is this
terror of degeneration that could engulf the whole British
Gay Left 37

Empire were the sources of contamination not firmly

contained that sexual reformers had to fight.
The social and political life of the times is generally
described with lucidity and perception in the book
especially the reality of day to day political work and
relationships (Rowbotham) and the vitriolic attitudes
towards homosexuality (Weeks). It is this terror of
degeneration which pushed left and right wing alike into
the eugenics movement which I would like to have seen
analysed more precisely, along with its possible connection
to the absence of a welfare state. The degenerates amongst
us today have been 'immunised', hidden from sight by our
welfare state and semi-detached houses. In the face of this,
Carpenter both identified with society's outcasts "our
common humanity" could be identified "in the troubles
and wandering eyes of the crazy and insane" and
romanticised male friendship.
Rowbotham well describes the yearning for comradeship, for love between equal friends that inspired many
socialists in the 1880s, and which continues as a powerful
force in politics. Carpenter's feelings about that were also
driven by a powerful male tradition that has hardly been
explored: the notion of brotherhood, rising to a male love
more exalted than anything women can attain. From David
and Jonathan to Redford and Newman that love has been
romantically mystified because it can't be honestly
explored in societies committed to heterosexual marriage
and the frailty of women.
Given the nineteenth century, bearing in mind how male
love still comes under the grandiose title of 'the love that
dares not speak its name', it is not surprising Carpenter
wanted to name male love as splendid, tender, creative. Yes,
he wanted to pull sexuality and homosexuality out of the
cess pit and reintegrate it into the human personality; but
his aim was also to reclaim masculinity from the deliberate
and 'consistent brutality' that Victorianism had made it. He
could not bear to be a brute.
In his compassion for women, his sincere commitment
to women's independence, his conviction that the women's
movement was one of the great liberating forces of his
time, women, points out Rowbotham, remain slightly
unreal objects, inhabiting a mysterious 'twilight women's
world'. Lacking a theory to explain the gulf between maleness and femaleness, he ends up exalting what is most
heroic in both. Unable to see how masculinity and
femininity can be integrated in people, Carpenter ends up
believing in an 'intermediate sex'. Carpenter was, of
course, bound by the particular nature of the sexual culture
he had to oppose and the limitations of the radical movements around him. Our own sexual liberation movements
are immeasurably stronger because of the theories of
sexism, of female sexuality, and because of the greater
material freedom of women.
Though Carpenter was in contact with the main socialist
and feminist organisations that were created, and which
collapsed or merged in his time, his beliefs about the
material conditions for liberation were closer to those of
the Socialist League than anyone else. The conflicts of class,
of the unequal ownership of property, the divisions
between manual and 'brain' work could be resolved in a
system of communal ownership and production.
Rowbotham makes the very crucial point that the political
divisions between organisations merged and overlapped at
local level; marxists, feminists, anarchists, libertarians,
radicals and nutcases talked to each other, and their ideas
were not contained within their organisations or lack of
them. But in this description of Edward Carpenter we can
see the shadowy roots of that public political gulf between
Britain's marxist tradition and the concern with sexuality,
relationships, morality and the way we live. Theoretically,
the two were not integrated. Better organised, more
consciously connected with material actuality, the marxist
tradition appears to have been more robust and
contained by its cold-shouldering of the other tradition.
Ellis's explorations of sexuality and human nature are
more narrowly drawn but through that concentration he
carried out the inestimable service of describing all the
Gay Left 38

curious things that people actually do in bed. Weeks points

clearly to the political limitations of Ellis's analysis: yet the
very accounting of actual sexual experience can be politically explosive, as the Hite Report has shown. And as I
discovered as an eager 19 year old who, on an expectant
rummage for dirty books in my father's hidden suitcase,
came across a book by Ellis, read it, was amazed, stirred
and reassured.
We learn less of Havelock Ellis's personal life than we do
of Carpenter's, but the value and limitations of his
researches in sexuality are most clearly explained. Faced
with the same culture as Carpenter, Ellis drew on the new
science to fight the idea that all sex outside the procreative
marriage bed was corrupting. The new science sought
material explanations for the development of humankind,
and rejected the religious idea that God dropped us on this
earth, wound us up, and sat back waiting for us to go
wrong. Ellis had been tortured by the gulf between religion
which venerated art and love and spiritual things and
science which explained things but was cold and mechanical.
The resolution of this conflict lay in believing that the
human being's essential nature was biologically determined,
but this biology included the capacity for things spiritual.
Liberation meant releasing the individual from those forces
which denied the expression of beauty or wholeness.
It is this which, according to Weeks, is the central
paradox of Ellis's work. His belief that human nature is
basically shaped by biology, and that sexuality was an
integral part of that, was in effect a counter to Victorian
notions that a person could become depraved through
moral weakness and especially through sex or indeed
that extra-procreational sex was itself a sign of depravity.
But this also meant that a person's sexuality or personality
remained bound by their bio-chemical make-up. The
weapon he used to fight for a revolution in attitudes
towards sex is the one we today, with the scientific
triumphant, are left to fight.
Ellis was the first person to write sympathetically about
homosexuality and one of the first to use the word
'homosexuality'. His studies of homosexuals and much of
his work was descriptive rather than analytical convinced
him that we come in two varieties. The natural ones, called
'inverts', and those who have been corrupted, called
`perverts'. Weeks doesn't say what formula Ellis found for
distinguishing the two.
His assertion that sexuality was an inherent part of our
make-up, could in part be proven by what are known as
`cross-cultural studies'. That is, by offering Victorian
society accounts of the sexual practices that could be
observed inside and outside the bounds of the British
Empire he could prove that people everywhere did do it, in
one form or another, and live to tell the tale.
However because he did not make a distinction between
the inherent potential for being sexual and the particular
forms it took, he also regarded social customs connected
with sex and procreation as being biologically inherent. For
Ellis, 'courtship', or the sexual conquest of the female by
the male was the foundation of sex and all sexual practices
were a more or less exaggerated manifestation of courtship.
This didn't, for him, make women less sexual than men
another blow to contemporary beliefs; but it did make
women inherently modest and passive, and did mean that
they all ought to procreate. Thus one more good man went
to the arms of the eugenicists.
It is easier to grasp the weaknesses of Ellis's work,
especially when you read about him from the position of
today's sexual liberation movements, than it is to grasp just
how much he helped haul sexuality out of the cess pit. He
was certainly regarded by his friends and other sexual
reform campaigners (many more politically involved than
he) as having helped 'free sex from the smudginess
connected with it from the beginning of Christianity'. His
vision of sex as something which can be liberating and
joyous is still not a part of out: own politics, ridden as we
are with notions of biological urges, compulsive sex and
compulsive angst.

What Is To Be Done
A Conference for Gay Socialists July 2nd 1977

After the publication of Gay Left No. 4 the Collective

thought that in the current political situation a one day
conference could be held, organised jointly by various gay
groups on the left, centred around discussing the positions
of socialist gay women and men within the left. Gay groups
are more or less established either officially or unofficially
in the IMG, SWP, CP and in various unions and there
seemed to be a need to talk about what being a gay
socialist means both in an autonomous gay movement and
within the framework of an established party.

All the various groups responded positively. A planning

committee made up of representatives of IMG, SWP, CP,
CHE, Lesbian Left and Gay Left met to organise the
conference. They decided that it should take the form of a
series of small workshops, each one led by a convenor. Four
topics were chosen with a session in the morning repeated,
with a different convenor, in the afternoon. A final plenary
session was called to bring out areas of agreement and
disagreement and to discuss future action.
Advertisements placed in Gay News and the left-wing
press placed emphasis on attracting gay socialists and on a
glorious summer's day almost 100 people responded to the
call. Sue Cartledge and Jeffrey Weeks as joint chairpeople
opened the day's events. Detailed papers were not prepared
for the conference. Instead the planning committee had got
ready substantial outlines of the sort of areas each workshop could cover, and these sheets were handed out.
Each of the eight workshops naturally covered much
ground and different people gained and gave different
things. The headings of the workshops Fascism and
Sexism, Gays and Class, Gays and Socialist Morality, and
Politics of Sexuality including gay women and men the
personal and the political and the issues and campaigns,
indicate the breadth of the discussion.
In the plenary session the extent of the discussion
became evident. Generally most people expressed the need
for this and similar conferences, feeling that only by
meeting and talking over common areas could any 'position'
for gays be worked out in their relationship to the left.
Brief mention was made of the possibility of any organised
`gay socialist movement' but this was thought neither
desirable nor useful at this stage.
On the value of future conferences there seemed to be
three points of view expressed though these often overlapped. Political activists felt that only by joining and
working within one of the established left parties could any
meaningful revolutionary change occur; to this end they
saw their gay work as only a small part of their political
activity. "Gay conferences are useful recruiting centres"
seemed to sum up their argument. Another view expressed
the need for gays to work for a major regrouping of left
wing parties around a central unified policy; they too
tended to see the question of their political gayness as less
i mportant than this, though they were anxious to work out
a theoretical position for gays.

work together for conferences was not discussed.

Numerically men outnumbered women and this imbalance
was not helped by fewer women attending the afternoon
session. No one suggested that joint conferences were not
possible but this central question was not tackled on this
occasion.
No specific dates have been fixed for the next
conference but anyone, who is interested in either
submitting papers or in planning arrangements in whatever
capacity can contact: Gay Socialist Conference,
26 Dresden Road, London N19.

What's Left
NEW GAY SOCIALIST GROUP

We are two gay men who have recently separately come to

live in London and are surprised by the small number of
discussion or study groups (especially for men) which are
open to new people.
We think there is scope for a group to work on sexual
politics, principally through reading and discussion, in
particular the relationship between gays, feminism and the
left.
If you are interested in getting involved in such a group
or have any views on the idea then get in touch with
either one of us, initially through gay switchboard:
Tel. 01-837 7324.
Ken and Bob.

Lesbian Line

Lesbian Line is a new phone service for women, operated

entirely by a collective of women. We are London based,
but have files on women's and particularly lesbian activities
throughout the country. We offer information and someone
to talk to, at present twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays
from 2 to 10 p.m., but we shall soon expand. We also hold
small socials for women who contact us.
We need up-to-date information on lesbian events, places,
groups etc. particularly those out of London. If you can
give us information on your town, please write to Lesbian
Line, BCM 1514, London WC IV 6XX. If you'd like to
join the collective ring us up we need you! We'll share
our experience with any woman who is interested; we'd
like eventually to see a network of lesbian switchboards
throughout the country.

A third view expressed a firm belief in an autonomous

gay movement outside of the established political parties to
continue trying to establish a theoretical position for gay
socialists. Further discussion, they suggested, could be
continued at a weekend residential conference. A venue out
of London was suggested and volunteers from different
parts of the country offered to serve on a planning
committee. A further suggestion was that one of the gay
groups of one of the parties could convene but not control
such a conference, as they had access to administrative
resources. As a workable alternative further one day
London conferences were suggested, with written papers
prepared and circulated beforehand. The theme put
forward was "Gays and the State".
The women's voice was not heard much in the plenary
session. The whole question of how women and men could
Gay Left 39

Editorial Notes
Publication Dates: We hope from April 1978 to be
coming out more regularly, three times a year. Contributions, especially short articles, are always welcome.
Letters: Owing to pressure on space we have had to hold
back letters this time. But please keep sending them in.
Subscriptions: We are now opening a subscription department. Details will be found elsewhere in this issue. Donations will also be welcomed. Gay Left is a non-profit
making journal completely financed through sales and gifts.
Any contributions would therefore be appreciated.
Back Issues: Copies of issues 3 and 4 of Gay Left are still
available, price 50p each inland, 1.00 overseas.
Next Issue: Gay Left 6 will include articles by Dennis
Altman on "The State, Repression and Sexuality", Gregg
Blachford on "Socialism and Sexual Morality", Derek
Cohen on "Clienting Individual Solutions to Collective
Problems" and Randal Kincaid on "The Apoliticism of the
Gay Press".
Correction: The "Gays and Work Symposium" held in
Seattle last March, was organised by the Union of Sexual
Minorities and not by the F.S.P. as we stated in Gay Left 4.
THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Gregg
Blachford, Derek Cohen, Emmanuel Cooper, Jeffrey
Weeks, Nigel Young.

Subscriptions

Contents
Why Marxism ...........................................................................
Here We Stand ........................................................................
A Breathtaking Sweep ...........................................................
Beyond Privilege .....................................................................
Politics and Ideology ..............................................................
Another Patriarchal Irrelevance .......................................
Crossroads Which Way Now ..........................................
How Time's Gone By ............................................................
National Organisation Of Lesbians .................................
I mages of Homosexuality ...................................................
Gays and Fascism ....................................................................
Various Routes .......................................................................
The Gay News Trial ..............................................................
A Unifying Experience .........................................................
Out of the Cess Pits ...............................................................
What Is To Be Done ..............................................................
What's Left ................................................................................
Editorial Notes ........................................................................

2
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40

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Happy Families?
PAEDOPHILIA EXAMINED
By the Gay Left Collective
THE CHALLENGE
It is striking that over the past two or three years conservative moral anxiety throughout the advance capitalist
countries has switched from homosexuality in general to
sexual relationships between adults and young people. In
America Anita Bryant's anti-homosexual campaign began as
a crusade to 'Save Our Children'; the Body Politic in Canada
was raided following an issue on paedophilia; in France as in
this country a moral panic has been stirred up over the issue
of child pornography and "exploitation". And in Britain this
has lead to the rapid passage through Parliament of a restrictive Child Pornography Bill which received no proper
scrutiny and very little principled libertarian opposition from
MPs. Even the recent Gay News trial had as a significant
undercurrent the issue of paedophilia, a topic and stigma
with which the prosecution made strenuous efforts to tar
Gay News. The attacks on lesbian parenthood are obviously
related to similar questions, while those organisations which
counsel young homosexuals and help them to meet one
another seem to be coming under increased surveillance.
There has, it seems, been a clear extension of concern,
from adult male homosexual behaviour, which dominated
debates of the fifties and sixties following the Wolfenden
Report, to the question of paedophilia and childhood. In
1952 the Sunday Pictorial published a series of articles on
adult homosexuality called "Evil Men". By 1975 "The Vilest
Men in Britain" (Sunday People 25th May 1975) were
members of the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) and
the News of the World in 1978 (11th June) enjoined the
members of PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) to
"Keep Your Hands Off Our Children: We expose the truth
about this pack of perverts." "Child Molesters" and
"exploiters of children" are the new social monsters.
Why is this so? Firstly it seems clear enough that few
moral conservatives are prepared publicly to campaign for
making male homosexuality illegal again, or for that matter
proscribing lesbian relationships. There might be police raids
on clubs and saunas and harassment in pubs; chief constables
will campaign against pornography (and some weak-kneed
liberals might support , them); Ian Paisley might try to Save
Ulster from Sodomy; Mary Whitehouse might recommend us
to pray and exercise restraint; and Leo Abse might prefer us
to "come out but not freak out", but as this latter phrase
suggests it is not so much private, consensual adult homosexual behaviour which is of primary concern, but so-called
public decency, and the related question of "corruption of
minors".
Realistically, the moral right wing cannot get much
support out of campaigning against homosexuality as such.
But they can hope to build up a new moral consensus around
the issue of protecting childhood, particularly in the context
of the current political emphasis on the family. Adult homosexuals can be dismissed as unfortunate historical deviations
to be pittied, with all efforts being put into preventing any
more children 'falling' into such a way of life. Here they can
build out from their traditional evangelical core, which
rejects all sex outside marriage, building a coalition with
various people from disillusioned libertarians to confused
progressives.
Moral reactionaries can serve their cause better by
building alliances on easy issues such as the protection of
childhood. Their success in pushing through the Child Pornography Act is proof of this. At the same time gay opposition
is minimised because of the wish to dissociate ourselves from
the traditional public image of being "dirty old men". A
Gay Left 2

moral panic can be drummed up over childhood because it is

an area of such easy controversy. If the child is the father
(sic) of the man as bourgeois morality informs us, then it is
of major concern to a conservative stratum that children are
protected, cossetted and channelled in the right direction
towards heterosexual familial patterns. We have all been
brought up from infancy in such patterns, and know the
scars we suffer in endeavouring to emerge with our own gay
identities. Childhood is a battlefield that gay militants have
to be concerned with. And to that degree the moral right is
correct. Homosexuals are a threat; we can, in their language,
"corrupt". Gay socialists cannot afford to avoid these issues.
PAEDOPHILES, PARENTS AND POWER
The question of paedcphilia raises a multitude of issues, from
those of simple civil rights to matters of sexual theory. As
socialists we can join with other libertarians in defending the
right of organisations such as PIE to put forward their point
of view without harassment from press and police, or
violence from the National Front. Socialists and gay groups
must support the freedom of speech and the right of paedophiles to associate and organise to raise social awareness
about the issue.
The Gay Left Collective, like many others in the gay
movement, has had many discussions about paedophilia. We
do not feel it would be a justified position to discuss adult/
child sexual relationships simply on libertarian grounds. It is
no good merely to say, people feel like that, feeling is valid,
let it all happen, right on. We know that feelings are socially
constructed and we must view all feelings with great
suspicion and scrutiny.
There is an argument that has been developed from some
quarters of the gay movement and the left which suggests
that children are sexual beings like adults and that since they
are oppressed by parents, teachers etc and no paedophile
experience could be any more harmful, therefore paedophilic relationships are alright. This is a false and idealist
arguement. It likens childhood sexuality to the experiences
of adult sexuality, an equation that cannot be made as
children cannot be read back as small adults. Paedophile
relationships raise the question of power too sharply for us
to treat them glibly. A radical approach to the question can
only come through the interrogation of two areas:
a) the question of the dominance in our culture of certain
categories of sexuality, of which 'homosexuality' and 'paedophilia' are examples. Is it, in other words, valid to think
through the questions of sexuality as if these are pre-given,
determined and firm? Do they clearly enough embrace the
varieties of behaviours which they seek to pull together
within rigid definitions?
b) the question of childhood sexuality specifically, the real
focus of the debate, and the key to the issue. Conservative
thought dismisses any idea of childhood sexual feelings and
experiences and much public opinion is reticent in acknowledging their existence. At the other extreme are those who
see childhood sexual feelings as being identical to adult ones.
Both are wrong. We began our own discussion of this area
with Freud's essays on children's sexuality. Whatever the
limitations of Freudian categories, they are valuable in
indicating the existence and diversity of childhood sexuality.
But our present limited knowledge of children's sexual
development still makes discussion of paedophile relations
very difficult.
WHAT IS PAEDOPHILIA?
One definition would embrace all sexual activities between
`adults' and those under the age of consent. In countries like
ours, however, where the age of consent for male homosexuals is so high (21), such a definition would be meaningless. An age of consent, in theory at least, would seem to be
meaningful only in the context of an entry into social and
sexual maturity, which in turn suggests a relationship to
puberty. The problem is that puberty is a process rather than
a particular age, occurring roughly between the ages of 11
and 14, though individuals differ greatly in their physical and
emotional development at this time. Together with the

sexual development of the body it implies a growing awareness of the social world, particularly through greater contact
with peers and older children as sources of education and
experience. Most of the Gay Left Collective recognise that
puberty is a useful framework. For convenience we define
a paedophile as someone who is emotionally and sexually attracted towards children, that is towards pre-pubertal people.
In their pamphlet Paedophilia: Some Questions and
Answers PIE define it as "sexual love directed towards

children" and they refer to "children" "both in pre-puberty

and early adolescence." In practice, they state that the age
group that attracts paedophiles is "usually somewhere in the
8-15 range". From our definition it is clear that we find this
equation of adolescence and childhood confusing. Another
issue with which we have to deal is that sexual/emotional
relations between adults and children need not be between
members of the same sex. In fact the majority of such
relationships are heterosexual, and in practice between
heterosexual men and young girls, usually in the context of
the family. But it is also true that the (relatively tiny)
number of people who have identified themselves as paedophiles are usually male and boy lovers. The vast majority of
members of paedophile organisations seem to fall into this
area. This already suggests the complexity of the issue: a
yawning distinction between behaviour and identity immediately appears. But once we recognise the very different
context in which heterosexual and homosexual sexual
relations take place, and the traditional invisibility of female
sexuality, the 'yawning distinction' becomes yet another
example of the inequalities of conventional roles and
relationships. The collective feels that male heterosexual and
homosexual paedophilia raise different questions.
The whole imagery of adult/child relationships is fraught
with contradictions which reveal the symbolic differentiations between men and women, adults and children in
our society. Whereas a male homosexual is invariably seen as
a potential child molester, and a lesbian paedophile identity
is socially non-existent because it presupposes an
autonomous female sexual identity, the image of an older
woman initiating youths fits in with traditional male fantasies
of woman. At the same time the deflowering of the young
virgin has a special place in male mythology. Given these
factors and conditions it is not surprising that the less
common forms of adult/child relationships, involving homosexuality, receives wider publicity and hostility than the
much more common heterosexual pattern. And it is for this
reason that a distinct male paedophile identity emerges
within the range of homosexualities.
Paedophilia centrally touches on the question of homosexuality precisely because of the question of "corruption".
The terror of homosexuals corrupting minors into their way
of life has been a sub-text of opposition to adult homosexuality at least since the 19th century, and behind it of
course has been the terror of homosexuality. In certain ways
homosexuality greatly overlaps with the heterosexual norm;

ie loving relations of "equals" living types of relationships

different but not alien to heterosexual. Children have been
seen as needing protection from going down the homosexual
road because of the potent challenge it poses to the family,
and to protect them a whole battery of ideological devices
have been employed. The major one has been the notion of
corruption; of forcibly diverting the innocent child from the
paths of righteousness to those of deviance. The use of this
imputation has been an important method of control of
adult homosexuality. We can already see that the campaigns
such as those of Anita Bryant and Mary Whitehouse,
ostensibly for the protection of children, become vehicles
for assaults on all lesbians and gay men.

THE HOMOSEXUAL CATEGORY

The category of the "homosexual" is, as we have argued
before, a historical creation, a cultural attempt to describe
and control a variety of sexual behaviours between members
of the same sex. The emergence of love or sexual desire by
one person for another is pretty near universal. The attempts
to describe this within rigid categories is relatively new, and
did not take off dramatically until the late 19th century. The
definitions of homosexuality have varied during the past
100 years; its origins variously described (genetic, environmental, "corruption"); its manifestations outlined (abnormal
sized bottoms, wide hips, inability to whistle); its likely
effect delineated (unhappiness, suicide). But those thus
defined have fought back. We have created our own sense of
identity or identities; we have begun to assert and impose our
own sense of ourselves, our own definitions ("gay"). The
gay movements throughout the West, the great sub-cultural
expansions, are all part of this process of self-definition. But
even today a high proportion of those who engage in some
forms of homosexual activity (eg in public lavatories) do not
define themselves as gay. And many would fall into the
cultural category of "heterosexual" by their usual patterns
of behaviour (marriage etc).
These cultural categories are, in other words, arbitrary,
only partially describing what they are supposed to, and are
artificial divisions of sexual desire. They have a reality
because they have social institutions backing them (the
family, the law, medicine, psychiatry) and because they set
the parameters within which we set out to live our various
lives. But even for those of us who define ourselves as gay
there is no essential identity, no single identifying pattern
of behaviour.. There is not a single "homosexuality" but
various "homosexualities". It is politically vital for gay
people to organise to defend our right to our own sexualities,
but we should be clear that a radical perspective does not
mean defending a gay ethnicity (the equivalent of a national
or racial identity). It means defending the validity of homosexuality and beyond that the many facetted nature of
sexuality in general. It is not so much an oppressed minority
that the gay movement is about as an oppressed sexuality.
Freedom for gay people will not come simply when we have
better facilities, freedom to marry or inherit property; it will
develop as rigid cultural categories are broken down. It is a
Gay Left 3

paradox that the only way for this to happen is through

using these categories, organising within them and bursting
their bonds.

THE PAEDOPHILE CATEGORY

Paedophilia, like homosexual behaviour, has existed universally, and has been variously treated in different societies.
`Boy Love' particularly has often played an important and
even socially approved role in some cultures eg pedagogic
relationships in Ancient Greece; in puberty rites in various
societies. In the 19th century, even in Britain, it was possible
to have sentimental and even physical contact with children
without social disapproval. During the past century the
category of the corruptor emerged, so that today almost any
non-familial contact between adult and child can become
suspect. Partly as a defensive measure, paedophiles
themselves have in recent years begun to assert their identity,
a few openly in organisations such as PIE and other equivalents in Europe and America. But just as for adult homosexuality there is little uniformity of behaviour, so with
paedophilia. Paedophilia in many cases is a matter of identity
rather than actual sexual activity, and many of those adults
who have sexual experiences with children would not in fact
identify themselves as paedophiles. For instance a German
survey suggested that among 200 cases of men sentenced for
indecent assault on children "there was not even a single one
preferring children to adult partners". (Quoted in Childhood
Rights Vol 1 No2, published by PIE).
Just as assault or rape by a man on a woman cannot be
defended so no paedophile would defend assault or rape of
children, or any alleviation of laws relating to these. Nor
would they approve of the conscious use of power to
`persuade' children. (PIE for instance apparently disapproves
of parent/child incest.) The issue then comes down to the
question of an affectionate relationship between a child and
an adult which involves sex.
Three issues immediately emerge: 1. the legitimacy of
childhood sexuality; 2. the adult fetishisation of a particular
age group; 3. the changing meaning and significances given to
different parts of the body throughout an individual's life.
The problem in discussing paedophile sexual relationships
revolves around the prioritisation of certain parts of the
body along adult lines in relations with pre-pubertal children
who may not have such priorities. Can paedophile relationships ever be justified and what should the attitude of
socialists and feminists be towards them?
Some issues seem fairly clear. It seems unlikely that
youthful sexual activity rigidly determines later orientation,
(object choice and emotional structuring seem to take place
much earlier in life) and we see a homosexual choice as
equally valid as a heterosexual one. We must reject the
dominant idea that it is an issue whether a child is influenced
into a homosexual rather than a heterosexual life. We must
demystify sex. The notion that sex is the great secret, the
ultimate mystery, is at the root of the worship of childhood
innocence. It is the puritans who elevate sex into the
embodiement of holiness. We should argue for sex as pleasure
not sacrament. If it is pleasurable on what grounds can we
deny it. We must also recognise that it is often the young
person who initiates sexual activity. It is the intrusion of the
law or panic stricken parents which often causes misery and
guilt in the child in a caring paedophile relationship rather
than the relationship itself.
But of course there are difficulties. There are practical
questions such as potential early pregnancy in girls, and the
problems connected with VD. A more rational attitude in
society towards contraception, a realistic attitude to VD and
better sex education would help. But it still leaves the
question as to whether children have the emotional resources
to deal with paedophile relationships and the emotional
crises that can happen. It is important to stress that the
paedophile issue is not one of molestation. No-one can
defend sexual violence in any situation where one party is
unwilling. It is in a crucial sense an issue of consent an
appallingly difficult concept to define in this particular
context. This raises two related issues. In the first place,
`consent' has different meanings for children and adults and
Gay Left 4

takes different forms. And secondly specific sexual acts

have different meanings, and a specific sexual act will have a
different meaning for the adult and the young person. In this
context what does it mean for a 'child' to 'consent' to 'sex'
with an 'adult'?
Fundamentally these are issues of disparity of experience,
needs, desires, physical potentialities, emotional resources,
sense of responsibility, awareness of the consequences of
ones actions, and above all power between adults and children. This is the crux of most opposition by feminists and gay
socialists to paedophilia.

CHILDHOODS
We must recognise that 'childhood' is itself a historical category, and like other cultural categories we have mentioned,
is a fairly recent one (its evolution is traced in Centuries of
Childhood by Philippe Aries, Peregrine Books). Only since
the 18th Century have we reified the position of young
people into our particular embodiements of 'innocence'. The
intervention by the State to 'protect' children often flowed
from economic and political pressures which led to Acts
controlling child labour and extending the period of
schooling for example. But it was also tied to concern with
the family and so laws controlling prostitution and homosexuality contained age of consent regulations. This all aided
the construction of the longer period of 'childhood' we know
today. Emotional relationships have been largely confined
within the family and the independence of the young has
been seen as a threat.
Only since the last century have we so paradoxically both
denied the existence of childhood sexuality and been preoccupied with curbing its manifestations, such as in childhood masturbation and sexual games. Even today, while our
moralists rush to protect children, the capitalist system they
support constantly incites sexuality, (including childhood
sexuality) at all levels to sell its wares. But people will say
that there is a difference between a child having sexual
experiences with someone of the same age and having them
with a more experienced, potentially exploitative adult.
There probably is, but how is this difference to be recognised.
Should a line be drawn and if it is how should it be enforced?
A legal age of consent is an arbitrary fiction. Emotional ages
vary and someone of 10 might be more able to 'consent' than
someone of 16. An age of consent in law does not prevent the
the sexual activity taking place and serves to perpetuate the
myth that most, if not all adults can and always do 'consent'.
Sexual expression between adults and children need not
harmful and so cannot be condemned just because it takes
place. But it is problematical because it raises issues of disparities of power. How can we safeguard the child's right to
consent? PIE answers this in four ways: (From Some
Questions and Answers pt 27)
a) by suggesting that we overdramatise the question of moral
choice involved in accepting a pleasurable act. "All that
matters is whether the act is pleasurable."
b) the child is quite capable, from infancy, of showing
reluctance. "If the child seems puzzles and hesitant, rather
than relaxed and cheerful, he (the adult) should assume that

he hasn't (the child's consent)."

CARE AND CONTROL

c) the best way to encourage choice is by encouraging

different attitudes to sex. "A healthier attitude would make
it easier for the child to speak up, without feeling
embarrassed about it."

As a long term issue we have to debate the whole question of

changing attitudes to sexuality. We can all agree that we need
better sex education, advice on contraception, VD etc, but
how do we fundamentally transform social mores? How in
the end do we ensure that the young person is allowed to
grow at his or her own pace, untrammelled by over-rigid
categorisation of childhood, protected from abuses of power,
and yet able to grow in caring relationships with other
(perhaps older) people?

d) if the adult persists and enforces his will on the child "The
adult should then be liable to legal action and social condemnation."
It seems to us that (a) and (b) are vague and circular.
Enjoyment is not necessarily a sign of having consented (an
arguement often used against raped women) and is not a
justification in itself for accepting a particular act. One may
be hesitant but consenting. An adult can manipulate consent
almost unconsciously.
Points (c) and (d) are the keys but they need to be closely
defined. This means two strategies which need to be
developed and discussed in the gay movement. Firstly we
need to be clearer about the implications of using legal
action. We need to find means of protecting young people's
rights which do not patronise, introduce the arbitrariness of
an age of consent, or destroy with a blunderbuss.
At present we have a situation where adults have supreme
power over children economic, physical, intellectual and
emotional. So it is at least problematical whether in this
situation relationships of some equality can be formed which
involve sexual expression. In an ideal situation where such
relationships took place in the context of mutual agreement
and without major social consequences for both parties this
may be possible. But some paedophiles stress that the sort of
relationships they want with children can take place in the
existing framework.
However, we have to take account of the real social
situation in which we live, with the vulnerability of children
and the relatively effortless way in which an adult could
manipulate the situation in pursuing their desires to the
point of ignoring the interests, wishes and feelings of the
child. Children may not be equipped, either experientally
or physically for adult-defined sexuality. Children are very
sensual and enjoy physical contact, but they may not have
the same conceptual categories as adults about sex. With such
a low level of children's autonomy and awareness, their inability to say no should not necessarily be taken for
agreement. For this reason it would seem that paedophile
relationships are likely to be unequal, though in this they
only parallel other adult/child relationships in our society.
To sum up this point, it would appear that the criteria
exist for recognising the validity of relationships when there
is some approximation of meaning. This does not imply
identity of age or interest, but it does imply an ability on the
part of the child to recognise some of the significance in
social and sexual terms of her/his actions. We are inclined to
believe that this does not usually happen before puberty. The
problem becomes, then, how do we socially recognise this?

Part of the difficulty is in the way we have defined and

constructed the problems. If we ask "How can we safeguard
the child's right to consent?" we are already relegating to
second place, if not totally ignoring, the ability of the child
to safeguard that right for him or herself. At present we find
ourselves as third parties entering into a dialogue between
unequal sides. The dialogue is one-sided because the children
involved or potentially involved are not seen or felt capable
of presenting their own case. Moral crusaders, and even
people like ourselves, in intervening may serve not to
decrease the power imbalance but to perpetuate it by totally
excluding children from the debate. An essential part of
adult responsibility is the recognition of the limitations of
children's ability to be responsible for themselves and to act
accordingly. But children still need to gain more autonomy
within new social relations in which adult reponsibility is not
synonymous with parental authority. An important step
towards this would be the strengthening of organisations
such as the National Union of School Students and School
Kids Against the Nazis. It is there, as well as in the sphere of
adult life, that issues such as children's sexuality and their
rights should be discussed and fostered.
It is paradoxical that it is in the area of sexuality that
there is so much uproar about the power imbalance between
adults and children. Where is the debate around the gross
economic differences between adults and children, the
intellectual and physical advantages adults have, all of which
can and are used to exploit and 'corrupt' children. It is paradoxical because it is in the sphere of sexual/physical pleasure
that children could have the relatively least disadvantage.
It is the one currency of social relationships that children
are best versed in we operate on the 'pleasure principle'
from birth. We do not deny that even on this level there are
difficulties, but it is crucial that the debate has centred on
child sexuality to the exclusion of other aspects of adult/
child relations. What we must avoid is a totally 'adultcentred' solution.

In the present climate some members of the collective

support proposals that the 'age of consent' should be reduced
to 14 as the only realistic possibility and that this age should
be enforced outside of criminal law in special children's courts
which would deal with all sorts of children's rights outside
the bureaucratic disaster of present legal interventions in
this area.
Other members of the collective, believing that any age of
consent is unjust and unworkable, want the repeal of all
legislation relating to the age of consent in the field of
sexuality. Offences would be considered on the basis of the
use of violence, force or pressure rather than an arbitrary age.
The concept of consent would have to be used on a
pragmatic basis, each case being judged on its particular
circumstances rather than the straightjacket of present
legislation. This would mean removing criminal sanctions
from non-violent sexual activity but providing the maximum
social means for protecting the child. In this situation the
responsibility of paedophiles would have a major part to
play.
Gay Left 5

GAY LEFT EDITORIAL ON PAEDOPHILIA:

A PRELIMINARY RESPONSE
Tom O'Carroll, chairperson, PIE, has sent the
following response.
Gay Left's considered view on paedophilia may strike some
as an exercise in fence-sitting, but insofar as questions are
left open, I believe there has been a welcome acceptance that
there is a real case for the admissibility of child-adult sex, as
well as one against. That, to my mind, is progress, and I feel
GL is to be congratulated on taking the public discussion of
paedophilia to a higher plane of debate than hitherto. I agree
with many of the points made and also welcome the fact that
views with which I fundamentally disagree have been put so
clearly I hope that in my reply in the next issue I will be

able to reject them with equal clarity!

The essence of my reply will lie in four points: (a) GL's
thoughts on child sexuality started with Freud, sensibly
enough, but unfortunately they appear to have finished with
him too; (b) analysis of our conceptualisation of 'homosexuality' and 'paedophilia' as categories was useful, and even
more useful would have been to challenge our conceptualisation of 'consent'; (c) the key issues of power and inequality
have more positive implications than those which have been
put; (d) it is an illusion that opposition by feminists and gay
socialists to paedophilia is based on these issues of power and
inequality important as they are, the paramount importance attached to them solely in a sexual context requires
explanation, and this is the key to the paradox outlined in
GL 's final paragraph.

GayArt

by Emmanuel Cooper

The emerging gay subculture and its clear identity is affecting, however slightly, gay artists. Art traditionally reflects
contemporary, mainstream ideas and only occasionally do
artists extend this to introduce different ideas. Since the war,
art has been primarily concerned with themes which refer
only to art itself to its conventions, to its highly developed
language and it ignores, for the most part, either political,
social or sexual statements which in any way question existing ideas. Gradually gay artists are beginning to introduce
evidence of their own sexuality and their relationship to the
world; this not only manifests their presence but also deals
with their emotions and feelings. This is important for two
reasons it provides gay people with positive affirming
images and in so doing it introduces into art ideas about
sexuality which the concentration on, and cultivation of,
`aesthetics' have largely precluded.
Homosexual artists are of course not new, nor are homosexual themes totally absent from history. It is worth while
looking at these aspects of art for they have much to say
about attitudes to homosexuality as they have developed in
western society over the last 150 years, for they are an
i mportant and positive affirmation that art and gay artists
have a useful contribution to make to the gay identity.

Gay History
In other cultural areas socialists have been able to use
writings and ideas from established theorists who have had
much to say about class, culture and society. However
neither Marx nor Engels had much to say about visual art,
but their remarks on literature seem equally relevant to the
visual arts. They pointed out that artists who were not
necessarily socialists could reveal truths about ourselves
which we can still accept. Equally painters and sculptors who
comment on human feelings and emotions provide us with
insights which cannot be dismissed merely because they do
not fall into today's socialist categories, or because they
worked in a bourgeois society. To benefit from these works
we need to look at them from a socialist perspective. For
example, argument over whether or not Courbet, Blake or
Goya were true 'socialists' pales into insignificance by the
side of the radical critique they made of society in their
pictures.
Classical studies and reference books mostly written in the
19th century, lay the basis for the established art history
approach to studying art; these sources rarely mention homosexuality. To all intents and purposes it did not exist.
Only one new study by Margaret Walters (The Male Nude)
deals with homosexuality in detail. She not only refers to
artists' sexuality but also refuses to separate the work from
the social and political conditions of the time. She rightly
points out though how when looking at art history, the use
of the term homosexuality is dangerous. As a term it has
Gay Left 6

Greek vase painting (from The Male Nude)

been used for little more than 100 years and must be carefully defined. Homosexuality has, she says, no more precise
definition than masculinity or femininity. For example in
5th century Greece love and even sex between older and
younger men was ritualised into much cultural life and meant
one thing, but in Renaissance Italy, centuries of Christian
disapproval forced its expression underground a repression
which reached its peak during the 19th century when homosexuality was seen as an unthinkable perversion for any
`normal' man and never for any woman. Artists like Leonardo
da Vinci, Michaelangelo are known from contemporary
letters and documents to have had homosexual experiences
and had a main homosexual orientation, but it was expressed
in a society very different from our own. From the point of
view of gay artists today, it is the artists who worked in the
19th century who shed much more light on today's attitudes
for both the public and the artist.

Commerce, Art and Bohemianism

First some general points need to be made about the period
which deeply affected both the artist and the themes they
painted. During the 19th century the identity of the artist, as
we know it today, emerged. The growth of a prosperous,
educated middle class helped to create an open market for
artists but it was one which demanded firm convention.
There was no room for sexual radicalism of any sort.
Commissions were still made and patrons still supported
artists, but an open market for painting was being established
and artists could compete in it. With the minimum of
resources the committed artist, in the proverbial garret, could
paint away and offer work for sale either in the enormously

popular Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, or in other

similar institutions. It was a system which encouraged conformity. Artists had to live and therefore must not show
work which would deprive them of their livelihood.
The 19th century revolutionary changes and developments
in society also brought changes concerning ideas about
sexuality, the main one being the rigid and polarising
definitions of what constituted male and female. Women
became enthroned as, on the one hand the Virgin Mary pure,
motherly, acquiescent and obedient, on the other the wayward and available sex object (Mary Magdalene?). Men were
strong, decisive, industrious and brave. Male nudes almost
totally disappeared while women in both their roles were
freely portrayed.
Protests against the rigid stereotypes were made by a few
artists, who though able to travel abroad and sample other
life styles (the Near and Middle East were favourite haunts),
and live Bohemian lives in fashionable London districts, were
still limited by convention. To show a sensual boy was far
more scandalous than a provocative female. Homosexuality
was heavily disguised; this was often achieved by making the
picture ambiguous in meaning and also remote, such as by
placing it in a different period of history. Some artists
escaped into the past either mythological, classical or
romantic. They then painted into their pictures beautiful
muscular male bodies, using such themes as 'The Archery
Lesson' in which an older man teaches a younger man the
various skills which involved much physical contact. In other
pictures two young boys were often shown grasping each
other and were used to symbolise Love and Death. While
artists like Tuke painted scenes of handsome naked youths
diving into the sea. Picturesque genre figures showed scantily
clad Italian peasant boys.

Closets and Cottages

But there was a limit to the rules of convention which must
not be over reached, a principle amply demonstrated by
Simeon Soloman. His paintings of limpid men and women
were much admired by aesthetes like Swinburne and Wilde.
Yet when Soloman was arrested for soliciting in a lavatory
his friends disowned him and he ended his days as a pavement artist in bitter poverty.
Towards the end of the 19th century the mix of Kitsch
and humour often identified as 'camp' was developed and
provided a useful outlet for homosexual artists, recognised
by the informed but equally capable of being read 'straight'.
Photography was popular and nude shots of coy Sicilian boys
in Studio magazine for example were acceptable effeminate
whilst appealing directly to a homosexual audience.
Beardsley was an exception but his drawings of open and
explicit homosexual fantasies were shown to only a very
small and select audience. In the mainstream of art, dominated by the French schools, most of the great leaders of the
modern movement seem to be anything but homosexual.

The Neutered Nude

The Renaissance had made the study of the male form
respectable, and this tradition was continued during the 19th
century. The concept of beauty was still rooted in the classical concept of the handsome male, though he was either
shown in suitably discreet poses or with tiny genitalia. It was,
nevertheless, a legitimate subject. This enabled artists, like
Lord Leighton, who mostly painted straightforward scenes,
to dwell lovingly on the male nude when sculpting, giving it
a strong homo-erotic element.
Towards the end of the 19th century androgeny became
fashionable, particularly among the symbolist painters who
were concerned to show ideas and feelings as well as reality.
Clearly, they still felt unable to express homosexual feelings,
and these became subverted into androgenous figures almost
totally asexual in appearance. They also continued the tradition of asexual figures started earlier in the century by the
pre-raphelite painters.
Classical and religious themes also offered artists means of
conveying homosexual overtones. David and Jonathan, St.
John the Baptist, the Martyr St. Sebastian, and the openly

Gluck. Self Portrait. (By kind permission of Fine Arts Society)

homosexual myth of The Rape of Ganymede, who was
caught up by the God Jupiter disguised as a great phallic
eagle, are some examples.

Homosexual Themes and Women

Emphasis so far has been almost entirely on men. Though
there were women artists and very excellent ones it was
very much a man's world, created for other men. For
example during the 19th century love between women was a
particularly acceptable theme. Not only were these scenes
acceptable but they reinforced the popular concept of masculinity. It is doubtful whether such scenes, painted by artists
like Ingres and Courbet were thought to involve anything
other than affection. Artists towards the end of the century
like Toulouse Lautrec further removed the sexual possibilities
by showing the women as prostitutes.
During the 20th century artists felt more able to explore
different concepts of sexuality in their work though the 19th
century ideas were firmlv established. Women artists for
example were more able to establish themselves and the
French painter Rosa Bonheur was awarded the Legion of
Honour.
Victor Gluck who started painting during the First World
War chose subjects who were often her lesbian friends. Many
were arch 'butch' stereotypes showing women with short
hairstyles, collars and ties and men's suits. It says a great deal
for the sexuality of women that these open expressions of
lesbianism were quite acceptable. It is surprising that Gluck's
work has found no place in the two recent books on 'Women
Artists' neither of which make any reference to lesbianism.
The sexuality of women who dressed as men, or painted such
explicit themes could still be ignored and their 'mannish'
looks and mannerisms accepted as mere eccentricity.

Bloomsbury and Paris

Men were slower to make such public statements, though the
intellectual and artistic societies of Paris and Bloomsbury
were anything but prudish in their displays, or acceptance of,
unusual sexual expression; yet artists like Duncan Grant or
Pavel Tchelitchew felt only able to exhibit ambiguous portraits of male bodies though they did paint explicit homosexual pictures. In contrast the Surrealist movement on the
continent led by Andre Breton was rampantly anti-homosexual and a member of their group was publicly put on 'trial'
Gay Left 7

and expelled for being homosexual. Women were fetishised

as the 'sex object' and no room was allowed for exploration
of different forms of sexual expression.
Until the '50s artists who were homosexual had an overwhelming tradition of secret, privatised sexuality and closet
society in which the closest homosexual images have come to
public expression was through the concept of respectable
classical Greece or the male, but neutered, beauty of ancient
Rome. Little wonder that this attitude dies hard.

Post War Freedoms

It has only been since the '50s that artists have dealt with
male homosexual themes with any clarity. Perhaps one of the
most famous examples is 'Two Men on a Bed' painted by
Francis Bacon in 1953, which is a clear pointer to a particular
sort of sexual relationship.
Despite there being numerous homosexual artists, few felt
able to express this in their work and many denied (and still
deny) the link between their sexual orientation and their
painting. David Hockney was an exception. While fellow
students in the early '60s stuck up pin-ups of women he put
up photographs of his hero Cliff Richard and painted a series
of pictures based on his pop hit Living Doll. One picture
shows an unhappy man who bears the label 'Queen'. The
whole series explores and expresses doubts and fears of a man
discovering his own sexuality an aspect of his work given
little critical attention in favour of his later and more respectable male nudes.
In America Andy Warhol almost created the pop world
yet none of his paintings deal with homosexuality. On a
recent visit to London Warhol claimed never to think about
politics nor to have heard of Gay News. Other pop artists
were concerned with rampant sex stereotypes in which
images of Marilyn Monroe and Brigit Bardot were (and still
are) endlessly repeated. Symbolism for sex such as lipsticks
and lips, sausages on a plate bring the act to our attention,
yet rarely seek to extend our awareness of it. Now gay artists
are beginning to express ideas about themselves in their work.
The Gay Times Festival had a gay art exhibition and gay
themes are not now taboo. There seems a real possibility that
gay art might emerge.

Feminist Artists
Artists in the women's movement have been concerned with
establishing themselves and their presence as women, dealing
with the way they are ignored and slotted into convenient
stereotype roles. They have made statements about themselves and their lives which fall into no preconceived 'art'
mould and use art in its widest sense. Their work not only
challenges the concept of 'femininity' but also popular ideas
about art. The artists in the gay movement have a long way
to go before they make this sort of analysis yet there are
already moves in this direction.

David Hockney. Doll. Boy.

Gay Art
The gay identity in art seems to be expressed in four major
ways, though many overlap. First, artists like David Hockney
convey it through a process of highly personal self discovery.
They pass on to us sensitive insights into their own feelings
and emotions which are quiet and thoughtful, and demonstrate the relationship between the artist and the world in
which they live. Other artists seek to demonstrate the gay
presence which identifies and legitimises, often through the
use of aggressive naturalism. Michael Leonard is such an
example . His super realistic paintings which almost have the
clarity of photographs, graphically testify to their homosexual themes. Third, is the protest and rebellious art, which
not only asserts the gay identity but shows it in all its aspects
sexual and political. Here the work of Denis O'Sullivan
shown at the Gay Times Festival is a good example. The
theme of the work 'Toilet Piece' was explicitly voyeuristic
and dealt with sex in a public lavatory, using photographs
and mock-ups of the lavatory walls.
Finally, the largest group of all, is the erotic and pornographic. With so many repressions on homosexuality in conventional painting, it is not surprising that it took flight
underground. As gays we are defined by our sexual acts by
what we do in bed and all too often gay art concentrates
only on this part of our lives. If Tom of Finland is popular,
he is not so because of his highly accomplished pencil drawings but because he reflects every prejudice in the book.
Real, super butch men having lusting, effortless proper sex!
Numerous imitations have produced even worse work and
many rely on the 'art' context to legitimise pornographic or
sexist imagery.
The new and emerging gay identity is one which challenges
and asserts. It rejects the traditional ambiguous role it usually
has thrust upon it but it can learn a little from the struggles
of earlier homosexual artists. Now, as never before, is there a
need for gay naturalism and it will produce work to which we
can all respond.
References
Margaret Walters, 'The Male Nude'.
David Hockney by David Hockney

Gay Left 8

Spotlight on Greece
SPOTLIGHT ON GREECE An Interview with a
member of the Greek Gay Movement AKOE.
The situation of gay people in countries like Greece, the
Soviet Union, Northern Ireland etc, where gays are not only
oppressed but also have very limited space to manoeuvre
politically, led to the recent formation of the International
Gay Association (IGA) as an expression of solidarity between
gays. An initial focus of concern and activity has been the
proposed legislation of the Greek Government.
In Greece homosexuals now face the prospect of a year's
imprisonment simply for cruising if the notoriously anti-gay
clauses of the draft-bill 'On the protection from Venereal
Disease and the Regulation of other relative matters' gets
passed by Parliament where discussion of the Bill is quoted
by Government sources as being 'imminent'. The law defines
prostitutes and homosexuals as 'indecent persons' and
recommends that women prostitutes register with the police
and undergo medical examinations twice weekly. Failure to
do this, soliciting or 'improper and provocative behaviour
offending public shame and decency' will be punished by up
to one year's imprisonment. Male homosexuals are subjected
to the same penalty, however, just for cruising 'in streets,
squares, public centres ... with the evident purpose of
attracting men to perform on them sexual activities lewd and
against nature' and for 'improper and provocative behaviour
etc ...' If the police have been informed in writing that a
male homosexual has indulged in a 'sexual activity' which
has caused the contagion of a venereal disease, then he has to
undergo the respective medical tests and therapy. We publish
here an interview with a member of the Greek Gay Liberation Movement AKOE.
What is the present situation regarding this Bill?
First, on behalf of everyone in AKOE, I want to express my
deepest thanks to all those who organised and demonstrated
in solidarity with Greek Gays in the face of this Bill. These
demonstrators showed representatives of the Karamanlis
regime that their resuscitation of a law concocted by the
fascist military Junta is equally unacceptable to people outside Greece.
The latest situation is that the Government is very
undecided about what to do. Last year's protest petition in
which 250 signatures of Greek personalities were collected
forced them to postpone the Bill's reading, but they never
expected a wave of international response like this, not for a
`few thousand queers'. I would say that it has thrown them
slightly off balance, but they still seem determined to get the
Bill passed, though with what they describe as 'radical amendments'.
What do they mean by 'radical amendments'?
As yet this is not clear but I imagine it might be a lessening
of the penalties or a change in the circumstances in which
homosexuals would be liable to imprisonment. At any rate
the responsibility for the Bill has been transferred from the
Ministry of Public Order to the Ministry of Social Services.
Did the international demonstrations get widespread press
coverage?
No, unfortunately. It was only a week later on October 7th
that Eleftheroypia, a non-aligned progressive daily, carried an
article which said that the demonstrations, as a culmination
of international protests (including the Dutch Parliament's
denunciation of the Bill and threats to bring the Greek
Government before the Council of Europe's Committee of
Human Rights) had been successful insofar as the Government had withdrawn the Bill for amendments.

Do you think the Bill will get passed?

It is very difficult to say. There are the opposition parties
who, hopefully, would not allow such a Bill to get through
but since they have not said anything publicly against it so
far I would not rule out the possibility of their not considering it important or serious enough for action. However there
is also a general reactionary swing in process here. For
example, conscription of women for military service on a
`voluntary' basis has been legalised, and often laws get passed
without warning! One instance is the recent law which limits
the number of years students can spend on university courses.
One fine day the newspapers declared that this was now law,
taking the entire educational establishment by surprise.
The Bill could of course be withdrawn until Greece was
safely in the EEC and then suddenly reappear, blessed by,
Parliament, and ruthlessly applied. Even if it is thrown out
by Parliament it would not mean that we could relax, there
are still many other problems to be confronted.
You mention the EEC. Does European public opinion play
an important role in determining policies?
Yes it does. The Karamanlis regime is very frightened of West
European public opinion. The Government is constantly
stressing that Greece belongs to the West and it is desperate
to get Greece into the EEC, therefore it has to be sure that
we are acceptable to the West. That is why it is now so confused by the unexpected international protests about the Bill.
In Greece has anything been done by the left-wing groups?
Unfortunately, it is only during the last couple of weeks that
the more progressive groups have started to voice their
opinions officially. On the 6th October, a week after the
international demonstrations, the youth groups of several
left-wing parties protested officially against the proposed law.
EKON Rigas Ferraios, the Young Communist Party of the
Interior, along with the 'Socialist Advance' and 'Democratic
Change' youth groups characterised the Bill as 'unacceptable'
and its title 'misleading' because in reality its aim was the
`persecution of . homosexuals, their banishment from public
life and their social ostracism'. Their communique added that
the Bill was a 'flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and other international agreements to
which the Greek State is constitutionally bound.'
For some time the EKON Rigas Ferraios group has at least
not been hostile towards our aims and objectives and
members have often supported us on a 'personal basis'. The
main party has not made any statement but they too are not
hostile. So the reserved support we have been given comes
only from the youth groups whose power is limited. Significantly, the declarations of support came after the interGay Left 9

arious Trotskyist and Anarchist

national demonstrations. Various
groups have occasionally published pro-gay articles in their
journals, but everywhere on the left the taboo against homosexuality seems far from broken. Even worse, the KKE,
Communist Party of the Exterior, and the Maoist groups still
consider homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois degeneracy, destined to disappear with the advent of socialism.
Recently, outside the structure of political parties, came a
protest from a group of 35 psychiatrists and 20 other
`specialised' doctors from the Athens area who stated that
the Bill contravenes basic human rights by penalising sexual
relations between adult males and indicates an ideological
regression. This is very significant because the Bill, by linking
homosexuality and V.D., tries to project gays to the public as
a medical as well as a moral menace, so it is necessary to have
the more progressive sectors of the medical world challenge
such propaganda.
What about AKOE itself? Have you organised any demonstrations or protest campaigns inside Greece?
First of all, no demonstrations can be organised without the
permission of the police. Sometimes demonstrations and
rallies are banned but have gone ahead anyway, because of
the vast numbers of people who have been present. Usually
there are violent confrontations with the police. So it is
unthinkable that we would be allowed to demonstration and
if we did so, the handful of gays would be mercilessly
crushed by the police and also by neo-fascist thugs who are
not averse to attacks on gay people. Also the publicity would
mean that most of the demonstrators would lose their jobs
and would find it very difficult to find others. It is not for
nothing that the articles in our journal AMFI are all anonymous.
Because of this bad internal situation we asked for and got
much international support. The Dutch Parliament
denounced the Bill and threatened to bring the Greek
Government before the Council of Europe Human Rights
Tribunal in the event of it being passed; petitions were signed
by 20 French intellectuals and various Italian public figures;
Danish protests were made and of course the IGA
co-ordinated demonstrations.
Could you describe the AMFI journal?
AMFI, the title means 'Both', is the first ever Greek journal
for homosexuals and the first issue came out in April. It
contained articles on our activities, the proposed Bill, some
abstract and literary items and a manifesto of our aims. The
second issue will be out soon.
How has it been received? Does it have a wide circulation?
Generally it has been criticised for being too intellectual and
theoretical. An anarchist review characterised it as being
written for heterosexual intellectuals. However, some people
liked it very much. At present it is the only periodical in
Greece which is putting across really progressive and new
ideas. But its 'theoretical' nature is a problem because it is
not reaching large numbers of gay people and circulation
tends to be limited to intellectuals interested in sexual
politics.

Gay Left 10

Distribution is also a major problem. Many distribution

agencies and shops will not stock it and it is impossible to
obtain in many cities. Selling it ourselves in the streets is also
dangerous both the threat of arrest and attack by fascist
thugs.
The survival of AMFI is a major issue at present. AKOE
itself could become demoralised and even disband. The
second issue of the journal has involved such immense problems financial, political, organisational and so on and
there is disagreement over policy. Some say it should be
simplified and made more accessible, others maintain that it
reflects the producers' position correctly. Then there is the
very name of the movement, should it be 'Liberation of
Homosexuals' or 'Liberation of Homosexual Desire' and so
on.
I believe that AMFI will and must survive because the
very nature of society is challenging us to keep it alive. We
need more people and money and I think its content needs
broadening to appeal to a wider cross-section of gays and the
differing situations that we face.
Why would you want to change your name to 'Liberation of
Homosexual Desire'?
Because here in Greece as in other Middle Eastern countries,
the oppression of women by men is so extremely polarised in
comparison with the West that the bi-sexual male animal
prevails in society. The 'homosexual' is the passive partner.
The active partner is not considered homosexual because he
is still a 'man', he is still 'on top', he still screws, whereas 'the
Queer' is the despicable creature who has betrayed his masculinity and identifies with the basically despised female. Of
course it is not considered wonderful to screw another man
but it is certainly not shameful as is playing the passive
homosexual role. While in the West, in England for example,
an average heterosexual male would be deeply offended if we
made advances to him and would be liable to react violently
to vindicate his 'threatened masculinity', such proposals here
in Greece actually flatter their masculinity because the active
male will not be culturally seen as losing his manhood by
screwing a 'queer' but on the contrary he will be reinforcing
it. The fact that these men will do this both for money and
pleasure and often for pleasure alone, indicates that they are
capable of fulfilling a homosexual desire which they have.
They do not consider themselves as 'homosexuals' and would
not identify with gays or the Gay Movement. The problem
we have is to show them that they too are 'homosexual' and
that they have good reasons to identify with the Gay Movement. In the West an active homosexual is homosexual and
the division is between straight and gay, here it is between
fuckers and fucked.
Do you work with the Women's Movement in Greece, and
what is the position for gay women?
There are several women's groups around the country and
there is the Movement for Women's Liberation in Athens. It
is a small group which has been split over several issues such
as women's military service and also over support for gays.
Because public opinion is so unused to sexual politics, to
feminism or to homosexuality as an acceptable alternative
existence and the Women's Movement is so new and small
that some women are afraid of alienating the public and
destroying the chances of expanding by identifying feminism
with socially unacceptable causes such as homosexuals.
However, in general our relations are very good and they
give us whatever help they can and we understand each
other's problems. The topic of lesbianism has been largely
taboo within the Women's Movement, neither of the two
issues of their periodical has contained anything on the subject. The Gay Movement itself is entirely male which means
the same old story of lesbians' oppression by invisibility.
Some lesbians have said that they will contribute to AMFI
which is encouraging. The tragedy is that lesbians as women
and gays should be able to identify openly with both groups.
This is another huge problem that we must confront.

FOR interpretation ~
Notes Against Camp
by Andrew Britton

"Genet does not want to change anything at

all. Do not count on him to criticise institutions.
He needs them, as Prometheus needs his vulture."
Sartre, Saint Genet
One
It almost seems at times to have become a matter of common
acceptance that camp is radical; and the play Men by Noel
Greig and Don Milligan provides a convenient example of the
process by which I imagine that to have come about. Men
offers itself as a polemic against 'the straight left' an
abstraction which it embodies in one of its two central gay
characters, a shop steward in a Midlands factory and, in
secret, the lover of Gene, a camp gay male for whom the play
attempts to solicit a besotted and uncritical reverence. Their
relationship is seen to be continuous with the dominant
patterns of heterosexual relationships, and is presented as a
synonym for them, though there is no attempt to consider,
or even to acknowledge, the social pressures which have gone
to produce the similarity. The play concludes that the political struggle in which Richard, the shop steward, is engaged at
work can be assimilated to 'phallic' power-drives (we are not
allowed to forget that he is known to his fellow-workers as
`Dick'), and offers, in Gene's plangent cry of "Socialism is
about me", what it takes to be the corrective emphasis. How
"socialism" is to be defined, or in what way, exactly, it can
be said to be about Gene, are not matters which the play
finds it proper to discuss, although it becomes clear enough
that Richard's activities (from which women workers are
pointedly excluded except, in one instance, as the 'victims'
of a strike-action) lie beyond the pale. Indeed, Gene's
intimate relation to "socialism" is very much taken as given.
His ignorance of, and indifference to, politics is repeatedly
stressed, yet he is somehow instinctively in tune with the
proper ends of political action; and in the final scene
becomes the medium not only for a series of vague and tendentious aphorisms about patriarchy ("Men, like Nature,
abhor a vacuum"), portentously delivered in a spotlight, but
also for the savage, cruel and self-righteous scapegoating of
Richard, who is endowed with the moral responsibility for
his oppression. Men concludes that Richard should allow
himself to become "nervous, sensual and effeminate" as
dubious a set of Moral Positives as any one could reasonably
demand and indulges itself in a Doll's House ending which
we are asked to take as a triumph of radical intelligence.
Richard's confusion, desperation, self-oppression, are neither
here nor there. It is all "his fault", and we can take due satisfaction in his come-uppance; his guilty secret has been discovered by his workmates, and his just deserts are at hand.
The point I wish to make is that Gene's camp is taken as
an automatic validation of the character. He has nothing to
recommend him beyond a certain facile charisma and a few
slick epigrams, yet his five-minute tour de force telephone
monologue at the end of the first act is considered sufficiently impressive to 'place' the portrayal, in the preceding thirty
minutes, of Richard's political involvement. Men arrives at its
assessment of camp by a simple process of elision. The
Richard/Gene relationship is 'like' a man/woman relationship. Therefore Gene's camp is continuous with womanidentification is 'like' a feminist discourse against patriarchy. Therefore, camp is the means by which gay men may
become woman-identified = radical = socialist, and we can
carry on camping and 'being ourselves' with perfect equanimity (camp, of course, is always 'being oneself'), in the
serene assurance that we are in the vanguard of the march
towards the socialist future. The play does not seek at any
point to demonstrate the validity of this spurious set of propositions. They are simply data, and as such relate significant-

ly to certain characteristic assumptions of bourgeois feminism. Juliet Mitchell has argued, for example, that the
`political' and 'ideological' struggles are conceptually and
practically distinct, the one to be fought by the working-class
and the other by the women's movement, and even goes so
far as to suggest, in Woman's Estate, that the revolution must
now come from within the bourgeoisie. Gene, while ostensibly working-class, is very much a mouthpiece for bourgeois
aspirations; and Men compounds Mitchell's fallacy in its
uncritical assimilation of camp to feminism, and its implicit
assertion that there is no conceivable form of organised
political activity which would not surreptitiously reiterate
patriarchal power-structures.

Two
Camp always connotes 'effeminacy', not 'femininity'. The
camp gay man declares " 'Masculinity' is an oppressive
convention to which I refuse to conform"; but his nonconformity depends at every point on the preservation of the
convention he ostensibly rejects in this case, a general
acceptance of what constitutes 'a man'. Camp behaviour is
only recognisable as a deviation from an implied norm, and
without that norm it would cease to exist, it would lack
definition. It does not, and cannot, propose for a moment a
radical critique of the norm itself. Being essentially a mere
play with given conventional signs, camp simply replaces the
signs of 'masculinity' with a parody of the signs of
`femininity' and reinforces existing social definitions of both
categories. The standard of 'the male' remains the fixed point,
in relation to which male gays and women emerge as 'that
which is not male'.

Three
Camp requires the frisson of transgression, the sense of perversity in relation to bourgeois norms which characterises the
degeneration of the Romantic impulse in the second half of
the nineteenth century, and which culminates in England
with Aestheticism and in France with the decadence. Camp is
a house-trained version of the aristocratic, anarchistic ethic of
transgression, a breach of decorum which no longer even
shocks, and which has gone to confirm the existence of a
special category of person the male homosexual. Camp
strives to give an objective presence to an imaginary construction of bourgeois psychology. The very term 'a homosexual' (of which, finally, the term 'a gay person' is only the
recuperation, albeit a progressive one) defines not an objectchoice of which any individual is capable, but a type with
characteristic modes of behaviour and response. Sartre has
analysed, in relation to Genet, the process by which a determinate social imperative ("I have been placed in such-andsuch a role") can be transformed into existential choice
("Therefore I will take the initiative of adopting it"); and
that process describes the fundamental complicity of what
may appear to be an act of self-determination. Camp is
collaborative in that sense.
Gay Left 11

Six

Four
'Subversiveness' needs to be assessed not in terms of a quality
which is supposedly proper to a phenomenon, but as a
relationship between a phenomenon and its context that is,
dynamically. To be Quentin Crisp in the 1930s is a very
different matter from being Quentin Crisp in 1978. What was
once an affront has now become part of life's rich pageant.
The threat has been defused and defused because it was
always superficial. Camp is individualistic and apolitical, and
even at its most disturbing asks for little more than livingroom. Susan Sontag's remark that "homosexuals have pinned
their integration into society on promoting" the camp sensibility seems to me exact, and in its exactitude quite damning. It is necessary, in making such a judgement, to dissociate
oneself from any simple form of moralism.
Clearly, until very recently the ways of being gay have
been so extraordinarily limited that the possibility of being
radically gay has simply not arisen in the majority of cases.
But in a contemporary context, gay camp seems little more
than a kind of anaesthetic, allowing one to remain inside
oppressive relations while enjoying the illusory confidence
that one is flouting them.

Five
The belief in some 'essential' homosexuality produces, logically, Jack Babuscio's concept of "the gay sensibility", of
which camp is supposed to be the expression. "I define the
gay sensibility as a creative energy reflecting a consciousness
that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness
of certain human complications of feeling that spring from
the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the
world which is coloured, shaped, directed and defined by the
fact of one's gayness". 2 This formulation contains two false
propositions: (a) that there exists some undifferentiated
"mainstream consciousness" from which gays, by the very
fact of being gay, are absolved; and (b) that "a perception of
the world which is ... defined by the fact of one's gayness"
necessarily involves a "heightened awareness" of anything
(except, of course, one's gayness). I would certainly accept
that oppression creates the potential for a critical distance
from (and action against) the oppressing society, but one has
only to consider the various forms of 'negative awareness' to
perceive that the realisation of that potential depends on
other elements of one's specific situation.
It is clearly not the case that the fact of oppression entails
a conceptual understanding of the basis of oppression, or that
the fact of belonging to an oppressed group entails ideological
awareness. 'Consciousness' (which is, in itself, an unhelpful
term) is not determined by sexual orientation, nor is there a
"gay sensibility". The ideological place of any individual at
any given time is the site of intersection of any number of
determining forces, and one's sense of oneself as 'gay' is a
determinate product of that intersection not a determinant
of it. It seems strange, in any case, to cite as exemplary of a
gay sensibility a phenomenon which is characteristically
male, and with which many gay men feel little sympathy.
Gay Left 12

The failure to conceive of a theory of ideology is continuous

with an untenable theory of choice. Susan Sontag, adopting
a surprisingly crude behaviouristic model, remarks that "taste
governs every free as opposed to rote human response",3
and associates "taste" with an ethereal individuality which
transcends social 'programming'. Jack Babuscio develops the
same line of argument: "Clothes and decor, for example, can
be a means of asserting one's identity, as well as a form of
justification in a society which denies one's essential validity.
... By such means as these one aims to become what one
wills, to exercise some control over one's environment".4
Neither writer seems aware that "identity" and "freedom" as
used here are problematic terms. In order to explain the fact
that gay men gravitate towards certain professions, one has to
adduce the "discredited social identity" 5 of gays as the
determining factor of the choice rather than suggest that the
choice alleviates the discredited social identity. The professions in which male gayness has been traditionally condoned (the theatre, fashion, interior decoration, and so on)
are also those in which women have been able to command a
degree of personal autonomy without threatening male
supremacy in the slightest, since 'real men', by definition,
would despise to be involved in them. It is scarcely permissible to explain the association of gay men with the 'luxury'
professions in terms of a collection of individuals who discover, by some miraculous coincidence, that the assertion of
their identity leads them to a single persona.

Seven
Whatever differences they may have on other points, the
three most fully elaborated statements on camp to date 8 are
all agreed that camp taste is a matter of 'style' and 'content',
ignoring the fact that 'style' describes a process of meaning.
The camp attitude is a mode of perception whereby artifacts
become the object of an arrested, or fetishistic, scrutiny. It
does not so much "see everything in quotation marks" 9 as in
parentheses; it is a solvent of context. Far from being a
medium for the "demystification" of artifacts, as Richard
Dyer asserts, 10 , camp is a means by which that analysis is
perpetually postponed. The passage from 'determinate
object' to 'fetish' preserves the object safely and reassuringly
in a vacuum.

Eight
All analysts of camp arrive eventually at the same dilemma.
On the one hand, camp "describes those elements in a person,
situation or activity which express, or are created by, a gay
sensibility" 11 (i.e. camp is an attribute of something). On the
other hand, "camp resides largely in the eye of the
beholder" 12 (i.e. camp is attributed to something). The latter
seems to me in most cases correct, and the generalising tendency indicates very clearly camp's essential facility. Camp
attempts to assimilate everything as its object, and then
reduces all objects to one set of terms. It is a language of
impoverishment: it is both reductive and non-analytic, the
two going together and determining each other. As a gay
phenomenon, it is a means of bringing the world into one's
scope, of accommodating it not of changing it or conceptualising its relations. The objects, images, values, relations of
oppression can be recuperated by adopting the simple
expedient of redescribing them; and the language of camp
almost suggests, at times, a form of censorship in the Freudian sense. There is, of course, a certain mode of contemporary aestheticism which is aware of the concept of camp,
and whose objects are constructed from within that purview;
but as a rule the conception of camp as a property either begs
the question or produces those periodic insanities of Susan
Sontag's essay, whereby Pope and Mozart can be claimed for
the camp heritage as masters of rococco formalism.

Nine
According to Richard Dyer, John Wayne and Wagner can be
camp. To perceive Wayne as camp is, on one level, simply too
easy, and doesn't make any points about 'masculinity' which
would not instantly earn the concurrence of any self-

respecting reader of the Daily Telegraph. Of course Wayne's

"way of being a man" is a social construct, as are all "ways
of being a man", including the camp one and to indicate as
much doesn't seem particularly significant. On another level,
which 'John Wayne'? The Wayne who advocates, on screen
and off, Johnson's policy in Vietnam and McCarthyism, or
the Wayne of Ford's westerns? Wayne 'means' very differently in the two cases, and while those meanings are intimately
related, they cannot be reduced to one another. To perceive
Wayne merely as an icon of "butchness" which can be
debunked from, apparently, a position of ideological neutrality, is either complacent or philistine. Similarly, to regard
Wagner as camp is, on one level, only silly, and no more to be
tolerated than any other kind of silliness because it masquerades as critical analysis. On another level, it pre-empts the
discussion of the real problems raised by Wagner's music and
the cult of Bayreuth (the discussion initiated by Nietzsche),
and ends by corroborating the vulgar bourgeois critique of
Wagner's 'overblown romanticism'. The 'camp insight', in
these and many other cases, is little more than a flip variant
of the worst kind of right-on liberalism.

Eleven
Jack Babuscio quotes Oscar Wilde "It is through Art, and
through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the
sordid perils of actual existence" and adds, approvingly:
"Wilde's epigram points to a crucial aspect of camp aestheticism: its opposition to puritan morality". 14 On the contrary,
the epigram is a supreme expression of puritan morality,
which can almost be defined by its revulsion from the danger
and squalor of the real. Puritanism finds its escape-clause in
the aspiration of the individual soul towards God, in a
relation to which the world is at best irrelevant and at worst
inimical; and Wilde simply redefines the emergency-exit in
aesthetic terms. Sartre remarks of Genet that "beauty is the
aesthete's dirty trick on virtue". I would rephrase him to
read "the isolation of style is the aesthete's dirty trick on
the concept of value, and the constant necessity to analyse
and reconstruct concepts of value".

Twelve

Ten
In his essay, Jack Babuscio attempts to construct a relationship between camp and irony which, it transpires, turns on
the same unresolved contradiction as that which afflicts the
definition of camp itself. "Irony is the subject matter of
camp, and refers here to any highly incongruous contrast
between an individual or thing and its context or
association". 13 By the end of the paragraph, the irony has
become a matter of the "perception of incongruity". One
should note, first, that irony is badly misdefined: it does not
involve incongruity, and it is not, and can never be, "subjectmatter". Irony is an operation of discourse which sets up a
complex of tensions between what is said and various qualifications or contradictions generated by the process of the
saying. Furthermore, it is difficult to see in what way any of
the "incongruous contrasts" offered as exemplary of camp
irony relate either to camp, irony, or "the gay sensibility".
Are we to assume that, because "sacred/profane" is an incongruous pair, a great deal of medieval literature is camp? Most
importantly, Jack Babuscio ignores the crucial distinction
between the kind of scrutiny which dissolves boundaries in
order to demonstrate their insubstantiality, or the valuesystems which enforce them, and the kind of scrutiny which
merely seeks to confirm that they are there. As a logic of
'transgression', camp belongs to the second class. If the transgression of boundaries ever threatened to produce the
redefinition of them, the frisson would be lost, the thrill of
"something wrong" would disappear.

Camp is chronically averse to value-judgements, partly by

choice (evaluation is felt to involve discrimination between
various 'contents', and thus to belong to the realm of 'High
Culture', 'Moral Seriousness', etc.) and partly by default: the
obsession with 'style' entails both an astonishing irresponsiveness to tone and a refusal to acknowledge that styles are
necessarily the bearers of attitudes, judgements, values,
assumptions of which it's necessary to be aware, and between
which it's necessary to discriminate. "The horror genre, in
particular, is susceptible to a camp interpretation. Not all
horror films are camp, of course; only those which make the
most of stylish conventions for expressing instant feeling,
thrills, sharply defined personality, outrageous and 'unacceptable' sentiments, and so on".15

Gay Left 13

What is "instant feeling"? or, for that matter, feeling

which is not instant? And what are "stylish conventions"?
The conventions of the horror movie are complex and significant, and cannot be discussed in terms of a chic appendage
to a content which is somehow separable from them.
Certainly, horror films express "unacceptable sentiments"
indeed, they exist in order to do so but to read them as
"outrageous" in the camp sense is to protect oneself from
their real outrageousness, to recuperate them as objects of
"good-bad taste" (which is what bourgeois critics do anyway). Once one has effected the impossible and meaningless
distinction between "aesthetic and moral considerations",16
it becomes perfectly feasible to associate the critical intelligence of Von Sternberg movies with the coy, vulgar, sexist
fantasising of Busby Berkeley musicals, or to confuse the
grotesque complicity of the Mae West persona with the
"excess" of Jennifer Jones's performance in Duel in the Sun
or Davis's in Beyond the Forest, 17 where "excess" is a function of an active critique of oppressive gender-roles. While
ostensibly making demand for new criteria of judgement,
camp is all the while quietly acquiescing in the old ones. It
merely takes over existing standards of "bad taste" and
insists on liking them.

Thirteen
Camp has a certain minimal value, in restricted contexts, as
a form of pater les bourgeois; but the pleasure (in itself
genuine and valid enough) of shocking solid citizens should
not be confused with radicalism. Still less should "the very
tight togetherness that makes it so good to be one of the
queens", in Richard Dyer's phrase, 18 be offered as a constructive model of 'community in oppression'. The positive
connotations an insistence on one's otherness, a refusal to
pass as straight are so irredeemably compromised by complicity in the traditional, oppressive formulations of that
otherness; and 'camping around' is so often little more than
being 'one of the boys' by pink limelight. We should not,

pace Richard Dyer, feel it incumbent on us to defend camp,

on charges of 'letting the side down' or wanting to be John
Wayne. Camp is simply one way in which gay men have
recuperated their oppression, and it needs to be criticised as
such.

Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Susan Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp" ' in Against Interpretation ( Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1970, p.292).
Jack Babuscio, 'Camp and the Gay Sensibility' in Gays
and Film (BFI 1977, p.40).
Sontago; op.cit. p.278.
Babuscio; op.cit. p.44.
Ibid.
Sontag and Babuscio, ibid; and Richard Dyer, 'It's
Being So Camp As Keeps Us Going' in Body Politic
(September 1977).
Sontag; op.cit. p.289.

NEW GROUP
North London GAYS against the NAZIS, contact Box
GAN, Tottenham Community Project, 628 High Road,
London N17.

Gay Left 14

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Dyer; op.cit.
Sontag; op.cit. p.281.
Dver; op.cit.
Babuscio; op.cit. p.40.
Ibid. p.41.
Ibid. p.41.
Ibid. p.42.
Ibid. p.43.
Ibid. p.51.
Ibid. p.45.
Dyer, op.cit.

Gay Lit
The Gay Journal a new gay literary/intellectual magazine
comes out in December 1978, founded by Anne Davison, Ian
David Baker and Roger Baker. The new journal will not be a
sex magazine. There will, for example, be no photographs
and the erotic content of any writing or illustration will be
part of the greater whole rather than there for its own sake.
Good writing, good design and good graphics are the aim. We
see no reason to be frightened of being intellectual, serious or
literary. We hope that the journal will reflect the experience
of gay people and our response to the world we live in. There
is scope for fiction, poetry, analytical articles, satire, humour
and autobiographical experience. We can cope with politics
and plays, tub-thumping and even music.
The journal will be quarterly and will have 64 pages in each
issue. Price 75p a single issue +20p post (students and OAPs
50p). Subscriptions 4 p.a. for 4 issues.
B.B.D. Publishing, Flat F, 23/24 Great James St,
London WC1N 3ES.

Homosexuals Fight Back

THE GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE
by Stephen Gee
The GAA was formed in February 1978. Its impetus was
the recent demonstration in London organised by the
National Gay News Defence Committee. The demonstration
was the largest gay protest seen in this country, signified a
regeneration of the gay movement. This has happened alongside another important development, the growth of the antifascist movement. The gay demonstration and the two great
Anti Nazi carnivals of 1978 have begun to fight the despair
of the previous two years, when the unrelieved crisis spawned
more and bloodier NF marches, racist killings, Whitehouse's
blasphemy case and the murder of Peter Benyon. About a
week after the Gay News trial in July 1977 a gay man, Peter
Benyon, was beaten to death by a group of men armed with
chair legs. He had just left 'The Rainbow', a gay club in
North London.
The new fight back mood has been characterised by countless simple slogans, such as Stop the Nazi National Front,
Gays and Women Fight Back, Stop Mary Whitehouse etc.
Punk and New Wave Rock music have also articulated this
urgency. The music and the politics have become strong
allies. This upsurge has also prompted anxious scepticism on
certain sections of the Left and out of that GAA faces a
challenge to both the political basis of its activism and to its
existence as an autonomous body.

Origins and Structure

The politics and organisation of the GAA are inherited from
those of the National Gay News Defence Committee. At the
time of the NGNDC a few Gay socialists questioned whether
the Gay News of today with its male bias and conservatism
was defensible. Most people, however, recalled the Old
Bailey, with the intense Saint Whitehouse praying for the
p
rosecution counsel as he railed against buggers and buggery

to the obvious approval of the judge and in the end with the
endorsement of the jury. Gay oppression became redefined
that summer with an almost medieval resonance. The concept
of Blasphemy, like the name Mary Whitehouse, was no longer
a joke. The anger it provoked united gays of different
political persuasions in the common view that we were all
under attack by the Gay News trial. The committee used the
trial as a focus for an increasing number of anti-gay attacks:
the murder of Peter Benyon, the attempt by her constituency Labour Party to sack Maureen Colquhoun MP, police
harassment, custody cases the same catalogue of oppression
as in Tom Robinson's Glad to be Gay. Affiliations to the
NGNDC were invited from a range of groups including CHE,
women's groups and trade unions. CHE co-operated fully'and
provided generous publicity in its broadsheet and even Gay
News welcomed and supported the new group. That broadbased support continues with the GAA and the resolution
passed at the CHE conference reflects this:
`That CHE become a sponsor of the Gay Activists' Alliance
and co-operate fully at national and local level in initiatives
taken by GAA in defence of gay people.'
The theme of 'defence' is expressed in the short policy
statement GAA adopted at its first meeting:
`to co-ordinate at a national level the fight against the
increasing number of attacks being made on homosexuals and
homosexuality. We see our struggle as part of that of other
oppressed people and therefore seek the active participation
of the maximum number of gay and non-gay organisations in
this aim.'
Some people thought this was too rhetorical and ambitious,
others thought a more explicitly socialist perspective should
be adopted. Clearer ideas of the direction of GAA have
emerged since the conference and there is continuing discussion at meetings and in the newsletter. The structure of
the GAA was and remains an important debate. The bureaucracy of CHE was as inappropriate as the inspired amorphousness of early GLF. So far it has been resolved that
`The GAA is not the whole of the gay movement: at a
national Ievel it brings together lesbians and gay men,
whether independent or as members of other gay groups .. .
to work on specific issues. All groups involved in GAA are
independent. National conferences, held every six weeks,
enable co-ordination and planning to take place, and give us
a chance to get to know one another. There is no formal
leadership or membership but a secretariat, based on a local
group, helps co-ordinate the spread of information by newsletter and telephone tree.'
Between February and September there have been four
national conferences in Manchester, Oxford, London and
Edinburgh, attended on average by 60 people. Ideas and proposals are generated in small workshops and a general plenary
makes decisions. Three main campaigns have emerged; a
campaign against police harassment, anti-fascist work and a
campaign against W.H. Smiths. In addition, local groups have
specific issues related to their area. This has put great
demands on the people involved. The stress on activism
threatens to exhaust some groups and leaves insufficient time
for theoretical reflection on our work. The activist emphasis
however began to involve new people. The Manchester group,
in particular, has been successful in involving people from the
gay clubs, which have been threatened with prosecution,
under an old bye law, for licentious dancing!

Personal As Political
Although ambitious, the GAA does recognise certain limitations 'the GAA is not the whole of the gay movement'. I
feel we will also need to look back however and reflect on
earlier groups, particularly GLF, if we are to achieve much.
For example, how does the concept of the personal is political, so central to GLF and the women's movement, operate
within GAA? It is instructive to look at an early GLF critique
of 'gay activists':
Gay Left 15

`Gay activists are not apologetic about their homosexuality,

so they can be more militant and defiant. But they refuse to
think politically. Gay activism is generally for men, often
hostile to women. It wants rights for gay people as they are;
it does not challenge butch or femme stereotypes or examine
ways of relating.'
Gay activists are now, of course, in a different social and
political context. Many have roots in earlier GLF groups and
communities such as the London gay centres. There, people
took up the personal political challenge in squatting and consciousness-raising groups. These communities grew in a more
liberal climate at a more economically abundant time. With
the onset of austerity these 'gay alternatives', as they were
conceived, are vulnerable and are no longer the open communities they once were. It is not possible for me for example
to relate exclusively to Brixton gay community. Although it
is still apersonal, even private focus it is no longer a political
one. London GAA provides for me the political focus. This
apparent dichotomy between the personal and the political
describes the way I perceive my activism and my relationships rather than an objective or a theoretical ideal. For other
people too, at least in London GAA, their primary sphere of
personal relationships is not within the GAA. This exposes
GAA to the criticism that it is evading the personal/political
question. Indeed if it is to grow and maintain its momentum
GAA will have to find ways of integrating the two. It cannot
simply be a co-ordinating body. It is for this reason that the
GAA was, I think, wrong to state in its first newsletter that it
was not a consciousness-raising group.
If the personal/political practice is abandoned then we
are, in the words of the GLF critique, fighting for the rights
of gay people 'as they are'. The illusion that we can fight for
our rights as we are is a particular drawback in CHE. At every
conference ambitious resolutions are passed, which are then
referred to the executive or another bureaucratic body set up
for the purpose. Individuals are relieved of the necessity to do
anything. In terms of gay liberation, the concrete expression
of that personal/political practice is simply coming out. GLF
established it, GAA finds itself defending it in its campaigns
in a very basic way. The police, the Festival of Light and the
National Front are all behaving in ways to drive us back into
the closet the NFoL explicitly so, it recently floated the
idea of a campaign to make it illegal to publicly declare one's
homosexuality. GAA is a renewed expression of coming out
and reflects the gay community's determination to stay out.

Alliance Not Party

A number of people working in GAA are socialists. Many of
us however, even those who describe ourselves as such have
an uneasy relationship with the left. The consensus in GAA is
that we are an autonomous group and that we therefore need
to organise as gays principally outside political parties. The
reason, at least partially, is that parties organise around issues
not immediately related to their own lives. For many men on
the left the politics of their feelings and identity is often completely unchallenged. This means that the urgency of gay and
women's issues is not perceived. The CP and the IMG have
begun to realise this by at least recognising the validity of
autonomous movements. The internal changes in the parties
is not yet such, however, that a significant number of gays
have identified with any one of them. Part of the problem is
that we have not arrived at any meaningful analysis of gay
oppression as it relates to class. It is even more problematic
and alien to gay people when the 'class struggle' is projected,
particularly by the SWP, with a stark male aggressive vanguardism.
'Alliance' rather than homogeneous 'party' structure is
then the most viable way forward at present. There are also
increasingly points at which the alliance of gays can become
an alliance with other oppressed groups. The most obvious
example is in fighting police harassment: GAA therefore has
to build an alliance within the gay world as well as out to
other groups. Many gays, apparently content with the scene,
see activism as irrelevant to their lives. Too much of it in the
past has perhaps been characterised by short-lived campaigns.
Gay Left 16

Also .GLF gays often separated themselves from the scene

dismissing it as a sexist rip-off. We must not repeat the mistake of making unconditional sacrifices of leather jackets or
drag or keys or suits for the redemption of political souls.

Keeping Together
Having laid the basis for an alliance we may be faced with
possible splits. We have to prevent this without at the same
time avoiding controversy. The newsletter has so far been a
good vehicle for conveying thoughts and ideas which help
define the alliance. On this particular question of political
divisions and possible splits the newsletter carried the following contribution: 'I think that splits sometimes happen (in
the old GLF again) because people are saying, in effect, "we
should use such and such a tactic and I won't work with you
if you don't agree".' We should try to avoid these kinds of
needless ultimatums. We must also guard against regarding
people you disagree with as the enemy. I think this was and
is very bound up with not understanding or trying to understand where people are coming from, the origin of people's
ideas. There are large numbers of political persuasions within
the GAA now, reflecting the diversity within society as a
whole. All the main positions have pretty deep roots in history and in the present. This means that, not only is GAA
going to have to deal with these ideas in one way or another
but also that each political group will contain well-meaning
and sincere people. This means a certain degree of respect
for people however objectively damaging one may think their
opinion. Our deepest differences don't originate in malice
and so we need not personalise them. We should keep the
real enemy in sight.' (Jamie Gough)
The alliance has so far allowed a fairly consistent policy
on anti-fascist tactics to emerge. A handbook which describes
how Nazi ideology dealt with homosexuals has been
produced. This has been taken up by Gay Sweatshop in its
recent anti-fascist production 'Iceberg', and so the discussion
about fascism can grow outside GAA groups.
The campaign against W.H. Smiths has been a long one
and has drawn in many new people. It is a clear cut issue and
is a useful campaign in that it brings people into contact with
the more complex issues.
The anti-police harassment campaign is proving to be the
most difficult. Assembling information and presenting a case
to groups in and outside of the gay movement on this issue is
the most important and long term issue facing us. Police
activity against us, as against blacks, is as threatening as the
NF. If we become demoralised by state harassment we will
have less strength to fight the fascists should they or their
ideas gain more ground.
GAA's continued effectiveness will be in its ability to
co-ordinate and initiate diverse campaigns within the gay
movement. It should promote a number of single issue but
linked campaigns as a united gay political organisation. This
includes people interested in law reform and those engaged,
for example, in anti-fascist work. The resulting federation of
campaigns could give gay politics the continuity and impact
it needs and has so far not achieved.

Gays At Work ~ No Complaints

by Shauna Brown
This is the second article in a series which looks at the strategies and problems for lesbians and gay men who come out at
work. We would welcome contributions from anyone who
has had experience of coming out at work and we hope these
articles will both help and encourage others in this struggle.
I came out at work after having been there for a year.
I joined three years ago, working in the complaints department of a holiday company with fourteen women and three
men. I suppose that the people I work with are fairly regular
London office staff. Most of the women are in their late
teens or 20s, some are married and all are avowedly heterosexual. There are some unusual factors, such as my boss being
a woman and two of the men being gay and out. The two
gay men joined the company after I did and their predecessors were two heterosexual men.

The phrase 'I thought so' when you come out to anyone
has always seemed to me more like an 'I'm just taking this in'
response rather than someone having any real idea. My boss
confirmed that this was the case later, but at the time I was
grateful that she had said it as I didn't really want to go into
an explanation about it. I stressed that I was quite happy
being gay and that that was not the problem. We talked for a
while about the relationship and although the conversation
didn't really provide any insights I felt relieved to be able to
discuss my personal life with someone I worked with. At the
end of our talk she asked me not to tell the girls in the office
as she didn't know how they would take it. I felt ambiguous
about this as I really wanted to tell the others after getting a
favourable response from my boss, but I didn't tell them
until about two months later.

I was not willing or prepared to go into the job saying I

was a lesbian. I wanted to be acceptable, to make my life
easier and get some sort of contact with the people that I was
going to have to be with five days a week nine till five, at
that time I did not think I would be able to if I was out. I
never said much about my personal life. I might say I had
been to a film or a disco but I wouldn't elaborate. I never
made up boyfriends' names or joined in general discussion
about whether the new bloke in accounts was dead sexy or
not. If I was asked I'd try to be terribly objective or dismissive depending on the situation.
I think that through the first couple of months the other
workers thought I was shy and later on they thought I was
just a very private person and perhaps a bit strange. I found
it very depressing not being able to share my life with the
other women in the office as they shared theirs with me.
There were times when I wanted to say to them that I felt
lousy because but I was never able to because if I had that
would have meant coming out, and I didn't know how they
would have responded.
I did make it clear from quite early on that I was a
feminist. I think this acted as a guard against suspicion,
almost as if they thought that feminism equalled being
asexual or that the men I knew were obviously too boring for
words and who would bother talking about them anyway.
My office personality and the fact that I was not 'one of the
girls' set my opinions on things apart from the norm. In conversations about sexism, abortion, education etc. they had
my line of argument down to a tee. They still do and sadly I
don't think that my feminism has given them a different perspective, it's probably ridiculous to think that this slightly
strange, isolated voice ever could. It is not that they don't
sympathise with feminism they just see it as unrealistic and
whilst they might agree with me on many issues they can't
see the point in fighting to change things.
My boss knew less about me than any of the other women
in the office yet I came out to her first. I was feeling down
and exhausted mainly due to some problems with a relationship I was having at the time. Had one of the heterosexual
women in the office been in the same situation my boss
would probably have given her a couple of days off or at
least appreciated that she could not ask her to work consistently hard in the circumstances. She called me in to her
office to find out why I hadn't been doing much and I told
her half-heartedly, using the word 'person' instead of
`woman'. I was not intending to tell her that I was a lesbian
but there came a point in the conversation where any pretence seemed ridiculous and I said I was gay. She responded
very calmly and said she'd thought so without giving any
clues as to why.

I was invited to the wedding reception of one of the

women in the office. I was having a chat with her when she
asked me, out of the blue, if I was bisexual. I must have
taken a long minute to decide what to say and finally said
"No, I'm a lesbian". We talked for what seemed hours, other
women from the office came and joined us. They asked
whether I role-played, did I REALLY fall in love, did my
prents know and how did they react, was I happy being gay
and every other question connected with the lesbian stereotype presented in the media. At the end of it I walked out
feeling happy at their response but also shattered and in need
of everyone I knew to be there and say it had been okay; I
hadn't compromised, they had understood and thought it
was fine.
The next day in the office was okay although I felt then
and for quite some time after that I could only deal with
individual conversations about my sexuality. Even now,
sometimes, when we have a group conversation and the topic
involves lesbianism I still feel a little shaky after, always
hoping I've said the right thing, although not for them but

Gay Left 17

for me. It's very hard to get away from the 'representative'
role. The women in the office view the two gay men very
differently from me. The men aren't political and I think
they see being gay as a slight handicap which with a bit of
luck people will accept enough to let them become managing
director. Both are always making remarks about other men's
physical appearance and constant sexual innuendoes. The
women are clear that I don't share their attitudes towards
things and talk to me about how pissed off with a lot of the
men's remarks they are. On these occasions they are not
thinking about my lesbianism and I feel that I have much
more in common with them as women than I do with the
men as homosexuals.
The main reason I have stayed in the job is the women
that I work with, the friendship and support we have for each
other and the fear that it won't be so easy starting from
scratch again. In retrospect I think that coming out after
having been at work a while gave me time to be known as a
woman as opposed to a lesbian first, person later. On the
other hand they did think I was rather an odd woman and I
spent the first year being depressed and isolated. The result
of coming out was to improve things socially to a great
extent, for this reason, if I moved to another job now I
wouldn't be prepared to keep quiet about my sexual identity.
Altogether I feel that coming out at work has been a very
positive experience.

Odds and Sods

HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE
by Guy Hocquenghem

Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire

Had Hocquenghem's book been translated six years ago it

would have produced much more of a storm than it does
now. So many of his concerns are now common currency,
his problematic is that of the contemporary Women's and
Gay movements: the nature of sexuality, the construction of
sexed and sexually oriented individuals, the relation between
the autonomous movements and other forms of political
struggle, etc. It is in the clear recognition of this problematic
that the value of Homosexual Desire lies. Hocquenghem's
observations and questions are of more interest than the
solutions and theory he offers.
Jeffrey Weeks' introduction gives a succinct account of
Hocquenghem's intellectual precursors and itself gives one of
the most lucid accounts of recent theoretical innovations in
sexual politics. One might almost recommend the book for
its introduction, for the main body of the text is often irritating, obscure and, in the end, profoundly unsatisfying.
Hocquenghem has an unnerving habit of introducing concepts and fragments of theory with no explanation, assuming
an intimate acquaintance with the work of Lacan, Deleuze
and Guatarri and using these notions to construct an account
radically underdetermined by empirical material, which he
draws mostly from literary accounts of homosexuality. A
mode of presentation that Freud got away with, in Hocquenghem's hands becomes infuriating and needlessly gnomic.
Hocquenghem picks out particular features of the public
representation of homosexuality, the juxtaposition of the
homosexual and the criminal, the homosexual as invalid, and
constructs an account of the expression of desire through
Oedipalisation, and the construction of the perverse. So far,
so good, but underlying his account is a very specific, if
unanalysed conception of desire which owes more to the
Romantic tradition of will and authenticity than to Freud.

Gay Left 18

Originally, Desire (metaphysically capitalised) was polyvocal and untied to objects but through the acquisition of the
Oedipal Complex, Desire succumbs to the rule of the Phallus,
and the unity of Desire is broken. For Hocquenghem, the
homosexual is as partial an identity as the heterosexual: an
identity of repression. Yet, though Hocquenghem wants to
maintain that there is no such thing as a homosexual desire,
he falters and certain homosexual desires and practices are
seen as 'the mode of existence of desire itself'. It is as though
Hocquenghem is torn between a despair at the total
repression accomplished through the family and Oedipus, and
a sincere belief that male homosexuals are already revolutionary: sodomy and cruising somehow prefigure the world
without Oedipus. This tension forces him into a frenzied
over-romanticisation of male homosexual practice whilst
ignoring the real world of homosexuals: closetry becomes a
mysterious but profoundly vocal moment of being of a hypostasised Homosexuality Desire, instead of a boring, deeply
miserable isolation. Similarly, cruising takes on the character
of a 'voyage of self discovery' akin to that of the schizophrenic; again real homosexuals, the reality of police
oppression, the often unhappy consequences of being
arrested for importuning, vanish in the glow of the idealising
metaphor.
This ambiguity of despair and frenetic optimism generates
some of the more peculiar stances of Hocquenghem's book:
the rigorous anti-humanism resulting from the description of

the ego and self as alien and repressive implantations, and the
utter distrust of organisation and explicitly of the Left. In
each case, authentic Desire bubbling away from the roots of
Being permits only spontaneous connection unmediated by
rationality, or interest or even language. All language is under
the rule of the Phallus and is suspect. All previous forms of
opposition are inevitably corrupt, tied to the evils of Oedipal
succession.
It is at these points that Hocquenghem becomes absurd
and utopic and psychologistic. It is as though the long 19th
century search for authenticity, always enmeshed in a
schismed vision of the individual and society (Rousseau onwards) finds its apogee in a grand conflict between Desire,
individually located, if not in the ego, and the social, the
realm of the Phallus, as demiurge and demon. History, as a
creation of the Phallus, vanishes and revolution is seen as
almost an instantaneous consequence of sodomy. Fourier and
Sade are quoted approvingly, yet it is hard to take seriously

this vision of sodomy as the grave digger of capitalism.

All this is coupled with a total ignoring of women and
lesbianism. On his first page Hocquenghem dispatches lesbianism to the realm of the unsayable, on the grounds that he, a
mere man, in men's language can say nothing about it. But
this false modesty becomes slight of hand sexism when the
role of an autonomous women's sexuality attacking patriarchal capitalism is ignored.
So in the long run, Hocquenghem yields nothing save a
justification of the voluntarism and separation that characterised the movement then: and poor justification too. But
perhaps it is a measure of the creativity of the gay movement
that we have transcended those positions. As a part of our
history, Hocquenghem's book is still pertinent, even if it
leaves all the questions still to be answered.

Up Against The Law

THE LAW AND SEXUALITY HOW TO COPE
WITH THE LAW IF YOU'RE NOT 100% CONVENTIONALLY HETEROSEXUAL
( Grass Roots/Manchester Law Centre 1.00)

Reviewed by Bob Cant

The relationship between the law and the development of our
emotional-sexual relationships is an immensely complicated
one. Since the 1967 Act legalised some male homosexual acts
a whole generation of gay men has come to believe that the
law will not interfere with them if they are not too flamboyant. With the rise of both the women's and gay movements an
increasing number of women have rejected heterosexual lifestyles and then found that, although lesbianism may not be
illegal, it is considered sufficient grounds to take their children away from them. But, whatever one's circumstances, most
people are totally unprepared for the intrusion of the law into
the most intimate part of their lives. This handbook recognises
the widespread ignorance about the law and sexuality and is
designed to help us all cope with the legal jungle.
It does not attempt to analyse the role of the law nor is it a
manifesto of legal reform. As a result of this approach there is
no discussion of the law as a repressive agency. The law is after
all designed to serve the interests of one class in society and
the closer one's relationship to that class the better a chance
one has of winning through. The white, middle-class defendant starts off with an advantage before she/he has entered
the court room. That apart, the book is excellent. It is
designed to help individuals win their cases and it is hardly the
responsibility of the authors that there is no large movement
for sexual law reform.
Each chapter deals with particular themes for example,
custody, transvestism, young people, and gives very specific
advice on how to respond to police interest in these situations.
The chapters end with a series of useful hints; the most important of which is probably the fact that one does not need to
answer any police questions. Given the sophistication of police
questioning techniques it is, in fact, very difficult for anyone
to remain totally silent. But it is not only in Northern Ireland
that convictions are often obtained largely on the basis of
conversations between the police and the accused.
Otherwise the most important part of the book is probably
the discussion of the way one's sexuality becomes a determining factor in cases which are apparently not concerned
with sexuality. The judge's view of normality can play an
important part in the resolution of cases which involve gay
defendants. Such prejudice is not pronounced in cases involving lesbians. The silence of the law on lesbianism certainly
does not mean that it is a factor ignored by those in judgement. When Louise Bovchuk lost her job for wearing a badge

which said "Lesbians Ignite", her dismissal was upheld by an

industrial tribunal which quoted the old testament on Sodom
and Gomorrah in its judgement. More commonly quoted than
the Bible is the opinion of psychiatrists. The psychiatric
report in one case where the mother lost custody of her child
said: "The mother practises statistically abnormal sexual acts
whch can be looked upon as a deviation from the normal and
is frankly perverted. It will be difficult to imagine that this
young boy could go through his adolescent period of development without feeling shame and embarrassment at having a
mother who has elected to engage in sexual practices which
are statistically abnormal."
The underpinning of prejudice is clearest in cases involving
lesbians but cases involving gay men are certainly not free of
it. It is common in gross indecency cases for the prosecution
to argue that proof of the defendant's homosexuality adds to
the likelihood of his guilt. But the case that in my opinion
illustrates most strongly the ignorance and prejudice which
operates in cases involving gay people concerns a male bus
conductor. He had been sacked following a gross indecency
conviction and appealed to a Leeds industrial tribunal against
his dismissal. The tribunal supported the employer, however,
and said: "It really cannot be argued in our view that a conviction for an offence of gross indecency does not reflect on
the suitability of the applicant as a bus conductor ... There
would be an understandable concern in the minds of the public, who are aware of this conviction, if they had to put their
children on the bus, including girls." It is extremely difficult
to imagine just what they thought homosexuality was.
These and many other examples of devious, irrational and
prejudiced operations of the law with regard to the sexually
unconventional, illustrate all too clearly the need for such a
handbook. Until such time as the law stops interfering in our
relationships we need to go on fighting it as often and as well
as we can. This book makes an important contribution to that
struggle. We should all have a copy of it for it costs only 1
and none of us knows when we next may need it.

You Can't Be A Socialist Perfume Maker

Meetings with Tom Robinson
by Derek Cohen and Hans Klabbers
If we had been interviewing any ordinary gay worker we
would not have had the expectations that we did that Tom
Robinson would be an interesting person with 'insightful'
things to say about his situation. As it was, we came away
feeling that in some ways he is quite ordinary; in fact he has
an ordinariness and unsophisticated side to him that leaves
you rather suspicious. This is because, like it or not, Tom
Robinson is a S*T*A*R. He is someone whom we might not
have interviewed had he not been a 'nearly famous person';
Gay Left would classify our interview as "Gays at Work"
rather than "Gay Culture". That he is a star, or at least some
way up in that hierarchy, is evidenced both by his own
aspirations, and the reactions of other people to him, ourselves included.

"Show me a boy who doesn't want to be a Rock'n'

Roll Star and I'll show you a liar."
First and foremost Tom Robinson wanted to be a rock and
roll star. He wanted to play rock and roll music and be
successful. We can forget any ideas that Tom took to a
musical career because he wanted to propagate certain ideas.
As he sees it, he has followed a musical career, being openly
gay, and committed to some left-wing principles all along. He
was an out gay man in Cafe Society, but the band did not
take off, and he realised that if he wanted to do what he
wanted he would have to form his own band. Entering into
the hierarchical, competitive world of musical fame is a very
dubious occupation politically, and the career that Tom is
following is little different from most other capitalist 'careerists', a competitive structure based upon commodities,
usually treating people as such. That his roots are in the gay
movement may be some reassurance, for example his involvement in Gay Switchboard, but 'stars' can never maintain that
sort of involvement in the same way.
Thus when Tom Robinson goes down to the Icebreakers
disco at the Prince Albert or goes on a Gay Pride or Right to
Work march he is there not as any ordinary gay man or
worker but as a celebrity. This means that people will come
up and talk to him in a familiar way, even when they've never
met him before; they will stand around and look at him as
someone special. He has a special position. He is on the stage
while we are in the audience. He has an access to the media
that most people do not. He can have his homosexuality
accepted while many gay workers lose their jobs because of
it.
While attempting to maintain some sort of contact with
everyday gay people, Tom Robinson behaves in certain ways
which accentuate his being a star. Not even just a member of
a famous or successful band, but a star in his own right. The
band was originally called the Tom Robinson Band though
efforts are now being made to get the band seen as TRB.
But this attempt is thwarted by things like his introducing
every number in the concert. He tends to do all the singing
standing alone, even when other members of the band sing as
well. The audience relates to him much more than to the
band as a whole. The paradox for us as gay people is that if,
with the same structure of the band, it were a less prominent
member who was gay, that fact would have a lot less impact
and influence on the audiences.

A Saleable Product
If Tom Robinson is trying, through his music, to convey
certain political messages, then the process by which he does
this, involving the music business and the music promotion
world as well, must necessarily affect the content and the
context of that message. It is doubtful that Glad to be Gay
would have had as many plays as it did if Tom Robinson
hadn't personally talked to the EMI reps. But it is equally
Gay Left 20

doubtful that it would have succeeded if it had been released

as a single on its own rather than tucked safely among some
less contentious material. This is a tribute both to Tom
Robinson's promotional ability, after all Glad to be Gay did
get lots of plays on the radio, and to the music business's
ability to accommodate itself to most things in order to
make profits.
An important part of this process is the way that Tom
Robinson's sexuality becomes just another interesting saleable exploitable part of him. It would be treated almost
identically were it that he sang songs in bare feet (Sandie
Shaw) or had unusual length hair (The Beatles) or could
dance in a new way (John Travolta).
By presenting his homosexuality as part of the package,
the music business makes it acceptable within conventional
terms. Glad to be Gay may have been directed against the
smug middle class patrons of the Hanover Grand, but Tom
Robinson is presented as extremely respectable, not as someone who might go cruising, or cottaging, or have a number of
lovers. The sexual aspect of his being is hardly ever
mentioned. He has a neutered identity.

if you want to play rock'n'roll and you want

to reach an audience beyond the number of people
that fit into a concert hall, then you have to make
records, and then you have to sell records, and then
you might as well sign with the best record company
there is and that's EMI ..."
"...

Tom Robinson has been hugely successful in changing

people's attitudes on a number of important issues and this
must be heartily applauded. However we must not expect
him to be leading any 'revolutionary' changes. If he was
singing about people picking up guns and going on the
rampage through the Houses of Parliament (or for that
matter the EMI headquarters) instead of urging people to
stop beating up gays and black people, there is no doubt he
would not be where he is today. He is not threatening to the
status quo, and seems not to want to be. In becoming
involved with a vast capitalist machinery such as the record
industry he has become part of the establishment. Sure
enough an establishment made slightly more bearable by his
presence, but an establishment nevertheless.
If you are committed to a goal of selling lots of records
and getting your music across to as many people as possible
you have to start compromising. If you want the widest distribution for your records you go to one of the biggest
record companies in the world, and considerations such as
EMI's investments in South Africa or its development of
guidance systems for missiles become much less important.
The second time you arrive at a foreign airport you almost
stop thinking about why you are being driven around in a
large limousine rather than taking a taxi. A careerist musician
has to take the music business largely on its own terms,
because the end justifies the means time and again.
But there are alternatives. You don't have to be part of
this machinery to reach a wider audience, as has been amply
demonstrated by the countless independent record labels
that have been set up over the last 1 years. The main
problem is that of distribution. Your record does not go into
the record shops with the EMI rep as part of a package for
which the shop has a standing order. There is no money for
publicity on the scale that the big record companies are used
to.
Yet in Scandinavia there are many successful alternative
record companies which put out feminist and socialist
records and distribute them on a national basis. They are

"It's Sunday night at the Hammersmith Odeon and our brains are warm with Southern Comfort. When we ask the bouncer
where our seats are he gives us a long hard look and takes our tickets with a tattooed hand on which the veins stand out like
little streams. When we've found our seat and convinced the people sitting in them that the numbers on the chairs don't
correspond to those on their tickets, the curtain rises to reveal a large fist in yellow on black. We look around. These are diehard fans, they've dutifully taken the stencils from the album covers and emblazoned their old clothes with the symbol. The guy
behind me hits his friend with the same clenched fist."
co-operatively run, they work, the records are cheap, and the
small profits are equally shared.
So why not in Britain? TRB's music is not political in the
same way as the Scandinavian groups, but nevertheless it
could have been the starting point for a similar operation. If
radical publishers can set up their own distribution service
why not musicians? There would be no limousines at the airport, no gigs in 3,500 seaters, no letters from isolated lesbians
in Japan. And that is the paradox.
Tom Robinson wants to see change but in a very limited
way. To say that it was necessary to make those compromises in order to reach a wider audience, as if there were no
alternatives, as if there weren't numerous bands and artists
who were trying to make changes from the bottom up, is to
ignore the roots of political music, where commitment
weighs heavier than the front page of the New Musical

Express.

A Honk from a Passing Limousine

"I feel frightened watching this strange spectacle. Every time
Danny Kustow, the TRB guitarist, takes a solo he hits the
front of the stage, face contorted into a scream, legs wide,
and Tom joins him in a classic male rock and roll stance."

Right On Sister came in at the very end of the gig. In the

midst of all this machismo was a song about and in support of

of feminism. It is amusing to think that we thought the interview we did with him would have had an effect. Some of our
main criticisms of him centred around that song. He had
expressed the fear that his songs could become like honks
from a passing limousine. We had argued that Right On Sister
was exactly that in a way that Glad to be Gay was not. He
said he felt the need to express his support of the women's
movement. But a far more supportive thing would have been/

is to write a song about men, a group of people he is part of,

to write about traditionally male behaviour, machismo and
so on, so as to get the men he reaches with his music to think
about their behaviour, which is so oppressive of women, and
perhaps to re-examine it and change it. Instead he and Danny
Kustow reinforce it by their behaviour on stage and yet sing
a song 'supportive' of the women's movement.
Coming from someone who is a star, and so is seen as
separate from everyday life, TRB's songs seem separate from
everyday experiences. They are about the future ( Winter of
'79) or other sorts of people (women in Right On Sister) or
exhortative of others (Don't Take No For An Answer). The
personal experiences of the band members do not come
through, and we are left being encouraged by people who
don't have the same material circumstances as ourselves, but
are just passing by our part of the struggle. Tom Robinson's
politics would seem much more real if he and the rest of the
band were to sing songs not just about what is happening to
blacks or women or gays (which are important issues to sing
about in themselves) but also about what it is about being
white, male and heterosexual that needs to change.

Letters to the Boy Next Door

But if the music business is using TRB and in particular Tom
Robinson's homosexuality to boulster its own commercial
ends, it is also clear that Tom Robinson attempts, and often
succeeds, in using his position to change his audiences, the
record companies, the media. Perhaps the most outstanding
effect has been the way he has become a focus for young
emerging lesbians and gay men, not just in this country but
as far away as Japan and the USA. He has become a focus for
young people who are coming out, a positive image to identify with that resonates with their own sexuality. Tom's mail
includes vast numbers of letters from gays writing about their
Gay Left 21

own experiences of oppression; he uses the programmes at his

concerts and his album sleeve to publicise gay facilities such as
Gay Switchboard and Icebreakers. He presents a public image
of gayness that is equated (albeit in bourgeois terms) with
success rather than failure. Gay counselling and befriending
services have recorded a great increase in calls from young
people since his increased prominence. That Tom Robinson
does come across as unsophisticated and accessible means
that there is an ever greater possibility of identification with
him by his fans than with many more 'glossy' rock stars.

Abba can certainly go further. Tom Robinson is trying to

keep in touch with his roots, by visiting gay events, by going
on political demonstrations, by taking an interest in the
people who write to him, by mingling with the crowds at his
own performances. Yet because he is a professional musician
there is suspicion, an inability of ordinary people to respond
to him except in his role, and yet without that role they
wouldn't respond to him at all.

Glad to be Gay has become a very acceptable tune to sing

along to, and there has been a danger that the content of the
song would get lost. Thus it was reassuring at a recent concert
that the band stopped playing in the middle of this song and
Tom Robinson acknowledged the fact that everyone could
easily sing along mindlessly. He showed the real significance
of the song by giving the organist a long full kiss. There were
many straight faces in the audience afterwards. Tom Robinson had used his power as a performer to confront his
audience. He is able to use this influence to affect the
` machine' as well. There has been a plethora of TRB badges
on sale, so to counter this exploitation Tom persuaded EMI
to give away free badges at the concerts; the stencil outfit
with the album enables people to make their own T-shirts
and posters rather than having to pay for them; concert
tickets are kept deliberately low.
The fact is that when you look around at a TRB gig TRB

has had an effect on all those people. He has made his

audience think about racism and fascism. They wear Anti

Nazi League badges on the same lapel as their TRB badges. If
you asked any of the thousands of people who bought the
records and go to the concerts about the National Front you
would get very clear answers and he has, to some extent, confronted them with their attitudes to gays.

Hard Facts/Soft Soap

It is difficult enough for most of us to try to avoid compartmentalising our lives: personal/political/work/play/culture ...
It is even harder to do this when 'work' takes place in a context which stresses individuality. The music business thrives
on 'individuals'. They can be marketed, manipulated, shaped
and packaged, eventually to be discarded. Someone who tries
to avoid this separateness from the more real world is
necessarily self-limiting. Gays may be able to go so far, but
Gay Left 22

"I'm involved in a massive compromise that can't be resolved

because you can't be a socialist perfume maker, because
you're dealing in a totally consumer luxury product."
The paradox for us as gay socialists is that we do not want
to support the commercial capitalist music business, but it
has succeeded in getting a song about being gay, and a selfidentified gay man, in the public eye far more successfully
than we could ever hope to do at present.... We need to
work out how best we can exploit the total situation both
before it has got too successful at exploiting us, and without
exploiting people like Tom Robinson himself. To do this
successfully we must work with people like Tom Robinson.
We must be neither seduced nor totally repelled by the 'star'
i mage, failing to see him as someone we can affect directly
and who is open to being influenced and supported by us.
We must not be fooled and deterred by the pedestal Tom
Robinson has been helped onto.
So what happens next? At Hammersmith it became clear
that, having achieved his aims, Tom Robinson could be ready
to become less 'angry' and settle into a comfortable middle
age like the rest of them, perhaps recording a solo album of
love songs as he said he might when we talked to him. A
foretaste of that came with You Turn Me On, a love song in
which there is no mention of another man, which he performed at Hammersmith, and which might well be the next
single:

"You turn me on, You turn me on

One Hell of a lot
I don't want no heavy situations
Getting high on you is all that I need . . ."
Tom Robinson goes Joan Armatrading?

Two Letters on Freud

by David Fernbach and Simon Watney

Dear Gay Left,

Thanks for inviting me to reply to Simon Watney's remarks
on my article 'Towards a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation'.
Could I start by saying a bit about myself, so that the
discussion isn't conducted simply at an abstract level? I came
into Gay Liberation in 1970 as a Marxist, very much under
the spell of the student movement of the late 1960s. In the
three years that I spent heavily involved in gay politics, I
went through all kinds of changes, in ideas and in lifestyle,
but after the collapse of GLF I could no longer find a viable
way of combining gay politics with socialism, and went back
into the straight left not that I ever rejected my belief in
gay liberation or the new things I'd learned from the gay
movement. Maybe I expected too much of the gay
movement, and wrongly believed that the civil rights struggle
could be bypassed, and the original GLF spirit of a radical
gay movement kept permanently alive. But as ever more
socialists of the 1968 generation are having to admit, it's far
more difficult to change social relations than we originally
thought, and on all fronts we have to find more gradual ways
of advancing a step at a time. At least, having failed to find
'the revolution' elsewhere, I feel drawn back to the gay
movement once again, and the fact that some of my ideas are
being discussed in Gay Left provides a useful starting-point.

The basic reason why any theoretical development of this

kind needs an injection of psychoanalytic concepts is that
gay people, unlike blacks, women or workers, are not
definable simply or primarily in terms of external characteristics (e.g. 'what we do'). It is the homosexual desire inside
our heads which sets us apart - and not because 'we were
born that way' either. Homosexuality, i.e. the choice of a
person of the same sex as sexual object, is as open a
possibility to every human being as heterosexuality. No true
liberation for gay people is possible in terms of changing
external social relations between 'gays' and `straights'; true
liberation demands the liberation of the homosexual desire,
so that this can flourish on an equal basis with heterosexuality, in which case the fact that there will always be a
certain spectrum of preference will no longer be of social
importance.

The first thing I couldn't help noting about Simon's

review was that it was neither comradely nor brotherly in
tone. I'm referred to in the academic style as 'Fernbach', and
in general the review seems more concerned to score
polemical points in an individualistic and competitive way
than to discuss in the spirit of seeking truth together. That
said, I'm very willing to accept several of Simon's criticisms,
and add a few of my own from looking back on this article
five years on; though as I'll go on to explain; I still see my
attempt at a Marxist theory of gay liberation as basically
pointing in the right direction.
As Marxists, we start out from the belief that human
history is an objective process in which certain general
tendencies of development can be traced. We also start out
with a fairly well-tested understanding of the economic
structures that play such an important part in human evolution, and at least some rudimentary ideas of how political
and cultural phenomena are articulated to this 'economic
base'. All this comes under the heading of 'historical
materialism', the only even half-way scientific approach so
far developed for studying the network of human social
relations. What this Marxist science of history cannot give us,
however, though it is highly relevant for the Marxist goal of
human liberation, is an understanding of the inner workings
of the human mind. This can only be approached in quite
other ways than the social relations that can be objectively
charted in terms of such graspable entities as movements of
goods and money, of voters and soldiers, newspapers and
tv transmissions.
Now the basic direction of my article was to take what is
fairly well established by Marxist theory, i.e. an
understanding of how capitalist relations of production
impose a certain patterning on relations between women and
men, and to try and carry this line of argument forward to
see what precisely are the limits that this system of
capitalism/family imposes on homosexuality. In this way we
can begin to get a clearer idea of the possibilities opened up
for homosexuality by the changes in the capitalism/family
system that are taking place today (in particular on the basis
of effective and quasi-universal birth control), and those
further changes that we can expect from a socialist transformation of the relations of production. Any Marxist intervention in the gay movement must base itself on some such
conception of the connections.

A theory of gay liberation must then try to show how the

prevailing social relations, which historical materialism can
analyse, repress or sublimate the homosexual desire relatively
successfully in most individuals, and fail to do so, often even
to the point of repressing heterosexual desire, in the gay
minority. And it is only the tendency in psychology deriving
from Freud for all his, and its, inadequacies which is able
even to talk of such things, to see the human mind as a
material system with a force of its own, reducible neither to
biology nor to external social relations, and their 'conditioning'. As soon as we talk of such things as homosexual
desire, rather than just homosexual behaviour, we are using
psychoanalytic concepts. These concepts are absolutely
necessary, which is not to say that they need no further development, nor that the specific theories put forward within
this conceptual framework are always correct.
Because I introduce certain basic psychoanalytic concepts,
Simon calls me a 'dogmatic Freudian', who 'assumes a universality of sexual forms'. But on this very point I specifically criticize Freud, i.e. for presenting the view children
form of the presence or absence of the penis, as a natural
`discovery', rather than a social ideology retailed to them by
parents and educators. Later, I specifically argue that as
women gain social independence, 'they will gradually stop
forcing their children through the castration complex, and instead will teach their little girls how to use their clitoris, and
Gay Left 23

teach the little boys that their penis, though bigger, is by no

means better, and also has its disadvantages....The abolition
of the castration complex will finally allow male and female
children to develop both their homosexual and heterosexual
trends in a non-compulsive and non-male-dominated way'.
However imperfect, my attempt is precisely to show sexual
forms as the product of changeable social relations.
Further on the subject of Freud, I willingly concede that
the orthodox Freudian theory of the mechanism of gender
differentiation is over-simple. Let us then go on to study
more recent developments in psychoanalysis, particularly the
work of theorists with some understanding of the historical
character of social relations and in particular of women's
oppression. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Simon feels that part of my 'dogmatic Freudianism'
is to locate the genesis of female and male homosexuality
`solely on the terrain of some purely genital consciousness
penis envy, etc.' I agree absolutely that homosexual desire,
which itself can take different forms, involves more that the
classical Freudian theory takes into account. But for better
or worse, we are defined by our distinct 'genital conscious
ness' I can't see any way out of that!
The weakest part of my article is undoubtedly the attempt
to show the changing economic relations of capitalist
development affected state policy towards homosexuality via
the requirements placed on the family. The reasons why state
repression of homosexual behaviour has varied so greatly in
intensity are undoubtedly far more complicated than I presented them. But even here, I would stand by my basic theme
that it was the difficulty of heterosexual marriage (economic
burden of children in a situation with no effective birth control) that required particularly strong sanctions against homosexuality, whereas today, when heterosex can so easily be
practised without any economic cost (which is why the traditional moral proscriptions are breaking down here, too), the
homosexuality that lurks outside the gates of the family is
that much less of a threat to the reproduction of the population. 'The state can step out of the arena of sexual orientation, for sexual orientation is no longer relevant to the reproduction of labour-power'. If Simon disagreed with this,
let him argue the point. But please don't present me as
holding the ridiculous position that this is a universal law of
human society, rather than a connection in the specific history of Western capitalism. Of course, in many societies 'preand extra-marital homosexual activity [is] successfully institutionalized and contained', rather than being simply
proscribed, as in the West. But these are all societies where
heterosexual marriage is tightly welded into the relations of
production and binding on all individuals, quite different to
the situation of industrial capitalism where male workers can
live and work quite happily without getting married.
Finally, on the question of strategy, I'm glad Simon agrees
that 'gay people can [not] be organised against the capitalist
state and for socialism on the basis of civil rights'. But again
he distorts my position. Of course gay people's lived experience of the family is crucial for us, as for everyone else. But
a movement of gay people for civil rights, etc. is nevertheless
a movement of people who, in their great majority at least,
are not living in a family situation, nor are involved in
bringing up children. (Not that gays should not strive to be
more involved in this.) There is a serious tension between the
spontaneous direction taken by a movement of gay people
the minority in whom the proscribed homosexual desire is
dominant, and the direction of gay liberation in the sense of
the liberation of the homosexual desire for everyone. At its
extreme, we see this in the American gay male movement's
explicit attempt to win the full privileges enjoyed by men in
the present society, while being free of straight men's family
responsibilities. And we see it at the cultural level in the ever
stronger 'macho-ization' of gay society.
While I can no longer see the transition from capitalism to
communism, as I still did in 1973, as a revolutionary explosion in the classical sense, I still believe that gay Marxists
have a particular contribution to make in helping to fuse our
specific critique of the present system of social relations together with the traditional socialist critique not just in
theory, but also in terms of a practical movement. I gladly
Gay Left 24

take back my 'depressing Leninist railings against 'opportunism', 'reformism', etc.' But from a gay Marxist perspective,
i.e. one that sees gay liberation as dependent on the
dissolution of gender roles and the reorganization of childrearing and domestic living to fit in with a reorganised
economy, there is a real problem of how to relate to the gay
rights movement, particularly for those of us who cannot
point to any existing Marxist grouping as the vanguard of
human liberation. Here I don't claim to have any answers;
this is what I've come in from the cold to look for.
Love and solidarity,
David Fernbach

Simon Watney replies:

David Fernbach takes exception to the tone of my review
( Gay Left 6) of a recently republished edition of his 1973
paper, Towards a Marxist Theory of Gay Liberation. Before
going on to discuss the major arguments in his letter, as they
appear to me, I should like to consider his point concerning
the use of surnames, which is not without significance. I
myself find it rather odd to be addressed as Simon by anyone
I don't actually know. This may well be aspective of my own
social construction as a man, but at the same time the use of
Christian names in our society does imply an intimacy which,
especially in print, is all too often spurious. I shall therefore
continue to refer to "David" as "Fernbach", and to "Karl"
as "Marx", employing a straightforward conventional
abbreviation which, whilst it is not intended to sound
"uncomradely", does not suggest a misleading and to my mind
rather liberal notion of some ineffable and universal
"brotherhood" to which I simply don't subscribe.
Having got that much off my chest I should like to dispute
Fernbach's claim that Marxism provides us with no means to
an understanding of the "inner workings of the mind". In so
far as I accept the validity of these terms to begin with, we
seem to have a direct disagreement. Further, I think that "an
injection of psychoanalytic concepts" is the very last thing
we need, at this or at any other time.
I am highly sceptical then about Fernbach's (and Freud's)
subjectivist assumption that the mind has mysterious and
autonomous "inner workings". Such an asumption can only
be based upon an a priori acceptance of the ideology of
Psychoanalysis which, as V.N. Volosinov argues,
("Freudianism:'A Marxist Critique. Moscow 1927. London
1976.) has at its heart a "sui generic fear of history, an
ambition to locate a world beyond the social and the historical, a search for this world in the depths of the organic". He
goes on to quote from the sixth of Marx's Theses on
Feuerbach: "The essence of man is not an abstration
inherent in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble
(aggregate) of social relationships." Psychoanalysis is one of
those pseudo-scientific philosophies which, to paraphrase
Marx on Feuerbach again, urge theory into mysticism rather
than towards rational studies of human practice.
In this context it seems to me that David Fernback is
turning the contemporary emphasis on the historically constructed nature of desire on its head. An emphasis is merely
shifted from what we as individual homosexuals "do", to
what we "want" to do. This is not the point of Deleuze or
Foucault or Hocquengham's arguments, all of which are
attempts to re-write human history in terms of its basic
modes of discourse and communication, such as sexuality,
without the inconvenient intervention of actual human
beings. It is not a question of being oppressed for what we
think, (who can tell?), rather than for what we "do", but of
establishing the relations between the two practices within
the material matrix of history. We all know that social
relations under capitalism oppress homosexuals. What is
much less clear is how they also contribute to the creation of
a whole range of identifications gathered together in the one
word "Gay".

I fail to see how Psychoanalysis or Freudo-Marxism, is

supposed to help us in all this. For Psychoanalysis is rooted
in a particular ideological concept of the individual which is
totally inimical to any such enquiry. It is no more "Marxist"
to accept this picture than it is to try to theorize away all
notions of the individual altogether, in the manner of
Deleuze, Foucault et al. David Fernbach appears to be
attempting to do both at the same time.
The entire theology of Psychoanalysis, from Freud to
Lacan, is founded upon a particular and at first sight seductive analysis of an all-determining infant sexuality. However,
this "analysis" merely projects judgements and values onto
infancy and childhood which are surely the exclusive
products of adult behaviour, rooted in adult social and productive relations. It is the objectivity of these relations, and
their mediation through the family, upon which Marxists
should locate and theorize the conflicts and crises of the
mind. I don't intend to take issue with individual points of
Freudian dogma used by Fernbach in his letter, but rather to
the crude assumption that "penis-envy" or "the castrationcomplex" are actual pragmatic "facts". It is precisely this
strong positivist aspect of all Freudianism, mistaking an
ideology for a description of concrete reality, which leads me
to reject the entire caboodle.

It is also my belief in the objectivity of class and of social

relations which leads me to strongly disagree with David
Fernback's flat assertion that "the choice of a person of the
same sex as sexual object is as open a possibility to every
human being as heterosexuality". This is sheer voluntarism,
suppressing or ignoring all issues of race; class, or culture (or
psychology for that matter!), and it is a voluntarism shored
up by both Freud's picture of the mind as a quasiautonomous mechanism operating independently of material
reality, and the Freudo-Marxists vision of a nebulous world
populated by material Desires and Discourses, but with
people somehow abstracted away elsewhere!
Our sexual politics are not aided by passively relecting the
wholesale sexualization of social relations which has taken
place in the name of Freud over the last fifty years. In conclusion, I still fail to see how gays can possibly be seen to
occupy their (our) own social world independently of the
values and institutions of the bourgeois family. The ghetto
remains neither that wonderful nor that grim.....

Why I Joined Gay Sweatshop......

Gay Sweatshop is a theatre company composed of lesbians and gay men who produce and perform plays,
most of which they have written or developed themselves, which are about the experiences of being gay.
Their shows have toured both this country and abroad, playing to audiences of gays and non-gays. We have
often referred to them in our Gay Left editorials as being an important part of gay culture and a means of
people coming in contact with positive images of homosexuality. We asked them if they would like some
space in the magazine to write about themselves, in whatever way they wanted. What follows is their contribution a number of personal perspectives.
The most political statement that a man who works as an
actor could make is to say that he's doing it because he enjoy
enjoys dressing up and pretending.
But No! comes the cry:
"I want to perform Great Art" (Classical Actor)
"I want to perform Great Art to the People" (Socially
Committed Classical Actor)
"I want to bring Enjoyment to humdrum lives" (Rep.
Actor)
"I want to bring Reality to humdrum lives" (Fringe Actor)
"I want to bring Enlightenment to humdrum lives"
(Socially Committed Fringe Actor)
"I want to create a Revolutionary Base in the Established
Theatre (Revolutionary Classical Actor)
"I want to create a Revolution" (Revolutionary Fringe
Actor)
Me: What about the sequins, my dears?
Under our present system of values, any form of work that is
'feminine' (ie about fun, fantasy, that is not about the production of material commodities) is not 'proper' work, and is
therefore `un-manning'. To be a man is to suffer the insufferable; to struggle; to provide. Any pleasure in work is dubious,
particularly those things we all took pleasure in as children,
things that have no place in the harsh adult world, except as
indulgences for 'the weaker sex'.
The actor who says that his prime motive and pleasure in
his work is putting on frocks and showing off to his friends is,
quite simply, Blowing the Gaff. The other things (Art, Social
Commitment, Politics) may come into it; but I maintain that
the statement of simple, self-ish pleasure as the prime mover
is the most political statement, for a man to make. But most

Mary someone or other (Alan Pope) witn her American visitor, a Ms Bryant
(Drew Griffiths) in 'Manmad'

actors would run a mile before they'd made it; and that's

because, although the Theatre does have many 'out' or 'semiout' Gay men amongst its workers, it is a terribly Straight
industry. It's basically run by a team of men in suits; women
don't get a look in; it's presented as a respectable part of the
Economy, or the National Culture, or the Working Class
Struggle (depending if you're in Shaftesbury Avenue, the
South Bank, or a meeting hall). The notion that creative
activity is a means of personal fulfilment and enjoyment is
given a very low profile indeed. And it's very, very strict
about this. That's why all those Gays who are supposed to
infest the woodwork of every theatre (never statistically
proven in a comparison with other industries) do so at the
price of silence; the theatre may have provided some refuge
for us in a hostile world, but only at the cost of colluding in
Gay Left 25

our own stereotyping. And of course, Lesbians don't even

have that dubious option. They don't exist in the theatre.
Now, to Gay Sweatshop. I've long had the suspicion that
GS is heartily disliked, and I don't just mean by all the prejudiced and the officious around the country; but by people
in the same industry as ourselves. And I think that's because
we have Blown the Gaff: the Gaff being the myth that Gays
feel all safe and cosy in the Straight Male theatre world,
where we are occasionally thrown a titbit (a play by a nonGay writer, say, in which we all end up murdering each
other). And what's really interesting is that, although the
notion of autonomous Women's or Black groups has taken
root, the same recognition has not been extended towards
Gay men and Lesbians. The cry of "Ghetto" goes up from
those very people who coo over the idea of autonomous
Black theatre.
Is it that they can't make the connections as far as Gays
are concerned? The real reason for their disdain, horror, or
cool support is, I suspect, that the Cissies have come out on
the shopfloor. We've put all those big butch numbers
( whether on the stage of the National, or in a touring Left
group) in a nasty situation, and their response is to be even
Bigger and Butcher. They don't like Gays in the theatre going
public; they're scared stiff of being associated with one of the
cissies who'd much rather put on a cossy and some slap, than
clock in at Fords every day.
I'm in Gay Sweatshop because, after working in the
theatre for 12 years (Rep, West End, Community, Political
and Fringe) I know it's only with Gay people that I can begin
to draw my sexuality and my politics together in creative
work. I don't want to work with people who are busy recreating the alienation between what you are and what you
do; who think that the best way to woo the People towards
Change is by claiming that the business of acting is as drab
and slogging as the lives they imagine their audiences lead. I
know that in GS, no-one is labouring under the delusion that
there is a split between the political objectives and the personal dreams and fantasies of the individual members of the
company.
NOEL GREIG

`normal' mathematicians. It wasn't till my last ditch attempt

to have a relationship with a woman failed that I finally
began to think that I had to come to terms with being Gay.
I'd still run a mile if I saw anyone wearing a Gay badge (rare
in Oxford even in 1973) but I did allow myself to start
having sexual fantasies about men. I also started to do a lot
more acting in College productions at about this time. I
didn't tell anyone I was Gay until I left university. Then, I
began to reject the uncommitted, liberal intellectual stance
that places such as Oxford encourage, and to become just a
weeny bit socialist; though I'd not made any connection
between politics and Gayness. So when I joined a left wing
theatre group called Mayday, I kept very quiet about being
Gay. It wasn't the sort of theatre I wanted to do, and my
heart wasn't entirely in the politics, so, having accepted that
I wished to be an actor, I obtained a place at a drama school.
I'd started going to Gay discos at this time, and made no
secret of my Gayness at the school. Just as I was about to
leave, Gay Sweatshop advertised for actors and I went along
very apprehensively, because:
1. I was still scared of being publicly identified as Gay.
2. I didn't know what I'd tell my family if I got the job.
3. Drama school had made me feel that "You just have to go
into rep. for the next five years, darling".
4. It might not be theatrically exciting enough.
I couldn't have been more wrong about the last point: I
was employed to take a part in "As Time Goes By". At first
I told my parents I was in a group called plain "Sweatshop"
(I'd considered and rejected "Happy Sweatshop") but eventually came out to my mum and the rest of them. Working
with Sweatshop, my apologetic attitude towards my Gayness
has disappeared (I also became quite distant towards my
straight friends for a while); I've felt incredibly lucky to be
able to work with other Gay people and what's more to be
'doing theatre' with them. This summer I went to Aberystwyth for nine weeks to be in "Joseph and his Amazing
Technicolour Dreamcoat", and at times, being one of those
eleven brothers was like being back at school in a rugby
team: it made me realise I didn't want to do just anything in
order to be working ("It's all experience, darling" is the
drama school maxim). However, I do feel the need to do
Stephanie Pugsley, Sandra Lester, Noel Greig and Philip

Homosexuality doesn't exist in North Devon, where my

family has a small, rather ramshackle farm. I always knew I
was a cissy, because I didn't like "going out on the farm"; I
preferred to stay at home playing with my sister's doll,
making cakes, or dressing up as 'beautiful ladies'. I heard the
word 'homo' on the school bus at the age of eleven and it all
began to dawn on me. I spent the next ten years trying to
straighten myself out; putting myself through rigorous 'normalising' programmes: looking at pictures of female nudes
while masturbating and censoring all fantasies about sexual
contacts with other boys or men. Despite this, I think I
sensed it wouldn't work, and that one day I'd have to escape
from the family and North Devon.
At Barnstable Grammar School, my two main interests
were academic achievement and acting. My early training in
performing had been at the Methodist Chapel, where I began
speaking 'recitations' at the age of three. I always wanted to
be an actor, but felt that it was a bit of a 'good for nothing'
and effeminate profession, and that the way to 'social security' was through University (how right I was). I thought I'd
really made it when I got a place at Oxford. I was still very
diffident about acting, but was also discovering that I
couldn't be the star of my college modern language course. I
was still trying to be heterosexual: all mv friends were very

work outside Sweatshop, in spite of mv commitment to the

company and the Gay movement. Perhaps I have an ambivalent attitude towards my "acting career" in that I'm quite
ambitious as an actor. But if I do work outside the company
I would want to return because you don't "move on" from
something that has become so much part of your life and
your personal development.
PHILIP OSMENT

Gay Left 26

I joined Gay Sweatshop at a time in my life when I felt very

much at a loose end with regard to my acting career. During
the previous three or four years my political awareness and
commitment to Gay politics were beginning to crystallise,
leaving me feeling somewhat high and dry with regard to my
function as an actor and director within both conventional
and fringe theatre.
My concern for positive media images of Gay people, and
the potentials of Gay culture and alternative relationships
meant that I could no longer make the conventional compromises Gay performers have to make in order to work at all,
ie by either condoning heterosexist behaviour, by playing
heterosexual stereotypes, or by performing anti-Gay material
(playing homosexual stereotypes). This effectively means
either turning down, or not even bothering to apply for, practically 100% of work in theatre, film, television and radio.

and in thinking this through I became aware of the link

between society's attitude to women and its attitude to gay
men both were treated as lesser beings. But I also began to
see how necessary it was that lesbians and gay men unite to
present two different, but two complementary attacks on
those forces which would have us all, gay and straight, conform to the dreary stereotypes peddled by the advertisers of
beer and washing powder.
In short I too had concluded that actors could not negate
their responsibility to the political content of their play,
whether it be "Hamlet", "Blithe Spirit", or "As Time Goes
By". But on a more personal level I was surprised and
delighted to find that this responsibility also made acting ten
times more exciting. And that is why I decided to stay with
Gay Sweatshop.
MARTIN PANTER

Conventional theatre offers little in general, and practically nothing positive in terms of either a critical approach
to heterosexist behaviour, or the exploration of serious alternatives. Fringe theatre occasionally tries, but since even left
wing theatre companies still function under sexist ethics,
they have not come very far, and any involvement they may
have with a critique of sexism is usually only tokenistic.
The opportunity Sweatshop provides, is a context and
environment in which we (Gay people) can explore and
present our perceptions and philosophies of Gay politics, lifestyles and potentials, IN OUR OWN TERMS, and the
relationship between the politics of sexuality to existing
political ideologies, without the interference of those groups
who do not take our politics seriously.
My personal, primary concern, is towards the Gay community and those Gay people for whom coming to terms
with their sexuality is still a problem. I want to see Sweatshop performing, and holding discussions in secondary
schools, I want to see Gay teenagers working with Sweatshop
telling the Gay and non Gay community their stories ... why
are we not doing that? Ask Mary Whitehouse.
PHILIP L. TIMMINS

When I left drama school, eighteen months ago, my first concern was to find any job as an actor: to persuade someone,
anyone, actually to pay for dressing up and pretending to be
somebody else in front of lots of people. Gay Sweatshop was
the first company to make me such an offer an offer I
couldn't refuse. So for me a more pertinent question would
be "Why did I decide to stay with Gay Sweatshop?"
Prior to drama school I had spent three years in the balmy
quadrangles of Cambridge where theatre was a leisure
activity, chosen in preference to rowing or croquet on the
Fellows lawn. True, I had also joined the university Gaysoc,
but never in my most fitful dreams had it occurred to me to
incorporate these two areas of my life.
Drama school reinforced this separateness. At the WebberDouglas Academy the gospel of professional non-involvement
was preached. An actor should be a well-oiled machine
capable of miming all emotions, but of feeling none; acting as
a job of work. A season in local rep was our shared ambition
there, the first step towards shimmering stardom.
Ten weeks with the women's company of sweatshop
therefore sent me reeling. It was a baptism of fire. I was the
only man in a company of women whose feminism was not
only the keystone of day to day living, but also, more specifically, the avowed reason for their being in this production.
For a long time I could not reconcile myself to the separatism the women considered so fundamental to their continued
strength. At university and drama school this had not existed,
and I found it painful to be constantly reminded that my
masculinity, a concept I never felt I had represented, had
become a barrier between me and the other members of the
company.
However over this period I came to understand the importance of women establishing their own lives away from men,

Jill Posener, Patricia Donavan and Martin Panter in 'Care

and Control'
As a child I wept at movies when a woman suffered at the
hands of a man or when the pit fell in and the miners were
killed because of the owners' greed: it was natural for me to
weep at human suffering. Self-sacrifice was also an occasion
for tears; the unmarried mother whose daughter never called
her `Mamma'; the giant ape who held the heroine aloft in his
palm as the island sank and the waters closed over his head. I
wept at bravery in the face of hardship ("As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again") and single-minded determination achieving the impossible (The children marching into
the village singing "Nick, nack, paddy wack, Give a dog a
bone, This old man came rolling home.") But what moved
me most of all was hope, when individuals representing
collective consciousness express the hope that the future will
be better than the present or the past because it is within our
power to make it so: the crippled child taking its first few
faltering steps across the sun-drenched valley; Scarlett O'Hara
saying "After all, tomorrow is another day."
To quote Michael Davidson, "There are, I suppose, three
kinds of rebelliousness: the bread-and-butter sort, kindled
when people who see they're getting a raw deal try to bash
authority; the philosophic, which brings academics, Karl
Marx or Bertrand Russell for example, to an intellectual
conclusion; and the romantic or emotional." From the foregoing it's obvious that I belong in the last category: I grasped
the ideology long after the emotional commitment was made.
That happened in ... well, a brief history... From 1967 to
1974 I was busy pursuing a career in the straight theatre. I'd
heard somewhere about painted freaks in the South wearing
silly clothes and saying ridiculous things and assumed it was
part of the queenery I found.so unappealing. When I arrived
in London in 1973 I saw them for myself and decided what
they represented was definitely not for me. But there was a
nagging doubt: perhaps these people were having a better
time than I was; perhaps my weekend gay status was incompatible with the hardworking, asexual, professional actor
image I presented during the rest of the week. The doubt
remained until I joined Gay Sweatshop in 1975. I joined with
great fear and trepidation after all, I could be ruining my
career (I remember vividly the first press call when I delibGay Left 27

erately dissociated myself from the group, sat with my back

to the cameras, afraid of being publicly identified as homosexual) but somehow found the courage to direct two of the
plays in the first season. At the end of the first six months I
knew that the previous seven years had been a preparation
for this.
It's now nearly four years later. Some of the people I
dismissed as painted freaks are my friends, everyone I know
knows I'm gay, and yes, probably, I have ruined my career as
far as straight theatre goes though it's remarkable how
little I care. Presently I am working on a play with Noel Greig
called Only Connect. It was because of my experience in
Gay Sweatshop that I began to do just that. Of course I am
aware that there are an infinite number of connections still
to be made: for example, though pledged to it I still find the
collective method of working extremely difficult; I internalise attacks upon the group as attacks upon me personally
and find it almost insupportable when these come from other
gays; I sometimes wonder whether acting in plays albeit
gay plays for gay audiences (vacuously denigrated by many as
`preaching to the converted') is not akin to fiddling while
Rome burns. But the hope remains that someday the conditions will have altered sufficiently to make these connections possible. And I am aware that it is only through our
own efforts that the present conditions will be altered. The
last sentence ties in the child weeping at the movies with the
emotional rebel and who I am now.
Who I am now went to the theatre the other night to
watch The Lady from the Sea. At the end of the play Dr.
Wangel has no alternative but to give his wife, Ellida, her
longed-for and warranted freedom. Ellida free at last to
choose her own destiny, entirely responsible for her own
actions, having gained the right to self-determination
becomes mistress of her own fate and decides what is best for
her. I wept again.

why i worked with gay sweatshop and why i've just

left.
i didn't have very idealistic reasons for joining gay sweatshop
2 years ago. i soon became a burning idealist, gay sweatshop
had the corner on my life. i haven't very idealistic reasons for
leaving. maybe burning idealists just burn themselves out. i
wrote a short play about my life growing up as a lesbian, it
was a very tentative piece of writing politically and theatrically but it was true and somehow it worked. the three of us
who had put on the first production of the play were invited
to perform the play during gay sweatshop's season at the
ICA. mary, kate and i joined sweatshop still very unclear
about our own feelings about being suddenly elevated to the
position of 'spokespeople'. 2 years later i think i'm just
recovering from that, finding out i'm not the extrovert, catalystic, heavy, clear, dynamite dyke of the press image. mind
you, i was called plump, pretty by "ms london" magazine so
at least someone saw the truth!
i do know that people have been afraid of me, i know that
i've been aware of that and maybe used it. the sweatshop
machine has afforded me a certain licence.
some really great things have happened, for me the best
was this year, gay pride week and our benefit performance
when we shared all that is best about being part of sweatshop
with some of the gay community the cohesionthe
supportivenessthe creativitythe pride and the energy.
but tiredness, and the chaos of my life has become too
much. i've left sweatshop with some trauma anger and pain,
but i've left knowing that it has been the most extraordinary
experience i've ever had, and sometimes the most marvellous.
i'll never forget it
jill posener

If Gay Sweatshop is about anything then, as far as I'm

concerned, it's about that: we must claim for ourselves what
Ellida demanded and finally won.
DREW GRIFFITHS

Gays and the Phoney War in

Northern Ireland
by Jeffrey Dudgeon

There is nothing complex or unusual about Northern Ireland.

Nothing about the level of gay oppression here that cannot
be easily understood. At its closest Great Britain is hardly
ten miles away whilst Belfast is in a direct industrial line
from Leeds through Manchester and Liverpool. Some thirty
miles south and west of Belfast there is a frontier zone where
the culture and industry of reformation and later capitalist
Britain met Catholic and undeveloped Ireland. Like any frontier area life is rough and old values die hard. Change is
unwelcome for it can be seen as weakness in any period of
retrenchment. Since the turn of the century the dominant
attitude in British thinking has tended toward withdrawal
from Ireland. Only the instinct of economic self interest in
Protestant Ulster has curbed the completion of the process.
Even the Conservative government deserted Stormont and
their Unionist allies in 1972.
For fifty years the Irish nation has had independence,
asserted its dignity and diverted radical and socialist effort
into aggressive nationalism. Change therein is also unwelcome, for the new bourgeoisie is hardly two generations in
control and no national sentiment can tolerate new ideals.
That sentiment is firmly based in ultramontane Catholicism
and a land based community. Dublin has never ruled Ireland.
Gay Left 28

The Communist Party, the Trotskyists and the Official

Republicans are only given a heavy media gloss whilst their
primary pursuit is "re-integration" of the national territory.
And the last group are heading outside the pale, literally,
because of increasing doubts on that score.

Any dim progressive light that has flared in the north,

like the Northern Ireland Labour Party in the 1940s and
1960s has been crushed by a pincer movement from first the
Unionists scenting a breaking of the ranks and Republicanism
secondly, sensing an opening for a programme of "socialist
anti-imperialism" amongst Protestants.
Those days are now over. Since the abolition of Stormont
and the advent of European Free Trade, the Unionist need
for power and the Catholic Nationalist grip on ideology have
withered. The present ten year war is but a warp, a last and
horrendous chance to interrupt that progress. Its strength and
length are in direct proportion to the seeming willingness of
the British establishment to consider withdrawal. From 1969
to 1976 through a ceasefire negotiated by Mr. Whitelaw
(1972), the Provisionals' greatest triumph, to a year and a
half of as yet unrescinded truce organised by Merlyn Rees
(1975/1976) the prospects of withdrawal were bright. The
emergence of the Peace Movement and the advent of Roy
Mason (late 1976) have reversed the process. In reality none
of this matters since the Protestant community has been
quite total and intransigent in its opposition to unity, as the
1974 UWC strike and the hundreds of murdered Catholics
make quite plain.

the Protestant community since radical and socialist politics

have been largely in opposition to their right of self determination. The reverse is the case amongst northern Catholics.
But these generalisations though correct are shallow and
superficial outside of the national question and consequential
side-issues like attitudes to law, the police, and the traditional
British symbols of loyalty and chauvinism.
Thus the dominant influence on the lives of emancipated
gays cannot be their native communities, which do not
recognise or consider their position. Rather they are
influenced by the same Anglo-American cultural factors that
predominate amongst Gay Left readers. All of Northern
Ireland and the eastern coast of the Republic receive BBC
and ITV. London newspapers circulate throughout the island.
Sylvester throbs through the gay discos, not the showband
sound so popular in country dance-halls. A thousand people
turned up for the TRB on October 15th and cheered his
references to the anti-gay laws here. A Belfast Punk group,
"Stiff Little Fingers", did support and were wildly received
for their anti-(para)military lyrics.
Religion, the war and the arrogation of radicalism to
Republicanism are the three factors peculiar to Northern
Ireland, over and above a provincialism proportional to prosperity and distance from London. A 1968 opinion poll
survey on church attendance produced the following statistics, startling in their differences:
At least weekly
Monthly
Seldom or never

CATHOLIC
95%
1%
4%

PROTESTANT
46%
18%
36%

There is no reason to believe the Catholic percentages are

significantly altered ten years later. To miss weekly Mass is
still a matter of great stress for even young and British
oriented Catholics. The momentum away from church
attendance amongst Protestants is likely to have been maintained over the decade. There has been no evangelical revival
in Protestantism emerging out of the war except from a small
group of ex-paramilitaries on whom standard Protestant guilt
and shame have been working, eroding the certainty and
pride which legitimised so many blood-curdling killings.
(Since late 1976 the UDA and UVF have been largely dormant.)

So far in ten years we have wasted two thousand lives. If

anything, Irish unity is further off than ever for Northern
Ireland is being inexorably re-integrated into the United
Kingdom. Without a devolved legislature Westminster has
direct control, and the benefits of progressive law are filtering through. Divorce law reform is on the statute book ten
years after England and Wales. Gay law reform seems possible
in 1979, twenty-two years after the Wolfenden committee
reported. None of these improvements were at all possible
with a devolved legislature and it is to be hoped one never
returns. Indeed it would be in the best interests of gay and
progressive people in Scotland and Wales to vote against their
legislative assemblies in the referenda next year. Provincial
politics are inevitably dominated by the more conservative
elements.
Independent Ireland provides a further example divorce
is prohibited in the constitution, the import but not sale of
contraceptives has just been legalised by judicial appeal. The
last Prime Minister Cosgrave voted against his own government's bill to allow married couples only to have access to
birth control devices! Male homosexuality is totally
forbidden. In the south despite the high incidence of visible
and vocal radicals social change is strictly determined by
non-governmental processes. Events not people are in charge
there. In the north there is a traditional reactionary bias in

These different levels of piety and participation may be

misleading. Most gay Protestants except the Anglo-Catholic
variety have easily abandoned their faith but their Protestant
ethic does not abandon them. The fewer gay Catholics (and
straight) who reject the church tend to have a period of crisis
and are then freed of religion and the attendant socialisation.
In Cara-Friend, the local befriending and information service,
there is a proportion of callers with religious problems, but
the answer is the same as would be given in England. Only in
Belfast and Dublin are there gay bars and clubs, which makes
for a small enclosed and friendly gay community in the
island. The city of Belfast has a population of half a million
people and is 70% Protestant. Sectarianism is a rare and
unpopular phenomenon amongst gays. We are few enough in
number, in most cases dislodged from the parent community
and pointedly uninvolved in working class prejudice and
paramilitary activity. Most gays are single and therefore
richer than their peers, living in flats or buying houses they
become declasse or bourgeois.
Around the beginning of July there is however tension,
restlessness in bars. Fights become more frequent, sectarian
remarks can be heard being muttered. Whispering is noticeable. Often it is.designed to be inoffensive, people not wishing the full extent of their national attachments to be known
to their opposite religion friends. It is not a question of gay
consciousness superceding sectarianism, rather it is a mixture
of middle class values arid sex. That "the penis is not prejudiced" may be the starting point but it certainly releases
gays from the traditional suspicions and segregation of
Belfast.
There have been two trolling murders in the city over the
last six years. Both occurred on the 11th July near the river.
Both victims were Protestant and their deaths were bizarre
and revolting. One was strangled with wire, the other mutiGay Left 29

lated and stabbed. The riverbank trolling zone edges on

Catholic areas. The 11th July is a night of Protestant
triumphalism which in turn appears to evoke a ritual response
in some psychopathic Republicans. What better victim than a
"degenerate" Protestant to bring out macho violence.
An opinion poll in January 1978 which asked 1009 people
whether they favoured homosexual and divorce law reform
showed the province as evenly divided with a sizeable majority in favour in the middle class, Belfast, Protestant and
young groups. The future looks brighter.
ALL
Greater
ADULTS 16-34 35-44 45- Caths Prots ABC-1
Belt
For
41 29
33
57
47
56
54
Against
45 52
32
37
53
33
29
D/Know
13 50
12
14
16
11
16
Such opinions give the lie to the theory that Northern
Ireland is rampantly reactionary and would compare favourably to the north of England. Perhaps the gay organisations
in the province can take credit for their monumental efforts
in public education. They will get little or no credit from the
gay community which is naturally resentful of boat-rocker,
talent snatching student types as the gay leadership is characterised here and indeed elsewhere. Support for NIGRA
during the Gay Raids was muted in the community. Some
plainly believed we had brought the police activity upon ourselves as indeed we had, for the RUC stated openly it was
their intention to break the gay organisations, and luckily
concentrated on the twenty most open and committed gay
men in the province. The Director of Public Prosecutions
concurred when he ordered charges to be laid against the
Director, Secretary, and Treasurer of Cara-Friend and one
other (two couples, ail over 21). A year after the first arrest
Sam Silkin, the Attorney General, finally put a stop to the

farce and ordered the DPP off. At that time we were in

receipt of no support from local political groups, our major
allies were journalists here and in England. The Northern
Ireland Office under Merlyn Rees was indifferent to our pleas
and was only prompted into reply by Liberal MPs Beith and
Freud.
Direct rule has been a liberating experience in many ways
and the introduction of more aspects of Labour legislation
like the Abortion Act must be fought for. Ironically during
the police persecution Cara-Friend was in receipt of a 750
grant from the Department of Health and Social Services,
since increased to 1.300. This was a civil service decision,
later underwritten by Lord Melchett, the Minister of State,
which would have been unthinkable in the days of devolved
parliament.
As the level of violence diminishes so does the tension in
the city. Once gays were the majority population in the
centre of Belfast at night. Both gay clubs were located in the
enclosed gated area, and most other pubs and clubs closed at
9pm. But the night-life is returning, pedestrians are no longer
rarities. The NIGRA/Cara-Friend gay centre, a three storey
terraced house in the university area, is being used more and
more. Women's groups and the radical feminist section of the
movement are gaining strength partly as radicalism abandons
the dead-end of Republicanism.
Even in England, people must be beginning to doubt the
efficacy of support for nationalism. Though Ireland is an
island and all those who live thereon are Irish, sea water does
not constitute nations, people do, and there are self-evidently
two national tendencies in Ireland both with their own fiefs.
To support one or other is to support aggressive nationalism
not national liberation. Rampant nationalism is literally the
death knell for gay liberation.

TheMaking of 'Nighthawks'
by Bob Cant
Anyone who went to see the Images of Homosexuality season
at the National Film Theatre in 1977 hoping to see positive
gay-identified images would have come away disappointed.
The images were largely of isolation, despair, suicide and
various forms of homophobia. But even where the images
were more positive they still tended to be images which
objectified gays. The film makers had looked at gayness from
a straight point of view as something alien.
Although films made since the emergence of the gay
movement have often been more sympathetic to gays than
those made previously, mainstream films have never broken
with the heterosexist ideology which is implicit in the
traditions of both Hollywood and Soviet Mosfilm. We know
that the good guy will get the beautiful girl. There's never
any doubt that Humphrey Bogart will get Lauren Bacall; in
Casablanca when he gives up Ingrid Bergman he takes on
noble, tragic characteristics. Even in more modern films
which have been influenced by feminism such as Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore the woman still gives up her
hard-won independence for a man. Heterosexual monogamy
or its tragic absence is essential to the representation of
personal relationships in most mainstream films which are
around today.

The Context
The commercial films which have examined gay relationships
have not veered from acceptance of this particular tenet.
Boys in the Band encourages us to feel sorry for all those
gays who can't get it together in couples; The Killing of Sister

Gay Left 30

George suggests that the problems of being in a lesbian

couple are insuperable; even a liberal film like Sunday,
Bloody Sunday attempts to make us admire the stoicism of
the Peter Finch character in the face of his gayness. I am not
saying that these films are totally insignificant or dreadful,
but none of them poses any real possibility of a gay life-style
on gay terms.
For such films we can really only look to film makers who
are part of the gay movement. The early 70s saw the production of Rosa von Praunheim's It is not the Homosexual who
is Perverse . . . This encapsulated the optimistic atmosphere
of the period as the central character rejects various forms of
the closet and opts for liberation in a Marxist-oriented
commune. Saturday Night at the Baths is of a later period
and looks at gay liberation capitalist style. It was made with
the participation of some of the gay community in New
York. It takes the idealistic/individualis tic view that anyone
can be gay if they want but the gayness examined is really
limited to sexual practice rather than any wider identity. But
all the films that have been made with any level of gay consciousness have been so few that they tend to be discussed to
death. It is still very difficult for any such film to be seen on
its own merits. Expectations are therefore very high for the
recently produced Nighthawks; so high that they cannot
really hope to be met.

Paid Pipers Play Own Tune

The idea for this film was first publicly posed by the director,
Ron Peck, in 1975. He had himself been a school teacher in

Ron Peck on set.

London and he wanted the film to be about the split life of a
teacher who leads a closeted gay existence and then takes the
first steps towards coming out. Another dimension was added
to this theme by the impact of the case of John Warburton.
He was a gay teacher who was effectively sacked by ILEA for
answering his pupils' questions about his gayness. The central
character of Nighthawks, Jim, finds himself in a similar
situation and he, too, comes out in the classroom.
In the intervening three years Ron Peck has been largely
concerned with two tasks working around the film in the
gay community, and raising money. He has spoken to hundreds of gay men who have shown interest in the film either
because their experience was relevant to it or because they
wanted to appear in it. From this he eventually hewed out a
script which ran along the lines of 'All You Need to Know
About Gay Oppression And How To Fight It In London In
The 1970s'. The final script or perhaps it would be
clearer to call it a shot-by-shot outline was the product of
endless interchange between Ron, his co-director Paul
Hallam, and many members of the gay male community.
This outline was in the nature of a cinematic manifesto of
gay liberation including, as it did, scenes from the Brixton
Gay Community Centre and the alternative disco at the
Prince Albert in North London. Both these scenes were later
dropped as the film evolved a story-line rather than a panoramic view and they were felt to be incompatible with this
narrative.
Ron's other task, raising money, was pushing him in a
rather different direction from his contacts with the gay
community. He was trying to convince various potential
sponsors that the film he intended to make was a film that
people would flock to see. The British Film Institute turned
down the film for reasons which were never fully explained
but seemed largely aesthetic; the National Film Finance
Corporation said (and this is a generous interpretation) that
it was too small for them. In fact the only official organisation which actually supported him financially was ZDF, a
West German television channel. Otherwise, the money was
raised from wealthy individuals. But this created another
problem for Ron now found himself under various pressures
to show Jim develop in a conventionally hopeful way. Such
an approach could easily have been seen as A Happy Ending
and any mechanistic solution of Jim's situation would have
created ideological problems with the gay movement. Fortunately, he resisted these pressures. By December 1977 the
necessary money (60,000 the same as the cost of a TV
commercial) had been raised or was confidently expected and
fil ming began.

A Triangular Relationship
Once filming began, however, the problems did not come to
an end; they simply changed their form. Ron was the director
but he was committed to a style of film-making that precluded any traditional directional role. The uncertainty of his
role in relation to the collective activity does seem to have
heightened tensions between at least three interest groups
involved in the making of a film.

(1) Four Corner Films Ron had been one of the four
original founding members of this team along with Jo Davis
(camera), Wilfried Thust (lighting), and Mary Pat Leece
(editing). They had worked together for several years and
had made two documentaries, On Allotments and Railman,
together. Their approach had broken considerably with many
of the established traditions of film-making and they used,
for example, almost no cutting or close-ups. Although their
treatment of subjects appears simple, their planning of shots
is a highly complex process. Nevertheless, their films are free
of much of the heavy manipulation that one finds in mainstream cinema. In On Allotments, for example, the camera
spent a lot of time looking at the kind of vegetables that are
grown there. Afterwards I realised that my perception of
allotments had been totally altered. I began to notice them in
places where I had never previously registered their existence.
A similar approach was used in Nighthawks. There was no
cutting from one character to another and few close-ups. By
striving not to create dramatic effects by the use of these
techniques, they were attempting to let the audience participate in forming their perception of the image on the screen.
This approach caused real problems in the camerawork in
the disco scenes. Jo Davis's camerawork for the pilot which
had been made in 1976 had been much criticised by some
gay men because it failed to capture the selectivity of the
cruising eyes of the central character. Much of this was
attributed to the fact that she is a woman who identifies
herself as heterosexual. But in my opinion, the problem was
actually rooted in the practice of Four Corner Films rather
than in the socio-sexual identity of the camera operator. The
problem of the cruising eye had been overcome by the time
filming began and the way the camera was used in the disco
scenes was quite different from the other scenes. The cutting
technique used in these scenes enables the audience to feel
the erotic atmosphere of the club.

Paul Hallam, Keith Cavanagh and Richard Krupp discuss a

scene.
The 'Professionals' some of the others involved in
(2)
the production, sound, lighting etc were people who had
become involved much nearer the period of shooting. The
main actor, Ken Robertson, would also come into this category. Some were gay and some were not; none of them had
been dragged from the local Job Centre but however supportive they were to the wider aims of the film their involvement
was different from that of the gay activists and the Four
Corners team. They have to continue to earn a living after the
completion of Nighthawks and their concern for the technical quality took precedence over the politics. They were
also uneasy, on some occasions, about their role in relation
to the director and to the gay activists involved. Some felt
that the film was too collective while others felt that it
wasn't collective enough.
(3)
Gay Community most of us who appeared in the
fil m saw it as 'our film' in some sense. The fact that gay men
rather than professional actors were portraying themselves
was just one indication of this. The ongoing discussions about
the script and the donations made by many gay people
Gay Left 31

towards the pre-production costs were other features of the

same involvement. Most of us, however, had no previous
experience of filming and we were often unclear about why
we needed two sets of clothes on one evening, about why we
had to wait four hours for a two minute shot at 2.30am, and
all sorts of problems of continuity. Our involvement with the
fil m induced an atmosphere of intensity and high expectations of a kind probably not often found on film sets. This
affected our attitudes particularly towards the director
some of us wanted total direction down to every last flick of
the wrist; others felt they had a far better perception of
events than he did; and others thought the very idea of a
director was redundant, if not patriarchal and oppressive. But
we were all agreed in that we wanted the film to give positive
support to gay liberation, in some form or other.

Ken Robertson and Clive Peters waiting for a shot to start.

Cut! Cut! Cut!

But apart from these tensions there were other problems in
the making of the film. The budget was the most obvious
one. Normally a feature film of this length (just under two
hours) would cost at least 400,000 to make in Britain. The
tight budget meant that mistakes and delays could not be
afforded. Diana Ruston, the sound recordist, had been asked
at first to do the sound along the lines of an Altman film
with lots of overlapping and background noise. To do this,
however, she would have needed an eight-track mixing deck
and a number of radio mikes to scatter around the set. This
was well beyond the capabilities of the budget and she had to
use directional mikes which cut down the background noise.
This meant that various scenes such as those in the pubs and
the restaurant had to be shot when they were not in regular
use. Although the result was fine, technically the representation in realistic terms was somewhat different from that
desired. The scenes were much more like film sets than
locations and thereby much more akin to the narrative norms
than the work of most other independent British film-makers.
This kinship with the mainstream was not entirely accidental.
The whole question of how far narrative is a valid form for
any radical film is a matter of heated debate and can't really
be discussed adequately here.
Another budgetary consideration-was the ratio of film
shot to film used. On Nighthawks it was 10 to 1 which is
much less than the 30 to 1 ratio which is standard in
commercial films. It is, however, much more than the average
ratio of other similar low-budget independent films.
The main reason for this relatively high shooting ratio was
the use of i mprovisation. The political importance of allowing gays to speak for themselves, as well as the cinematic
practice of Four Corners really made the use of this technique inevitable. But there were scores of problems as a
result. Many people were just intimidated by the cameras;
there was frequent confusion between the two main actors,
Ken Robertson and Rachel Nicholas James whose approach
to their roles was a professional one, and the others, who saw
their roles as being much nearer themselves. Such different
interpretations of the character structure led to different

Gay Left 32

problems of direction and script planning. One of the central

scenes in the film, when Jim and Judy drive out on the
motorway after the disastrous school dance, was first filmed
using improvisation; it was felt to be so unsatisfactory that a
line-by-line script was written; it was then filmed again with
the script to everyone's satisfaction. This particular scene
caused other problems too in terms of the director's role.
Most of the crew thought that the drive should have been
done on a set, but Ron's opinion won out and it was filmed
in a moving van. The crew consequently agreed that this was
a correct decision.

The Story So Far ...

The final version of the film which has been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival and will soon be shown by its distributors, Cinegate, at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill Gate,
London, has been cut down from seven hours to just under
two. It is essentially a narrative dealing with the split life of a
teacher, Jim. We see him in a continuous rhythm, alternating
between school and the gay scene. He is a geography teacher
in a large London comprehensive who clearly cares a lot
about his pupils although he doubts the value of much of the
content of what he teaches them. A new supply teacher,
Judy, a married woman with two children, comes to the
school and they become close. Parallel with the development
of a friendship between them we see him going to a small
club, not un-reminiscent of The Catacombs, where he gets
off with a series of men. These friendships are affectionate
enough but short lived and, as far as many of them are concerned, Jim might as well have no independent existence outside of the pick-up situation. He presents himself rather
negatively, anyway, and much of the conversation he has
with these other gay men is really only to fill in the silence.
As his relationship with Judy develops, she tells him of her
marriage which allows her almost no independence and
gradually he gets around to declaring his gayness and then
explaining its meaning. He tries to show her that his gayness
is not simply an imitation of heterosexual monogamy. As his
openness increases the pupils begin to notice and ask him if
he's 'bent'. There is no going back and he answers their questions.
His life is becoming more integrated both in terms of
coming out in the classroom and of spending time together
with Judy, and John, a gay friend. He could be about to slip
into True Love and a Happy Ending when he and John go to
Glades. There is a sense of excitement which we can feel in
Jim as they enter the disco where hundreds of available gay
men are enjoying themselves. But even in the midst of all this
enjoyment there is a claustrophobic sense that it goes no
further than the walls of the club. Glades is just one of the
larger commercial gay clubs that have become common in
the country's larger cities over the last few years. Jim
remains with John but we sense it is not for long. Despite the
kind of stability he could find with him, Jim still sees
cruising and picking up as a central part of his way of life
and they are inherent within the gay scene as it is represented
by Glades. This scene highlights the contradictions felt by so
many gay men between the search for a lasting relationship
and the search for casual sex. As Jim finally moves away
from the camera his place is taken by another man. The
camera moves into his cruising eyes just as it had moved into
Jim's earlier in the film. And so it all goes on.

Isolated Gay Finds Selfless Shoulder

Many gay liberationists have argued that the film is too
cautious and depressing. We never see him with other gay
men except in pick-up situations; we never see him in a gay
political setting; he doesn't ring Icebreakers or even read Gay
News; it's not clear that he might lose his job; there is little
humour in the film. All of this is true and, in fact, scenes
which did involve some of these aspects were cut from the
film because they were not close enough to the central narrative. Inclusion in the film might then have made the film
much more didactic than it was ever intended to be. Such a
style is not in keeping with the Four Corners' tradition of
leaving the audiences with the choice to make and the problems to think about. But by including no gay contacts other

than pick-ups the film does fall into the trap of implying that
a gay life-style is sexual contact and no more. Given the
rarity of such gay films it will be difficult for it to avoid that
interpretation.
The scenes in the film, as it stands, which are unsatisfactory are those at the school dance and at the party afterwards. Apparently, the use of improvisation here did not
work at all, and once shot, it was impossible to shoot them
again. However this very brevity makes the impact of the
social alienation that Jim feels in these scenes difficult to
relate to. It is interesting, however, that a similar image of a
gay man alone at a straight party is also used in a film made
by Lewisham CHE David is a Homosexual!
But the most serious criticism, in my opinion, is in terms
of his relationship with Judy. Because she is the only developed woman character in the film she tends to be seen as
WOMAN. She comes over rather flatly (I don't mean the
acting) and the tension that she would have felt as she
learned about Jim's sexuality is hardly explored at all. It is
true that she escapes some of the female stereotypes inasmuch as she is not seen as an object, her face is not glamorous in any fashionable way and she does not use make-up.
This is further strengthened by the film's avoidance of the
close-up technique. But she does fulfil one female stereotypical role (not so unlike the roles of 40s Hollywood stars
like Barbara Stanwyck) in as much as she is the selfless being
who lets the man cry on her shoulder, regardless of her own
needs. She makes no attempt to relate her own trap (her
marriage) with the trap (the closet) that Jim increasingly perceives himself to be in.
These criticisms apart, the film is excellent. So many
scenes the coming out to a work colleague, the restlessness
of being alone in a gay pub, conversations the morning after,
phone calls in a staff room to gay friends have a strongly
identifiable authenticity about them.

Ken Robertson and Rachel Nicholas Jones at a rehearsal of a

classroom scene.
This scene also makes one question the whole role and
purpose of education. For once Jim was talking about something which was important to him and would have an impact
on the lives of his class. It is so different from his attempts to
instil information about Canadian wheat prairies into their
unwilling heads. By sharing a part of his life with them he
makes it impossible to continue to exercise authority in the
traditional classroom manner; but he also makes it possible
to develop a new kind of relationship with these kids, based
on trust rather than authority.

Coming Out Breaking Out

In the end the film has to be judged a success. It enables us
to perceive and comprehend the split in the life of the gay
teacher and consequently, the need for him to come out.
We may regret its frequently depressing tone, the absence of
an overt gay liberation movement, the weakness of the Judy
character, but we are never left in any doubt about the
importance of coming out. And that does remain the central
tenet of the gay movement as it is now, however much we
might wish it was more. So the film, by being firmly rooted
in the ideology of the gay movement, has succeeded in breaking from the standard heterosexist ideology. Jim has begun
to live a gay life-style on his own terms. The ambivalence of
the last scene in Glades is not so different from the ambivalence that many of us feel about the fact that places like
that are sometimes taken for the supreme achievements of
the gay male community. But within that ambivalent context
the fact remains that Jim has come a long way and if he still
has a long way to go so do we all.

Footnotes

Ken Robertson with some of the children who play in the

film.

Life Class
The coming out scene in the classroom is particularly moving
and much more moving than the motorway scene
because the kids are so much more positive about their own
identification than Judy is about herself. Improvisation
again was a problem here but in quite a fruitful way for the
shifting uncertain nature of much of what they said was a
reflection of their very real uncertainty about their own
developing sexuality. Although the teenage actors claimed to
be tolerant of homosexuality, the questions they asked
revealed all the prejudice and uncertainty that makes coming
out so difficult and yet so necessary. "What if everyone was
like you?" "Do you carry a handbag?" "Won't women have
you?" A real split also emerged among the school kids,
between the punks and teds. The punks who knew Jim and
were taught by him in several scenes defended his right to do
what he wanted against the more hostile teds who were not
familiar with him.

1. The title Nighthawks comes from a picture of the same

name by the American artist, Edward Hopper, of three
rather isolated people sitting in an all-night bar.
2. Fans of Nicholas Ray will, no doubt, have noticed that
the names of the central characters, Jim and Judv, are the
same as the central characters of Rebel Without A Cause.
3. Hitchcockian influences can be seen in the shot of the
school staircase and also in Jim's change of T-shirt in the
first scene which is reminiscent of Janet Leigh's miraculous change of underwear in the opening scenes of Psycho.
4. An overview of the Images of Homosexuality season at
the NFT by Paul Hallam and Ron Peck appeared in Gay

Left 5.

5. A review of Open and Positive the storv of John

Warburton's case appears elsewhere in this issue.

The Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association needs

money for its appeal to the Commission on Human
Rights in Strasbourg. Please send cheques and postal
orders (payable to NIGRA) to the NIGRA Strasbourg
Appeal, PO Box 44, Belfast BT1 1SH.

Gay Left 33

Dear Gay Left,

After reading with interest Gregg Blachford's article
"Looking at Pornography" in issue No. 6 of Gay Left, I felt
it necessary to make some comments on his ideas about porn,
the erotica and the Socialist Morality. Unfortunately time
restricts these comments to a brief letter, however I intend
to elaborate upon the points raised below in a more detailed
reply during the next few months.

The Personal and the Political

"Looking at Pornography" starts off by referring to the
influence that Feminism has had on Socialist (Communist)
political practice and theory, with its main contribution
being its attempt at breaking down the barriers between the
personal and the political. From this the article concludes
that the personal is indeed the political. However, the point
to emphasise is that, if the personal is the political then it is
not only bound up in sexual relations, it would necessarily
relate to all our activities and thoughts. Having said this
doesn't of course belittle the importance of investigation into
sexual relations. But we must be careful not to restrict this
investigation to a narrow, onesided individualist approach, it
must be made from a class standpoint, the standpoint of the
working class and its struggle for political power, which is
something this whole article has avoided.

A Socialist Morality
'Having accepted the idea that "the personal is political" it
becomes necessary to evolve a socialist morality ... (or passing judgement on what should be considered as "proper" or
"improper" behaviour).' We have here a misconception as to
what morality is and what a communist attitude towards it
should be. Questions that remain unanswered are, 1. who
makes these 'moral judgements'? and 2. for whom and for
what purpose?
A Communist (or Socialist) morality like any other
morality is a question of class. The history of morality is the
outcome of class struggle. The morality of the bourgeoisie,
for instance, is the outcome of its class struggle, first with
the feudal nobility then with the proletariat; Proletarian
morality is the outcome of the class struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Stating that morality is just
the passing of 'judgements' on what is considered as 'proper'
or 'improper' behaviour, has the effect of putting morality
outside the class struggle and above classes. It implies that
morality 'evolves' out of the whims and fancies of certain
individuals, and does not explain how a morality comes
about. The thing to remember is that morality has been
moulded by the class struggle of the various class interests
throughout the whole history of class society, and that a
communist morality is made by the working class to serve
the interests of that class in its struggle for political power
and the construction of communism. Lenin made this point
clear, as follows: 'We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the Proletariat's class struggle.
Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of
Gay Left 34

the proletariat ... Communist morality is that which serves

this struggle and unites the working people against all exploitation.'1
By using phrases that are devoid of class interests, only
adds to the confusion about morality and leads to the conclusion that, all we need do is get the individual to bridge the
gap between their sexual behaviour and their political 'perspective' to arrive at a proletarian morality. Can this be seen
as a morality conceived by the working class for the furtherance of its struggle against the bourgeoisie for political
power?
Our investigations into bourgeois morality and that
includes sexual relations, must be undertaken to determine,
what in bourgeois morality furthers the class struggle of the
proletariat and what hinders that struggle. Our theories and
conclusions, if correct and tested through practice, will
'evolve' into a proletarian morality.

A Definition of Pornography
Here again the question of porn is dealt with from an
individualist approach, which probably stems from the
'secretive' nature of certain pornographic material.
Porn today manifests itself through the machinery of the
bourgeois mass media, e.g. newspapers, books, mags, records,
still photos, films, TV, theatre and the like, which are both
private ('secret') and public. But if the personal is the
political (which has been accepted) then porn must be
studied from a political standpoint, a class standpoint. Mistaken ideas like, 'the nature of pornography is inherently
secret, furtive, guilt ridden and essentially private' come
from an inadequate historical analysis.
It was said that 'What is considered to be pornographic
varies from culture to culture and from time to time. It
cannot be analysed as a concept or as a reality on its own. It
must be placed firmly within the structural and historical network of the economic and social relationships from which it
springs.' Here the basis of an historical analysis had been laid,
but this basis had been overlooked in Gregg's 'historical analysis' which only analysed the development of porn in just
one culture, that of the bourgeoisie. This poses the question
that porn is a relatively recent phenomenon and that there is
no need to look back any further than the last three hundred
years to understand its true nature.
To discover the origins of porn and its true nature, we
need to study the whole history of human society. For to
look for its origins and nature in just the cultural development of capitalism will not result in a concrete definition.
We must make an on-going scientific study of porn and find
out what role it has played, in its various forms, over the
whole history of human society, from its primitive state to
its most developed form. Only then will the true nature of
porn reveal itself, from which we can conclude a concrete
definition.

Pornography and the Erotica

At the end of this section on a 'definition' attempts were
made to draw a line between porn and the erotica. But without a scientific analysis of the erotica it would be difficult to
understand what the erotica is, and how it differs from pornography. Without such an analysis we end up with the same
'half baked' theories of the bourgeois intellectual, who claims
that no proper definition of porn or the erotica can be made
because of their 'problematic' nature.

What to do with Pornography?

Because a clear historical analysis and definition of porn have
not been achieved, Gregg's theories on how we should deal
with porn reveal an inadequate understanding as to how a
Communist should deal with such a question. The point to
emphasise is, does porn further the struggle of the working
class for political power? Would the working class be better
off without it?
Without actually coming down on one side or the other,
on whether porn is an asset to the working class, or not,
Gregg proposed four ways on how porn might be dealt with
and discusses the practical outcome of these theories. Which
in a 'nutshell' were: 1. Porn could be banned, but without a
clear definition this would turn out to be ineffective.
2. Greater censorship towards porn 'would be dangerous for
the freedom of expression of ideas in areas other than porn.
If censorship becomes acceptable, it will not be too difficult
for the state to move it into political areas as well.' 3. As the
demands of the Feminists are the same as the Mary Whitehouse's of this world, No Porn (although for different
reasons), we could not rely on the mass media to distinguish
between these two campaigns. 4. If a ban was imposed on
porn a black market would emerge and make porn 'even
more degraded and furtive and may even increase the demand
for it ... The real basis of sexism would remain untouched
while the sex shops in Soho have their front windows
smashed.' Gregg concludes, that a threat of a ban could be
more effective than an actual ban, then individuals would be
left to live with their consciences if they remain sexist or use
pornography. This would be the most effective way of overcoming sexism and pornography.
Presuming that the above four points and their conclusion
are related to overcoming porn and sexism in a bourgeois
society, let us look at each point as laid out above. Point 1. A
direct ban on porn would be ineffective since there is no clear
definition. We need a definition that will explain why porn
appers to have always been at the expense of the exploited
classes. Point 2. There is a danger that greater censorship on
porn could be used by the bourgeoisie to attack areas not
related to it. We have already seen how the bourgeoisie 'bend'
its own laws to suit its own interests, in the Gay News v
Whitehouse trial for instance. If the Gay Movement, or the
Women's Movement, do not ally themselves to the wider
Labour Movement their hard fought for rights and gains will
always be at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. Whether greater
censorship on porn could be effective and whether it was
used against areas not related to porn would depend upon the
strength of the forces struggling over this censorship. Point 3.
Apart from the confusion caused by no explanation being
offered as to why there is a difference between the campaign
of the Feminists and that of Mary Whitehouse for, no porn,
it is fair to say that the proletariat could never rely on the
bourgeois mass media to do anything for it, let alone explain
these differences. Point 4. and its conclusion touch upon the
important question of how we as communists should deal
with pornography and sexism. If a ban was imposed on porn
then a black market would undoubtedly flourish and the
demand for it could increase. But isn't that how the bourgeoisie would deal with porn? The question is however, how
should communists deal with porn and sexism. Is it just a
matter of legislating porn out of existence, which would have
no effect on the real basis of porn and sexism, or a matter of
campaigning amongst the masses of working people to reveal
porn and sexism for what they are, a handy means for the
bourgeoisie to cloud the minds of the workers, leaving them
confused as to whom their real enemies are, and squabble
over 'the body politic'. Lenin once said in a conversation

with a German comrade: 'The proletariat is a rising class. it

doesn't need intoxication as a narcotic or a stimulus. Intoxication as little by sexual exaggeration as by alcohol. It must
not and shall not forget, forget the shame, the filth, the
savagery of capitalism. It received the strongest urge to fight
from a class situation, from the Communist ideal. It needs
clarity, clarity and again clarity. And so I repeat, no weakening, no waste, no destruction of forces. Self-control, selfdiscipline is not slavery, not even in love.' 2 I equate porn
with Lenin's term 'sexual exaggeration' and would add, the
taking of drugs to the use of alcohol as a narcotic or a stimulus, which is just as effective in clouding the mind. The
working class must rid itself of these bourgeois habits which
blur its vision, it must gain clarity and have a clear mind to
understand whom its real enemies are. This will not be
achieved by indulgences in sexual exaggeration, drunken
stupors, or by being 'stoned' on drugs.

The 'Socialist' Feminist Versus the Gay Male

`Socialist'
The greater part of Gregg's article is taken up with an analysis
of the 'socialist' feminist line towards porn and sexism. The
`socialist' feminist holds that people should relate to each
other as complete people, instead of using each other as
sexual objects (whether it be mutual or one-sided, in the
personal form, or in the wider social form). This 'socialist'
feminist line is condemned as being 1. a denial of the erotica
( which by the way Gregg has not defined), and 2. by it being
equated with bourgeois marital relations. This 'socialist'
feminist line has been condemned because it does not adhere
to the ideas of the Gay Male 'Socialist' who accepts 'the open
and prominent place that sex, especially casual sex, plays in
many gay men's lives.' The line taken by the 'socialist'
feminist has nothing to do with bourgeois marital relations,
which generally makes one part of that relation a sexual and
economic object, a possession, which is also mimicked by the
`gay subculture'.
Sexual relations are not outside class struggle, they are
part and parcel of it and bourgeois sexual relations are the
very thing that the 'socialist' feminists attack when they
struggle for the supremacy of people being seen as complete
human beings rather than as sexual objects. To say that this
line is too close to the absolutist notion that 'sex is only
allowed within the context of marriage and that any form of
sexuality outside of that framework is perverted or criminal
or sad'; has misunderstood what this feminist line is trying to
get at. For, can't people show emotion towards each other
and love one another without using each other as sexual
objects, or adopting legal marital ties? This is the essence of
this feminist line which challenges the superemacy of sexual
objectification and struggles to put in its place the supremacy
of people being seen as real people. The condemnation of this
feminist line appears as a justification for people to continue
to use each other as sexual objects and 'to do exactly what
they want to do'. It has ignored the fact that human beings
are social beings that relate to one another in one form or the
other, and because of this fact we cannot 'do exactly what
we want to do' as something existing outside of these social
relations. Gregg has refuted the very thing he started out to
achieve, and has ended up with the 'do your own thing' libertine attitude he rejected at the beginning of his article.
Gregg Blachford's article has raised many important
questions, questions that Communists need to examine and
draw conclusions from. But this examination cannot be
undertaken from the individualist approach, it must be
undertaken from a class standpoint, the standpoint of the
class struggle of the proletariat. I hope this debate will continue and I look forward to reading what others have to say
about pornography, the erotica, and the Socialist Morality.
Yours fraternally,
Fred Bearman

Notes
1. From The Tasks of the Youth Leagues. Foreign Languages
Press, Peking 1975.
2. From Lenin on the Woman Question, Conversation with
Clara Zetkin. As published by MLWA Women's Caucus.
Gay Left 35

The Four Waves

WOMEN'S BODY, WOMEN'S RIGHT: A SOCIAL
HISTORY OF BIRTH CONTROL IN AMERICA
by Linda Gordon (Penguin Books, 1.50)

Reviewed by Sue Bruley

Linda Gordon has done us all a great service in writing this
superb account of the history of birth control in the USA.
The subject, as she readily admits, is such an integral part of
the struggle for women's emancipation as a whole that the
two cannot really be separated. She has undertaken, therefore, a mammoth task. She manages to combine a brilliant
analytical study with a vast amount of factual information.
I wish we had something comparable to it for the UK. Angus
McLaren's recent book, Birth Control in 19th Century
England, is shallow by comparison.
The author identifies three stages in the evolution of
women's right to reproductive freedom. Voluntary Motherhood was advanced by late 19th century feminists who
pressed for the social recognition of motherhood. Birth control at this time was not associated with increased sexual freedom, but the right of women to choose the circumstances
when they would undertake their social role as mothers.
From 1910-20 the movement passed into the period of

Birth Control. This term was first used by Margaret Sanger in

1915. Sanger began her public life as an organiser for the

Women's Commission of the Socialist Party, which in this
decade was a significant force in American political life (in
1912 they had 118,000 members and got 6% of the Presidential vote). Many birth control leagues were formed by
feminists who were also committed to a socialist transformation of society. As Linda Gordon points out, the birth
control movement reached its most vital and dynamic stage
at the point of its maximum integration with radicalism. For
this brief period, therefore, real possibilities existed for a
socialist-feminist practice.
Regrettably, the connections which were made at grass
roots level did not permeate through to the top. The Socialist Party leadership never committed itself to the birth
control movement and its elaborate Women's Commission
was never utilised to promote the birth control cause. As
Linda Gordon states, Sanger's defection from the left was 'as
much because the left rejected birth control as because
Sanger and her followers rejected the left'.

During the 1920s the movement gradually adopted a

liberal, reformist outlook, culminating in what the author
calls the era of 'Planned Parenthood'. The voluntary clinics,
which were mainly run by ordinary women, were replaced by
state funded clinics in which the professional, male doctor,
usually with entrenched conservative attitudes, was the
centrepiece. As the movement lost its connections both with
socialism and feminism, it became more prone to eugenicist
arguments (ie using birth control to restrict 'undesirable'
categories. This and the Neo-Malthusian argument for controlling overall population size, had been present from the
late 19th century.) Women campaigners began to openly
advocate birth control as a means of restricting the black and
immigrant populations in relation to the `yankees'. During
the 30s Sanger lost almost all the vestiges of feminism,
couching her speeches in a eugenicist framework.
Linda Gordon refers to the modern feminist movement as
the 'fourth wave'. She acknowledges that she is part of that
movement. Throwing aside any notion of academic 'impartiality' she openly declares that her work is written from a
socialist-feminist perspective. It is rare to uncover such
thorough scholarship combined with an uncompromising
political stance.
This perspective brings in a rich harvest. An example of
this can be seen in the section on the modern movement,
where she establishes the link between reproductive freedom
and lesbian liberation. Referring to the "tyranny of heterosexuality", she states that "the political power of lesbianism
is a power that can be shared by all women who choose to
recognise and use it: the power of an alternative, a possibility
that makes male sex tyranny escapable and rejectable"
(p410).
The only point where I found myself disagreeing with
Linda Gordon is in her conclusion where she says that 'most
people' want to produce children and see them develop
(p405). I don't and this made me feel abnormal, not to
mention guilty, for rejecting the conventional path of
motherhood. (Perhaps she has vestiges of the 'Voluntary
Motherhood' perspective?) This is, however, a very minor
flaw, in what is in every other respect an excellent book.
Great value at 1.50 for over 400 pages. Buy it!

Girlfriends
GIRLFRIENDS

Reviewed by Sue Cartledge

The ambiguity in the title, "Girlfriends", goes straight to the
paradox at the centre of this film. Annie and Susan are
friends and flatmates, but not lovers. There is little to suggest
even latent lesbianism in their relationship. They chat about
work and boyfriends; Annie leaves to get married in the timehonoured heterosexual pattern. Female friendships, however
strong, must fade at the advent of the all-conquering male
with his promise of husband, home and family. And yet: the
drama of the whole film hinges on the emotional intensity of
their relationship. Susan is thrown, but cannot object, when
Annie announces her impending marriage. After all, they are
only girl friends, aren't they? But still ... Annie keeps coming
back to Susan for advice should she go on writing? take a
course? just as she tried out her latest piece of writing on
her before she married. Susan's resentment and sense of loss
simmers and finally erupts in the emotional climax of the
Gay Left 36

film, when she accuses Annie of deserting her: "I didn't

leave you, Susan, I just got married" ..... "I felt betrayed".
The question raised by the film is a central one in the
Women's Movement: just what is the status of friendships
between women? And this is a question not just of theory
but of everyday practical conflicts. My own marriage started
to crack apart when it became obvious to both of us that I
was growing closer to my women friends than to my
husband. And this is a common experience for feminists,
heterosexual as well as lesbian. Many a marriage has run
aground on the rocks of sisterhood. If this film has a moral,
it is the feminist one that friendships between women are
important, and can no longer just be brushed aside when a
lover turns up. Indeed, the tables are turned, and at one
point it is Annie's husband who is brushed aside, prudently
retiring with baby while Annie and Susan sort out their
feelings. We are left guessing as to the final outcome the
film ends as a cosy fireside scene between the two friends is
frozen by the sound of hubby's approaching car in the drive.

So are Annie and Susan really repressed lesbians? As a

feminist, I want to say, not necessarily. Sisterhood is sisterhood, never mind the sexuality. The Women's Movement is
founded on solidarity between women, heterosexual as well
as lesbian. As a lesbian, however, I must suspect that something funny is going on between Annie and Susan. I'm sure
Claudia Weill had something in mind when she opened her
film with Susan photographing Annie asleep in bed. And yet
elsewhere the film appears to espouse an old-fashioned view
of the Great Divide between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Rejecting a physical advance from Cecilia, a lesbian
she has offered temporary shelter to, Susan explains: "That
woman that I told you I roomed with she was my flatmate,
not my lover". In other words, I am not A Lesbian. At any
rate, Cecilia is sympathetically partrayed and certainly not a
stereotype: naive, vulnerable, into yoga and the counterculture, gentle and infuriating. A refreshing change from the
weird creatures of male fantasy who occasionally struggle
onto the screen under the label of lesbian.
But then, male fantasy doesn't get a look in in Claudia
Weill's film. Realism triumphs, in the tackiness of Susan's
flat, the recognisable messiness of conversations and events.
There are no sex-objects: Susan struggles along with carrier
bags, hung about with scarves and shapeless coats; Annie is
blonde and could be conventionally pretty but always looks
exhausted and dresses in acrylic polonecks gone frilly at the
edges with age. Their lives are full of real-life problems how
can Susan learn, as a struggling photographer, to stand up to
indifferent editors and supercilious gallery owners? Should
she move into her boyfriend's flat or not? He sees it in terms
of the wastefulness of paying two rents; Susan is worried
about her security and sense of identity. Her mixed feelings
produce one of the film's best lines: "I like me when I don't
need you". Here she pinpoints the other central theme of
the film: the struggle of women to exist as independent
beings. Annie gives up and goes under in marriage and

motherhood: "I want Martin to take care of me" only to

surface again desperate for her own time and space. Susan
keeps the time and space, and the lonely evenings and misplaced romantic lunges that go with this. Nobody mentions
women's liberation, but on every count this is a good
feminist film.

Chemical Castration
by Tom O'Carroll

The following article by Tom O'Carroll about the chemical

castration of prisoners is a transcript of a contribution made
at the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) conference
'A Fair Deal for Homosexuals' which was held in London in
Spring 1977. It was due to have appeared in the forthcoming
NCCL pamphlet based on the conference contributions.
However in the summer of this year it became clear that
there was opposition in NCCL to Tom O'Carroll's piece
appearing, because of its sensitive subject matter. Most,
though not all, of the prisoners on whom chemical castration
is practised are paedophile offenders.
Despite strong support from the Gay Rights Committee at
NCCL, the National Executive voted for the exclusion of the
article. Patricia Hewitt, General Secretary of NCCL, noted in
opposing its publication that public hostility to paedophilia
was such that it damaged the cause of gay rights for the gay
movement to be associated with it. She also argued that this
article is badly researched and poorly written, but no offer
was made to O'Carroll to include more information on such
cases (though other contributors were given this opportunity)
and despite O'Carroll making it known that he had extensive
files on the topic. Several leading members of NCCL argued
that there would be immediate press interest and mass disaffection from the NCCL membership especially from
affiliated trade unions if the article was printed.
The article will not now appear in the forthcoming
pamphlet, but is reprinted here in full.

In the course of my work with P.I.E. I have made interesting

and appalling discoveries in the medical so-called 'treatment'
of convicted paedophiles; of the various existing methods of
behaviour modification of the sex offender that are in use
today, such as the torture-like techniques of aversion therapy
'
or the use of drugs. In addition to these 'treatments , some
prisoners have undergone hormone implant operations.
This is the theory behind this particular treatment. The
male sexual drive is based on the production of testosterone.
The implanting of female hormones suppresses that drive. The
implant itself is a small pellet, inserted under the patient's skin
in the buttocks or abdomen, and the female hormone is
absorbed into the bloodstream over a period of months,
neutralising the maleness of the patient and extinguishing his
sexual drive in effect, chemical castration.
However, there is at least one common side effect. Patients
subsequently grow breasts, of such a size that they have to be
cut off. This has been publiclv admitted. In a television interview Dr. Henry Field, a psychiatrist responsible for a series of
hormone implants on prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs, said
when asked about his work and specifically the growing of
breasts,

"I always ensured that I chose the hospital and the surgeon
who did the operation ... once I'd embarked on treating a
man, I undertook to follow him up and make sure that the
surgeon of my choice did the mastectomies."
In a discussion written up in the B.M.J. in 1973, Dr. Field
said of hormone treatment,
Gay Left 37

"This is a radical procedure for treating the sexual

offender. There is no question that one is deliberately
changing the personality to remove his sexual life, so he
won't interfere with small boys or girls and so that he'll be
able to be released into society and not go on offending."
Although treatment is supposed to cover all sex offenders
it is significant that Dr. Field does not say that the treatment
is given specifically in order to stop men from raping women,
or from murdering, or attacking children in sexual assaults.
While it is true that some of the offenders in question may
have been violent, this appears not even to figure as a criterion
in whether they receive treatment. For instance, when asked
the nature of his sexual offences, a prisoner featured in the
television programme said they consisted of "just fondling"
and that, to "see if they were interested". Yet this man was
considered suitable for chemical castration.
What of the other point made by Dr. Field: "The sexual
life of the prisoner is removed, so that he will be able to be
released into society". Effectively, this means that the
prisoner is offered the hope that if he consents to being chemically castrated, he will have a better chance of being released
on parole, or, in the case of a life sentence prisoner, on a
licence which can be granted at any time during the sentence.
Either he has the implant or he stays inside, possibly for many
years, or in the case of a 'lifer', indefinitely.
Under these circumstances it is no good for the Home
Office to plead that a prisoner's 'consent' has to be given for
an operation to take place (as they do). Consent under such
duress in meaningless, and curiously enough, Dr. Field has
admitted as much.
In a quote from the British Medical Journal, talking about
brain surgery in the treatment of homosexuality, Dr. Field
says, "The difficulty is one of valid consent when treating
offenders. You can only get this if you offer treatment to
somebody who has a fixed sentence, who can choose to have
or not to have it. But you can't get what the lawyers call true
volenti from somebody who's serving a life sentence. What
you're saying is: 'We can't let you out until you're safe; we
want to do a certain procedure to ensure this; now we want
you to give consent to this.' Clearly it's absurd to talk about
true consent in this context."
Indeed it is. That is exactly what is happening. For the last
two years I have been visiting a life sentence prisoner in Long
Lartin prison, Worcestershire, who has received hormone
implant treatment. In the course of sentencing him in 1972,
Mr. Justice May said, "You will remain in prison until a cure
is found for your freakish behaviour", and in answer to a

Out & Out

OPEN AND POSITIVE: An Account Of How

John Warburton Came Out At School And The
Consequences.
Published by Gay Teachers Group 75p.

Reviewed by Margaret Jackson

This is a straightforward and lucid account of an attack by
the 'socially enlightened and tolerant' Inner London Education Authority on the right of a teacher to be openly gay. It
is a reminder to all gay teachers, if one were needed, that our
gayness will only be tolerated as long as we do not talk about
it to our pupils. We may be taunted, jeered at, or otherwise
insulted or abused, but we still must not talk about it, not
even to restore order in the classroom, or to regain the
respect of our pupils. In 1974 the Leader of the ILEA gave
an assurance that the Authority did not discriminate against
gay teachers; yet it has barred John Warburton from employment in any of its schools unless he gives a written undertaking 'not in future to discuss homosexuality with pupils,
except in the course of a completely structured programme
of sex education, of which the Headmaster/Headmistress has
Gay Left 38

question from Mr. Norman Atkinson, M.P., the government

indicated that this particular prisoner's release date would be
affected by his response to medical treatment.
Life sentences are not the only problem area: the fixed
sentence prisoner who stands a chance of getting release on
parole can also be coerced into accepting chemical castration
in order to impress the parole board. Others can be coerced
simply by the threat of a prison sentence; in April 1977 a
schoolteacher convicted of indecently assaulting boys was
given a suspended gaol sentence, and the judge said he should
be treated with drugs and electric shock treatment to subdue
his urges.
Dr. Field is on record as having publicly advocated that
actual castration should be offered to offenders as an alternative to long prison sentences. In saying this he is going a
long way beyond what would be acceptable to Parliament at
the moment. Unfortunately he is a man of immense power to
the hapless paedophile offender, and displays the arrogance of
those whose authority has for too long gone unchallenged.
When he was asked whether one doctor alone should take the
decision to treat offenders Dr. Field said, "I'm against
committees, particularly of lay people who can't understand
the issues". Not medical details, but "issues"
Dr. Field has been allowed by the Home Office to conduct
a whole series of hormone implant operations at Wormwood
Scrubs. What is worrying to me and others is how much freedom may be given to carry out experiments which go much
further, possibly in the direction of psychosurgery, ie, burning
out part of the offender's brain, to mentally castrate him. In
this regard Dr. Field says,

"The arguments against psychosurgery are often specious,

although there have been some disasters I've seen some
excellent results."
With the passage of time, he says,

"Brain surgery in offenders which may at the present time

be viewed with misgivings, would come to be accepted. It is
perhaps a matter of educating the administrators and public
opinion."
I believe this whole issue has not been taken up forcibly
enough. Perhaps because the numbers of people at risk from
these experiments is so small and the facts not easily available.
The Home Office must be forced constantly into answering
question after question about what they are up to exactly
which experimental techniques they are carrying out with
regard to the treatment of sexual offenders, and to what
extent.

full knowledge and with which he/she is in full agreement.'

As John points out, not only does this amount to being
required to sign a separate contract of employment; it also
means that he would have no right of self-defence in the face
of future taunts by pupils.
How are we supposed to deal with such situations which,
in view of the widespread ignorance about and prejudice
against homosexuality, are hardly likely to be rare? John
repeatedly posed this question to his employers and his union
executive, who were both apparently unable or unwilling to
offer any suggestions. Not surprisingly, the NUT executive
once again revealed its reluctant to provide advice and
support for embarrassingly 'deviant' members ( remember
Tyndale?).
The bulk of the booklet consists of correspondence
between the protagonists, with commentaries by John and
other gay teachers. As an account of the events it provides
fascinating reading and conveys a real sense of the struggle of
those involved. My main criticism is that there is no attempt
at a deeper political analysis of the issues and that consequently the strategies proposed, such as more gay teachers
coming out, building up union support at grass roots level,
and demanding a place for homosexuality in the curriculum,
have a naively optimistic ring.

The afterword by Peter Bradley attempts to provide an

overview of the case and its implications for future struggles,
but he does not seem to view it as anything more than a Gay
Rights issue. He correctly points out that John was not
sacked for being gay or for coming out to his kids, but
because, according to the ILEA, his private and personal life
his gayness obtruded into his professional life 'far
beyond acceptable limits'. There is apparently no record of
any complaint being made against John by a parent or child.
So the question is whose limits are being referred to? The
answer would appear to be heterosexuals' limits.
Women teachers, especially in girls' schools, are in my
experience constantly plied with questions about their boyfriends or husbands, and nowadays generally respond frankly;
moreover heterosexuality is continually affirmed in schools
in countless ways, eg by the wearing of wedding rings or the
use of the style 'Mrs'. If I were to respond to the question
`Have you a boyfriend, Miss?' with the answer 'No, but I
have a girlfriend', or 'No, I am a lesbian' I would be affirming
my sexuality in exactly the same way as my heterosexual
sister. Yet to judge by ILEA's reaction to John, this would
constitute going beyond acceptable limits. Thus there is a
contradiction between, on the one hand, ILEA's avowed
policy of no discrimination against gays, and on the other,
their implicit view that a teacher's affirmation of her gayness
is unacceptable.
This contradiction is explained by Peter Bradley in terms
of hypocrisy and prejudice, but is not, in my view, an
adequate explanation. The intransigence of the ILEA, the
ineffectiveness of the NUT, the absence of homosexuality

from the curriculum are not simply the result of prejudice

and hypocrisy, but have their roots in a social structure
which, organised as it is around the principles of private
property and male supremacy, makes it inevitable that homosexuality will be viewed as a threat. Sexism is not merely a
reactionary attitude which can be changed by pressure
towards greater enlightenment, but a deeply pervasive ideology which is both produced by, and helps to legitimate and
reproduce, patriarchal and capitalist relations. Homosexuality
is not merely an alternative life-style, but undermines two of
the key institutions of the patriarchal, capitalist state, namely
marriage and the family. This is why its affirmation in our
schools goes beyond acceptable limits.
One aspect of the book is particularly disturbing, and that
is the inclusion of a letter written by John's parents to his
former headmistress, in which they say: "We were told in
1972 by our two GPs that one in ten of the population is
born with this feature and it is not something that they elect
by choice. This has been confirmed to us by another medical
practitioner of great experience." While I understand John's
reasons for including this letter I find the lack of comment
on the pathological model of homosexuality it so clearly
expresses extremely alarming. It is bound to reinforce the
prevailing view that homosexuality is a congenital disease or
abnormality, and thus effectively depoliticises the whole
issue.
Socialists and feminists will, I am afraid, find nothing to
bite on in this booklet. Ultimately it treats gayness as a legalmoral issue, rather than a political-economic one, and therefore amounts to little more than a plea for tolerance.

Letter
PARIS NOVEMBER 1978
The major event in the French gay scene since the beginning
of the social year, September in France, has been the denunciation in the courts of police raids on gay clubs. The
Manhattan, an inexpensive gay club by Parisian standards,
was raided by twenty or so cops dressed up in leather, who
arrested eleven gays for 'outrage of public morals'. When the
case came to court last month this rather banal affair was
turned into a political trial by the lawyers and defendants
who attacked the laws which double the penalties for gays
for this 'crime', and linked the police raid with a pay-off
system between the police and a mafia of the more expensive
gay clubs.
Using the testimony of Senator Caillavet, who recently
introduced a bill into the Senate to end the anti-gay legislation of Petain and De Gaulle, as well as a petition from such
intellectuals as Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault, Jean Luis
Bory, and Guy Hocquenghem, six lawyers attacked the
judicial bias against homosexuals in France.
Those involved in the trial were found guilty but given
light fines and no convictions, which suggested that they
government may be ready to vote the abolition of the gay
laws, which was the programme of the homosexual candidates in the March general election.
Until now the French political parties and the trade
unions have been terrified of the gay debate. A glimmer of
light from through the closed door has come from the
attitude of some of the press: Le Monde, the establishment
paper, Liberation (extreme Left), and Rouge (Trotskyist).
Aragon's lover* stated recently in an interview with the
Socialist Le Matin, 'I am gay and communist'. L'Humanite,
the Communist daily, didn't comment on this.
GLH has broken up into local quartier committees, the
CHA's. In the provinces, which can be heavily anti-gay, some
twenty or so groups are active, something which neither the
FHAR nor Arcadie, the reformist gay organisation in existence for twenty years, was ever able to initiate. There was
also a national gay conference in Lyons earlier this month.

A new national paper 'Gay Life' will be coming out soon,

to give a new perspective for gays and politics in France. It is
to be put out by gay journalists, writers, and philosophers
and GLH activists. Amongst those collaborating are Foucault,
Hocquenghem, Nicholas Powell, and Rene Scherer. We hope
it will survive longer than Gaie Presse, which was banned by
the government along with other gay publications, and
suffered from horrible financial difficulties which have also
been affecting the rest of the Left and alternative press in
France.
Jean Le Bitoux (Groupe de Liberation Homosexuelle)
Philip Brooks
Simon Watney (London).
* Louis Aragon, veteran French Communist, writer and
Surrealist Revolutionary.

What's Left

Contents

Please can I stop being a tree soon? How a group of men

looked after 200 children at the 1977 WLM Conference
Creche. A pamphlet, costing 40p, published by Men's Free
Press, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1, and distributed by
PDC.

Happy Families? Paedophilia Examined.

Gay Art .........................................................................
Spotlight on Greece .....................................................
FOR Interpretation Notes Against Camp
Homosexuals Fight Back
Gays At Work No Complaints ...................................
Odds and Sods
Up Against The Law
You Can't Be A Socialist Perfume Maker .....................
Two Letters on Freud
Why I Joined Gay Sweatshop .......................................
Gays and The Phoney War in Northern Ireland ..........
The Making of Nighthawks
Another Look at Pornography
The Four Waves ...........................................................
Girlfriends ..............................................................
Chemical Castration .....................................................
Out & Out ....................................................................
Letter from Paris ...........................................................

ZAP! A magazine which seeks to be of personal relevance

to gay people. From Zap Publications, c/o Peace Centre,
18 Moon St, Queensway, Birmingham 4. Price 20p each +
postage.
Red Therapy A new one-off pamphlet costing 70p, published by a leaderless, self-help therapy group which has been
going for about 5 years. The pamphlet is an attempt to share
ideas and experience. Details from Red Therapy, c/o
28 Redbourne Ave, London N3 2BS.
The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism. Red Collective and
the Publications Distribution Cooperative have jointly republished in book form two pamphlets written by the former,
first published in 1973 and long out of print. The pamphlets
were collectively written by the group comprising of women
and men. They addressed themselves to issues of general concern to the sexual liberation movements: the personal as
politics, sexuality and capitalism, personal relationships and
Freudianism. Though much work has gone on in these areas
since the originals appeared, they are still of interest and,
value. Copies can be obtained from bookshops, price 1.95
paperback, 5.95 hardback.
SISTERWRITE is a new cooperative women's bookshop
opening to the public on 30th November 1978. It will be
carrying a large stock of British and American feminist books,
ranging from women's studies, politics, and history to more
general literature of particular interest to women. Posters,
records and journals will also be available. It will be providing
a comprehensive mail order service and catalogues in the near
future. 190 Upper St, London Nl. 01-359 2573

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THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Derek Cohen,
Emmanuel Cooper, Phil Derbyshire, Simon Watney, Jeffrey
Weeks, Nigel Young.

BACK ISSUES
Gay Left No 3
Women in Gay Left, Gays and Class, IS Gay Group, Gay
Workers' Movement and usual reviews etc.
Gay Left No 5
Why Marxism, Images of Homosexuality in Film, Lesbian
Invisibility, Gays and Fascism, Gay Theatre Past and Present,
Politics & Ideology, Gay History, Future of the Gay Movement.

York Community Bookshop: 73 Walingate, York, YO1 2TZ.

Specialises in books on gay liberation. A list of gay books and
pamphlets can be obtained on request.

Gay Left No 6
(Gays) In The Balance, The State Repression and Sexuality,
Looking At Pornography, Working Class Lesbians, Gays at
Work, Motherhood, Fighting Fascism.

Alternative Socialism Newsletter published by a group of

people trying to bring together the approaches of the 'alternative society' and libertarian socialism with special emphasis
on feminism and creating a non patriarchal society. There are
contacts in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester and
London. The London contact is Danny Cohen, 15 Rosslyn
Hill, London NW3 5U0.

GAY LEFT RATES

Single Copies:
Inland
50p each
Overseas Airmail 1 or $2. Sterling, US or Canadian cheques
only.
Gay Left Collective 1978
ISSN: 0307 9313
Typeset by Dark Moon, 01-221-4331
Printed by Feb Edge Litho, London E2
Trade Distribution: Publications Distribution Co-op,
27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R OAT
Carrier Pigeon, 88 Fisher Ave, Boston, Mass. 02120 USA.
The Body Politic, P.O. Box 7289, Station A, Toronto,
Ontario M5W 1X9.

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Inland 1.50 for three issues. Overseas Airmail
3 or $6 for three issues. Longer subscriptions
pro rata. Subscriptions may include available
back issues. Donations always gratefully received.

GAY LEFT 38 CHALCOT ROAD LONDON NW1

Gay Left 40

Make all cheques (Sterling or US or Canadian

dollars only) payable to Gay Left, 38 Chalcot
Road, London NW1

Editorial
When we started putting together this issue of Gay Left noone knew that on May 3rd, this country would elect the most
right-wing Prime Minister, together with an equally
reactionary set of ministers, since the war. The issues and
tasks confronting us were never easy under Labour but
there did seem a chance, through resistance and organisation,
of defending attacks made on the Women's Movement, the
Gay Movement and civil liberties generally.
The availability of abortion came under attack through a
number of private member's Bills. There was pressure from
the police lobby and others to give the police extra powers
and to restrict the rights of those under suspicion or arrest
(the review group on criminal procedure is soon to report).
The Prevention of Terrorism Act seriously attacked civil
liberties with the freedom it gave the police to deal with
'the Irish question'. The Special Patrol Group made its
presence felt at gay meeting places as well as harassing the
black community, pickets and anti-fascist demonstrations.
Moral bigots such as James Anderton, head of Manchester
Police, and Mary Whitehouse have tried to restrict public
expressions of homosexuality.
Meanwhile, Parliament could sell out on extending the
li mited legality of male homosexuality to Scotland and
Northern Ireland with the same equanimity as they continue
to deny the Irish the right to self-determination. We had the
spectacle of the Labour Government selling out the rights
of Northern Irish gays at the European Court of Human
Rights for the tacit support of reactionary bigots like Paisley
in Parliament. A Bill introduced into the House of Lords
to reduce the age of consent for male homosexuals to 18
was treated with contempt and derision, whilst Mary
Whitehouse seemed to gain more of the ear of Merlyn Rees,
the Home Secretary, than we ever did.
As well as this we saw the Labour Government destroy
itself through taking up economic policies which attacked the
living standards of its own supporters and running an
economy where the dole queues grew longer while prices on
the stock exchange rose higher.
In response to the general ideological shift to the Right,
with the Tory talk of law and order, the need for a return to
the old moral values and the importance of the family,
sections of the Labour Party, and Callaghan in particular,
took up these themes in a number of speeches, thus
operating on terrain defined by the Right. In this climate a
dangerous situation develops in which traditional values
about family life and the correct roles that one should play
would make all our lives and work more difficult.
This is not of course to suggest that the Gay Movement
and the gay sub-culture is about to be swept away. In fact,
the sub-culture and the commercial facilities were and are
booming. This and the failure of the Gay Movement to make
any significant links with the wider gay scene, except
perhaps through the Gay News Defence campaign, means
that there is little collective awareness of the threats presented
by these wider social forces. Often aspects of oppression and
reaction are experienced solely as individual disasters an
arrest, the loss of custody, the loss of a job while the
closure of a nursery or club are still isolated and isolating
events. A central need is for the Gay Movement to build a
collective awareness of these issues and to provide greater
support and resistance.

International Experience
This is not just a British experience. In Canada, the gay
paper Body Politic, has been harassed by the police for
some time and this last year withstood a serious prosecution.
The election there has also seen the victory of the
Conservative Party. In the USA we have recently witnessed
attacks on the civil rights of homosexuals in a number of
States even though the Briggs initiative in California was
defeated. It is symbolic that on the 10th anniversary of
Gay Left 2

Stonewall we have reports of thousands of gays rioting in

San Francisco in response to the jury verdict on the murder
of the liberal Mayor and a prominent gay rights campaigner.

The Tory Future

What can we expect from the Tories? In a simple phrase -the same but worse. Hopes for any reforms have been dashed.
The first action of the new Government in giving massive
pay increases to the police and the army illustrates the stress
on law and order and the strong state.
There will obviously be major cutbacks in many public
sector areas which will have an important impact on women,
both in the loss of employment in these areas and in that
the support provided by these services will largely become
again the tasks of women in the family. The new economic
and moral climate will also affect those areas where support
is given to groups providing help and advice and those trying
to create 'alternative' institutions and attitudes, ranging from
law centres and community support projects to workers
co-ops, while work around racial and sexual equality will
inevitably suffer.
The other obvious area of attack is the Trade Union
movement, which, however reformist its leadership may be,
presents the only resistance to the worst excesses of
Thatcherism. The proposed limiting of the right to picket
may have wide repercussions while the stress on 'scroungers'
builds on ignorance and social division.
Of direct relevance to gay people is the appointment to
the highest legal positions in the Government of three men
with long histories of moral bigotry, especially regarding
homosexuality. In this climate, local police forces may
begin to broaden their attacks on the gay community like
the recent experiences in Manchester and Brighton.

Our Response
At this time gay socialists need to get together and ask
ourselves what our tactics should be, and how we can support
each other. There is of course always the question of
political differences but it appears to us that most gay
socialists are not in parties and we should therefore resist
sectarianism. It is a luxury which at this period in our history
we cannot afford.
There are however two areas which need re-emphasising
strongly at this time. One is the importance of autonomous
movements and two is the continuing exploration of the
personal as a vital area of politics for all socialists. The
explosive growth of these areas occurred at a time of
relative economic prosperity and in a liberal social climate,
but they remain just as crucial in the present political
conjuncture. We need to argue vehemently against those who
produce a shopping list of political activities in which
questions relating to sexuality and personal politics come
very low. No doubt even more people now than in the past
will argue that it is a bourgeois indulgence to fight in these
areas while living standards are under attack, when unemployment is rising and when the power of the State is being

increased to deal with stroppy workers and the Left. But our
concerns are no less important under a Thatcher Government,
indeed they become more urgent. It is not only the economic
position of women and most gays which will decline under
the present Government but the quality of all of our lives
will be under attack. The family will be elevated as the
panacea for all our moral ills. The media will sustain
distorting images which reinforce alienation and sexism.
Without autonomous movements and without a continuing
exploration of personal politics -- the way we relate to each
other, the alternatives to traditional political structures, the
way we feel any alternatives to fighting solely around
economistic questions will fade away. We will be in danger
of yet again seeing the struggle for socialism as being
something outside of our lives.

The fight for socialism has to be carried forward on all

fronts and in all aspects of our lives. Unity and growth in our
struggles can only come about through a recognition of the
specific forms of oppression that individuals and groups
face and by confronting these in the socialist movement
itself. Only in this way will more people be prepared and able
to colletively resist the threats posed by the policies of the
Tory Government and be drawn into and build the struggle
for socialism.

Gay Left 3

Personal Politics~Ten Years On

The Personal is Political ... that principle, despite its problems, remains the enduring legacy of the
Women's and Gay Movements.
We discovered that what we were doing in our 'private' lives was not isolated from the wider structures
of society: we also discovered that the goals and aims of broad political action were not separable from
their impact on our own lives and concerns. The traditional models of the privatised individual and the
'selfless' militant both proved inadequate as ways of understanding and acting to change the oppression
of advanced capitalism.
That redescription of what constitutes politics needs re-emphasising in a political situation very
different from the early days of GLF. It would be too easy to forget, to fall back into an increasingly
strident Left orthodoxy which would make Women and Gays mere auxiliary troops in some romanticised attack on state power, or to try and escape into the dreamworld of 'individual solutions' The
dialectic has to be maintained, between the personal and political, between the struggle for new ways
of relating to each other now and the building of organisations that could effectively challenge and
change the whole oppressive order. The beginnings of socialism can't wait till after the revolution; they
have to happen now in our own immediate personal and political practice.
The following accounts by the members of the collective try and show how that dialectic has operated
in our own lives, and the changes that have resulted in how we see ourselves and how we see our
politics.

Ten years ago I was still at school, feeling isolated and persecuted for being 'queer' which the other kids seemed to be
able to identify though I could not understand why. I knew I
was gay but never had thoughts of meeting other gay people,
it just seemed impossible. I did not feel bad about being gay
although I felt unhappy at the rejection and insults that I
received.
I had developed a socialist attitude, partly perhaps
through a rejection of the people and society around me
which seemed to oppress other groups and me for no
apparent rational reason. I also felt very distant from my
family with their mixture of rural and working class conservatism. I could not speak with them or anyone else about the
things that I really felt. I became more withdrawn and
depressed and could cope with school less and less. I just
thought of getting away so that I did not have to have contact with anyone.
I left school at 18 and much to my own surprise and that
of my family, I arranged a job and moved to London in early
1971. For about three months I had no meaningful contact
with anyone, living in a hostel, going to work and loosely
working with the Young Socialists.
Then I saw news stories about GLF and somehow I
managed to arrive at a meeting in Covent Garden one evening
- - a new life exploded into being! Within the week my whole
life was based around GLF. I started to go to the Youth
Group, I joined the Commune Group and there were the
large weekly main meetings with hundreds of lesbians and
gay men. The excitement and optimism are hard to convey. I
still felt nervous and withdrawn as a person and yet I threw
myself into everything I could with a confidence my gay
identity gave me. The second week I met Kim. It was the first
gay sexual experience for both of us, though we both pretended to be terribly calm and experienced.
The people and activities of GLF became my whole life. I
remember going back to the Socialist group to proclaim my
gayness and the parting was mutually wished. I started to live

Gay Left 4

with Kim and then we moved into a gay commune together.

There were marches, gay-days, sit-ins against pubs that discriminated against us, guerrilla activities against newspapers
which abused us. We joined the demonstrations of the
Unions, those against British troops in Ireland and others to
show our support and to make our own stand, though we
were often put to the rear of the marches and occasionally
abused.

GLF seemed to bring together all my political ideals and a

new lifestyle based around my sexual identity. It was a
period of euphoria whatever problems might be going on in
my relationships, in the commune or at work, which became
incompatible with the rest of my life and so I left the job. 1
believed strongly in the politics that we put forward in GLF
about relationships, sexism, the integration of personal and
political actions and the critique of an oppressive capitalist
system. It did not seem at odds with my socialist beliefs but
extended them. However, the political groups of the left and
the reformist and male dominated unions seemed in ways to
be part of the enemy or at least not to be trusted. Their lack
of understanding and dismissal of sexual politics made it hard
to become involved closely in day to day work with them.
Not everything though was perfection. I was still insecure
about myself and collapsed into bouts of jealousy and tried
to force monogamy on our relationship. The commune was
often stormy and problems were avoided rather than gone
through honestly. GLF had warring factions laying down the
paths we should follow from drag, drugs to detonators.
Despite this I felt free and the world was going to change. It
oppressed women and gays and we protested and confronted
it vigorously but it did not seem to impinge on my own life
very much.
After a couple of years GLF slowly disintegrated, the
commune split and it was necessary to reassess one's position
and the world outside. It had not gone through the
revolution. Things were easier, at least in London, one had
lots of friends and gay groups to work with and from this
one could move back into other areas of activity. I worked

for a year and ran into very few difficulties about being very
openly gay. I then went to college and helped to start a gaysoc and worked with the revolutionary socialist groups whose
positions on sexual politics were opening up. In some ways
my coming out through GLF and being so involved in its lifestyle and politics has made it difficult for me to relate to the
commercial gay scene and it has taken some time to come to
terms with this reality. However, the experience of GLF and
the groups that now make up the gay movement are still the
focus for my self identity and gives me the personal and
political confidence to carry on my involvement with the
Trade Union and socialist movements.

Keith Birch

For most of the first 18 years of my life, my experience was

of trying, 'despite my handicap' to fit in and be accepted. My
handicap was of not being tough, not one of the gang, but
someone who was a 'softie', an outsider - not interested in
games or girls or smoking, but talking, working, and other
boys/men. I found my acceptability, at least to adults, by
being clever.
Being clever, I went to University which opened up new
horizons, for here I mixed with other young men, and a few
women, who were also finding their feet and making a fresh
start after leaving home. Together we tried various aspects of
the counter-culture, drugs, Divine Light and Rock Music. But
somehow homosexuality was still somewhere outside. The
love for one another that we fostered in our drunken stoned
moments stopped at the point at which I even tried to get
into bed with any of my friends. I wasn't rejected, I was
patronised.
It wasn't until I left college and started work as a residential social worker in Southampton that I consciously sought
contact with other gay men. My first faltering steps at
making contact were bedevilled with my fears of mutating
into the stereotypical queers I had been taught to hate. I persevered for lack of any better alternative and had my first
sexual experience with a man at the 1974 Malvern CHE conference, when I was 25. The next year, at the Sheffield CHE
Conference, I first came across terms like 'sexism' and I
began to be aware that being gay was a political issue, not
just a personal one. I learned that there were structures
imposed on us as individuals which conditioned the way we
behaved. I first appreciated what it was to act in an oppressive way.
Prior to my contact with gay politics I had been very
much of an a-political person a Liberal if anything. I had
always dismissed parliamentary politics as the manoeverings
of individuals and groups eager to retain or gain positions of
power. But this new sort of political thinking was different.
It tried to draw links between people's different experiences,
and didn't start from pre-ordained ideas but from our own
situation as gay people. I found it difficult to identify this
sexual politics with the politics I was familiar with. No-one
was leading us; no-one was laying down a party line.
As time went on I became involved in setting up a union
branch in the charity where I was working. There were
struggles we even went on strike and occupied the head

office. I started to draw links between my oppression as a

gay man and the strength and inspiration gained by organising with other gay people, with the confidence and
increased political awareness we gained fighting as workers
against a paternalistic oppressive management. It was during
this time that I started making some tentative links between
sexual politics and socialism, though in both cases what I
understood was often fairly skimpy.
It was as a result of joining Gay Left that I first came to
read some Marxist theory and appreciate the structural
analyses that were possible of work, and of sexuality. What I
liked was a politics which didn't intend to provide 'right
answers' but supplied tools for discovering what the most
useful questions were. In addition it gave a framework for
doing something I had never been able to do successfully,
and that was to struggle against oppression, rather than to
give in to it.

Derek Cohen

Ten years ago life seemed rosy. I had a lover, a small, if damp
basement flat in Notting Hill Gate, work I liked and two
circles of personal friends one gay, one straight. I enjoyed
exploring liberal ideas, supporting the Labour Party, marching for peace in Vietnam, and experimenting with dope. Neat,
ordered, separate compartments which appeared to fit
together.
Yet sometimes the pieces did not quite fit. When any gay
topic came up in conversation with non-gay friends all of
whom I assumed knew I was gay but never mentioned it (me
colluding in a conspiracy of silence) I blushed deep; my face
reddened, my heart leapt and panic rose. I could hardly
speak let alone imply that I was gay.
This awareness grew more acute when GLF started
meetings in Powis Church Hall just round the corner from
where I lived. My 'straight' gay friends looked faintly amused
and asked 'liberation from what?' then changed the subject,
but I was drawn like a reluctant magnet. I went to the door,
but it was only after several attempts that I felt able to go
inside to discover a room packed full of men. Some did strips
to obscure poetry, some milled about, but at the centre there
was much lively, sometimes angry discussion. A general smell
of dope pervaded the air of rebellion and anger. It was too
much for me. I felt remote and distant, yet disturbed. Life so
neat and ordered seemed to be threatened.
A friend sent me 'Psychiatry and the Homosexual' which
I judged critically - overstated I thought with some faked
facts. Its real message about gay oppression never got a look
in. I was as possessive and jealous in my love life as ever, yet
the contradiction between the ideal I had in my head i.e. a
loving totally satisfying physical and intellectual monogamous relationship seemed in total contradiction to what
happened and about which I felt unable to speak. The split
between reality and desire loomed even wider. After living
together for a year with my lover, our relationship broke in a
huge crest of silent, unspoken recrimination leaving me
deeply hurt and shaken. I withdrew, as I now see it, to try a
complete reassessment of my life. No more romantic,
assumed relationships. no more lies about monogamy and
pretensions at fidelity; no more apeing an ideal. Gay politics

and openly gay friends seemed to offer at least a framework

in which to understand what was going on.
A cautious tentative relationship was struck up with a
man who was a socialist and interested in gay liberation and
I joined CHE. Again I felt panic at going to an open gay
meeting but I persevered. Relationships, loves, even occasionally politics were discussed, if not deeply at least with a basis
of shared interests. I met people who did not seem afraid to
say they were gay and were willing to talk about it.
Slowly gay liberation was beginning to mean something. I
came out to a few friends to little response and no bad
reactions. We organised (a very badly attended) public meeting. Activism seems a positive contribution but somehow
needed a political framework. I eyed the ad in Gay News for
the Marxist Reading Group but thought it would be too
heavy for me. Anyway, doubts about the treatment of homosexuals in communist countries seemed to augur badly for
any marxist answer and overshadowed any meaningful discussion.
' With Downcast Gays' was sold in the CHE group and
every word seemed to speak directly to our experience. Gay
oppression, self-oppression, feelings of guilt about being gay,
internalizing the attitudes of society about myself, and even
hating my gayness seemed to echo every half thought, mostly
repressed idea. Society seemed suddenly not to be the
i mmutable natural force I had assumed, but perhaps could be
changed, and I could help. By good fortune I was invited to
the tail end of the series of meetings of the Gay Marxist
Reading Group and for the first time in my life 'things came
together'.
Here politics, sexuality, work, study and discussion
seemed all part of a whole, which could be looked at and
analysed. I could hardly sleep for the excitement and
wondered if it was all too good to be true. The group continued, and then reformed itself to become the Gay Left
Collective. We instituted a formal reading programme of
marxist texts, and set about producing a Gay Left journal.
Links were set up with the women's movement and
friendships with feminists brought new awareness. It would
be easy to suggest that the political and personal path was
smooth or always the same they were not. Personalities
still clashed, particularly in the early days before we held
regular discussions about our relationships in the group, and I
still had to confront my feelings of gay guilt and objectified
sexual experiences. At times the euphoria of the intimacy of
the shared experiences in the collective and the personal
discussions is almost too much, while at the other extreme
heavy discussions of 'discourse' theory or the writings of
the latest French philosophers quickly redress the balance.
The struggle has to go on and attempts to give up through
exhaustion and frustration have to be resisted. All of us in
the group are involved in other areas unions, gay politics,
writing and so on, yet for me, Gay Left is high up on my list
of priorities. The search for alternative relationships with
seemingly endless discussion is a challenge and cannot be
ignored. The personal and political cannot be separated and
all change is for the better but there is still a long way to go.

Emmanuel Cooper

When Stonewall happened I was just seventeen and on the

verge of falling in love for the first time, with a straight boy,
a year younger than I. Unless you posit some sort of mystic
synchronicity, there was absolutely no connection between
me and what was happening in a New York bar. The contradictions of my adolescence: I declared myself an anarchist,
and was ridiculously pleased with myself for having won a
place at Cambridge; I espoused a philosophy of youth
rebellion and the need for violent revolution, "all power to
the imagination" and couldn't tell the guy I was in love with
anything of what I was feeling. That rift persisted for a long
ti me an intellectual commitment to a radical politic, which
nowhere touched my real life.
The next years were an emotional maelstrom for me: I
went up to Cambridge, lost touch with my home and friends,
Gay Left 6

became embourgeoise, acquiring status, culture, the appropriate dreams and even the speech of an alien class, all these
transformations adding to the dislocation that I felt because I
was gay, and prone to fall madly and extendedly in love with
very beautiful and extremely fucked up straight men ...
erotic passion finding its legitimacy in the role of mentor/
martyr. The confusion was compounded by a fairly constant
drug and alcohol diet, in an atmosphere of aristo decadence,
a sort of haute-bourgeois appropriation of the counter culture. But that milieu provided a space to come out as gay, or
at least bisexual, just so long as you didn't take it too seriously, could be amusing and entertaining about it. So I posed, all
the while feeling utterly at sea. I also came across GLF for
the first time, but even though it appealed intellectually it
was too much at odds with the environment I depended on
for some sort of validation and sustenance, and the conflict
between the two quite often fused me out. I'd go to a CR
meeting with people from the GLF and then nip back to the
college for drinks and dope, and also to hang out with a man
who was trendily bi (gave me the first GLF badge I wore in
fact) but who was, as my pattern masochistically dictated,
monstrously screwed up and who didn't give a shit about me.
I teetered on the edge of that contradiction for the rest of
my time in Cambridge, and came close to, as the jargon has
it, freaking completely, especially as my consumption of acid
increased. It's always struck me as ironic that I tripped before
I had sex.
At the end of that time, I went, faute de mieux, to the
States to study for a Ph.D., and went back into the closet,
and closed the door firmly for two years. In retrospect that
seems completely insane, but the extreme disorientation I
felt in Cambridge, in America, the seeming impossibility of
getting any sort of relationship that I wanted with a man,
made me give up ... a sort of inner suicide. The nadir of that
experience was nine months in virtually perpetual anxiety,
occasionally blossoming in literal terror at being on my own,
walking down a street, taking tubes ... Getting out of that
was due to the ministrations of a very sympathetic therapist
who had the nous to recognise that it was the repression of
my homosexuality and not my being gay that was at the root
of my 'breakdown', and due too to growing close to another
straight man who though he didn't respond sexually at least
valued me and the friendship we had. That process of healing
had its consequence in my moving to London in '76, coming
out again only this time with a little more vigour, and with a
growing political awareness. The analyses of gay liberation
and later of marxism, or at least sophisticated versions thereof, actually made sense of the chaos I'd been through in a
way that the particular strand of GLF thinking that I'd
encountered in '73 had not. Over the next year or so there
was a slow resolution of the contradictions that I'd first
realised when I was seventeen, even if new problems and
conflicts flowered.

I'm committed, then, to gay liberation, to feminism and

to socialism not at all primarily from an intellectual development, or from logical conviction, though the eminent sense
and rationality of gay socialism seems obvious to me now,
but rather from a deep and enduring sense of having been
personally fucked over in this society as gay, by the ten
years repression of my own capacity for pleasure out of guilt
and fear, and as working class in that I was well and truly
mauled as I was being yanked away from my background to
the promise of a Cambridge education and a middle class
career. The sense of singular personal hurt, and the still
lingering scars of a proneness to depression, to irrational
resentments of friends and comrades and often intense feelings of isolation and alienation, coupled with an understanding that all of that was no mere caprice but was systematically related to the warping of others' lives because of their
race, sex or class: that remains the wellspring of my own
loathing and opposition to capitalist patriarchy, and the
vision of a society where that hurt could not have happened
maintains me in struggles that often seem as meaningless as
the society that makes them necessary.

Philip Derbyshire

In the autumn of 1970 I had recently graduated from the

University of Sussex as an Art Historian, and had just
commenced a one-year teacher training course, having turned
down an M.A. place in London in order to stay in Brighton
with my boyfriend. Although I didn't know the actual
phrase, I had 'come out' to my family and friends some three
years previously. I was 21. I knew the gay scenes in London
and Amsterdam. I was extremely sociable, extremely gregarious, and extremely articulate. I had six years involvement
in socialist and pacifist politics behind me. I probably
thought I was the bee's knees. And GLF scared me half to
death.
This is hard to explain. I'm well aware of how Gay
Liberation changed some people's entire lives overnight. I can
only say that at the time it didn't change mine. I've said I
was gregarious: certainly my address book was full of names.
Yet these remained little more than names. For I was completely involved in a relationship in which I was totally
dependent on one other person for emotional and physical
security, for love as I then understood it. I'm not for one
moment saying this was a good thing. Clearly it was not. But
in this context GLF inevitably seemed terribly threatening. It
showed me things about myself which I wasn't ready or able
to face. All that tremendous feeling of togetherness only
served to make me feel more isolated still. I knew in some
dim way that this was what I wanted, but I also knew, or
thought I knew, that this was simply not for me.
I can see in retrospect that my ambiguous responses to
GLF were objectively structured in my childhood growing
up gay on a big council estate with highly neurotic parents,
and being sent away to private boarding schools. Leaving
school my carefully cultivated facade of urbane literate
egotism continued to hide a real terror of even the most
ordinary social situations. And like the mask in Onibaba, I
found it was one I could not easily remove. At consciousnessraising groups, at Gay Days, in the founding of a local GLF,
I found myself mouthing gay slogans and exuding Gay Pride
without much conviction, still paralysed inside with nameless
secret fears. I don't suppose I was unique in this.
I liked the bars: I didn't like beards. I liked the clubs: I
didn't like the ethos of enforced collectivism and organized
spontaneity. I have spent the Seventies trying to work
through these contradictions, and now look back with an odd
mixture of regret and relief. Regret for what might have been,
and relief that what was is lover. Thanks to GLF I can now
take that mask off, sometimes ...

Simon Watney

My involvement with GLF changed my life. In Autumn 1970

I had just started working at the London School of
Economics, having escaped with all the speed I could muster
from a disastrous period as a school teacher. I had a small,
but protective circle of 'queer' friends. I knew a lot of the
cottages and some of the bars. Some of my best friends
knew ...
My politics were socialist, but unfocussed. Disillusion with
Labour and Wilsonism had not propelled me towards the
revolutionary or libertarian left. Somehow May '68 did not
speak to me or my concerns. I watched it all on television.
And at the height of the evenements I succumbed to glandular fever. That seemed to summarise my prostration when
confronted by great events. My politics and my sexuality
were in different compartments, and my friendships were
neatly demarcated. He was a friend, he was a lover: never the
two should meet.
And yet by the autumn of 1970 I was, I can now see,
ready for change. I was drawn to the counter culture, but
terrified of it. I was intellectually interested in the ideas of
the new, new left, but uninvolved in it. I was anxious for new
types of relationships but unable to break out of my pseudo
incest taboo. I was ready to climb, but fearful of falling. And
LSE suddenly, unexpectedly, offered me the opportunities.
Hardly had I started when a new burst of student militancy
shook the School, drawing me into the 'new politics'. I
became involved in my trade union just as the Labour movement was gearing itself for the biggest industrial confrontations for a generation. And above all I was at the LSE when
the Gay Liberation Front started there.
It crept up on me almost unnoticed and then flooded over
me. An article in the student paper awakened me to the birth
of GLF. I went along to the first meeting I could, in early
November, not sure what to expect. It was Wednesday night.
I timidly went into basement room. And suddenly there were
all those people, all those GAY people. Here was the counter
culture, and the flavour of alternative life styles wafted
through the room. Here was the revolutionary left, and the
rhetoric of confrontation and liberation sparked from person
to person. Here was the gay subculture, openly meeting,
passionately speaking, collectively transforming itself. Here,
for the first time, I immediately and permanently saw the
possibilities of integrating my life: of making a politics of my
person, of making personal and relevant my politics. Above
all, I saw the possibility of change and transformation: the
possibility of people working together to change their lives.
It was a revolutionising experience.
But of course the reality turned out to be a little more
mundane. What I eventually had to face was the contradictions between the new possibilities and the old, resistant
realities. I mouthed the compulsory rejection of compulsive

35 west rd
lancaster
A Magazine of Sexual Politics produced by lesbians and gay men. 30p.

monogamy, while I entered an intense, long lasting and

immensely valuable one to one relationship. I firmly rejected
the tyranny of bourgeois morality only to flirt, half in love
with easeful death, with the demands of libertarianism. I
threw away my grey suits and swished in my not inexpensive
kaftans beads and beard. But the greatest contradiction,
underpinning all the others, was that between the hopes
inspired by GLF and the grim realities of the 1970s. The last
flame from the cultural energy of the 60s was being
quenched by the downpour of the 70s. We believed that all
the possibilities and aspirations of the movement were going
to be realised overnight. Revolution was around the corner,
and with it all our frustrations and oppressions would
dissolve like strawmen in the wind. Alas!
And yet, beyond the rhetoric, the browning copies of old
handouts, the dated flavour of liberation dialectics, is the
hope and the possibility, the memory and the inspiration. We
all know now that the struggle is a long and hard one. But
the struggle goes on because of those millenarian, wildly
optimistic and utopian, but inspiring early days. Despite
everything, GLF transformed the possibilities of being gay in
our society. And it showed that given the will, the energy
and the collective endeavour nothing is entirely impossible.
Jeffrey Weeks

In 1969 I was a closeted, gay socialist at the London School

of Economics immersed in long hours of discussion around
an obscure point in Kantian philosophy whilst not comprehending that the student strikes, sit-ins and take overs,
which had sped over the waters from Berkeley, California
were demands by students for control over part of our own
lives. The gay movement was a year or two away so the
politics of control over my own life was even less well understood, indeed not yet even thought about. What I can
remember about myself then was a deep sense of fragmentation and a longing to meet other gay men who at least voted
Labour even if they thought politics an abstract irrelevance
to their own lives and a subject best avoided. But I never did.
My experience of my gayness was essentially about having
sex whilst relationships those beautiful, life-long, endlessly
satisfying love affairs were something which I assumed everyone else had. So if there weren't any satisfying relationships
there was intellectual superiority and analytical reasoning to
fall back upon; a beautiful protective device which enabled
me to assume a knowledge of my own fractured life but
which gave me nothing to piece it together with.
Academic study and its associated levels of abstraction
were generally beyond my comprehension and far more
hours were spent looking longingly at men across the library
rooms than divining the inner meanings and the great importance of the philosophical difference between "I raise my
arm" as opposed to "my arm was raised". Kant dominated
LSE in more ways than one! More often than not a socialist
analysis or a marxist interpretation of anything was treated
on the same level as a disease, a passing phase or an act of
open defiance against the natural order of things. In these
circumstances my socialism stood still; student politics
seemed so remote and complex compared with my previous
experience as a stroppy young socialist in a local Labour
Party constituency.
At the same time I was surrounded by aggressively heterosexual women and men holding hands, kissing, dancing,
laughing together, getting engaged and some even getting
married. I felt so alone, I so much wanted to be like them.
And to think we were all considered so rebellious, so radical!
It would be wrong though to paint a totally dismal picture
I wasn't a mere tool of patriarchal and capitalist oppression,
there were lots of good days and I had a couple of very close
non gay friends. But without support and without an understanding of my own life, I couldn't tell anyone I was gay.
After all what would I have said? "I have sex with men, long
to fall in love like heterosexuals and when I'm in a relationship can't get out of it quickly enough". But despite this it
still seems extraordinary and sad to me that in four years at
LSE, I never met another gay student I could speak to, and
when I left there at the age of 23 I had outside one close gay
Gay Left 8

friend a kind, supportive, perceptive man who I ran away

from.
What was left? Well my socialism was still unblighted. It
seemed to me and still does, impossible to support a system
which glories in the success of the rich, whilst all around us
lies the anarchistic anachronisms and destructive oppression/
exploitation of patriarchal capitalism. So given this as a very
brief, sketchy backcloth to ten years ago perhaps it was
inevitable that I should be drawn to gay liberation and its
emphasis on understanding and controlling our lives, openness, honesty, and developing relationships which were not
just sexual. It was also very important for me as a trade
union activist that gay liberation enabled me to develop a
socialist practice which went beyond the struggles for better
wages and working conditions and stated loudly and boldly
that what had always been considered private and personal
was public and political. Thus I was supported by the movement and able to come out at work, and in my trade union
and raise our concerns about sexual politics which never
crossed my mind in 1969.
It may sound trite and corny but it's true to say that my
life was transformed by gay liberation; its collective
consciousness, a sense of belonging to a group, has made me
stronger and richer whilst it has also enabled me to make
some sense out of 10 years ago; it wasn't necessary to see
1969 as some sort of mental aberration or the way things are
if you're "queer" I could even look back to that period
and smile at some of the more desperate moments.
So at this point in time, I'm beginning to think about the
disparate parts of my life; work, sex, friendship, love, politics.
Ten years ago, this would have been impossible. My socialism
was something outside of me. Today, though, it's a question
of trying to find some sort of balance. Everything seems
more urgent with a Thatcherite government bristling to go on
the attack. You feel a little guilty if you're not being a right
on 100% political activist, but then even activists need some
sort of personal life. It's not possible to keep bashing oneself
because the revolution hasn't come or doesn't look likely
next week. Then there's the problem, for me, of trying to
live a personal life that somehow relates to one's politics a
real problem as there are no easy answers to living under
capitalism and as a friend put it recently, we have to try hard
not to be "sexually and socially capitalistic" more understanding, more supportive, more caring less exploitative.
But at least as a gay socialist I feel there's a framework in
which we can start to tackle these things.
I suppose deep down well not very deep I'm an idealist and a romantic, so I want to end by waving a political flag
for the future and say that I feel that only by piecing
together our gayness and our socialism and combining it with
collective action can we defend and advance the gains of the
gay and women's movements. I can't say capitalism will
crumble tomorrow, next week or in a year because of our
action, but I know that without it "Socialism and the New
Life" will remain a mere slogan.
Nigel Young

Gays at Work :Student Unions

by

Kate Ingrey

Looking back I suppose I entered the privileged world of

higher education via the back door.

doesn't take long to catch up, overtake, and castrate (in a

manner of speaking).

I flew the coup before my 15th birthday, to share the

grotty glories of living, existing in Dalston, while being
exploited (on my sisters insurance cards) by a firm of
accountants in Holborn, as an underpaid 'Girl Friday'.

Through some quirk of circumstance I found myself

standing for election as student union publications editor
on a NOISS platform at the end of my second year. I'd put
in a lot of time helping the previous year's editor, and I
think it was due to this, and the sexist vote, that I managed
to pip the then president at the post.

My independence established, (walking to and from work

twice a week due to lack of funds) I returned home,
temporarily.
I found a better job as a printer in a college, which
through youth and/or ignorance I held for three years. There
I was 16 years old tied to a stinking offset litho machine,
while all around me were taking day trips to Brighton as and
when they felt like it. I wasn't exactly overpaid for it either.
When I left I was earning 17 a week, the man who took
over from me started on 42. This brought me to the
'wonderful world of work', namely, temping. This is probably the worst way to earn a living. The agency earns twice
as much as you, so the employer is inclined to expect their
money's worth. I sometimes thought that the jobs I was
sent on were specially created by the firm to give their other
employees someone to snip at; they can always replace you
if you retaliate.
I'd always done a lot of drawing and an escape was needed.
One day in spring 1975 I turned up half an hour late for an
interview at a foundation Art School (who have a good
record for waving '0' and 'A' level requirements), and was
accepted. Prospects certainly seemed brighter.
A foundation year is spent thus:
1st Term: Making marks. The mark made by spitting on a
piece of paper is very exciting if viewed while standing on
your head over a 60ft drop.
2nd Term: Building a portfolio. i.e. making spit on bits of
paper look like works of art by spending vast amounts of
money on cardboard frames. Your portfolio completed the
rest of the term is spent applying for places on degree
courses.
3rd Term: When you finally get accepted somewhere, anywhere, you can relax and do what you want to do which is
far more fun.
This is how I managed to get a toe-hold in a large London
poly.
Most of my sexual relationships were of the one night
stand variety, all with the opposite sex. On the whole, if they
lasted beyond this brief liaison I'd discover that the strong
nasty exterior, (something I was very attracted to) only hid
a dishonest desire to make me feel guilty for not being the
ideal, giving creature I was on the first night.
Being one of those people who cheerfully (if unknowingly)
take responsibility for everyone and everything around them,
this was a desperate position to be in. In the first place I'd
feel it was my fault for starting the encounter. In the second,
due to the crumbling exterior, the person would no longer be
in the slightest bit desirable. Experience taught me it was
generally easier to move house or change jobs than to try
and sort out the mess. Of course there were times when the
shoe was on the other foot, but it doesn't seem the same
somehow when it's you phoning up in tears at midnight.

Degree of Independence?
Anyway I was at college on a degree course, involved in an
on/off relationship of a couple of years standing with a man
called Andrew, who is now one of my best friends. At the
time things weren't so good between us, but we hung on to
the investment. Especially as we'd both lost a lot of 'friends'
in the process of setting it up.
Andrew first read me the SCUM manifesto in 1974, he
was well up on feminist theory, but if you are female it

I'd been spending a lot of time involved in various political activities, and had hung around on the fringes of SWP,
but had never joined, which was probably a good thing since
I don't think I could have handled the discipline of the party
system and investigated myself at the same time.
With hindsight I'm fairly sure that the college cell underestimated both my intelligence and my individualism. I think
they thought they had a 'pretty puppet' in the Publications
Editor elect.
I'd been to a few Gay Soc. discos, not because I wanted to
initiate a lesbian experiment, but because at the time I was
much into discos, drinking and having a good time. The fact
that I didn't/don't find political lesbians and Gays particularly predatory was an added bonus. I was mystified that a
lot of people at college shyed away from such events for fear
of being labelled 'queer'. Still that was, and is, very much
their problem not mine.
I met the woman I now live with at our college 'Women's
Day', but didn't get to know her until sometime later when
we managed to get ourselves, invited back to a mutual
friend's place for lunch. It later transpires that this friend was
in the market for a bit of sexual experimentation herself.
( A feeling very prevalent at that time within this particular
women's group. 'Glad to be gay' was getting a lot of air
time). However she never did manage to work out whether
she wanted to sleep with Kay or myself or both.
Kay was involved in a relationship with a woman and two
kids, I was living with Andrew. So our friendship didn't
become a sexual relationship until a couple of months later
when both of these relationships had fallen apart. I think
our mutual friends/acquaintances were convinced it wouldn't
last. They willed or hoped it wouldn't, however, it has.
The concensus is that having a lesbian affair is an OK
thing to do over the summer, but that one can't afford to
have a radical lesbian feminist running the college magazine
during the year.

Editorial Freedom?
College papers tend to deduce a lot of their adolescent
humour from thinly veiled sexism, I wasn't prepared to produce those goods. What were the poor swines going to laugh
at now. They certainly don't know how to laugh at themselves.
Nowadays most students aren't interested in their union
as such and many resent having to pay for something they
don't see the use of. Mass student militancy is a thing of the
past. Nearly all the gains made by student unions for their
members were made in the late 60's and early 70's. The
present officials just caretake a dying idea. Thus the reality is
one of mismanaged funds, forgotten meetings and stardom
for the few at the expense of services.
As the union becomes more intangible the membership
becomes more reactionary, voting into office anyone who
promises to keep a low profile and avoid confrontation.
Editors have found it hard to get student contributions
for the college paper. During my term of office this has been
further hindered by other union officers 'forgetting' to produce such things as President's reports etc. It means they
don't have to account for what they've been doing on behalf
Gay Left 9

people around my age, but no matter how many parties I've

previously spent listening to this crap, my political advance
does mean that I now see that this particular song is racist
and sexist in the first degree.
I approached one of the 'stars' of the occupation, (a
woman whose energy has launched a hundred badly attended
'How dare you presume I'm heterosexual' discussions.) and
asked her what she thought about it. After being informed
that I was over-sensitive and intolerant I slunk back to the
table I was sharing with my lover. People were sitting on the
floor, on each other, but the two chairs at our table were
empty. Which just goes to show that taking your politics
seriously can badly damage your image.
It's only since I've been a lesbian that I have really seen
the way in which all women are oppressed. I've stopped
playing the game and don't try and hide the fact. Instead of
being able to brush aside the shit that is constantly forced
on women, I feel raped by it, and react to it. A lot of
feminist women at college see this reaction as a
condemnation of the way they let things pass for a life of
acceptance. It isn't intentional, but people always see things
the way they want to, which gives everyone a nice cop-out.
My alienation/exclusion hasn't been particularly obvious,
it's slightly self induced, (I don't feel it's up to me to prove
to folk how harmless I am despite my 'perversion'), but
mostly it's just that the way I live my life questions those
around me, asks for answers to their exclusive sexuality,
their imminent return to the state of the nuclear family.

of the membership, generally not a lot. Without news it

becomes increasingly hard to produce a newspaper.
The membership looks to social events and to the magazine to provide evidence that their fee is doing something for
them. Unfortunately, both these services have had their
budget cut. But they do have a paid editor, researcher, writer,
designer, typist, paste-up etc. However, they don't see it
quite like that.
Kay and myself have spent many a fraught day writing the
news pages, the letters page and so on. Sometimes I know
the issue so well that I don't even bother to look at it when
it comes back from the printers. I do try to print every
student contribution although that often means severe
editing, i.e. racism and sexism. If I disagree with a letter I
disagree in print, but this hasn't, as I hoped, stimulated more
discussion. Still, they have stopped coming in addressed
`Dear Sir', except from the Federation of Conservative
Students who must be thicker skinned than most.

Must Spend My Time . . .

Racial politics rate high on the average political student's
'must spend my time fighting for' chart, basically because
most students are white and middle class. With all the frenzy
in the world for the issue of the moment, these people are
still able to return to their comfortable abodes without any
risk of racial abuse. Sexual politics are something else
entirely, everyone is affected. Too much investigation in this
field has the drawback of changing the lives of 'right on'
politicos.
Our poly recently went into occupation against the
i mposition of quotas on overseas students, instead of the
usual minimal support from students, the occupation was
packed with 100-150 students sleeping in. Not only were
students participating, they were of varying nationalities,
Malaysian, Iranian, etc. and were providing very positive insights into the whole area of neo-colonialism. I first felt
something was wrong when the General meeting asked for a
`Chairman' for the occupation committee. Piecemeal protest
from surrounding 'feminists'. Things went from bad to worse.
Beyond the usual sexual free-for-all that inevitably
accompanies occupations, women were doing the cooking,
women doing the washing up, women being molested, and
everyone happily getting drunk to the strains of 'Brown
Sugar'. The Rolling Stones are very much the heritage of
Gay Left 10

I'm glad that during my year of office I haven't had to ask

for direct and public support from the liberals and temporary
left, because when it comes to the crunch I don't think that
support is as forthcoming as we try and make ourselves
believe.

SISTERS, NEVER LET A DOCTOR PUT YOU

DOWN AGAIN!
Our Bodies, Ourselves, a Health Book by and for
women.
Boston Women's Health Book Collective.
British edition by Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen.
Penguin, 1978. 3.50.

Reviewed by Sue Bruley

One of the most important aspects of the women's liberation
movement has been the desire to overcome ignorance about
our own bodies. Women have sought to retrieve from 'the
professionals' an understanding of their own physiology. A
necessary part of this process must be the availability of low
priced literature which can be easily assimilated by women
wth no background in medical terminology. The Penguin
edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves is the English version of the
original Boston Women's Health Book Collective, which was
first published in 1971.

Our Bodies, Ourselves was an instant success and has been

widely acclaimed, and deservedly so as it is a truly impressive
manual of women's health care. But the book's originality
lies in the fact that it is far more than a mere 'body manual'.
Women's bodies are never treated in the detached and
mechanical manner of the medical profession. The element
of consciousness is always present. This integrated perspective successfully embraces detailed information on complex
medical problems such as Pelvic Inflammatory Disease and
Endrometritis along with a whole range of material concerning lifestyles and personal relationships.
Ordinarily one would cringe at the sight of a section on
Lesbianism in a manual on women's health care, expecting
the topic to be dealt with in pathological terms. Fortunately
a complete break with this kind of approach has been made.
The section on 'Lesbian Perspectives' presents a straightforward and honest (ie non-idealised) description of lesbian
sexuality and life styles, including lesbian mothers. The use
of three personal accounts in this chapter blends in well with
the overall concept of the book.

Pat Arrowsmith -Pacifist

The following interview with Pat Arrowsmith was arranged because of her experience over the past
20 years and more in progressive causes. We were interested both in these involvements in themselves and
how the emergence of the women's and gay movements may have affected her political perspectives. This
is an edited version of the interview with Pat conducted by Keith Birch, Jacky Plaster, Marie Walsh and
Nigel Young.
GL: In this election you stood as a Socialist Unity candidate
in Jim Callaghan's constituency, campaigning particularly on
the Troops Out issue. How successful do you feel this kind of
intervention is?

PA: When the major political parties keep such a silence on

the British War in Ireland it is a way of getting some publicity,
and to confront people with the issue. We held public
meetings around Troops Out and I got to speak to groups
that would not normally consider Ireland. At one meeting a
young man who was about to join the army changed his
mind on being confronted with the realities of the war he
would have to fight in. One is also made aware of the
coercive power of the State. During the campaign I was
arrested twice by the police merely because of speaking in
public on the Irish question.

GL: How did you come to stand as a Parliamentary candidate and why do you feel the Irish question to be of such
importance?

PA: I stood as a candidate in 1970. I was approached by

some people from the Communist Party who wanted someone who would attract wider support. I stood exclusively on
the Vietnam war issue but my agent was Irish and a
Republican and I became aware that this was Britain's first
reponsibility. It was not good enough just to take up causes
in far away places such as Vietnam and Chile. Right here
England was involved in a war situation in Ireland and as a
pacifist this became of primary concern.

GL: There seems to be little general awareness of the issues

at stake in Ireland and the Left and Troops Out Movement
have made little impact as yet. What sort of reaction did you
get?
PA: The majority of public opinion polls show that people
do want Troops Out. Largely this is not from a socialist
perspective of giving the Irish people the right to selfdetermination. Rather it is the expression of a feeling of 'let
them kill each other', a repugnance for the bombings and
killings and there is no end in sight. In a broad sense this
state of public opinion can be attached to the perspectives
of Troops Out if the issues can be explained properly and
mass pressure put on the Government to move from this
i mpasse.

GL: In the campaign you stood openly as a lesbian and in

support of the Women's and Gay Movements. Do you see
any connections between this stand and the Irish question
and what effect did it have on your campaign?

PA: I see no connection between my being a lesbian and

my involvement in Troops Out. They are separate issues
both personally and in regards to Ireland. Gays in both parts
of Ireland are in a bad position, it may be worse in the Free
State than in the North. My public stance as a lesbian,
though, did give me the opportunity to speak to audiences
of gay men and lesbians who listened to me on Ireland when
they may not have otherwise done so. At public meetings
in the streets people would be shouting and joking about
whether I was a lesbian. But when it was baldly announced
that I was it usually just silenced them.

GL: What is the background to your political beliefs and

involvements? You became well known with the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament but how did you arrive at that
position?

PA: My first political activity was at University and in the

early 1950s with the Crusade for World Government. I was
particularly concerned with the horrors of the bomb and the
possibility of the destruction of all human life. I was a
pacifist and became deeply committed to campaign against
all wars and killing. I came to London in 1950 and was
available to organise the first CND march to Aldermaston
and from that time my involvement in the pacifist and CND
movements became complete.

GL: When did you recognise yourself as a lesbian and what

was your involvement in the lesbian subculture during the
50s and 60s?
PA: I first recognised my feelings for other women at
boarding school but when I went to Cambridge University I
fell in love with two men though the relationships were more
on an emotional level rather than sexual. I felt rather blocked
about my feelings at this time in the early 1950s. I then
went into social work and fell in love with a woman who
was one my supervisors. There was an atmosphere of liberal
tolerance but also the pressure that one needed help to be
cured. I wrote to an analyst explaining my feelings and I
received a letter back saying that she would help if I felt
out of accord with myself, but if not, it was not a matter to
be 'cured'. I did not contact her again.
Later I was working in Chester where I met a woman and
fell in love and this was my first sexual relationship. The
situation and relationship were very difficult and I left my
job before being sacked and was almost run out of town.
However I did not feel guilty by then, though she found it
very difficult.

GL: Did you know any other lesbians, just circles of friends
or clubs?

PA: No. This was the middle of the 50s and one felt very
isolated. When I came down to London and started working
for CND and other progressive movements I started to meet
and have relationships with other lesbians. People ask when
did I first 'come out', but it never seemed an issue in the
environment I was working in. If one was living with another
woman it was just accepted that that was the situation and
nothing more was said; it was just taken for granted. I even
discovered it could have its advantageous side when I went
into Holloway on my prison sentences. Relationships were
very much on the Butch/Femme stereotype. I remember on
one sentence a group of women were discussing sexual
relationships and one women said very matter of factly, that
she was bisexual, and I was very impressed by her honesty.
At that time, because of my very public involvement with
CND, I felt that if I came out as a lesbian it might be used
against CND, and looking back at the public attitudes of the
time, I think that was right. I met Wendy in the early 60s
who was also involved in the movements and we lived
together for 14 years.

GL: How did you see this relationship and what contact did
you have with the lesbian scene and the Women's movement
from the late 60s?
PA: Wendy and I were fairly monogamous and we lived in a
quasi-childless marriage. I occasionally had other
relationships which caused difficulties and for which I felt
guilty. It depends on the individuals and the way that they
come together. It is natural for people to want to live
together whether they are heterosexual or homosexual.

Gay Left 11

Wendy and I lived together on the basis of monogamy and so

I was dishonest to her when I had other relationships and
that is why I say I felt guilty with just cause.

Wendy. So it came as a relief to see that such roles did not

matter.

We only went to the clubs such as the Gateways very

occasionally because of the way our relationship worked. I
went to a few of the early GLF meetings, probably in 1971
or so. I remember at one of them a woman announced herself as being 'butch' and the other women were very
moralistic and put her down. One almost felt out of place
for having short hair.

GL: You seem to see your lesbianism very much on an

individualist basis, the making of statements if it seems
relevant etc. But surely it is movements that make these
interventions possible, that make the statements political and
give them strength. I'm a lesbian and live on an estate in
Hackney. Living there can be very difficult, people can make
life hell. (Marie)

GL: What about the Women's movement and the issues it

raised. Did you not feel oppressed in the organisations that
you were involved with in the 60s, the kinds of experiences
that many women in the left had?

PA: I suppose I've been lucky as a lesbian. I've never been

attacked and I've spent most of my time with people in
progressive groups so my lesbianism has never been a great
issue. Also my public name has probably given me some
safety, especially with the police and in prison with regard to
being a lesbian.

PA: I did not really have those sort of experience. My

involvement was in pacifist and progressive movements
rather than Marxist groups. I was rather a late comer to the
concepts of the Women's movement. My first contact with
any such ideas was at the War Resisters Conference in 1970,
when some Americans complained about sexist language and
the use of words like 'Chairman'. I remember feeling rather
scornful. It was only later that I began to realise that words
do not merely reflect attitudes but help to define them as
well. I have made a great point of this since in all the
organisations that I am involved with such as CND and
Amnesty International.

GL: In what terms would you describe your political beliefs

and activities?
PA: I would regard myself as a pacifist and socialist though
not a Marxist. I am against privilege and for the public ownership of the means of production but as a pacifist I am against
violent revolution in Marxist terms. I do not believe the end
justifies the means. This does not mean that pacifism entails
just sitting back and making useless protests. It means
organising mass movements, campaigns of mass civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. People ask what would
one have done in Germany against the Nazis. This is difficult,
but one hopes that if a mass movement had been built early
enough to oppose racism things would not have happened the
way they did. That is why the Anti-Nazi League in the last
year has been so important here against the National Front.
I also think it is possible to talk to people individually and
confront their prejudices. People on an individual level are
susceptible to change. I believe in active pacifism.

A Response

by Jacky Plaster

Pat Arrowsmith believes that many, if not most, people can

be convinced by rational argument and that any use of
violence to effect social change is morally unacceptable under
any circumstances. If this were true, it would mean that
communist, feminist, black and gay liberation movements
could achieve their objectives by peaceful means alone. It
would also mean that the use of violence would necessarily
make the ends worthless.
For instance, we would have to say that the Chinese
Communist in achieving their objectives by means including
violence, have inevitably rendered meaningless and suspect,
the subsequent lives of millions of Chinese women and men,
simply because of bloodshed involved in their revolutionary
struggle.

GL: Why have you not been particularly involved in the

Women's or Lesbian movements? You said before that you
became concerned about Ireland because it was nearer home.
Surely the oppression of women and gays is 'close to home'?

PA: I have been involved in many aspects of the

movement on demonstrations, in union groups, to wearing
badges. I do feel part of the general movement. However my
primary concern is directed against killing the bomb, wars,
Ireland. In a sense I am not 'proud' of being gay. I just am.
The notion of pride is just to compensate. I do not see being
a lesbian as a political issue. It's not political, it's erotic. It's
about love. What is political is the oppression that we suffer
because of it and the resistance that we offer. If you are
oppressed you fight back, you picket pubs, you caucus in
your union. I am rather mistrustful of aspects of the Women's
Movement where being lesbian is trendy, taken up as a
political stance. The idea of 'any woman can' is nonsense.
What I have found important personally from the
Women's Movement has been the opening up of sexual roles,
that we do not have to be restricted to narrow stereotypes of
butch and femme. I always felt uncomfortable in trying to fit
into this kind of role and it did not fit my relationship with
Gay Left 12

Is this position true or tenable?

Granted our aims are desirable, what use is a 'moral'
position that refuses the necessary means to achieve them?
If it is true that, in many situations at least, civil disobedience
and rational persuasion are insufficient, then we have to
consider the consequences for the masses of oppressed
people of what amounts to tilting at windmills. It might
well be greater oppression.
In Britain today, we have capitalist oppression clothed
in the ideology of human rights. Space has both been
provided by the oppressor and created and used by the
oppressed, within which peaceful methods of change have
operated with some success. The Welfare State is an outcome
of struggle, and even though it operates partly to facilitate
capitalism, it is also a substantial gain of working class
solidarity. But it may not always be so easy. The new Tory
government intends to strengthen the repressive apparatus of
the state in order to enfore its policies, which will mean a
severe lowering of the standard of living of the mass of
people and the destruction of the Welfare State. The erosion
of civil liberties (increasingly paid only lipservice to by
capitalist rhetoric) forces us to reexamine our political
practice.

' Morality', our notion of human welfare, always has to be

put into context. Without specific and careful analyses of
the situations facing us, we are left in an unexamined and
ahistorical moral posturing. The probable consequence of
such posturing is the pursuit of policies which are
inappropriate and harmful to others. We cannot simply
respond reactively in our political practice. Adjusting our
practice to the anticipated consequences of our proposed
actions is quite distinct from an amoral pragmatism; it is a
sensitive recognition that the same action, productive in one
context, may well be counter productive and harmful in
another. (For example: coming out is not self-evidently
good in all situations what would be the result of coming
out as gay in our children's infant school tomorrow?)
If our practice damages others, and we fail to reflect on it,
then it is dubious whether we are morally intentioned: we
must get the facts right, understand what we are doing and
adjust our strategies.
Why should it be that physical violence leading to injury
and death is an a priori and unacceptable violation of a self
evident moral code, valid always and everywhere, and civil
disobedience and rational discourse are self evidently morally
correct?
There is no pregiven justification for such a position. Both
means and ends have to be subjected to criticism in terms of
their consequences in specific situations. We must cease to
operate with an untheorised moral code.
Further, decisions as to what means one employs are
never taken unilaterally, without taking account of the
intentions of our enemies and their power to enforce their
codes against us. Their is no single mode of rational discourse
by whose rules we all abide. Our enemies' `rationality',
however coherent, is predicated on values totally opposed to
ours. Not all people wish to negotiate rationally, and there
is no necessary connection between ' rationality' and morality;
a systematic world-view does not entail a concern for human
welfare. The contradiction between us and our enemies is
antagonistic, not resolvable by peaceful methods.

cannot be resolved by the capitalist system itself, only by

socialist revolution" (p443, 'On the correct handling of
contradictions amongst the people' Mao Tse-tung)
What chance would the Chinese Communists have had
before 1949 had they followed a pacifist policy? Civil
disobedience and rational discourse, have a place, but a
necessarily limited one.
Taking away human life should not be done lightly or
arbitrarily. But the fact that human life is valued implies
that it has the potentiality for high quality. The quality of
life has to be fought for as hard as life itself.
These considerations determine how we judge the violence
of the Provisional IRA or the violence of the British troops
in Ireland. It cannot be violence per se that we attend to,
but the meanings that violence is endowed with. We have to
look at specific oppressions eg in Ireland that of British
i mperialism, the church, capital and patriarchy, which
specific violences address. How those oppressions interact,
what their strengths and weaknesses are how they might
respond to specific pressures, all these considerations
determine which actions are appropriate.
Many questions need to be asked. Why did the movements in Thirties Germany, communist, gay, feminist so
tragically fail to draw sufficient support to resist Nazi power?
This question pinpoints where the rational persuasion that
Pat Arrowsmith advocates is crucial: the whole area of
ideological struggle. Political action by the few, unsupported
by the understanding and desire for change of the mass of
people, is merely adventurist. Communists must use the
democratic methods of persuasion and education, and
should on no account resort to commandism or coercion.
We have to overcome the internal divisions in the working
class man against woman, white against black, heterosexual
against gay. If we cannot end our oppression of each other,
if fascist, racist and sexist ideology cannot be overcome by
a desire for change and willingness to act by the mass of
people then the realisation of a high quality of life is nothing
but a dream.

"In capitalist society contradiction find expression in

acute antagonisms and conflicts, in sharp class struggle: they

Paedophilia ~A Response
In my preliminary reply to the Gay Left editorial on paedophilia, I promised a full response, and listed four points
which would be its essence. All of these points are implied in
what follows, but I do not propose to re-iterate them, since -and I hope I will be forgiven I have decided it might be
better to tackle the article in a slightly different way, taking
puberty as a point of departure:
People think of puberty in the way the history books talk
about the River Rhine: it is a "natural frontier". Just as the
state boundaries of France and Germany might shift back
and forth with the fortunes of war, so might ages of consent
go up and down by governmental decree; but both
phenomena have been thought to bear some loose relationship to important "natural" facts.
Puberty as a "natural frontier" is a concept which has
bedevilled the discussion of paedophilia, in the Gay Left
deliberations as much as elsewhere. The reason for this is
clear enough: it provides a seductively neat, clear mental
landmark for the mind to take bearings by only to point
our thinking in a completely inappropriate direction.
At one time, puberty was thought of as the great sexual
awakening, preceded by childhood innocence. People don't
make that mistake these days, least of all GL. As every
schoolchild knows (except those crippled by socially induced
shame), children are capable of orgasm from infancy onwards,' an ability which is not lost in the Freudian so-called

by Tom O'Carroll

"latency period". Puberty, and the years immediately

preceding it, 2 are indeed distinguished in our society by an
increase in sexual behaviour, especially in boys, but as a
period of awakening it is vastly overrated. Thanks to the
cultural repression of their sexuality, girls are in fact more
likely to experience orgasm for the first time during, or
following, an adult sexual relationship' than at puberty.3
The myth that children become sexual at puberty has
been largely dispelled. Yet a myth closely, indeed
inseparably, bound up with this false notion persists, and has
evidently played an important part in GL's thinking. 1 refer
to the view that puberty marks a stage at which children
cease to be children: that this is the stage at which they
become transformed into beings who are somehow able to
give an at least quasi-adult consideration to sex to both
its physical and emotional implications.
GL put it thus: "An age of consent, in theory at least,
would seem to be meaningful only in the context of an
entry into social and sexual maturity, which in turn suggests
a relationship to puberty. The problem is that puberty is a
process rather than a particular age, occurring roughly
between the ages of 11 and 14, though individuals differ
greatly in their physical and emotional development at this
ti me. Together with the sexual development of the body it
i mplies a growing awareness of the social world, particularly
through greater contact with peers and older children as

sources of education and experience."

There is an important confusion of ideas here. In the first
place, puberty is not a process, as is suggested: it means
"being functionally capable of procreation" (Concise Oxford
Dictionary), neither more nor less. This capability is one with
which boys and girls find themselves more or less overnight,
although development of the secondary sexual characteristics
associated with it (the growth of pubic hair and so on) takes
longer, and the period of acquisition is known as
"pubescence". It is worth noting the precocious puberty has
been known to occur as early as age 5 or 6, in children who
show no sign of greater intellectual or emotional maturity
than their coevals. (4)
What GL are getting at in their description of "a growing
awareness of the social world" and so on, is not puberty at
all, but adolescence, which fits the bill by definition:
"ADOLESCENT: (Person) growing up, between childhood
and manhood, or womanhood" (C.O.D.)
This distinction is not merely a pedantic one. For whereas
the word "puberty" has the clear quality of a "natural
frontier" about it, with direct reference to physiological
changes in the body, the definition of "adolescence" is
irritatingly vague. It begs all the important questions about
what characterises childhood, as opposed to adulthood. In
answering such questions it might be useful to make reference
to a young person's demonstrable ability to cope with
certain intellectual and moral concepts, a la Piaget, but the
crude rule of thumb which settles for vaguely associating
puberty with maturity simply fails to stand up to inspection:
social workers and others are all too familiar with girls of 18
or 19 years of age (well past puberty) who do not have anything like the maturity needed to cope with having their own
baby, and some of them never will have. Others show an
i mpressively "adult" capacity to handle responsibility many
years in advance of puberty, especially when the culture in
which they are raised expects it of them. "Puberty rites"
traditionally delineate an important event insofar as, in
primitive societies, a young person's capacity to reproduce
was of social and economic significance.
But it is not necessary for arguments relating to
paedo-philia to become bogged down in the question of "What is
maturity", and in ages or stages associated with maturity.
The belief that the question is irrelevant clearly marks the
dividing line between those who embrace a real change in
sexual attitudes and those who do not; between those who
look upon sexual feelings positively, as a natural good, and
those who can only regard it as an area of special danger and
difficulty. In this respect, the issue becomes almost entirely
separable from paedophilia as such: it is a much broader one,
the resolution of which will profoundly affect every growing
child and ultimately the entire quality of society.

Maturity
Let's try and dispose of the "maturity" red-herring once
and for all by a close examination of exactly why GL
appears to feel it is important. GL isolates two sets of issues:
1. More or less practical matters. GL mentions early prepregnancy and VD, though neither is a problem of paedophilia as such: a girl can become pregnant, or catch VD, from
a boyfriend of her own age. But, as GL says, this still leaves
the question "as to whether children have the emotional
resources to deal with paedophile relationships and the
emotional crises that can happen".
2. "Consent", which involves "issues of disparity of
experience, needs, desires, physical potentialities, emotional
resources, sense of responsibility, awareness of the consequences of one's actions, and above all power between
adults and children."
Now it makes no sense at all to analyse the above
propositions bit by bit, in a myopic, detailed way. To do so
would be to miss the wood for the trees -- the "answers"
would all be distorted by the obsessions and preconceptions
of our own, very particular, society. We need always to look
outward, to be aware of the insights we can derive from
history and anthropology, and to look forward, to have a
conception of the quality of human society we want to
build and the imagination to see what may be possible. These
Gay Left 14

are fundamental, and one would think perhaps too obvious

points to labour with the readers of a radical journal, but
they are the ones which are often neglected or lost sight of
in the paedophilia debate, such as it has been. People have
become all too hungup on the here and now; they have
become ensnared by the doubts and anxieties which have
for the most part attended their own sexual upbringing and
which, by becoming radical gays, they had thought to have
cast off, but which in reality still niggle away at some point
of subconsciousness.
Let's start by reminding ourselves that "paedophilia" is
far from universally stigmatised, or even recognised as a
condition needing categorisation. By the pastoral Lepcha
people of Sikkim, sexual acts between adults and quite young
children, including full coitus with girls of eight or nine, are
looked upon indulgently.(5) In some societies, paedophilic
acts have a special and institutionalised significance: such as
the Aranda aborigines of central Australia, where "paederasty
is a recognised custom ... Commonly a man, who is fully
initiated but not yet married, takes a boy ten or twelve
years old, who lives with him as his wife for several years,
until the older man marries."(6) In a very great many cultures
it is considered acceptable for adults usually parents or
relations, but not always to masturbate children.
It may be debatable how far the customs of small and
"primitive" peoples have any relevance to economically
advanced, sophisticated societies like our own. But what
we can be sure of is that our society, thanks partly to the
multiple distortions of the personal life that have been
engendered by the very factors that have made us
"advanced" the spirit of intense competition and will to
dominance and exploitation is riven with sexual strife,
exploitation, neurosis and perversion (and here I use the
word in the Stollerian(7) sense, to mean a sex life, like that of
many rapists, in which positive hostility towards the sex
object plays a major part).
Insofar as economic factors underpin what Reich called
"the psychic massacre"(8) of our people (he could just as
easily have been describing this country as his own), only

politico-economic solutions, based on a libertarian left

approach, offer any hope. But political change does not exist
in a vacuum: people are not going to cast off their neuroses,
their guilt, their male chauvinism or their female subordination, in response to some alien revolutionary clarion
call. Such change is evolutionary, and the evolution that
matters is in the minds of little babes in arms and of growing
children: only if they grow up feeling good about sex and
unprejudiced about gender are they at all likely to reach
adulthood psychically intact.

Without Shame
So far, I daresay, I'm on common ground with GL readers.
Why then go over it'? Because I feel we need reminding that
most people in our culture reach their so-called maturity,
whether at puberty or some other time, in a state of total
mental muddle about sex. Adolescent boys (if they are
"straight") find a massive conflict between their guilt feelings
about sex on the one hand and the expectation that they
should behave in a "manly", sexually go-getting way on the
other -- a crisis which sometimes resolves itself disastrously
by a projection of their guilt onto "bad girls" who can be
degraded and humiliated at will. Girls, for their part,
frequently eschew "dirty" thoughts about sex, in favour of
an idealised world of romance. and the absurd search for a
"Mr Right", to whom they seek domestic enslavement.
Having said this, it is possible to return to the issues of
"maturity", as isolated by GL, with a fresh eye. Let's look
again at the question "as to whether children have the
emotional resources to deal with paedophile relationships
and the emotional crises that can happen". Bearing in mind
the points made above, it is possible to see that the question
is totally misconceived: people only need great "emotional
resources" to cope with "emotional crises" if their upbringing has taken them into adolescence saddled with the
sort of monumental sexual hangups that are likely to give

rise to crises. Adolescence is not necessarily a time of

emotional crisis: witness the idyllic adolescence of the Muria,
as described in Elwin's classic study.(9) Children, by contrast
and the younger they are the more this applies are better
equipped to sexually relate to adults with a spontaneous,
unproblematic sense of pleasure in our culture, precisely
because they are not mature: because they are less likely to
have been damaged by society's prevailing anti-sexual mores.
Dr Alayne Yates, a psychiatrist who is also the mother of
six children, put this point well in her recent revolutionary
book, Sex Without Shame(10), when she assessed the impact of
incest between father and daughter: "The young child who
doesn't know that, incest is immoral is both flattered and
fascinated. It feels good and gets better with practice ... The
girls I have evaluated who were young, uncoerced and
initially pleased with the relationship remained emotionally
unscathed, even after protracted incest ... Guilt is a
relatively late occurrence, often not appearing until early
adolescence. When these girls move out into the school and
the community, they swiftly form gratifying liaisons with
more appropriate males ... " Incest which starts in
adolescence, however, is much more likely to be accompanied
by intense guilt, depression, suicidal tendencies, bitterness
and frigidity.
Now, it will be pointed out that children who enter a
sexual relationship in the innocence described by Dr Yates
i.e. being innocent of sexual shame and guilt, could be in for
a rude awakening when a relationship is discovered. This is
perfectly true. Guilt, it not taught by parents, tends to be

Impressed soon enough by other authority figures. Take the

case of Virginia, aged seven, as described by Bender and
Blau:
"It was discovered she was making frequent visits to the
janitor of the apartment house for sex relations. The
relationship included cunnilingualism (sic), mutual masturbation, and fellatio. During this period her aunt also said that
she observed her in sex play with a dog."
In hospital she was treated for this strange malady known
as sexuality: "at first she discussed her sex experiences
freely and shamelessly but" after being taught shame, one
gathers "she later became more reticent and evasive".(11)
This leaves us with a question. Should we protect children
from sex (to avoid the consequences of the guilt and social
retribution arising from it) or, alternatively, should we
prioritise the diminution of guilt? Knowing the hideous
consequences of guilt and the harmlessness of sex, it doesn't
seem a particularly difficult question to me.

Problems
But some will contest my assertion of the "harmlessness"
to children of sex per se. Direct physical sources of harm
include pregnancy and VD, as already noted. One might ask
how far are adolescents in our society mature enough to cope
with these problems in a way which children are not? By and
large, adolescence is entered into with very little sexual
knowledge or experience. Indeed, pregnancy only becomes
a problem in the postpubertal years, not beforehand. What
we need to work towards is a society in which children arrive
at adolescence with plenty of sexual experience: it can only
be helpful to a girl newly capably of becoming pregnant if
she is not easily "swept off her feet" by the first youth or
man who comes along.
The "harmlessness" of sex also depends on what we are
talking about when we speak of "sex" itself. Obviously, it
would not be harmless for an adult to have anal intercourse
or coitus with a toddler, whether or not the infant showed an
initial willingness to let the adult attempt intromission. In
these circumstances, the argument that the child "doesn't
know what he/she is doing" has something to it: there can be
no valid consent to a potentially dangerous act in the absence
of a full understanding of what the act entails.
It is important to understand that although this issue
appears to play a prominent part in the minds of those who
are appalled by paedophilia, it is really an illusory problem,
arising -- significantly, in view of all that GL had to say about
a conflict in the "meaning" of sex, as between the child's
and the adult's understanding of it from a confusion as to
the "meaning" of sex for the paedophile. In the older
psychiatric texts, paedophiles used to be described as
"infantosexual"(12), meaning that as well as being deviant in
the preferred sex object, their sexual aim was deviant too,
being characterised by an "infantile" preoccupation with
foreplay with gently masturbatory and oral or caressing
techniques, rather than with an urge to penetration. It is a
pity in a sense that this deviancy of aim is less remarked upon
now.
However, the facts, so far as they are available, back up
the early clinical impressions. Gebhard et al, in their standard
work on male sex offenders(13), found that noncoital sexual
activity, mostly manual manipulation of the genitals,
accounted for no less than 94% of offences against girls under
under 12. In offences against boys under 12, an even higher
figure, 97%, did not involve anal intercourse, most of the
activity being manual-genital (45%) and oral-genital (38%).
Gebhard listed separately those offences in which there had
been aggression against girls. This was a smaller, but very
different group. In these cases, where a degree of violence
or intimidation had been used, coitus was attempted in 23%
of cases and actually achieved in a further 23%. Interestingly,
there were so few examples of aggression against young boys
that Gebhard did not feel justified in separating them out as
a category. It should also be pointed out that Gebhard's data
related to convicted offenders only, so that the cases involved
may have been biassed towards including a disproportionate
number of unsatisfactory ones, in which the child was the
Gay Left 15

complainant. In cases which do not reach the courts, the

proportion of non-penetrative activity may be even higher.
What we are talking about as the activity of most paedophiles, then is touching and licking the kind of sexual
pleasuring that children do among themselves (given a
chance) and which is accepted as legitimate for parents in
many cultures to do with their children. I have slowly come
to believe that PIE's proposals for abolishing the age of
consent(14) (these proposals were formulated in 1975) do not
take sufficient account of this fact, and I believe a great deal
of legitimate concern could be obviated if the issues of full
penetrative sex on the one hand and "sex play" on the other
could be distinguished and considered separately. For my
own part PIE has yet to deliberate formally on this I
feel it may be both theoretically and practically acceptable
to endorse a minimum age for penetrative sex, while allowing
other forms of consensual sex at any age.

But why should the ability to honour commitments be an

issue in sexual consent? Why should consent involve, as GL
puts it, "a sense of responsibility", or "an awareness of the
consequences of one's actions"? If there is no commitment,
and no dire consequences, these qualities are quite redundant,
and only play a part in our thinking thanks to those vestiges
of our anti-sexual culture than continue to lurk at the back
of our minds. To children, particularly younger children, sex
may mean simply a kind of play, a "game" that makes you
feel good, just as hopscotch, or riding on a swing, can be fun
in other ways and they are perfectly able to accept or
reject it on this level. They may have some idea from a very
early age that sex is "naughty", and this may influence their
decision, either by putting them off, or by positively attracting them to the lure of the forbidden. Either way, they have
no need to conceptualize sex as other than a "game" in order
to play it.
This is not to deny that there is more to sex than just a
game, or that children need to grow towards an appreciation
of that fact. But let's not forget that even infants
especially infants -- experience and know the link between
physical intimacy and "emotional" feelings: their earliest
notions of parental love for children are built around cuddles
and caresses. To be loved, as opposed to merely played with,
by a paedophile, need be neither an alien nor alarming
phenomenon to the child.
Paedophiles, for their part, often enter the spirit of
"playing games" in their relationships with children, just as
parents do. This does not mean that they cannot be capable
of, and willing to, assume a role involving responsibility
involving an inward commitment, or wish, to care for and
cherish a child. In this sense, there may indeed be a disparity
of meaning to the relationship, as between what the paedophile feels and what the child feels, just as the parent-child
relationship means different things to each party within it.
But we do not insist because of this that a child must become
grown up before he can " consent" to being nurtured by his
parents.

Disparities

Consent
It is not necessary here to discuss specific legal proposals
any further. Instead, I want to consider the legitimacy of
"consent" to non-penetrative i.e. physically harmless sex, in
the light of what GL had to say about sexual "meanings" and
issues of relative power and equality between adults and
children. Perhaps the most crucial "meaning" of sex to
adults is that in our culture it is charged with a tremenddus
amount of importance: the decision to "consent" or not
"consent" is assumed to have enormous consequences and
ramifications a point which has some validity in the
context of an unwanted pregnancy or a forcible or damaging
penetration, but which extends far beyond this meaning.
The decision to "consent" has overtones in our culture of
accepting a commitment, or at least something which is
going to very radically and permanently affect one's future
life. At one time in "respectable" society the commitment
would only have occurred within marriage a lifelong pairbond which undoubtedly requires a mature appreciation by
both partners of what they are letting themselves in for (a
maturity which is often absent among adults even at the
highest levels of intelligence and sophistication, and which
really presupposes an impossible degree of prescience). Even
now, entering a sexual relationship implies for many young
people a commitment, if not to marriage, then at least to
engagement, or to "going steady". If one accepts the ability
to make mature commitments as a necessary basis for
consent to sex, then children (plus most adolescents and
many adults) have to be ruled out, just as these categories
of person cannot enter into financial contracts such as hirepurchase deals, unless their credit rating (reflecting their
known maturity in handling money) is good.
Gay Left 16

It has been suggested that among the disparities of

meaning, of intentionality, between paedophile and child,
there are two elements to the adult's "prioritisation" of
certain areas of the body and secondly his "fetishism" for a
particular age group. Either of these objections could be the
subject of a full-length article in itself. But suffice it to say
that the first is based on a rather dated, Freudian, conception
of the child's psycho-sexual development towards genital
gratification, when in fact children of any age may be
strongly disposed towards specifically genital acts, while the
second is based on the idea that paedophiles concern themselves solely with a sexual "symbol", rather than with a
whole person, and that this apparently diminished response
would appear to impoverish the quality (and/or duration) of
the relationship. A priori, this may appear to be the case, but
this view overlooks the fact that the sexual response of all
people is reducible to fairly basic symbols (see Colin Wilson's
existentialist exposition of this in Origins of the Sexual
Impulse)(15) and the limitations of the paedophilic response
are simply more visible than others. It does not mean that
paedophiles are any less able to relate to their sexual
partners as people which may mean, and often does mean,
continuing a warm social relationship with the young sexual
partner well into his/her adulthood.(16)

Power and Equality

The key issues, however, are those of power and equality,
and in this respect the parallels between the paedophilic
relationship and the parental one are all important. In the
parental setting, disparities of experience and power between
adults and their children are taken for granted; it is assumed
that these disparities will be used for the benefit of the child
rather than to exploit him. Usually, this is the case, but no
GL reader needs to be reminded of the failings of the nuclear
family and the pathological domination and suffocation
or sheer physical abuse of many children by their parents.
The answer is not to abandon nurturance as such children

positively need to be nurtured by an unequal person (there

would be no point in a mother breastfeeding a "baby" as big
and strong and independent as herself) - but to think in
terms of supporting alternative, less introverted family
structures, in which power is spread more broadly, and also
to support a notion of children's rights, to counterbalance
the possibility of arbitrary and exploitative imposition of a
parent's will (or the will of any other adult, in a sexual or
non-sexual context).

to children, including sexual ones, can be on a much more

equal basis ... A widening of the scope of relations between
adults and children will inevitably mean an increase in the
incidence of paedophile relationships. We thus see the raising
of the taboo on paedophile relationships as being an integral
part of the liberation of children and of women. Paedophile
relationships are not only allowable, they are to a large
degree inevitable in a socialist society."

In the case of paedophiles, as opposed to parents, it is

assumed -- totally without justification - that any disparities
in experience and power will be exercised malevolently,
whereas many paedophiles are patently well-disposed, as
loving teachers, residential house parents, or simply "friends"
to their children, who bring a degree of heart and dedication
to their involvement which far exceeds that given by people
for whom kids are just another job. Of course, it is not
difficult to "prove" the paedophile's malevolence so long as
any sexuality between children and adults is defined as bad.

Paedophile Information Exchange:

PIE,
P.O. Box 318,
London, SE3 8QD

There will be those who find it hard to understand how a

further unequal relationship can be justified, in addition to
that between parent and child. Such an objection is misplaced for a number of reasons, but principally because inequality is at its most powerfully malignant in situations
(usually within the family) in which the child has no choice,
when the adult in question is able to dictate absolutely the
conduct of all aspects of the child's life - what the child will
eat, when he/she will go to bed and get up, the type of
religious indoctrination to be received, what company the
child will keep etc. The paedophile is rarely in such a position
of "monopoly control" ( a position which is always undesirable, irrespective of sex). On the contrary, he is far more
likely to represent an alternative to the strictures and narrow
horizons of the parental home, a broadening of the child's
view of the world, a new option, which can be taken or left
just as (freer) children choose friends among their peers.
This element of choice has to be at the core of any
programme for the development of children's rights; without
it, the word "rights" is empty and meaningless.
This is a theme on which it is tempting to write endlessly.
But I believe it would be useful to leave the last word to a
recent internal discussion document prepared by the Gay
Commission of the International Marxist Group(17), which
emphasised the need for broadening the base of the child's
social experience in the way I have suggested:
" ... we should see the involvement of children in the
social life of the wider society and the development of
relationships with adults as entirely positive ... the involvement of children in adult society will mean that, while
children cannot have the same experience as adults, they
need not be systematically deprived of an understanding of
adults, as at present. This means that relationships of adults

References
1.
2.

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

15.
16.

17.

A.C. Kinsey et al, Sexual Behaviour in the Human

Male, Saunders, 1948. Sexual Behaviour in the Human
Female, Saunders, 1953.
In Ramsey's survey of 291 boys, over 20% reported
masturbating by age 9. The figure rose to around 55%
by age 11 -- still a prepuberty age for most boys. G.V.
Ramsey, 'The sexual development of boys,' Amer. J.
Psych. 56, 217-234, 1943.
J.Gagnon & W.Simon, Sexual Conduct: The Social
Sources of Human Sexualities, Aldine, 1973.
J. Money & P. Tucker, Sexual Signatures, Abacus 1975.
C.S. Ford & F.A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour,
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952.
Ibid.
R. Stoller,Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred,
Quartet, 1977.
W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, Vision Press, 1972.
V. Elwin, The Muria and their Ghotul.
A. Yates, Sex Without Shame, Temple Smith, 1979.
L. Bender & A. Blau, 'The reaction of children to
sexual relations with adults', Am. J. Orthopsychiat.,
7:500-518, 1937.
And in some popular texts too. See for instance:
D.J. West, Homosexuality, Pelican, 1960.
P.H. Gebhard et al, Sex Offenders: An Analysis of
Types, Harper-Hoeber, 1965.
PIE, 'Evidence on the law relating to and penalties for
certain sexual offences involving children, for the
Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee,' PIE,
1975. (Copies available from PIE, P.O. Box 318,
London, SE3 8QD, price '70p, incl. p&p)
C. Wilson, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Arthur
Barker, 1963.
A particularly vivid account of "fetishistic" paedophilic
feelings combined with an acceptable social relationship
between paedophile and child is to be found in the
story of "John" in: W. Kraemer et al, The Forbidden
Love, Sheldon Press, 1976.
The Gay Commission, International Marxist Group
'Our Line on Paedophilia', internal discussion
document, 1979.

Gay Left 17

Childhood Sexuality & Paedophilia

by Jamie Gough

The editorial on paedophilia in Gay Left was a welcome

opening up of the discussion in the left press of a previously
taboo subject. However, it does not seem to me overall, to
provide a good framework for the discussion. In this article,
I will try to sketch an alternative.

1. The oppression of children as a revolutionary

question.
I think that the starting point for the discussion should be a
historical materialist analysis of the social oppression of
children, and of its contradictions; and the perspective that
this opens up for the liberation of children.

In the peasant and early petit bourgeois family the child

was put to work at the earliest possible age in order to contribute to the collective or private production that the family
was engaged in, but work was carried out under the discipline
and violence of the father. In the development of industrial
capitalism in England, children were increasingly used in
factory production, gradually coming under the direct
discipline of the capitalist. From the mid-nineteenth century,
however, the gradual rise in the real wage, the exhaustion of
the reserve army in the countryside, together with a certain
pressure from (adult male) working class organisation, meant
the removal of children from the workforce. In the latter
part of the century, the slackening rate of accumulation
produced a parallel decrease in the involvement of women in
industrial wage labour. This allowed the re-appearance of the
form of the petit bourgeois family out of the decay into
which it had fallen during a hundred years of frenzied
accumulation. Backed up by an extension of schooling, this
structure could meet the need of capital for a more skilled,
disciplined and healthier labour force. Thus the creation of
the new role for children, the creation of modern 'childhood',
coincided with a qualitative intensification of the definition
of women as wives and mothers.
By the late nineteenth century the productivity of labour
was such that it was technically perfectly possible for the
family to begin to wither away, for housework and child care
to become a social task, and for the subordination of children
to their parents to become obsolete. Only capitalist social
relations, with their tendency to privatise responsibility, to
atomise the working class, and to keep down the cost of
reproducing labour power, prevented this occuring. From
now on, there was the latent possibility of children's
liberation, which could therefore become a political question.
The moral of this is that the oppression of children is not
the result of some abstract power of adults over children
deriving from their difference in age, strength or social
experience, but is a limited historical phenomenon.
Moreover, it is now rooted in capitalist social relations. The
liberation of children is thus inseparable from the achievement of socialism.
Unfortunately, this is an aspect of the construction of
socialism that has received little discussion to date. But same
outlines are fairly clear. Children would not be tied, whether
legally or socially, to their biological parents, and parents
would no longer have the responsibility for the economic
maintenance and social care of their children. Rather, this
would be the responsibility of the whole community. This
does not mean that children would be in nurseries 24 hours
a day (as some feminist and socialist writing sometimes tends
to imply). Children could be integrated into communal
households where they could develop stable relationships
with a variety of adults, and where they could choose which
adults they wanted to be with. This would lay the basis for
attempting to progressively overcome the separation of
children and youth from the major social, economic and
political institutions of 'adult society'. Thus, schooling would
no longer be the confinement of children in the artificial
Gay Left 18

world of abstract learning, safely away from the world that

this learning is supposed to reflect. The struggle for the
liberation of children would thus involve not only the
moment of separation, of the autonomy of children, but
also the moment of integration, of superceding the divide
between adult and childhood social institutions.
The removal of the authority of adults over children, and
of the special emotional relationships that children are
compelled to have with their parents, together with the
possibilities for greater autonomy and privacy for children,
would allow enormously increased scope for children's
sexuality. This is very obviously the case for sexual relations
between children. The general changes already outlined
imply also a completely different framework for sexual
relations between children and adults. Firstly, the involvement of children in adult society will mean that, while
children cannot have the same experience as adults, they
need not be systematically deprived of an understanding
of adults, as at present. Relations between adults and
children, including sexual ones, could then be on a much
more equal basis. Secondly, within the households or
communities of which they are a part, children will have a
much greater ability to shape their relationships with the
adults than they presently have within the nuclear family.
A third important change will result from the increasing
role of men in looking after children in nurseries and 'at
home'. Because of the specific role of women in the care of
children, women are allowed and, within certain bounds,
encouraged to have relationships with children, particularly
their own, which are very physical and sexual. (The limits
of this would seem to be that where women have relationships with young people that are sexual in adult terms, they
are regarded not so much as corrupters of youth but as
neurotic.) It is for this reason, as well as the general denial
of women's sexuality, that women are very seldom
considered as paedophiles or capable of having paedophile
relationships. An increasing responsibility of men for child
care will mean increasingly physical relationships between
men and children and thus a putting into question of the
distinction between men and women in this respect. It will
also mean that the sexuality of women itself will no longer
be denied by the very process of its compulsive focusing
onto children.
The intertwined process of children's and women's
liberation would therefore inevitably mean a widening of
sexual relationships between adults and children. This would,
in fact, seem to undermine the existence of paedophiles as
a separate group of people. And this change would be
inseparable from changes in the sexual identities of (adult)
women and men.

2. Puberty
In the context of sexual relations, the definition of 'child' is
usually now taken (at least among liberals and leftists) as
being those before puberty. What marks out puberty, in the,
first place, is the ability to participate in reproductive sex.
While this is a biological given, the importance attached to
puberty is socially constructed. The possibility of creating
and rearing children, and the social relations within which
this takes place, remain the core of the family structure and
the central sexual-political question. The 'problem' of
puberty, presenting itself as the difference of pre- and postpubertal sexuality, is in fact a political, not a natural one.
This point is missed in the editorial. It describes puberty as
"the entry into social and sexual maturity . . . Together with
the sexual development of the body, it implies a growing
awareness of the social world ... " This definition slides
blandly from biology to the social. On this basis, a natural
gulf between child and adult sexuality is constructed, one

that in itself makes paedophile relationships "invalid": "The

criteria exist for recognising the validity of relationships
when there is some approximation of meaning ... We are
inclined to believe that this does not usually happen before
puberty." This is a central argument of the editorial, but the
criterion of "validity" (oppressiveness?) seems to me
arbitrary and in fact absurd. It is certainly the case that a
sexual relationship between an adult and a child will have
a different, socially defined meaning within the life of each.
As we have already seen, this meaning is likely to be very
different under socialism; but it will still be there. But there
is also a systematically different meaning in, for example,
sexual relations between adult men and women, and in nonsexual relations between adults and children. Are these, too,
"invalid"?
A more substantial problem is that of the degree of understanding of the meaning of the relationship for the other. We
have already seen how society mystifies paedophile relations
for both adults and children. The understanding in each case
will vary enormously, depending on the individuals. But this
is in any case not a firm foundation on which to legislate,
either literally or morally.

3. Consent
The real problem is not one of puberty, or of meanings, but
of power to coerce. Here again, the editorial takes a rather
naturalistic view: " 'Consent' has different meanings for
children and adults." In the sense that children express
consent in different ways, and have different social
opportunities to consent, this is true. For instance, in some
situations children will be afraid to express disapproval of
what adults do; in others they will express disapproval
directly where an adult would be embarrassed to do so, or be
unable to conceal their feelings. But what appears to be
meant is that our (adult) conception of consenting simply
does not apply to children.
I think that this is simply the conventional view, which is
at the centre of the oppression of children, that children do
not and cannot know their own minds. The point here is not
at all to understate the social power of adults to manipulate
children. But precisely because that power is social, it has
cracks in it. Only the most oppressed children are really
unable to show to adults their consent for or against things
that they do with those adults, whether sexual or not.
Children can, and even now do, seek out and find things that
correspond partially to their needs. There are sexual relationships between adults and children to which the children
manifestly consent, for instance where they go to great
lengths to continue the relationship, or where they have
actually intiated it. In concrete instances, the question of
consent cannot be judged a priori. All forms of social power
contain contradictions; if they did not, there would not only
be no possibility of revolution, there would be no possibility
of even thinking of one's own oppression.

4. The state and the law

But what of the use by adults, this side of socialism, of their
power to coerce children? Does this not require an age of
consent in the law at least until that time?

capable of consenting in an area where their strongest feelings

are involved, and by extension, in all areas which are of
greatest importance to the child itself. Secondly, the 1885
legislation was seen at the time as being a way of emphasising
the importance of male protection to women: girls would
be protected from men, especially at work, up to the age of
16, when they would require the 'protection' of a husband.
This moral still has force today. Thirdly, the law prevents
people under the age of consent from obtaining contraception and abortion, since they could only want these things
for illegal acts. Fourthly, the law mystifies sex to children.
'Sex education', even at its best, does not, and cannot at the
moment, tell children anything about their own sexuality.
What it tells them about adult sexuality is totally abstract,
since if this were portrayed concretely it would imply a real
exposure of children to it, a sort of paedophilia-in-thought.
All this actually makes it much harder to a child to discuss a
sexual relationship with an adult that it may have or have
had, because it is dealing with something which has been
rendered mysterious and which seems to be a cause for
shame. This, of course, increases the possibility of exploit.
ation. Finally, the actual application of the law terrorises
children. The police use all the powers at their command to
extort 'confessions'; and the court proceedings teach the
children that they have been involved in something dirty,
whether or not that was their estimation at the time.
The law, and the court cases that the press goes to such
lengths to dramatise, are thus a very important part of the
way in which children's continued subordination is ensured.
It is therefore nonsensical to argue on the one hand for
measures to liberate children, and on the other to support
their continued 'protection' by the law of the age of
consent. What is necessary at the level of the law is a prohibition of assault of demonstrable coercion.
We should be clear, however, what the limitations of such
a change in the law would be if not accompanied by the
wider social process of the liberation of children discussed
earlier. Only a complete change in the social position of
children can effectively prevent their sexual coercion by
adults. The solution of the editorial here is hopelessly
inadequate and liberal: it proposes "providing the maximum
social means of protecting the child. In this situation the
responsibility of paedophiles would have a major part to
play" (my emphasis).
Moreover, under the present form of the state, it is
guaranteed that in the actual application of the law nothing
would change. In cases where the child has consented, the
police, judiciary, and in many cases the parents would do
everything to ensure that the 'child molester' was convicted.
The state apparatus would still be dominated by a class that
had an interest in the perpetuation of children's oppression.
The editorial, however, argues that an age of consent of 14
might "be enforced outside of criminal law (?) in special
children's courts which would deal with all sorts of children's
rights outside the bureaucratic disaster of present legal interventions in this area." The problem, though, is not bureaucracy but the class nature of the state. Once again, the
question of child sexuality points to the need for a
socialist revolution.

First, it is necessary to point out how little the law does to

protect children from harrassment. For instance, by far the
most common form of sexual coercion of children is of a girl
by her father. But the girl is effectively prevented even from
going to the police not only by the fear of and moral
blackmail from the father, but because the result would
si mply be for her to be taken into care, that is, imprisoned.

This is not at all to say, though, that a campaign against

the age of consent law is not important. A campaign led by
young people themselves would be a very sharp way of
challenging the whole reactionary ideology that surrounds
child sexuality. It is never too soon to start to do this!

In fact, the law not only does not protect, it exacerbates

the problem. There is, of course, a whole battery of legislation that effectively makes children and young people the
prisoner and possession of their parents. But the law of the
age of consent plays a particularly important role within
this. First it implies that children do not have any 'real'
sexuality (and conversely, that only reproductive sexuality
is 'the real thing').

context, to see its place in the contradictory structures of

society as a whole and its relation to the power of the ruling
class. Seen in this way, it is evident that the questions of
child sexuality and paedophilia cannot be solved except by a
massive social and political struggle. This is in the first place
the struggle of young people themselves, whose rebellion has
made child sexuality a political issue.

But children's sexuality is not simply non-existent it is

also dangerous! The law implies that children are not really

5. Conclusion
I have argued that it is vital to see this issue in its class

The oppression of children and young people, and in a

secondary way that of paedophiles, is a cruel oppression, and
the struggle against it cannot be 'managed' or postponed.
Gay Left 19

In Defence of Disco
by Richard Dyer
All my life I've liked the wrong music. I never liked Elvis and
rock 'n' roll; I always preferred Rosemary Clooney. And
since I became a socialist, I've often felt virtually terrorised
by the prestige of rock and folk on the left. How could I
admit to two Petula Clark L.P.s in the face of miners' songs
from the North East and the Rolling Stones? I recovered my
nerve partially when I came to see show biz type music as a
key part of gay culture, which, whatever its limitations, was
a culture to defend. And I thought I'd really made it when
turned on to Tamla Motown, sweet soul sounds, disco.
Chartbusters already, and I like them! Yet the prestige of
folk and rock, and now punk and (rather patronisingly, 1
think) reggae, still holds sway. It's not just that people whose
politics I broadly share don't like disco, they manage to
imply that it is politically beyond the pale to like it. It's
against this attitude that I want to defend disco (which
otherwise, of course, hardly needs any defence).
I'm going to talk mainly about disco music, but there
are two preliminary points I'd like to make. The first is that
disco is more than just a form of music, although certainly
the music is at the heart of it. Disco is also kinds of dancing,
club, fashion, film etc.; -- in a word, a certain sensibility,
manifest in music, clubs etc., historically and culturally
specific, economically, technologically, ideologically and
aesthetically determined -- and worth thinking about.
Secondly, as a sensibility in music it seems to me to
encompass more than what we would perhaps strictly call
disco music, to include a lot of soul, Tamla and even the
later work of mainstream and jazz artistes like Peggy Lee
and Johnny Mathis.

Now it is unambiguously the case that disco is produced

by capitalist industry, and since capitalism is an irrational
and inhuman mode of production, the disco industry is as
bad as all the rest. Of course. However, this argument has
assumptions behind it that are more problematic. These are
of two kinds. One assumption concerns music as a mode of
production, and has to do with the belief that it is possible
in a capitalist society to produce things (e.g. music, e.g. rock
and folk) that are outside of the capitalist mode of
production. Yet quite apart from the general point that such
a position seeks to elevate activity outside of existing
structures rather than struggles against them, the two kinds
of music most often set against disco as a mode of production are not really convincing.

The other kind of music most often posed against disco

and 'pap pop' at the level of how it is produced is rock
(including Dylan-type folk and everything from early
rock 'n' roll to progressive concept albums). The argument
here is that rock is easily produced by non-professionals all
that is needed are a few instruments and somewhere to
play -- whereas disco music requires the whole panoply of
recording studio technology, which makes it impossible for
non-professionals (the kid in the streets) to produce. The
factual accuracy of this observation needs supplementing
with some other observations. Quite apart from the very
rapid but then bemoaned by some purists move of
rock into elaborate recording studios, even when it is simply,
producable by non-professionals, the fact is that rock is still
quite expensive, and remained in practice largely the preserve
of middle-class who could afford electric guitars, music
lessons etc. (You have only to look at the biographies of
those now professional rock musicians who started out in a
simple non-professional way the preponderance of public
school and university educated young men in the field is
rivalled only by their preponderance in the Labour Party
cabinet.) More importantly, this kind of music production
is wrongly thought of as being generated from the grass roots
(except perhaps at certain key historical moments) nonprofessional music making, in rock as elsewhere, bases itself,
inevitably, on professional music. Any notion that rock
emanates from 'the people' is soon confounded by the
recognition that what 'the people' are doing is trying to be
as much like professionals as possible.

One is folk music in this country, people might point

to Gaelic songs and industrial ballads the kind of music
often used, or reworked, in left fringe theatre. These, it is
argued, are not, like disco (and pop music in general), produced for the people but by them. They are 'authentic'
people's music. So they are - - or rather, were. The problem
is that we don't live in a society of small technologically
simple, communities such as produce such art. Preserving
such music at best gives us a historical perspective on peasant
and working class struggle, at worst leads to a nostalgia for a
si mple, harmonious community existence that never even
existed. More bluntly, songs in Gaelic or dealing with nineteenth century factory conditions, beautiful as they are,
don't mean much to most English speaking people today.

The second kind of argument based on the fact that disco

is produced by capitalism concerns music as an ideological
expression. Here it is assumed that capitalism as a mode of
production necessarily and simply produces 'capitalist'
ideology. The theory of the relation between the mode of
production and the ideologies of a particular society is too
complicated and unresolved to be gone into here, but we can
begin by remembering that capitalism is about profit. In the
language of classical economics, capitalism produces
commodities, and its interest in commodities is their
exchange-value (how much profit they can realise) rather
than their use-value (their social or human worth). This
becomes particularly problematic for capitalism when dealing
with an expressive commodity such as disco since a

My defense is in two parts. First, a discussion of the

arguments against disco in terms of its being 'capitalist'
music. Second, an attempt to think through the
ambivalently, ambiguously, contradictorily -- positive
qualities of disco.

Disco and Capital

Much of the hostility to disco stems from the equation of it
with capitalism. Both in how it is produced and in what
it expresses, disco is held to be irredeemably capitalistic.

Gay Left 20

The Characteristics of Disco

Let me turn now to what I consider to be the three important characteristics of disco eroticism, romanticism, and
materialism. I'm going to talk about them in terms of what
it seems to me they mean within the context of gay culture.
These three characteristics are not in themselves good or
bad (any more than disco music as a whole is), and they
need specifying more precisely. What is interesting is how
they take us to qualities that are not only key ambiguities
within gay male culture, but have also traditionally proved
stumbling blocks to socialists.

Eroticism
It can be argued that all popular music is erotic. What we
need to define is the specific way of thinking and feeling
erotically in disco. I'd like to call it 'whole body' eroticism,
and to define it by comparing it with the eroticism of the
two kinds of music to which disco is closest popular song
(i.e., the Gershwin, Cole Porter, Burt Bacharach type of song)
and rock.
Popular song's eroticism is 'disembodied': it succeeds in
expressing a sense of the erotic which yet denies eroticism's
physicality. This can be shown by the nature of tunes in
popular songs and the way they are handled.

major problem for capitalism is that there is no necessary or

guaranteed connection between exchange-value and
use-value in other words, capitalism as productive relations
can just as well make a profit from something that is ideologically opposed to bourgeois society as something that
supports it. As long as a commodity makes a profit, what
does it matter? (I should like to acknowledge my debt to
Terry Lovell for explaining this aspect of capitalist cultural
production to me.) Indeed, it is because of this dangerous,
anarchic tendency of capitalism that ideological
institutions the church, the state, education, the family
etc. -- are necessary. It is their job to make sure that what
capitalism produces is in capitalism's longer term interests.
However, since they often don't know that that is their
job, they don't always perform it. Cultural production within
capitalist society is then founded on two profound contradictions the first, between production for profit and
production for use; the second, within those institutions
whose job it is to regulate the first contradiction. What all
this boils down to, in terms of disco, is that the fact that
disco is produced by capitalism does not mean that it is
automatically, necessarily, simply supportive of capitalism.
Capitalism constructs the disco experience, but it does not
necessarily know what it is doing, apart from making money.

Popular song's tunes are rounded off, closed, selfcontained. They achieve this by adopting a strict musical
structure (AABA) in which the opening melodic phrases are
returned to and, most importantly, the tonic note of the
whole song is also the last note of the tune. (The tonic note
is the note that forms the basis for the key in which the song
is written; it is therefore the harmonic 'anchor' of the tune
and closing on it gives precisely a feeling of 'anchoring',
coming to a settled stop.) Thus although popular songs
often depart especially in the middle section (B) from
their melodic and harmonic beginnings, they also always
return to them. This gives them even at their most
passionate, say, Porter's 'Night and Day' a sense of security
and containment. The tune is not allowed to invade the
whole of one's body. Compare the typical disco tune, which
is often little more than an endlessly repeated phrase which
drives beyond itself, is not 'closed off'. Even when disco
music uses a popular song standard, it often turns it into a
simple phrase. Gloria Gaynor's version of Porter's 'I've got
you under my skin', for instance, is in large part a chanted
repetition of 'I've got you'.
Popular song's lyrics place its tunes within a conceptualisation of love and passion as emanating from 'inside', the
heart or the soul. Thus the yearning cadences of popular
song express an erotic yearning of the inner person, not the
body. Once again, disco refuses this. Not only are the lyrics
often more directly physical and the delivery more raunchy
(e.g. Grace Jones' `I need a man'), but, most importantly,
disco is insistently rhythmic in a way that popular song is
not.

I am not now about to launch into a defence of disco

music as some great subversive art form. What the arguments
above lead me to is, first, a basic point of departure in the
recognition that cultural production under capitalism is
necessarily contradictory, and, secondly, that it may well be
the case that capitalist cultural products are most likely to
be contradictory at just those points - such as disco
where they are most commercial and professional, where the
urge to profit is at its strongest. Thirdly, this mode of
cultural production has produced a commodity, disco, that
has been taken up by gays in ways that may well not have
been intended by its producers. The anarchy of capitalism
throws up commodities that an oppressed group can take up
and use to cobble together its own culture. In this respect,
disco is very much like another profoundly ambiguous aspect
of male gay culture, camp. It is a 'contrary' use of what the
dominant culture provides, it is important in forming a gay
identity, and it has subversive potential as well as reactionary
implications.
Gay Left 21

Rhythm, in Western music, is traditionally felt as being

more physical than other musical elements such as melody,
harmony and instrumentation. This is why Western music is
traditionally so dull rhythmically nothing expresses our
Puritan heritage more vividly. It is to other cultures that we
have had to turn and above all to Afro-American culture
to learn about rhythm. The history of popular song since
the late nineteenth century is largely the history of the white
incorporation (or ripping off) of black music ragtime, the
Charleston, the tango, swing, rock 'n' roll, rock. Now what is
interesting about this incorporation/ripping-off is what it
meant and means. Typically, black music was thought of by
the white culture as being both more primitive and more
'authentically' erotic. Infusions of black music were always
seen as (and often condemned as) sexual and physical. The
use of insistent black rhythms in disco music, recognisable
by the closeness of the style to soul and reinforced by such
characteristic features of black music as the repeated chanted
phrase and the use of various African percussion instruments,
means that it inescapably signifies (in this white context)
physicality.
However, rock is as influenced by black music as disco is.
This then leads me to the second area of comparison between
disco's eroticism and rock's. The difference between them
lies in what each 'hears' in black music. Rock's eroticism is
thrusting, grinding it is not whole body, but phallic.
Hence it takes from black music the insistent beat and makes
it even more driving; rock's repeated phrases trap you in
their relentless push, rather than releasing you in an openended succession of repetitions as disco does. Most revealing
perhaps in rock's intrumentation. Black music has more
percussion instruments than white, but it knows how to use
them to create all sorts of effect light, soft, lively, as well
as heavy, hard and grinding. Rock, however, only hears the
latter and develops the percussive qualtities of essentially
non-percussive instruments to increase this, hence the
twanging electric guitar and the nasal vocal delivery. One
can see how, when rock 'n' roll first came in, this must have
been a tremendous liberation from popular song's
disembodies eroticism here was a really physical music,
and not just mealy mouthedly physical, but quite clear what
it was about cock. But rock confines sexuality to cock (and
this is why, no matter how progressive the lyrics and even
when performed by women, rock remains indelibly phallocentric music). Disco music, on the other hand, hears the
physicality in black music and its range. It achieves this by a
number of features including the sheer amount going on
rhythmically in even quite simply disco music (for rhythmic
clarity with complexity, listen to the full length version of
the Temptations' 'Papa was a Rolling Stone'); the willingness
to play with rhythm, delaying it, jumping it, countering it
rather than simply driving on and on (examples Patti
Labelle, Isaac Hayes); the range of percussion instruments
used and with different affects (e.g. the spiky violins in
Quincy Jones/Herbie Hancock's 'Tell Me a Bedtime Story';
the gentle pulsations of George Benson). This never stops
being erotic, but it restores eroticism to the whole of the
body, and for both sexes, not just confining it to the penis.
It leads to the expressive, sinuous movement of disco
dancing, not just that mixture of awkwardness and thrust so
dismally characteristic of dancing to rock.
Gay men do not intrinsically have any prerogative over
whole body eroticism. We are often even more cock-oriented
than non-gays of either sex, and it depresses me that such
phallic forms of disco as Village People should be so gay
identified. Nonetheless, partly because many of us have
traditionally not thought of ourselves as being 'real men'
and partly because gay ghetto culture is also a space where
alternative definitions, including of sexuality can be
developed, it seems to me that the importance of disco in
scene culture indicates an openess to a sexuality that is not
defined in terms of cock. Although one cannot easily move
from musical values to personal ones, or from personal ones
to politically effective ones, it is at any rate suggestive that
gay culture should promote a form of music that denies the
centrality of the phallus while at the same time refusing the
non-physicality which such a denial has hitherto implied.
Gay Left 22

Romanticism
Not all disco music is romantic. The lyrics of many disco
hits are either straightforwardly sexual not to say sexist
or else broadly social (e.g. Detroit Spinners' `Ghetto Child',
Stevie Wonder's 'Living in the City'), and the hard drive of
Village People or Labelle is positively anti-romantic. Yet
there is nonetheless a strong strain of romanticism in disco.
This can be seen in the lyrics, which often differ little from
popular song standards, and indeed often are standards
(e.g. 'What a Difference a Day Made' Esther Phillips,
`la Vie en Rose' Grace Jones). More impressively, it is the
instrumentation and arrangements of disco music that are
so romantic.
The use of massed violins takes us straight back, via
Hollywood, to Tchaikovsky, to surging, outpouring emotions.
A brilliant example is Gloria Gaynor's 'I've got you under my
skin', where in the middle section the violins take a hint from
one of Porter's melodic phrases and develop it away from his
tune in an ecstatic, soaring movement. This 'escape' from
the confines of popular song into ecstacy is very characteristic of disco music, and nowhere more consistently than in
such Diana Ross classics as 'Reach Out' and 'Ain't No
Mountain High Enough'. This latter, with its lyrics total
surrender to love, its heavenly choir and sweeping violins, is
perhaps one of the most extravagant reaches of disco's
romanticism. But Ross is also a key figure in the gay
appropriation of disco.
What Ross' record do and I'm thinking basically of her
work up to Greatest Hits volume 1 and the Touch Me in the
Morning album is express the intensity of fleeting
emotional contacts. They are all-out expressions of adoration
which yet have built in to them the recognition of the
(inevitably) temporary quality of the experience. This can be
a straightforward lament for having been let down by a man,
but more often it is both a celebration of a relationship and
the almost willing recognition of its passing and the exquisite
pain of its passing 'Remember me/As a sunny day/That
you once had/Along the way', 'If I've got to be strong/Don't
you know I need to have tonight when you're gone/When

you go I'll lie here/And think about/the last time that you/
Touch me in the morning'. This last number, with Ross'
'unreally' sweet, porcelain fragile voice and the string
backing, concentrates that sense of celebrating the intensity
of the passing relationship that haunts so much of her work.
No wonder Ross is(was?) so important in gay male scene
culture, for she both reflects what that culture takes to be an
inevitable reality (that relationships don't last) and at the
same time celebrates it, validates it.
Not all disco music works in this vein, yet in both some
of the more sweetly melancholy orchestrations (even of
lively numbers, like 'You Should Be Dancing' in Saturday
Night Fever) and some of the lyrics and general tone (e.g.
Donna Summer's Four Seasons of Love album), there is a
carry over of this emotional timbre. At a minimum, the,
disco's romanticism provides an embodiment and validation
of an aspect of gay culture.
But romanticism is a particularly paradoxical quality of
art to come to terms with. Its passion and intensity embody
or create an experience that negates the dreariness of the
mundane and everyday. It gives us a glimpse of what it
means to live at the height of our emotional and experiental
capacities not dragged down by the banality of organised
routine life. Given that everyday banality, work, domesticity,
ordinary sexism and racism, are rooted in the structures of
class and gender of this society, the flight from that banality
can be seen as is a flight from capitalism and patriarchy
themselves as lived experiences.
What makes this more complicated is the actual situation
within which disco occurs. Disco is part of the wider to-andfro between work and leisure, alienation and escape,
boredom and enjoyment that we are so accustomed to (and
which Saturday Night Fever plugs into so effectively). Now
this to-and-fro is partly the mechanism by which we keep
going, at work, at home - the respite of leisure gives us the
energy for work, and anyway we are still largely brought up
to think of leisure as a 'reward' for work. The circle locks
us into it. But what happens in that space of leisure can be
profoundly significant it is there that we may learn about
an alternative to work and to society as it is. Romanticism
is one of the major modes of leisure in which this sense of an
alternative is kept alive. Romanticism asserts that the limits
of work and domesticity are not the limits of experience.
I don't say that the passion and intensity of romanticism
is a political ideal we could strive for I doubt that it is
humanly possible to live permanently at that pitch. What I
do believe is that the movement between banality and something 'other' than banality is an essential dialectic of society,
a constant keeping open of a gap between what is and what
could or should be. Herbert Marcuse in the currently
unfashionable OneDimensional Man argues that our society
tries to close that gap, to assert that what is all that there
could be, is what should be. For all its commercialism and
containment within the work:leisure to-and-fro, I think
disco romanticism is one of the things that can keep the
gap open, that can allow the experience of contradiction to
continue. Since I also believe that political struggle is rooted
in experience (though utterly doomed if left at it), I find
this dimension of disco potentially positive. (A further
romantic/utopian aspect of disco is realised in the noncommercial discos organised by gay and women's groups
Here a moment of community can be achieved, often in
circle dances or simply in the sense of knowing people as
people, not anonymous bodies. Fashion is less important,
and sociability correspondingly more so. This can be
achieved in smaller clubs, perhaps especially outside the
centre of London, which, when not just grotty monuments
to self-oppression, can function as supportive expressions of
something like a gay community.)

in the mirrors and tat of discotheques, the glitter and denim

flash of its costumes. Its tacky sumptousness is well evoked
in Thank God It's Friday. Gone are the restraint of popular
song, the sparseness of rock and reggae, the simplicity of
folk. How can a socialist, or someone trying to be a feminist,
defend it?
In certain respects, it is doubtless not defensible. Yet
socialism and feminism are both forms of materialism why
is disco, a celebration of materiality if ever there was one, not
therefore the appropriate art form of materialist politics?
Partly, obviously, because materialism in politics is not to
be confused with mere matter. Materialism seeks to understand how things are in terms of how they have been produced and constructed in history, and how they can be better
produced and constructed. This certainly does not mean
immersing oneself in the material world indeed, it includes
deliberately stepping back from the material world to see
what makes it the way it is and how to change it. Yes, but,
materialism is also based on the profound conviction that
politics is about the material world, and indeed that human
life and the material world are all there is, no God, no magic
forces. One of the dangers of materialist politics is that it is
in constant danger of spiritualising itself, partly because of
the historical legacy of the religious forms that brought
materialism in existence, partly because materialists have to
work so hard not to take matter at face value that they
often end up not treating it as matter at all. Disco's celebration of materiality is only a celebration of the world we
are necessarily and always immersed in; and disco's
materiality, in technological modernity, is resolutely
historical and cultural it can never be, as most art claims
for itself, an 'emanation' outside of history and of human
production.
Disco's combination of romanticism and materialism
effectively tell us let's us experience that we live in a
world of materiality, that we can enjoy materiality but that
the experience of materiality is not necessarily what the
everyday world assures us it is. Its eroticism allows us to
rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of materiality
and the possibility of change.
If this sounds over the top, let one thing be clear disco
can't change the world, make the revolution. No art can do
that, and it is pointless expecting it to. But partly by opening
up experience, partly by changing definitions, art, disco, can
be used. To which one might risk adding the refrain If it
feels good, use it.

Materialism

Disco is characteristic of advanced capitalist societies simply

in terms of the scale of money squandered on it. It is a riot
of consumerism, dazzling in its technology (echo chambers,
double and more tracking, electric instruments),
overwhelming in its scale (banks of violins, massed choirs,
the limitless range of percussion instruments), lavishly gaudy
Gay Left 23

Living With Indecency

I entered the cottage at about 3.25am. I stood next to a man
who was already there. There was neither physical contact
nor eye contact between us. I may well have been fantasising
but I was so drunk that I cannot remember if I was. Two or
three minutes later three policemen entered from both ends
of the toilet. We were charged with gross indecency. Eleven
months later, after a four day trial in a Crown Court, the
judge instructed the jury to acquit us on the grounds that the
police evidence was 'unsafe and unsatisfactory'. The following is an account of some of the things I experienced and
learned in that eleven month period.
My immediate responses were very contradictory. As soon
as the police came into the cottage I went along with them
quietly and obediently, almost like a lamb. It would have
been stupid to try to escape but I never even thought of it. I
made no sound of protest. I knew perfectly well what was
happening and showed neither surprise nor anger. The police
evidence later said that I looked 'sheepish' and that was
certainly how I felt. I was in complete awe of the forces of
the state.
But within two minutes, by the time I was in the police
van, I was determined to plead not guilty. I had no idea of
what that would entail but I wasn't giving in. As a trade
unionist activist, I'm fairly used to standing up to authority
and that trade union consciousness made me determined to
fight. In the police station I made it clear that I would defend
my innocence. I tried, as I was legally entitled to do, to stop
them taking my fingerprints. I only agreed when they made
it clear they would keep me inside until a court gave them
permission to take them. When I realised they were searching
me for what they called 'traces of homosexuality' I told
them I was gay because I felt I would have to argue that my
sexuality was irrelevant to their case. I asked a police officer
to stop using the word 'queer' in my presence.

Fear and Isolation

These contradictions continued throughout the whole period
before the trial. On the one hand I was prepared to conform
with certain demands made on me by society because I did
not want its disapproval; on the other hand, I was going to
fight every inch of the way over the case itself, and for my
job, if convicted. That tension, between my need for acceptance and my sense of militancy, nearly tore me apart.
Gay Left 24

by Bob Cant

One of the most predominant feelings I had was one of

fear. I was terrified to go out, at first. I wouldn't, of course,
go near a public toilet. I wouldn't even stay on the same side
of the street as a policeman. I also found it difficult in supermarkets because I felt that I looked so guilty that store
detectives would be bound to watch me. I met no-one else
who had fought and won such a case and that simply intensified the feeling that my whole view of the world was
becoming incomprehensible to everyone else. I felt more and
more isolated and in danger of losing contact with everyone
around me. My sense of panic increased along with the
isolation and a lot of the time I felt I was clutching at fog.
One morning at 4 or 5 o'clock after drinking a bottle of
whisky, smashing some crockery, playing Billie Holliday to
the whole street and screaming hysterically I was eventually
able to tell the friend who was with me that I was terrified of
being alone. It seems banal to say that, but as the world I
knew slipped away from me I thought I would never be able
to return to it. I saw myself as always alone and rejected.
It was to compensate for this fear of being alone that
made me adhere to most of my old routines (eg work) in a
very rigid way. I found their familiarity very comforting. It
also helped me to tell people about my arrest and I talked
over the whole thing again and again with anyone who would
listen. But my other great fear was not helped by talking for
I could not express it even to myself. In the event of being
found guilty, the case would probably be reported in the local
paper. Because I'm a teacher the local paper near my college
might well have published the story. And if my trial took
place in a thin week for news, it might even be reported in
the national press. (The Daily Mirror recently published the
name and address of a head teacher convicted on a similar
charge.) How would I deal with being known as a man who
allegedly went cottaging? How would I deal with remarks on
the street in the working-class community where I live? How
would I face students, many of whom are unsure of their
own sexuality but nonetheless very conventional? How
would I face my colleagues at work and in the trade union
movement? If I hadn't come out already it is just inconceivable as to how I might have dealt with it. Even so, I was
absolutely terrified of a situation where my alleged sexual
behaviour and fantasies would be a subject of public discussion.

Face to Face with Myself

All this forced me to reconsider the way I saw my own gayness. Since I came out, I had always been very public in my
gayness. I had come out to all my old friends and I had come
out to the people I worked with. I had campaigned on the
gay question in the International Socialists and in my union.
All but the first of the gay groups I had been involved in had
had a very public function campaigning, writing and so on.
But by the time I came out I was 26, at work and had been
passing as heterosexual for many years. I had always had to
argue for acceptance and had seldom felt myself to be in a
position where I could assert my gay identity as I wanted
for I always had to think of the consequences. However
brave I may have been I had been able to ignore certain
aspects of gay liberation; there was no sense in which my
heterosexually-learned patterns of behaviour had been
challenged on a day to day basis.
Much of this related to the way I had chosen to live with
other people. In the six years since I came out I had chosen
to live in households whose occupants included two children,
eleven heterosexual adults and three gay adults. It was only
a month before my arrest that I had begun to live with a
lesbian and a gay man. The straight people I lived with could
not have been more supportive of my attempts to establish a
gay identity; but they would not challenge me in the way
other gay people might have done. The result was that,
unchallenged, I had retained many of my old heterosexual
assumptions about the way that one person might relate to
another. A bit of me was still monogamous enough to believe
that some day a knight in shining armour would come and do
wonderful things for me. And until that time there were
certain 'dark and shameful secrets' that I would keep hidden
even from myself. Only he would help me explore them;
only he would absolve that guilt for me. The adolescent fears
and fantasies about homosexuality which I had had in the
50s were unexplored and unexpressed. Given this sudden
smashing of my confidence, I found myself face to face with
this hideous mess.
The way I had previously failed to acknowledge these
fantasies made it even more difficult for me to deal with the
fact that they were becoming public knowledge. For twenty
years I had harboured fantasies about seeing/touching a
moving cock such as would be possible in a cottage. (The
motion is what is important; the static nature of pornography
leaves me completely cold.) For twenty years I had refused
to accept the fact that the first place where I had realised
that I could see such cocks was a public toilet. Consequently,
I had refused to accept that going into a cottage would be a
search for a repetition of that first voyeuristic, sexual
experience. Seeing and fantasising about what I might see
were the important things and that was why I had never had
sex with a man in a cottage. But in the process of coming to
terms with these un-exotic fantasies I nearly destroyed
myself. My anxiety and paranoia became hyper-anxiety and
hyper-paranoia. I was in the grip of an incomprehensible
fury. Some of the time these emotions were released through
contact with the two men I was/am closest to. I suppose I
can feel pleased about the fact that I never felt violent
towards them; there certainly wasn't much else to feel
pleased about. But under this duress I slowly began to realise
that no-one could help me explore my fears and fantasies
unless I really began to explore them myself. I realised that I
had to be the knight in shining armour myself.
Another important part of the self-knowledge I gained in
this period was about my sense of security. It depended on
things like having the Guardian delivered, going to the pub
every day, going to the cinema, eating out, buying books,
going on holidays abroad. It was a security which was based
on things external to me things which resulted from the
fact that (unlike most of the world's population) I had a
pleasant, well-paid job and a comfortable standard of living.
As I reflected on the possibility of losing the case, losing my
job, undergoing a massive drop in my standard of living, I
panicked. There were other things to keep me going, but I
was no longer sure of what they were.

Solidarity
I had to do something to relieve these tensions and so I took
up swimming and dancing. There's nothing to say about the
swimming except that I enjoyed it. But the dancing was
important for a number of reasons. It became a ritualised
way in which I could express the violence I felt about my
situation. But it also opened up to me a whole new world
the world of the gay ghetto. I had come out into the gay
movement and had never been part of or dependent on the
ghetto. I had really only used it when I wanted to pick up
someone. My expectations in that area had been confined
purely to casual sex since most of the men I had been
involved with on any other level I had met through the gay
movement. But now through going to a gay club and dancing
a lot (often on my own), I discovered features of the gay
ghetto previously unknown to me. The group of people I got
to know through dancing were warm and supportive and yet
unquestioning. The few glimpses I had of their often alien
political views did not prevent me from recognising their
warmth and responding in a similar vein. I discovered that
the ghetto/commercial scene was more than just a creation of
the breweries and other entrepreneurs. For some, it was the
gay community. It was the only place where they could begin
to be themselves. Outside its doors the world was cold and
oppressive. I do not in fact hold with this analysis but for the
first time I identified and understood what I had disparagingly seen as a closeted existence. The rest of the world was
unbearable, but for these few hours on a Friday or Saturday
night the world was ours. We were all in the same boat. At
such points I could have become a gay separatist. The way I
had tried to persuade others of the reasonableness of my
life-style now seemed an irrelevant gesture. The only thing
that mattered then was to build a way of living that was
acceptable to me along with people whose situation was
similar to my own.
This was not, of course, the only form of solidarity which
I experienced. The people I lived with and one other man
friend were remarkable in their patience and love. On some
occasions when I became really unbearable they told me so
and their criticism helped me to feel that I was still human.
The fact that I had responsibilities to others enabled me to
perceive of myself as more than just an object of pity. There
was, too, a strong clearly articulated sense of support from
the people I worked with, and when I couldn't cope they
coped for me. I also got a great deal of support from the gay
group in my union. A group of both women and men, they
allowed me to ramble on about some of my fears at their
meetings. That in its turn made me feel secure enough in that
group to participate in their other discussions and activities.
The precence of women in the group was probably important
inasmuch as their feminist politics may have made it more
acceptable that I should talk about my fears without threatening the function of the group.
The other gay group to which I belonged was Gay Left
and they responded rather differently. Apart from a six
month break prior to my arrest, I had been in this group for
nearly three years, since its foundation. It had been successful in what it had set out to do and it had enabled me to be
more creative than I have ever felt elsewhere. But, it seemed
to me, in my absence a definite political shift had taken place
and my activist style of politics had become rather less
acceptable in the group than once it had been. The very
success of the group had also made us more complacent. The
survival of the group had become an end in itself, more
important than the attempt to confront difficult areas of our
personal politics. There had been internal personal problems
within the group which had been neglected because they
were too awkward. I had felt unhappy about it but had done
nothing positive about it. I had given a kind of token support
to the idea that we should all share tasks but I still continued
to be one of the thinkers and someone else typed out my
thoughts. Given my failure and that of the group to resist
certain roles and situations it was not surprising that the
group found me very difficult to deal with at this period.
Everyone was very concerned about me, and individually
Gay Left 25

some were very supportive. But as a group they acted as if I

had no problem at all. This, I think, taught me one very
i mportant lesson about the gay men's movement. However
much we have come out, gay men of our generation remain
conditioned men. Our involvement with the gay movement
does not enable us to escape our socialisation, and the notion
that we should be brave, strong etc. I was exhausted with
trying to be all that and really wanted to cry in a group
situation where I didn't have to put all my fears on to one
person. But that was not permitted to me. I was, however,
permitted to feel bad about my undoubtedly strong sense of
guilt. Such a feeling was not right on and could not, therefore, be expressed in that group. All this certainly helped me
to see how easy it is for gay men to fall into new forms of
complacency. We must all take part in a constant process of
resistance to such patterns of male behaviour if gay liberation
is to mean anything.

The Trial
After the torment of waiting the trial itself was almost a
relief when it came. I had a barrister who appreciated the
importance of sexual politics and we had prepared the case
carefully over the previous months. I had contacted Gay
Switchboard as soon as the police released me, five or six
hours after my arrest. They had been very helpful and had
put me in touch with a solicitor that very morning. After
speaking to him I realised that I should opt for a Crown
Court trial. I decided to make notes of every detail of what I
had been doing on the night of my arrest and also of the
police's treatment of me. I found these very useful in refreshing my memory before I went into the witness box. Despite
all my preparations, I still felt that my role was a highly contradictory one. A part of my case depended on the fact that I
was a nice, articulate, middle-class, white man with a wellpaid job. My witnesses were also nice articulate middle-class
white people; as indeed were the group of people who came
to court with me every day to give me moral support. People
like us are far more likely to be believed by judges than many
other members of the community. My gayness, instead of
coming over positively, might in fact appear to be a blemish
on an otherwise impeccable character. If I did want to be
positive about my gayness perhaps I should be prepared to
say that I thought cottaging was all right. Perhaps I should
say that, in my opinion, cottaging charges were one way in
which the gay community was oppressed in Britain today.
There would be little point in winning the case if it was by
suggesting that my form of gayness was socially more acceptable than that of men who do go cottaging. For many men,
and this is particularly true of married men, and men in
working class communities, it is their only gay outlet. It is
also the case that many men go cottaging simply because
they enjoy it. How could I possibly express disapproval of
that?
To a great extent the dilemma did not arise in court
because of the highly specific nature of the questioning.
There was no general discussion at all. I only had to talk
about what had happened on that particular Saturday
morning. I said what was required in my most authoritative
teacher's voice. My shirts were pressed; I wore my tie; the
henna had grown out of my hair; my appearance and bearing
certainly did not go against me.
The one factor which, undoubtedly, won the case for me,
however, was the evidence of an expert medical witness. The
police had alleged that when they arrested me my penis was
erect and remained so for some minutes (despite the fact that
I was looking 'sheepish'). They also said that I was not
circumcised. In fact, if I had had an erection it would have
been impossible for them to tell whether or not I was circumcised. Because I was out at work, I was able to discuss the
evidence there. A friend on the union branch committee
suggested that I should get a medical witness to discredit that
evidence. With his assistance, I found a consultant with
experience in medical jurisprudence who was prepared to
testify to this in court. But it was also necessary for him to
have a photograph of my erection to show the jury. They
were rather more embarrassed then I was by this badlycoloured instamatic representation of a penis trying to
remain erect. The picture would have aroused no interest in a
Gay Left 26

porn magazine but it led to the judge dismissing the police

case against me as 'unsafe and unsatisfactory'. The prosecuting counsel, however, argued for a further hour that my codefendant could still be guilty. It is a strange idea of justice
that one person could be innocent of mutual masturbation
and the other guilty. Finally we were both acquitted.

Reconstructing My Life
In a sense, I was sorry not to hear the jury's verdict, although
the judge's decision totally discredited the police case. But
after four days in the same court room I felt we had all
developed a kind of siege mentality. After all that time in the
windowless court room, in the same pub at lunchtime, in the
queue for the same gents toilet, perhaps some kind of silent
sympathy had been born. But perhaps I'm just kidding
myself.
A socialist feminist friend who attended part of the trial
expressed some feelings I shared in a poem.
There'd been hundreds who'd heard Tom say
"glad to be gay, glad I'm that way"
many who'd not known of the pain
of one gay on trial that day.
"Gross indecency, right hand or left
Stroking the hm hm of the other"
Legal inaccuracy, blatant prejudice
The cops were to blame for the bother.
Acquitted - - but after a week
Of the court's indecent exposure
either undermining male sexuality
or riling raped women's exposure.
"The penis" brought out on show
as another 'object' in evidence
Never seen in this light before
Sensed now by a feminist with lenience.
And as we go out of the court
He says sadly, as one been accused,
"the others would have lost their wives,
their jobs or been badly abused."
And indeed had I lost the case, I could well have lost my
job as well. I would certainly have been suspended from
teaching until such time as I could appear before a special
meeting of the governing body of my college. My union
would have argued for me to keep my job but it would have
been virtually another trial. Even if I had kept my job I
would then have had to face all the comments of less sympathetic colleagues and students.
But now it was over. I had expected a fantastic sense of
elation but that only lasted an hour or two. It was really all
very anti-climactic. Then I had to try to get back to some kind
of ordinary life. But while I live in the same house, read the
same papers, work in the same job (I got promoted after the
acquittal!) and am politically active in the same circles there
could be no return anywhere. Long after the main cause of
the anger and anxiety had gone, the anger and anxiety
remained. There was also a long struggle to regain control of
my own language and expression; I seemed to imagine that
there was a court of law in judgement on everything I said
and thought. Gradually I began to feel more together. I also
appreciate much more any real struggles however small
they seem. And so I have more respect for my own small
struggles. Yet again, the message seems to be the personal
is the political. It can't be bad to re-learn that.

Lost Freedoms
by Tom Woodhouse

This article was written partly in response to Jeffrey

Dudgeon's piece, The Phoney War in Ireland (Gay Left 7).
I will not attempt to criticise what was said there, that has
been done already by Margo Gorman in Outcome No 8.
The central core of his argument stands in shreds after
Jim Callaghan attempted to exchange gay law reform for
Ulster Unionist votes. Jeffrey Dudgeon may think Ireland
provincial, British Prime Ministers certainly need no lessons
in being cosmopolitan.
I have not tried to postulate any solutions to the 'Irish
Question', just some ideas and different ways of looking at
the relationships between nationalism, sexism and imperialism in Ireland. This article is partly about why I am an Irish
nationalist. It is also an attempt to clarify some points about
the history of Ireland which are rarely discussed and little
understood.
It is difficult to decide whether homophobia in Ireland is
greater than in other parts of Britain. In both the 'north' and
the 'south' anti-homosexual laws remain on the statute books
and attempts to reform the law through pressure from the
European Courts have so far failed. In Northern Ireland law
reform is unlikely to come from within as evidenced by Ian
Paisley's 'Save Ulster From Sodomy' campaign and the
recorded opinions of the Northern Ireland politicians. The
forces of repression in the 'south' have as yet to show their
teeth though the strongest upholder of state morality, the
Roman church, is hardly likely to take the side of law reform.
In many ways although they might vehemently oppose law
reform heterosexists north or south need fear little from the
change, if law reform comes through outside pressure. The
strength of their ideology can remain intact, their claim that
freedom under the law for gay men is an imposition by
liberal democratic Europe rather than the desire of the
ordinary Irish person will assure the myth that homosexuality is a foreign disease.
From my own experience in Ireland (outside the major
cities), homosexuality does not exist in the minds of the
people though homosexual acts exist in practice. In the west
of Ireland people have refused to recognise my homosexuality when I have been alone but will recognise a homosexual
relationship when I have been with another gay man. It must
be similar to the situation in England before homosexuality
became a concept during the 19th century (Weeks).

example as a type of thinking rather than a reference to the

primacy of Catholicism in Ireland.)
This situation is a direct result of British Imperialist
manipulation of Irish culture. Until the 17th century Celtic
Irish society enjoyed a sexual freedom surpassing any other
group in Europe. A freedom deliberately destroyed by the
English through the plantations of Elizabeth and James and
finally by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell who, after slaughtering
a large percentage of the population, including every living
thing in Kilkenny, excluded the native Irish from more than
half the island ('to hell or Connaught'). What was significant
about the English colonisation of Ireland, though not unusual,
was the concentration on the destruction of a culture rather
than the simple destruction of native political power. Irish
celtic society was based on common rather than individual
ownership of land and gave freedom to women unheard of in
those Celtic countries which had been in contact with the
fiercely anti-matriarchal Roman Empire. It is the position of
women which must be used as a barometer, as it is the most
recorded and about which information is most easily accessible, of the sexual freedom in pre-colonial Ireland (realistically before the 17th century).
There is evidence that male homosexuality was not proscribed, for example, in the Tain, the great epic poem of
early Celtic Ireland, we can read of Cu Chulainn and his lover
Fergus who are forced to fight because of tribal loyalty, the
love song of Cu Chulainn to the dead Fergus is a masterpiece
of homoerotica. But it was the destruction of women's
equality and its replacement by rigid sex role stereotypes
that led more than anything to the repression of homosexuality, through the demand that 'man' only exists as the
dominator of 'woman'.
To summarise briefly, Irish women's equality under the
law ceased with the statutes of Kilkenny enacted in 1366
which forbade the use of the Irish language, Brehon law,
Irish surnames, costume, Irish riding, poetry, music, and
epic, though the English did not have the political power to
enforce these acts until the 17th century. Under Brehon law
( which, surprisingly, survived longest in Ulster) women had
the right of independent property ownership, divorce and
remarriage and could be practitioners of the arts and sciences
if they chose to do so.

This has advantages and disadvantages. Queer bashing

although not unknown is relatively uncommon compared to
England and rare outside the main centres, but on the other
hand, because of the situation, the jump from the homosexual act to recognising one's homosexuality seems an even
greater leap for the Irish man. There are no shortage of
homosexual acts in Ireland, just a shortage of homosexuals.
For a further discussion of a parallel situation see 'Spotlight
on Greece', Gay Left No 7.
Use of the anti-homosexual laws is rare (defined as sex
between men over 21). For the frequency of prosecutions in
Northern Ireland see Northern Ireland Office statement on
gay law reform May 1979. However, organised homosexuals
who see themselves as intrinsically homosexual are persecuted by the police for their homosexuality rather than
their homosexual acts, as in the case of Cara-Friend and
NIGRA (see Dudgeon, Gay Left No 7). Homosexual
oppression in Ireland has little need of the law because
oppression centres around the actual existence of homosexuality as a possibility. This can be seen for example in the
pronouncements of the Vatican on homosexuality which
centre around the sexual act, a man may be tempted to have
sex with another man but so long as he avoids the 'act' then
he does not sin. It is an attempt to deny that homosexuality
has an existence outside the sexual act, an existence more
threatening than two men making love together. (I chose this
Gay Left 27

'If a couple chose to part all they had to do was stand

back to back on the hill of Tailteann near Tara and walk
away from each other. Trial marriages were very common ...
Grainne O'Malley 'for forty years the stay of all rebellions
in the west' as the English called her divorced her second
husband by calling out "I dismiss you" from the walls of her
castle. Later they re-married on her terms. Grainne
commanded war-galleys in Clew Bay' (Trewhela).
There was no such thing as an illegitimate child, a mother
had simply to 'name' the child and, if a son, would inherit
a part of the father's property. Marriage was one of the keys
to Irish women's independence, based as it was on a complex
series of property relationships which did not automatically
involve property transfer from women to men.
'Down to the end of the old order in 1603, what could be
called Celtic secular marriage remained the norm in Ireland
... Christian matrimony was no more than the rare
exception.' (Nicholls)
The Catholic church was not a key mover in the change of
women's position. This can be directly linked to the final
conquest of Ireland by Cromwell.
Ironically some critics of Irish society equate the preeminence of the Catholic church with the puritanical
segregation of the sexes and the stereotyping into rigid sex
roles. To view the relationship this way is not only simplistic
but also ignores the fact that Catholicism in Ireland had
proceeded along very un-Romish lines, as did sex role stereotyping until the final conquest by Cromwell which accelerated the land ownership transfer begun with the earlier Ulster
plantations.
'The puritanism afflicting women's status amongst
Protestants and Catholics in Ireland was not and is not a consequence of Catholicism, but rather the infusion into secular
life of the archaic domestic code imposed by the Cromwellian invasion. It was further imposed by the non-conformist
sects, which have been the dominant force in shaping the
mores and morals of the majority of the Northern Ireland
working-class of all denominations, and it was fused into the
indigenous institutions.' (Fields).
In fact it was the outlawing of Catholicism which led to
the romanisation of the Catholic church in Ireland. From the
17th century until the foundation of the Maynooth seminary
in the 1820s priests were trained in Europe, mainly Douai in
France, and introduced into Irish Catholicism Roman
celibacy, forbiddance of divorce, Augustinian misogyny and
fear of homosexuality. Augustine talked of 'the beastliness of
women' and 'for men to suffer women's desires is not according to but contrary to nature'.
However when Irish educated in Europe towards the end
of the 18th century began to bring back republican ideas, the
college of Maynooth was founded using aristocratic French
priests to again try to control any liberationist ideas that
religion might spread.
The manipulation of religion was not the only way in
which the English attacked the culture. The Gaelic language
was destroyed because it did not encompass capitalistic concepts of property ownership and did not support sex role
stereotyping, for example, the word chairman does not exist,
the Gaelic equivalent carhadirleach means 'occupant of the
chair', none of the overtones of sexism and power of the
English word. Misogyny, institutionalised by the English,
continues to be a driving force behind the Irish male.
`The imagery of Eire as the Mother further alienates and
fascinates the Ulster Protestant. His religion and society are
so strongly male oriented no equivalent symbolism can be
readily available without incorporating the fear-evoking
symbolism of the Church of Rome. Thus as a female, 'She'
(Eire) has the potential to possess a man and somehow
influence him away from his masculine objectives.' (Fields)
`Older country people in Ulster have a superstitious dread
of the power of Catholic women to influence their sons away
from their religion and swallow up the family's future in
catholic assimilation. Also, it is perhaps significant that Ulster
Protestants have always been willing to give their daughters
Gay Left 28

distinctively Irish names, but have on the whole been

hesitant to give Irish names to their sons ... The unconscious
symbolic 'logic' underlying this custom is possibly as
follows: Ireland is female and you can ratify your possession
of her by naming women in her honour, but if you name
your sons in this way she will thereby in some way possess
them.' (Rankin)
`This kind of fear of femaleness translates into or possibly
derives from an attitude that God in creating desire for
women in men has been guilty of a lack of taste. For the
Catholic the church is male dominated, if not male oriented,
and family life tends likewise. Ignorance of facts about sex
and the guilt emanating from engaging in it have conspired to
produce a strained relationship even between those spouses
who enjoy each other. In both segments of the population it
is expected that males will prefer the company of other males
and have a right.' (Fields)
Thus we have a society with an institutionalised misogyny
but which also expects, through fear of women, men to
spend most of their time together primarily through work
and the pub, the main form of leisure for the mass of the
working-class. Masculinity is equated with the sexual domination of women and homosexuality, though always close to
the surface, feared as a failure of masculinity, 'being like a
woman'.
For Irish feminists and gays the choices are difficult.
Obviously there is scope in terms of law reform and general
agitation towards equality. But the central issue of Irish
politics is the relationship with nationalism and or republicanism. Republicanism, the major nationalist outlet is a blend of
nostalgia for old Ireland, frustration of the oppressed
Northern Catholic working-class and an uncertain socialism;
though in the case of the official republican movement, an
uncertain marxism.
That nostalgia for old Ireland is not a nostalgia for the
Brehon laws or sexual equality but more for an artificial
golden age epitomised by the poetry of Pearse or Yeats. An
Ireland of suffering virgins rather than Grainne O'Malley and
her war-galleys. But nationalism could be a liberationist force
if redefined in terms of regaining lost freedoms, sexual and
political, and one of our struggles should be to rewrite our
history in those terms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Trewhala, Peter. 'How Celtic Women Fell From Power', from
Celtic Theology, SCM pamphlet.
Nicholls, Kenneth, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the
Middle Ages.
Rankin, H.D. On the Psychostasis of Ulster.
Fields, Rona M. Society Under Seige, A Psychology of
Northern Ireland. Temple Press.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out. Quartet Books.

LAMPIAO
In Mid-September 1978 members of the editorial collective
of the Brazilian Gay Liberation Magazine Lampiao were subpoenaed and questioned by the police on the direct instructions of the Minister of Justice Falca.o. It transpired that all
eleven members of the collective were to be charged with
` making propaganda for homosexuality' and 'acting against
public morality and good mores', violations of the Brazilian
Press Law.
So far, Lampiao has not been seized, but the editorial
collective has been subject to fairly continuous harassment
by the Brazilian police, and legal action for the above
violations is still pending.
Letters of condemnation of this action have already been
sent to the Brazilian Minister of Justice, but the campaign
should not stop now. Lampiao needs support, either in terms
of messages of good will, letters to the Minister of Justice, or
demonstrations organised outside Brazilian embassies.
Gay Left hopes to publish an article on the Lampiao
issue 9.

case in

The Regime of Sex

A History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction
Michel Foucault. Allen Lane. 5.95.

Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire

Acclaimed when it first appeared in French in 1976,
Foucault's first volume in a projected six-volume history of
sexuality, seems certain to become one of the most widely
discussed texts to emerge from the theoretical eruption in
Paris. It is possible to disagree with Foucault's ideas, even
more to object to the allusive and often opaque style that
embellishes them: it is impossible to ignore them. Foucault's
history is the most radical attempt to rethink our understanding of sexuality, and more generally of power and knowledge, since the rebirth of sexual politics. Whether it succeeds
in that rethinking cannot be decided on the basis of this slim
volume, and even in failure, Foucault's work is likely to be
infinitely suggestive of new lines of thought and research.
The History comes at the end of a whole series of investigations into the institutions, discourses and practices of what
Foucault has come to call 'disciplinary society' and is linked
to those inquiries in method and objective. The very compression and density of this volume is less deliberate obscurantism than assumption of knowledge of previous texts,
especially Discipline and Punish. The latter sections of the
History depend for a full reading on knowing how Foucault
has come to see Power as productive of subjects, which are
no longer the natural, given individual egos of bourgeois
thought, but are, rather constructed and have their only
existence in discourse; Foucault too has previously theorised
the extension of individualising and discplinary techniques
from the mental hospital, the prison, the school and military
academy to the whole of society. And it is in this theory of
power that Foucault is at his most radical and most sketchy.
Around this theory of power Foucault constructs an
account of the history of the body very different from that
current on the Left. Sexuality is seen as an apparatus of
power deployed along lines of penetration into the bodies of
individuals and the social body in order to regulate and
administer the whole of life. 'Sex was a means of access to
the life of the body and the life of the species.' He rejects the
idea that sexuality has been repressed for the last three centuries, with an increasing liberalisation since Freud, and that
that repression is coeval and coextensive with capitalism.
Rather, he suggests, there has been a discursive explosion
around sex, and sex has come increasingly to be seen as the
secret of our existence, a jewel in the silent darkness of ourselves that is being constantly incited to speak and to speak
THE truth about our being and our lives. Contemporary with
that explosion and immanent in it has been the creation of
sexualities and sexual types: there is no 'natural' or essential
sexuality, rather sexuality is produced, sex itself is an effect
of the operation of power ... an imaginary unity of all the
possible pleasures, sensations, affects behaviours of the body.
Foucault's History of Sexuality is in fact a history of the way
sexuality has been constructed, the way an ideology of sex
has come into being, the technologies that effect this genesis
and the purposes and intentions they serve.

missible and impermissible was replaced by the Norm which

distributed, defined and actively produced. Sodomy could he
committed by anyone. Homosexuality was an essential
property of individuals, was inescapable and was present in
every aspect of the individual's life. The sodomite was a
backslider; the homosexual is a species.
Foucault's account of how this transition was achieved is
fascinating and irritatingly incomplete. Techniques, he claims,
that had begun to develop in the fourteenth century,
especially that of concession, were adapted and encroached
into the main body of society. Truth through self interrogation, where the speaking subject coincided with the subject
spoken of, became increasingly the way of gaining access to
and producing the individual. This religious confession
gradually became confessional science, was medicalised: the
speaking subject was interrogated and observed; a generalised
sexual causality was posited and aetiologies were hidden even
from themselves and hence constant and varying avowal were
de rigueur, in the hearing of interpreter who could decipher
the coded meaning of what was said. Again and again sex was
at the heart of things but recalcitrant in its truth telling,
demanding the utmost attention and coercion to make it
speak.
Parallel with this development was the shift in the legal
regulation of sexual practice. Acts 'against nature' became
the manifestations of criminality and treated as such.
Foucault
sees the genesis of the prison with the construction
of ' criminality' and the growth of a science of sexuality
(unique to the West) with the implantation of perversions as
parallel but interlocking trends. There is no a priori connection, no global strategy by the ruling class, rather specific
technologies with particular goals and aims, and powerknowledges with specific strategies gradually pervade the
body politic and articulate each on the other to maintain a
society where power insinuates itself into every aspect of life.
Four major strategies can be seen in this particular extension of power in the nineteenth century: the hystericising of
women's bodies; the pedagoguisation of the child's sex; the
socialisation of procreative conduct; and the psychiatrisation
of perverse pleasures. Each strategy creates an object of
knowledge ... the hysterical woman, whose body is suffused
with sex, the masturbating child, the malthusian couple and
the perverse adult, each of which becomes a target of intervention, the object of manipulation by technologies and their
practitioners. The classic example is the homosexual: named
in 1869, criminalised in England in 1885, given an aetiology
by Kraft Ebbing, Ellis and Freud and made the target of
corrective technology every since ... psychotherapy, shock
treatment, chemotherapy etc.

That history begins in the seventeenth century, with the

transition from a society based on alliance and kinship, to
one based on sexuality. In the former, blood and ancestry are
the major thematic concerns within the family and marriage
is the target for intervention by the law and the church; in
the latter, marriage fades into a discreet silence and the formerly undiscriminated and peripheral sexual activities
become the major focus of scrutiny, codification and
regulation. Prior to this time, the illicit was a set of
behaviours, from rape to sodomy to bestiality, which were
potentially options for everyone. Increasingly from this time,
the illicit was transformed into the sexually abberant:
abnormal sexual behaviours were seen as the acts of particular
sorts of people. The Law which drew a line between perGay Left 29

All this Foucault situates in the rise of the bourgeoisie and

the transformation from a regime which used death, especially
spectacular death, as mark and manifestation of its rule to a
regime where death became the limit of power which now
extended its order over the whole of life: population was
counted and recorded, its growth encouraged or retarded:
the body and its health became a concern especially as the
life and vigour of future generations depended on it: an
expansionist bourgeoisie became obsessed with sex as a
distinguishing mark and affirmation of itself. The sexual
family was in origin the bourgeois family: the nervous
woman was the leisured woman, the masturbating child is the
public school pupil, the perverse adult is the degenerate
youth whose sexual conduct endangers the future rule of the
class, who is unfit for the manly tasks that face him. It was
only later that this family was extended to the proletariat: as
a means of subjugation and regulation, but in that extension
a new principle of differentiation enters, where the degree of
repression undergone becomes the mark of the Chosen. It is
here Foucault claims that is the origin of the discourse of
sexual repression, and he casts doubt on the possibilities of
such a discourse ever escaping its implication in the
apparatus of sexuality: whether Freudian or Reichian psycho.
analysis is merely the displacement and realignment of that
apparatus.
In the end Foucault returns to power and the resistances
that exist against it: power comes from everywhere, is sustained everywhere. But there is always resistance, and that
power-resistance couple is immanent in the discourses of
sexuality themselves. The discourses of essential sexuality
have been used by the sexual politics movement to counter
power itself; the homosexual has become gay. But now sex
itself has to be attacked and the ideology that makes it the
crucial aspect of our being. It is no longer a question of the
liberation of sexuality but rather a struggle for the body and
its pleasures.
Such a provocative, novel and encompassing account
leaves many questions unanswered which nag after the sheer

exuberance and vitality of the text have lost their entrancing

quality. Power remains tendentiously analysed; it is not something that can be seized, it cannot be understood on the
model of law and prohibition. It does not exercise its rule by
denial and negation 'in political theory the king's head has
not been severed'. It is not unitary, it flowed from everywhere; it comes from the base and not from a single source,
in the state or wherever. But quite what it is Foucault
delicately refrains from saying and how the "great dominations" maintain themselves is obscure, as is the way that we
can combat them and power itself. There is no justification
for Leninism in Foucault, but no coherent alternative
political practice either.
Foucault delineates some of the technologies of power
and regulation, but does not ask why particular individuals
fall into one definition or another; why do some people
define as homosexual and others not? The effectivities of the
technologies are not discussed.
And if power is thinly analysed, the nature of the 'body'
stands in complete obscurity. Why should bodies stand in
privileged exception to the operation of power, a sort of last
term in a series of constructions. Foucault gives no answer.
Sexuality and subjectification/subjection: it is all of a piece,
despite Foucault's assurance that there is resistance ... but
that might be a pious manichean hope in the face of what is
pictured as a Power of infinite resource, sophistication and
subtlety. How much does Foucault's disenchantment with
the millenarian optimism of May '68 dictate a vision of
pessimistic complexity: the abandonment of the myth of
Revolution subborn him to a piecemeal and fragmented
politic?
Perhaps the next volumes of the History may allay those
criticisms: whatever one's judgement the History is a work
that demands reading and rereading; like Nietzsche whose
work explicitly informs Foucault, the despair that Foucault
senses is faced with courage, and the task of rethinking old
forms of thought is accomplished with bravura.

Picking up the Pieces

Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the making
of socialism.
By Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary
Wainwright.
(Newcastle Socialist Centre and Islington
Community Press. 1.25)
The left in Britain is in crisis. Confronted by the biggest
upsurge of industrial militancy for five years in early 1979
the Labour movement, from ultra right to far left, was
paralysed. Confronted by a vital General Election we allowed
the most right wing Tory leadership since the 1930s to seize
the ideological intiiative and to achieve the sort of political
consensus that might well take us into the 1990s. And the
response of the left has been confusion, division, a revival of
sectarianism, or despair.
This short book faces our dilemmas and begins the
arduous task of self examination and self criticism. It consists
of three essays: an Introduction by Hilary Wainwright, a long
essay on the Women's Movement by Sheila Rowbotham, and
an account of local political activism by Lynne Segal. There
is no attempt at a programmatic conclusion (indeed that
would be totally alien to the aim of the book) nor even total
political agreement. Sheila Rowbotham's essay, for instance,
polemicises against existing left organisations, while Lynne
Segal has just joined one (Big Flame). But the concerns of all
three writers are similar: to attempt to rethink what it means
to be a socialist, how to work as socialists for a new form of
society, and how socialism will integrate the insights and
aims generated by the women's, gay, ethnic and cultural
movements of the past decade.
Gay Left 30

Review by Jeffrey Weeks

The central (and longest) essay by Sheila Rowbotham

illustrates the dilemma most acutely, but also projects the
possibilities. At the heart of the essay is a two-way movement: of reflection on the almost laughable inadequacies of
our Leninist sects, bound to rigid Bolshevik models, eyestrained through perusal of holy texts, and bureaucratically
authoritarian in their 'support' of workers' self activity and
autonomous movements; and of recognition of the really
i mportant gains in terms of self help and self organisation
that we have learnt from the women's and other autonomous
groupings. The form of the essay is part of the message: acute
personal experiences are interwoven with polemics against
IS/SWP and other left sects and with general reflections on
the possibilities of socialism. The point constantly reaffirmed
is that socialism is not just about the laws of capitalist
accumulation or of surrender to the ineluctable processes of
history, but is also about personal feelings and inter-personal
relations.
The whole point about autonomous movements is that
they begin with our personal, often idiosyncratic experiences
of oppression. They cannot stay there, if the oppressions are
to be ended, but without that reaching out to the personal
there is no hope or possibility of any general social advance.
Thatcherism stretches out to the greed, envy and hatred that
capitalist society generates in individuals. Socialism must
reach out to the hope and possibility of a better life.- This
book, by stressing this constantly, and by underlining the
vital need to make socialism a struggle for a new life, raises
our eyes from the gutter. It does not provide answers. But it
makes that vital start by generating many of the right
questions.

Edward and George

THE DEAR LOVE OF COMRADES

Reviewed by Sarah Maguire

The play was enchanting: the performances were good, the

set beautifully designed and the songs and music were
wonderful. It was well directed and the script was engaging
and entertaining. I enjoyed 'Dear Love of Comrades' very
much, and I would certainly recommend seeing it. As a piece
of gay theatre it is excellent, and possibly the best work that
the men of Gay Sweatshop have performed, for which the
company deserves warm congratulation. However, I feel both
unable and unqualified to criticise the play's theatrical merits
in depth, and therefore I intend to comment on the interpretation of the politics of Edward Carpenter as represented
in the play.
A play about Edward Carpenter should have relevance to
the gay movement, and to gay socialists in particular.
Carpenter was a prominent figure in socialist politics during
the political struggle of the 1890s, and he was a gay man
who tried to explore the connections between his politics
and his personal life.
The play concentrated very heavily on Carpenter's
personal life, and the dominant theme was the sexual and
emotional relationships between Edward, George Merill
( whom he lived with for thirty years) and his personal friends
formed by his involvement with the Sheffield Labour Movement, George Adams and George Hukin. The struggles that
they encountered in their personal lives were represented as
being very similar to those faced by feminists and gay people
today. Obviously the strife and anguish involved in trying to
have non-monogamous relationships is not a prerogative of
the 1970s, but I felt that the emphasis was placed on these
particular tensions and that the peculiar difficulties which
must have faced Carpenter and his contemporaries were not
fully explored.
The stresses inherent in having relatively open gay relationships at that time, both psychological and legal, must have
been overwhelming. And not only was Carpenter having
sexual relationships with other men, but he was relating to
working class men. Carpenter felt unable to form emotionally
satisfying relationships with men of his own class: upper
class men could not show any affection for each other
because of their position and role. He was drawn to working
class men by the warmth and support they were able to give
to each other. Although he did form sexual relationships with
working class men, Carpenter was still an upper class
intellectual, something he felt unhappy about. This point was
touched on quite clearly in a scene when he is at the opera in
London seeing his publisher, Fisher-Unwin, who is objecting
to printing material on homosexuality in Carpenter's book
due to current scandals surrounding Oscar Wilde. Carpenter
makes it quite clear that he loathes being at the opera and
that he dislikes having to spend time with members of his
class in order to get his book published. He is in a position of
privilege that he obviously feels contradictions about: he can
disappear off to India to study philosophy and religion when
he wishes, leaving George Adams and George Hukin to
manage the farm at Milthorpe, an event they seemed to
resent.

were generally middle class feminists. His contact with these

women undoubtedly affected his analysis of sexual politics,
but, as women, they were unable to make a large impact on
him emotionally, and consequently radically to influence his
politics. Carpenter was obviously far more aware of the
oppression of women than the vast majority of upper-middle
class men of his time, but this awareness was fundamentally
li mited by his preoccupations which were largely decided by
both his sex and his sexual orientation. These preoccupations,
and their effect on Carpenter's politics, were clearly demonstrated by the 'invisibility' of women.
The 1890s were a time of enormous political change that
affected the succeeding decades. Splits began to develop in
the Labour Movement between the anarchists and the socialists and the Independent Labour Party emerged with the aim
of furthering the interests of the working class through
election to government. Given Carpenter's involvement with
socialism these issues needed to be explored. There were only
passing references to the industrial disputes and class conflict
in the play as though they were very distant from the life as
portrayed at Milthorpe. The farm was very isolated it had
to be given what Carpenter was trying to do but all the
inhabitants were also actively involved in the 'outside world'.
The arrival of Frank Simpson, a member of the ILP, was
treated as an intrusion, which, under the paritcular circumstances of his arrival, it was. But the people at Milthorpe
mut have often welcomed such visits as an opportunity for
political discussion.
An attempt was made to deal with Carpenter's politics in
a scene depicting a picnic which Fred Charles, an anarchist,
attends. The political differences between Carpenter and
Charles are not adequately dealt with, and this lack of
analsyis affects the relevance of the following scenes. At that
ti me serious splits were developing in the Sheffield Socialist
Club between the anarchists and the socialists. The anarchist
faction was advocating direct, and violent, confrontation,
which Carpenter, and other socialists, disagreed with. The
anarchist group was infiltrated by a police spy and Charles
and others were arrested and imprisoned for planning to
manufacture bombs. Carpenter became heavily involved in
the trial and tried to help Charles. Because, in the play, the
political differences between the two men is not explained,
the significance of Carpenter's support for Charles is missed:
it is seen as personal, rather than as an alliance with someone
he fundamentally disagrees with politically, against the Right.
Presenting a play about Edward Carpenter is obviously
fraught with difficulties. I enjoyed the play very much, but I
felt that it did not adequately explain Carpenter's politics. I
thought that the play would have been quite confusing to
anyone who did not know anything about Carpenter as his
actions were isolated from their political roots, losing
significance. Because Carpenter was a person who tried to
connect his politics with his personal life he is someone who
is relevant to gay people, feminists and socialists today, as
the recent interest in his life and work has testified. Although
an enjoyable and interesting play, I am not sure that it
manages to reflect Carpenter's political and personal life
accurately or adequately. I do think that it should be seen,
and I would hope that it would stimulate the audience to
discover more about Edward Carpenter, opening out the
debate in the gay movement between our personal lives and
the politics behind our actions.

I felt that the contradictions of class, which ultimately

Carpenter was unable to transcend, were not fully explored
in the relationships portrayed between Edward and the
Georges. Nor did the politics behind those non-monogamous
sexual relationships come over. Non-monogamy was obviously the 'right' way to relate, but the reasons for this choice
were not explained. At points I felt as though I was watching
a group of my gay male friends discussing their relationships
except that they were wearing funny clothes and kept
bursting into song.
I found the complete absence of women very striking and
an accurate reflection of Carpenter's emotional and political
interests. Although he did have some women friends these
Gay Left 31

Teachers Out
In the last issue of Gay Left we printed a review by
Margaret Jackson of the Gay Teachers' Group's
pamphlet Open and Positive. The following two
letters have resulted.
From John Warburton
I would like to make some comments on Margaret Jackson's
review of 'Open and Positive', in Gay Left No. 7, not because
the review is essentially critical and dismissive, that is a
reviewer's prerogative but because I feel the basis of the
criticism is, in terms of the advancement of the gay movement, counter productive.
First, I must question the opinion that there is a lack of 'a
deeper political analysis' behind 'Open and Positive',
Jackson's main criticism. Rather than expect every gay artefact to spell out such an analysis, it might be better to judge
such artefacts on whether or not they contradict that
analysis. From the little information Jackson gives of her
analysis, 'Open and Positive' does not seem to contradict it.
If Jackson pursues her argument with all elements of the
movement's culture, her perception of gayness must be bleak
indeed.
'Open and Positive' is essentially a fully documented
account of the correspondence between myself and the ILEA,
NUT and others involved in my dismissal from teaching, and
a careful reading of these letters should reveal that my arguments are purposefully restricted to the line of debate
adopted by my adversaries. I do not accept that any 'deeper
political analysis' in my letters would have achieved greater
success in terms of my reinstatement (the purpose for their
being written), and on reflection I certainly doubt if so much
of the Authority's and Union's attitudes would have been
exposed, if from the start I had argued my case in terms of
homosexual oppression having its 'roots in a social structure
which ... (is) ... organised around the principles of private
property and male supremacy' and sexism being 'a deeply
pervasive ideology which is both produced by and helps to
legitimate and reproduce patriarchal and capitalist relations'.
The contributions from the three other teachers involved
in 'Open and Positive', have a four-fold importance. Firstly,
they supply further factual information about my case;
secondly, they introduce new perspectives to the arguments,
where they exist, used against me by ILEA and NUT, still
using the terms of reference laid down by these bodies;
thirdly, they make it clear that the phenomenon of gay
teachers coming out at school does not start and finish with
John Warburton; and fourthly, they are public statements
that those teachers are as open, or more so about their gayness in school than I was, and thus they defy ILEA to deal
with them in the same way it dealt with me. Considering that
none of them nor, to my knowledge, none of the 2,000
teachers who signed the petitions supporting my case and
demanding the right to discuss homosexuality in the classroom, have been dismissed, I feel that Jackson's statement:
`It is a reminder to all gay teachers, if one were needed, that
our gayness will only be tolerated as long as we do not talk
about it to our pupils' shows more than a little paranoia.
Jackson claims that because there is 'no attempt at a
deeper political analysis of the issues ... the strategies proposed, such as more gay teachers coming out, building up
union support at grass roots level, and demanding a place for
homosexuality in the curriculum, have a naively optimistic
ring'. Yet despite her 'deeper political analysis' (which I
presume goes deeper than the cliches quoted above) she
offers no more useful strategy, much in the same way that
officials from ILEA insisted I handled the classroom
situations in the wrong way but provided no alternative
tactics.
The call for more gay teachers to come out is hardly naive
when in fact it is happening, without those teachers losing
Gay Left 32

their jobs. The fight against my dismissal, although not able

to achieve my reinstatement, for reasons explained in the
booklet, has made it much less likely that ILEA will repeat
its actions. It is even conceivable that the Authority's
officials have mellowed their attitudes towards openly gay
teachers after their exposure to movement ideas. For far too
long gay teachers have been granted special closet licences by
the gay community, when in fact, as educators, there is even
more reason for them to come out than most, if for no other
reason than to provide alternatives to the tired queer stereotypes each new generation grows up with.
Jackson's suggestion that building up grass roots union
support is naively optimistic must, coming from a socialist,
be more of a statement of arrogance, or fear, than anything
more profound. Is it because ordinary trade unionists, perhaps without Jackson's 'deeper political' insights, just would
not understand, or is it because she fears the possible
reactions towards her that arguing her case as a gay person
might produce. Perhaps she should check out Westminster
and Hackney NUT Associations as examples of what can be
achieved by openly gay teachers, and imagine how much
more could be achieved if those teachers had more gay
support. It may be a slow process but it is essential that the
process continues. The trade union movement is far too
i mportant to be dismissed so glibly.
Jackson's criticism of my parents' attitude as expressed in
their letter to the Headmistress of St Marylebone CE School
shows no sensitivity. As she finds it 'particularly disturbing'
that the letter was included at all, yet 'understands John's
reasons for including it', am Ito presume that she thinks my
naivety has led to another political faux-pas? The letter was
included primarily because it is relevant to the full documentation of the case and as I stated in 'Open and Positive',
'perhaps more than anything else it nullifies any argument
that has been put to me that I should not be as open about
my sexual orientation as the majority is about theirs'.
Jackson's specific criticisms of the letter are the sentences:
' We were told in 1972 by our two GPs that one in ten of the
population is born with this feature and it is not something
that they elect by choice. This has been confirmed to us by
another medical practitioner of great experience', together
with the 'lack of comment on the pathological model of
homosexuality it so clearly expresses'. Personally, I am forever grateful to those GPs for reassuring my parents that for
me, being gay is completely natural, especially when I consider what they could have been told. As with many working
class people of their age group, at times of crisis they rely
heavily on doctor's advice, and finding out that their son is
queer was, for them, one hell of a crisis. (The use of 'queer'
here is metaphorical and is not an indication of my political
standpoint.)

For me, 'being born gay' is convenient shorthand for all

the possible theories of why I am gay. Being born heterosexual or bisexual is similarly convenient shorthand. I am not
interested in causes of sexual orientations. What I am concerned about is that all non-exploitative sexual-emotional
relationships should be equally validated by society. Whilst
believing that that should be an integral part of socialism, I
also believe that if the majority of socialists are to accept that
view, gay people must be seen to be proud of their orientation. Thus I am convinced that, in most cases, the primary
political action for any gay socialist is to come out as much
as possible in all areas of their life.
With regard to my parents, my openness has caused them
to move an incredible distance since 1972 in terms of understanding homosexuality and gay oppression. If my parents
believed my gayness to be pathological, as Jackson suggests,
they would hardly be as supportive in my right to be openly
gay as they are. Neither would have written to the Headmistress as they did; nor would they have been so successful in
enlightening the community in which they live about gayness.
I can't help but feel Jackson suffers from some form of dogmatic blindness which has led her to equate 'born with this
feature' and 'GPs' with 'pathological model'. When she goes
on to say she finds 'the lack of comment ... (on this
"pathological model") ... extremely alarming ... (and) ...
bound to reinforce the prevailing view that homosexuality is
a congenital disease or abnormality, and thus effectively
depoliticise the whole issue', blindness turns once again to
paranoia. Moreover, when she has previously criticised 'Open
and Positive' for lacking 'deeper political analysis' and
labelled the strategies it proposes as naive and optimistic, to
say my parents' letter "effectively depoliticises the whole
issue" strikes me as being just silly.
Finally, Jackson states that 'socialists and feminists will I
am afraid, find nothing to bite on in this booklet. Ultimately
it treats gayness as a legal-moral issue, rather than a politicaleconomic one and therefore amounts to little more than a
plea for tolerance.' To say that the book offers nothing to
socialists and feminists assumes all socialists and feminists
have the political understanding of homosexuality that
Jackson herself has. That itself is naive and optimistic.
In practical terms, what is 'legal-moral' as opposed to
'political-economic' about three gay teachers who, having
understood how one of their colleagues has been kicked out
of teaching for refusing to promise not to discuss homosexuality with pupils, have stated clearly that they have done,
and will continue to do what the latter teacher did, and
furthermore will likewise refuse to give an undertaking to discontinue to do so if asked. Furthermore, is Jackson really
denying the importance of countering gay oppression unless
it has a clear 'political-economic' basis? Presumably Jackson
would dismiss as unimportant the struggles, for example, to
keep Gay News and Body Politic circulating, to repeal the
anti-gay laws in Northern Ireland and the fight to keep
California's gay teachers employed, because of their 'legalmoral' bases. Theorising by itself can sometimes take you so
far ahead of present reality, that you can become isolated
from the wider gay community, blind to the battles that are
being fought and callous towards the individuals who take
the brunt of homophobia.
I am led to the conclusion that Jackson's excuse for not
coming out (ie its being politically naive) and the use of her
'deeper political analysis' as a shield behind which she hids
are far worse than the ploy used by some more reactionary
gay teachers who claim they prefer the double-life of respectability during the day and naughtiness at night. Both tacitly
allow society's perverted ideas about homosexuality to be
adopted by a new generation. But Jackson's also brings
socialism into disrepute.
John L. Warburton, London SW15.
From Margaret Jackson
Thank you for sending me a copy of John Warburton's
comments on my review of 'Open and Positive' and for giving
me the opportunity to reply. I've found it difficult to formulate a reply, as he and I seem to be arguing from rather

different political perspectives, but perhaps the following

attempts at clarification may prove helpful.
1) I cannot agree that the review is 'essentially critical and
dismissive'. It is certainly critical but also appreciative and
therefore not, in my view, dismissive.
2) I am at a loss to understand how John is unable to
infer that I think his letters to ILEA, NUT etc, should have
contained a deeper political analysis. I was referring specifically to the lack of such an analysis in the contributors'
commentaries and afterword which, in my view, weakens
though does not dismiss the importance of the book as a contribution to the theory and practice of the struggle against
sexual oppression.
3) I certainly do not underestimate the political importance of John's and similar struggles, or dismiss strategies
such as coming out, building union support, exerting pressure
for curriculum change etc. Indeed it is my own involvement
in such activities which has made me aware that, although
the strategies proposed by the contributors to the book are
not in themselves misconceived, they are not only much
more difficult and complex than they are made to appear but
are in themselves not enough. For instance, in my experience
it is much easier (though not easy) to win trade union
support to gay rights than it is to get the male-dominated
trade unions to question and change their own sexist assumptions and practices, without which neither women's nor gays'
oppression can be overcome.
4) My criticism of the inclusion of the letter from John's
parents without editorial comment on the view of homosexuality it contains was certainly not intended as a putdown
of the letter itself nor of his parents' achievement in coming
to terms with their own personal crisis and changing their
attitudes towards homosexuality and gay oppression. My
criticism relates to my belief that one has a responsibility to
ensure that readers are not left with the impression that it is a
fact that 'one in ten of the population is born with this
"feature" '. Such a view of homosexuality confines it within
a deviance perspective, even if the deviance is not necessarily
viewed as pathological. I am reminded of Jeffrey Weeks'
comments on Havelock Ellis, one of the early crusaders
against the oppression of homosexuals:
'Ellis' approach is still the most common among liberals
in attempting to understand homosexuality. By collating all
the available data, the aim is to show that it is not a product
of particular national vices or periods of scoial decay, but a
common and recurrent part of human sexuality. This was an
important element in liberating ideas of homosexuality. But
in Ellis' case (and in that of most of his successors) it stopped
there. No attempt was made to explore why forms of homosexuality were accepted in some cultures and abhorred in
others, and the only hints he gave as to why homosexuals
were oppressed in contemporary society were vague references to the survival of religious taboos. Ellis' approach is
basically descriptive: the material roots of sexual oppression
are left unexplored.' (Coming Out, p.62). As Weeks points
out, Ellis' approach set the tone for liberal attitudes to homosexuality for generations to come. I would argue that contemporary liberalism, while tolerating homosexuality still
views it as essentially deviant, and that to do so is not only
to misunderstand it but to defuse it politically.
This brings me to what I see as the heart of the matter.
John's statement 'I am no longer interested in the causes of
sexual orientation', his reference to gay pride, and his conviction that 'the primary political action for any gay socialist
is to come out as much as possible in all areas of their life'
suggest to me that he and I may be operating with very
different conceptions of socialism. While I would not deny
that coming out is a political act, I do not see it as the
primary political action for gay socialists. I do not know
what sort of action I would regard as primary (it would be
arrogant to think that I did), but I do believe that a sine qua
non of fighting sexual oppression and sexism is to expose and
challenge their material bases. As a lesbian, and a socialist, I
do not want my 'deviance' to be tolerated or accepted as
something to be proud of (in what sense is anyone's sexuality
something to be proud of?). One of the problems of the gay
Gay Left 33

movement has been its liberalism, ie its tendency to limit its

activities to demanding certain 'rights', without challenging
the social relations that underpin the withholding or granting
of those rights in the first place. In relation to homosexuality
I want to argue that a central task for socialists is to challenge
sexual identities and categories, and to open up the whole
area of sexuality as a problem within the wider issues of

HOMOSEXUALITIES
by Alan P. Bell & Martin Weinberg
Mitchell Beasley 7.95 hardback
Reviewed by Emmanuel Cooper
Sex, its practice, function and frequency has become, above
all other topics, a popular post-war obsession, and symptom
and fact of the liberal mind and the permissive society. In the
last 20 years Freud's revelations about the importance of the
sex drive have become much more well known, with such
concepts as 'blocked' projection and 'sublimation' becoming
a part of everyday language, helping to fuel the fire that
sexual excess was a feature of our society.

social relations, the aim being ultimately to transform those

relations. If 'coming out' is seen as a part of that task then
indeed it can be a valuable contribution to the struggle: the
danger of liberalism is that in stopping far short of such aims,
it may in fact impede them.
Margaret Jackson, London SE3.

other areas. Also, most of the research is 9 years old, which

covers a period in which there has been an enormous and
liberalising switch in attitudes towards homosexuality.
But perhaps the biggest criticism is that the study compounds the theory that homosexuality can be studied as an
identifiable and separate group with a unifying identity when,
in fact, the first Kinsey Report with its theory of sexual continuum, pointed to the exact opposite. All the interviews
were with self-identifying homosexuals when there are many
expressions of homosexuality throughout the whole spectrum
of sexuality. Yet there is much useful information here and
much clearing away of myths and it contributes towards a
general and necessary review of the way we see sexuality and
sexual behaviour.

On the heels of Freud's theories about sexual behaviour

came the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who set out to
painstakingly find out and measure much of what Freud and
his followers hinted at. The famous two-volume Kinsey
Reports one on men (1948) and one on women (1953)
researched in as scientific a manner as Kinsey and team could
devise the sexual activities of its many 'subjects'. His findings
which were often sensational in the Press, revolutionised
many popular ideas about sex and love.
Perhaps the Report's most famous or infamous discovery was the number of people, in particular men (over
70%) who had had homosexual experiences in their lives,
though only a small number became exclusively homosexual.
These startling findings prompted Kinsey to research the
subject thoroughly, but he died before the project started.
The Institute of Sex Research he founded continued with the
idea and the latest Kinsey Report aptly and cleverly titled
'Homosexualities' is the result. It will shock few people. The
authors sensibly point out that just as there are many
different sorts of heterosexual behaviour, the same is true for
homosexual behaviour which does not fit into easily stereotyped patterns. Equally it would be as inappropriate to think
that one book on homosexuality would be the definitive
work, as only one book on heterosexuality.
The research team set out in true Kinsey tradition to
carry out their task in as conscientious a manner as possible;
interviews were carefully graded and elaborate systems of
cross checking were devised to ensure accuracy and impartiality. Lengthy face-to-face interviews with approximately
1,500 people were conducted with 'subjects' drawn from
'every walk of life'. Though quite how men in a steam bath
could or would provide useful information when approached
by an earnest interviewer is hard to imagine.
The study examines in detail the extent of sexual
experience, including sexual partnerships, sexual techniques
and sexual problems; acceptance of homosexuality and social
adjustment; and religion, politics, friendship and marriage
among homosexual men and women.
All the information, complete with statistical tables,
analyses and comment, makes a solid tome, which says little
new but, importantly and scientifically confirms much of
what we knew already. For example, most homosexual men
in satisfactory relationships are as happy as or happier than
the control group of heterosexual men in similar situations.
Equally, they confirm that gay clubs and pubs are primarily
social meeting places and not merely the 'meat market' they
are often put down to be.
There are criticisms to be made: the sample of women is
far too small to warrant the book's subtitle (A Study of
Diversity Among Men & Women), and its chosen geographical' district, the Bay area of San Francisco is a well known
area for gay liberation, and would compare favourably with
Gay Left 34

CRITICAL THEORY OF THE FAMILY

by Mark Poster
Pluto Press, 3.95
Reviewed by Keith Birch
In this book Poster challenges the simple determinant
relationship that some Marxists have posited between
economic relations and the form of the family. His aim is to
give a theoretical basis for studying the family in order to
understand its role in constructing those needs which make
radical consciousness difficult and because in itself the family
is a source of oppressive relationships. To this end he critically explores the theories of Freud, Reich, Lacan and others
and the ways they construct the relationships between the
individual, the family and society.
What Poster argues for is a greater stress on the psychological forms that are constructed by familial and social
relationships in specific historical and class settings. Family
relationships construct and reproduce differing forms of
domination, particularly those of sex and age, in the context
of wider power relations.
Poster outlines some aspects for a critical theory of the
family from which empirical studies can enlarge our understanding. He limits his project to the synchronic level of
family structure rather than studying its historical development and he rejects the functionalist account of the family
reproduction, socialisation etc. which has dominated
most Marxist and sociological approaches, as well as that of
the early Gay Movement. The family is a region where the
psychic structure and emotional patterns are primarily
formed. Poster argues that a revised Freudian psychoanalysis
provides the foundation for understanding psycho-sexual
development in given family structures and he goes on to
construct and analyse different models on this basis.
This book is an interesting critique of a variety of theories
of the family which have influenced our approach in the Gay
Movement until recently and shows ways in which a more
complex appreciation may develop.

Past Present
With Downcast Gays
by David Hutter and Andrew Hodges
Published by Pink Triangle Press, 65p.
Psychiatry and the Homosexual
Published by Gay Liberation, 25p.
The Politics of Homosexuality
by Don Milligan
Published by Edinburgh SHRG, 25p.
Reviewed by Nigel Young
Apart from the fact that these three pamphlets speak
volumes of truths sometimes overstated, sometimes hard
and crude and sometimes just plain wrong, they are a timely
reminder of the anger, energy, directness and urgency of the
gay movement in its early days. We have not moved mountains since then or made our theory and practice perfect, but
we have become aware of more of the dilemmas and contradictions about oppression and self oppression, the development of and our relationship to, the sub-culture, and the
untidy relationship between gay liberation and socialism. It is
because we now have a more developed consciousness in all
of these areas that on re-reading these pamphlets I felt acutely aware of their shortcomings.
With Downcast Gays clearly documents the widespread
and overwhelming social basis of our oppression and rightly
states that self oppression which stems from the former is an
equal enemy. However in their anger about oppression the
authors appear unsympathetic about the ways it affects our
behaviour and unconcerned about the very real material constraints which stop people coming out. Coming out is seen as
an act of revolution in itself, a path to eternal liberation,
instead of being seen as a vital and difficult process in
relation to other factors. The authors talk of coming out
"being opposed to a life time's conditioning ... but coming
out is essential". This is obviously true, but it begs the
question of how and with what support. Later in the pamphlet we are told, "It is pointless to limit coming out to
those who will understand; only by public, indiscriminate,
indiscreet self disclosure can this shame be denied." Thus in
the process of castigating one moral framework the authors
erect an equally oppressive one. The arguments are not about
how to support every act of coming out, but about a moral
i mperative which few people then or now could deal with.
Perhaps the underlying flaw in the pamphlet is expressed in
the final sentence, "External oppression we can only fight
against: self oppression we can root out and destroy",
because it suggests a polarity between external factors and
the self. Certainly we need to be aware of self oppression, but
it is not, as the authors suggest, a self imposed factor to be
exorcised by our individual efforts. Damnation for being in
the closet doesn't help us, collective support does.
Psychiatry and the Homosexual was written a year earlier
and "deals with the treatment of homosexuality by mainstream psychiatry". The importance of the pamphlet is its
strident questioning of all those areas of psychiatry which
have defined us as an "abnormal statistic" or a "deviant
neurotic" or "sick" or any other pejorative term. It throws
them back at their originators and says plainly that being gay
is not a problem or a sickness. However the pamphlet's total
rejection of all mainstream psychiatry and psychiatrists
throws the baby out with the bath water. And some of the
bricks thrown at Freud would have been better directed at
the malpractices of neo-Freudians. Yes some psychiatric
practices and practitioners are horrific, these should obviously be fought against, and yes it is important to develop our
own counselling and therapy groups. But some fears, phobias
and repressions may be outside the scope of a self help group.

As well as this, some of our relationships to the world around

us are more complex than the pamphlet suggests. Psychiatry,
therefore, may help us to become more aware of these
relationships in order that we can both understand and
accept ourselves.
The Politics of Homosexuality looks at the content and
relationship of gay liberation to socialism. Its political scope
is broad and although the domestic labour debate has moved
the discussion around the family away from a simple
economistic vision, Don Milligan's pamphlet does shift the
debate around homosexuality away from crude
conspiratorial-oppression theories. He is also aware of the
need for gay socialists to build relationships with the gay
community on the one hand and the trade union movement
on the other. However his account of trade union homophobic heterosexism crumbling whilst gay socialists work
evangelically and tirelessly at the point of production, one
hopes, is a product of his membership then of the International Socialists (now the SWP), rather than a belief still
held. For me, although the pamphlet has some limitations,
Don Milligan articulated a whole series of concerns which are
still relevant to us as gay socialists. He set down the starting
points which enabled us to look more closely at the ideology
surrounding the family, gender and camp and gave a focus
for our theory as gay socialists in terms of action.
These three pamphlets cover the social, psychological and
political ground which surrounds homosexuality. Their value
then and today was to question the past definitions imposed
on us by outsiders. By doing so they gave us the confidence
and the tools to recreate our own social, psychological and
political realities. Our task now is to move on, not away,
from those early concerns and to create a body of theory and
practice which is equally relevant to the late 70s and 80s.

PSST JOHN TYNDALL IS HETEROSEXUAL

Sexuality & Fascism
Big Flame 10p
Reviewed by Colm Clifford
Big Flame's pamphlet on fascism and sexuality briefly covers
the areas of Women and Nazi Germany, Women and the
National Front, and Men and Fascism. From my perspective
as a gay male, both sections on women are interesting and
informative. The section on Nazi Germany and Women talks
about the position of women in the thirties under Hitler and
some of the contradictions of a sacrosanct family in a
Germany at war. "In 1939 3.5 million women took the
decision to stay at home despite the labour shortage in the
munitions factories." Women and the National Front gives a
point by point run down of the National Front's attitude to
women which, in combination with the first section shows a
very obvious parallel.
Gay Left 35

The section on Men and Fascism is one I feel, as a gay

man, a lot more relaxed discussing (thus it's getting the most
space). Its analysis of gays and Nazi Germany is lacking in
both perspective and facts. (If I feel that about an area I'm
closest to I wonder how a feminist would feel about the
other two sections.) The article points out the male prerogative of fascism along with the necessity of role playing.
Men being strong, emotionless etc, while women are
emotional. sympathetic, gentle. However the assumption of
the unique link between homosexuality/maleness/fascism
grates.
"Not surprisingly, a fair number of the masculinest street
fighters, including their leader, Rohm, took the philosophy
of love between men seriously, and some were homosexuals.
It needs to be said LOUDLY that the homosexuality of some
Brownshirts was woman hating and different from today's
gay liberation movement and from much of the gay movement in pre-Nazi Germany."
Do we conclude from this that Rohm was the gay movement of the thirties in Germany? No mention of Hirschfield
and the Institute of Sexual Reform (which the Nazis looted
and burned in May 1933) which by no means held a feminist
politic. By implication J. Kimberley (the writer) sees male
homosexuality in negative terms, is woman-hating as opposed
to man-loving. Again:

Outlawed

THE SEXUAL OUTLAW

John Rechy (W.H. Allen 5.00)

Reviewed by David Thompson

It is disturbing if politically appropriate that the wheel

of history should have come full circle within the short space
of 12 years. It is as if the privilege of being able to read Last
Exit to Brooklyn in 1966 was a privilege only; as if every
ti me we want to publish a work which aims to explore the
realities, and not merely the hypotheses, of our sexuality, we
will require the sanction of the moral protectors of society;
as if we are doomed forever to bow and scrape to get a hearing! Yet, Rechy's blockbuster is now with us, in spite of a six
month delay in publication through the benevolence of the
Festival of Blight and the consequent caution of the publishers, who were forced to collect affidavits supporting publication before they could give the green light, although, by
then, copies were available in paperback! We can only hope
that when the next cycle rounds to a close or well before
then, by preference the sanction of affidavits will not be
necessary.
The Sexual Outlaw has two distinct although clearly
related tracks: one centres around the story of Jim, and
details his escapades during a three day period in the sexual
underground. The other is a reasoned justification for gay
existence and a fleeting look at a world which makes that
justification necessary. Rechy's technique, of fusing a
fictional albeit earthy and recognisable storyline with a
polemic based on documentary coupled with personal statements ( the whole expressed in crisp sentences), satisfies, not
only because it provokes a clenched fist in defiance, but
because it provokes more questions, like 'there is much in the
gay world that demands critical exploration', and, 'complacency and indifference about our own are among the ugliest
aspects of the gay world' abound, and require an in-depth
analysis which the hook was not written to give.
The story of Jim is the weaker of the two tracks. While we
see Jim as part of the spectrum of life (as Jim lies on the
beach, a hand moving towards his cock, a fisherman on the
nearby rocks obliviously throws his line), his persona is
almost surreal, not so much an outlaw as at times a cruel
egoist, and at others a desperate sexually-unfulfilled failure,
yet always with an enormous phallus seeking worship. The
other track, however, offsets the fiction, with its autobiographical base, breaking the repetition of Jim's experiences
Gay Left 36

"It was because so much of the gay movement in Nazi

Germany was woman hating that the Nazis could recruit."
Just how different was straight/gay misogyny in thirties
Germany? Both left and right wing were anti-abortion and
pro-family.
"We are deeply convinced that the best foundations of
society necessitates the consciousness of motherhood."
( Dr A. Gens, German Communist Party).
I disagree with Kimberley in his assumption that gay men's
reasons for joining the National Front are any different from
those of straight men, ie masculinity, which in this society is
misogyny from a different viewpoint.
The article closes with a 'What is the situation today?' run
down. It mentions the difficulties that women in the AntiNazi League face, and criticises the SWP suggestion that
Women Against the Nazis should be dropped. (He neglects to
mention the ANL fear of offending 'the masses', and thus
refusing to give much publicity to Gays Against the Nazis,
which is a pity as the parallel is relevant.)
Looking back over this review it seems I must have hated
this article from the word go. Ironically my initial reaction
was 'it seems ok'. Unfortunately it just doesn't stand up well
on closer reading.

and giving a clear perspective to the American gay myth (that

myth which we, on the other side of the Atlantic, often
falsely claim to be superior to our own). It would be
ludicrous to endeavour to draw any global conclusions about
a myth which encompasses so many styles. Rechy recognizes
this:
"Gay must be allowed variations. It is gay fascism to
decree that one must perform this sex act, and must
allow that one, in order to be gay; it is gay fascism to
deny genuine bisexuality, or to suspect all heterosexuals."
Yet it is not ludicrous to draw conclusions about those
who prey on that gay world, like those who turn a blind eye
when an elderly woman is raped because police are out
arresting gays for holding hands in a gay bar! The emulation
of that power game, witnessed in the gay world according to
Rechy, by the S and M aspect, comes under his thundering
hammer. While S and M may be a threat to gay freedom, so is
any situation which aims to regiment people, as does 'the
totalitarian imposition of the heterosexual norm', or which
condones cruelty through contempt, like Rechy's jaded film
director, firmly ensconced in his closet. The ugliness of the
threats to our freedom need to be answered, not only with
the outrage of suggesting that when gay people fuck and suck
in the streets a revolutionary act is committed, but with
celebration. Jim's hunt should not end at 'the tangled barbed
wire', but should go beyond the vision of Dachau to that
utopian world which is somewhere over the rainbow but
becoming more visually tangible by the day. Then we will
know, Mr. Rechy, whether a won revolution ends the life of
the revolutionary. For now, however, thank you for your
part more please, and on with that revolution!

Music to do the washing up to....

Tom Robinson Band "TRB 2"
Reviewed by Hans Klabbers
Not the most imaginative of titles, and the same can
unfortunately be said for most of the music on the record.
The cover however is excellent. It provides a wealth of useful information with phone numbers of organisations such as
Gay Switchboard, Lesbian Line and the National Women's
Aid Federation who do not usually receive such wide
efficient publicity. It also contains a list of good publications
to read (eg. Trouble With the Law, the Release Bust Book,
although "The Law and Sexuality" (Grassroots 1) and Gay
Left are obvious omissions.)
The TRB sound has changed, become more mature,
thicker somehow. Part of this must be due to an addition to
the line up in the shape of Ian Parker, a fine keyboard player
who provides interesting solos and a solid backing with Tom's
bass and Preston Heyman who has replaced Dolphin Taylor
on drums since the last album. The keyboards are more
integrated, an important part of the overall sound unlike
Mark Ambler on the first LP. Danny Kustow whose contributions on guitar are extremely extrovert at the best of
times has not been allowed to dominate the TRB sound to
the same extent as on stage and the previous record by Todd
Rundgren taking time off from his involvement with the
Patti Smith group to do an excellent production job on the
album.
Tom's voice seems to be getting better with age, as
demonstrated on Blue Murder, an emotional song with a
haunting chorus which is the highlight of this selection. It's
about the sometime boxing coach Liddle Towers who was
beaten to death by the police after they arrested him for
being drunk and disorderly outside a Newcastle pub. The
coroner returned a verdict of 'justifiable homicide'. It is sung
with sensitivity over a slow rhythm. The song ends with a
menacing keyboard solo and a grinding guitar, with much
confused shouting and arguing going on in the background:
" ... So if you figure on staying alive
Button your lip and swallow your pride
Don't make trouble when your hands are tied
Liddle, he died ... "
Another highlight is "Sorry Mr. Harris". In the vein of
"Winter of 79", it is a song about a man picked up by the
army, who is interrogated and tortured. Tom Robinson's
`straight' voice is perfectly matched to the mock sincerity of
the interrogator:
"
I'm sorry but we simply don't believe you Mr. Harris
We've seen you with these people several times
We appreciate your pain but we need to know their names"
It's effective and powerful stuff.

"I've got a brand new problem

Pretty, and he's five foot ten
I don't want to fall in love again ..."
should be blasting out of every radio in the country, with
the doo-wop chorus in the background singing "sexist,
sexist ...". The flip is "Getting Tighter", an old Hot
Peaches favourite, sung with just the right amount of nastiness. It is interesting and encouraging that, despite the compromises he's chosen to make, Tom Robinson is attempting
to make political popular music, although. it could be
argued, a stronger emphasis on gay politics is needed.
There are other encouraging developments on the horizon
Tom is involved with the independent record-label Deviant
Records, which he also backed financially and which
recently released it's first single: "Stand Together"/"A
Dyke's Gottado", the first by Noel Greig and the latter
co-written with Jill Posener, who initiated the setting up of
the label.
The single issued for Gay Pride Week, mentioned above, is
another one, and I wonder how many more gay musicians are
going to come out as a result of Tom Robinson's presence
on the scene. I am not sure how Elton John's recent tour of
the USSR, where gays are committed to mental hospitals and
labour camps as a matter of course, fits into all this though.
It is very easy to criticise Tom as he is in a very vunerable
position, and the music press have done a typical build-emup-knock-em-down job on him. Right now he needs support
and encouragement. As many people hear what he says as
Margaret Thatcher, and he is 'one of us' so listen to TRB 2,
but remember that EMI do invest in arms in South Africa
so borrow it from a friend.

The other tracks on this record are mainly `fun' singalong

songs, some with memorable riffs and/or tunes ( All Right/
All Night/Hold Out) and some without (Black Angel/Crossing
Over the Road). It is a real disappointment not to find any
songs about gays or being gay, unless you count "Let My
People Be", which could be about anything, like any Village
People cut you'd care to name. They're songs for a long hot
summer (I hope he doesn't make any more predictions like
that after the song of that name on TRB 1, and the
disastrous summer that followed it). Everyone of these tracks
are perfect for those American FM stations, songs for doing
the washing up to. And that's good too. As Jill Posener said
in a recent Time Out interview; " ... Politics has to be a
totally intrinsic part of the popular music we're constantly
flooded with .. .".
The new single on EMI records is a development of this
idea. "Never Gonna Fall in Love (Again)", co-written with
Elton John, is a gay disco song with a very strong and
danceable tune. By the time you read this:
Gay Left 37

LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND SUBVERSION

Working Papers Collection

Reviewed by Keith Birch.

This book is the first of a series by the Working Papers

Collective. It is the result of an effort, as the editorial
explains, to clarify the theoretical and political interventions
that the group wish to make in the Australian political context. To this end they are going to publish collections of
articles, pieces of research and reviews around more clearly
defined areas of concern, mainly derived from French and
Italian theoretical innovations such as the work of Foucault,
Deleuze and Guattari and Irigaray.
This issue looks at the discourses of psychoanalysis,
political parties, specifically the Italian Communist Party,
and other institutions and the way in which their practice
reproduces power relationships and ensures their transmission.
In the section Power and Psychoanalysis, two important
articles use Freud's analysis of Little Hans to show the way
that psychoanalytic practice imposes its definitions and
meanings on the behaviour of the small boy and helps to
construct the very sexuality and relationships that it claims
to discover. Deleuze and Guattari show how Freud's interpretation of Hans' beahviour, thoughts and fantasies conceals
and excludes their real basis in the boy's experience and
desire.
Gross and Campioni use the same work of Freud to show
how his analysis is constructed within a bourgeois, patriarchal
and heterosexual framework which imposes itself on the
child in the course of analysis. Freud, with the parents, constructs Hans' individuality and sexuality within the dominant
categories that Freud claimed psychoanalysis revealed. The
theory of psychoanalysis is retained in their own work while
rejecting Freud's claims to its universality and ahistorical
nature. The article places the analysis in its historical and
class setting while also pointing to the active role of the
parents' unconscious.
An article by Meaghan Morris discusses some of the
political developments in Italy up to 1977, focusing on the
way in which elements to the left of or outside the
Communist Party have been characterised, disqualified and
attacked both by the State and by the PCI. Known as the
'excluded' or 'the Movement', these groups include elements
of the young, the unemployed, the women's and gay movements and the far left. The challenge that they represent
comes not only from their political organisation but also the
disparate forms that their activity has taken.
The book also includes a number of translations of short
articles by Eco, Deleuze and Guattari and Irigaray with the
intention of bringing this theoretical work to a wider
audience.

Gay Left 38
y

Left

LETTER ON CAMP
Dear Gay Left
In Notes Against Camp ( Gay Left No 7), Andrew Britton, for
an hors d'oeuvre, bitterly attacks Gene, a character in 'Men',
the play that Noel Greig and I wrote. Gene is an outrageously
camp man and clearly not everybody's cup of tea. But,
Andrew criticises Gene for saying "Socialism is about me",
and in another place in the article complains that Gene
asserts: "Men, like nature, abhor a vacuum".
By the same token Andrew would presumably attack
Hamlet simply for saying "To be or not to be". Alternatively,
he might haul Bette Lynch over the coals for chewing gum or
having bottle-blonde hair. But just as there's more to Bette
Lynch than meets the eye, so Gene says a little more than
Andrew has credited him with.
What Gene actually says about men is: "Men, like nature,
abhor a vacuum. They have to fuck all the holes. Fill all the
orifices. Plug all the gaps. Leave nothing to chance. Forewarned is forearmed." And about socialism he screams:
"Socialism is about me, not about your neurosis. Socialism is
the gift of the powerless. It's got nothing to do with powerful
men."
Gene is a man who is powerless in the socialist and labour
movement simply because he cannot and does not want to
bury his identity to satisfy the prejudices of the manly men
who, in his experience, are in sole charge of the Class
Struggle. If it comes to the 'crunch' Gene would rather polish
his nails than have to go all butch. And I can't blame him for
that.
Gene, like camp gay men generally, is not expressing
femininity by being camp. He is simply using irony to undermine the 'acceptable' stereotypes of masculinity on offer. Of
course he is trapped with in the confines of being a camp gay
man, but this is because Gene has not discovered an androgynous role. Have you Andrew? Because I certainly haven't.
The play may be, and has been, legitimately criticised at
many different levels, but to attack the work because it
celebrates openly gay effeminacy at the expense of butchness
is to completely miss the point. Because 'MEN' is, among
other things, an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which
those of us enmeshed in the masculine stereotype conspire in
the oppression of our effeminate brothers. It is about the
gender-trap, that labyrinth we all live in.
Don Milligan

SEXUAL EXPERIENCE BETWEEN

MEN AND BOYS
Parker Rossman. Temple Smith. 6.95.

Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire

Homosexuality seems to have lost its standing as absolute

threat to the fabric of the family and society, at least if it
remains confined within the ghetto and as a predeliction,
however unfortunate, of adults. But the Demonology of the
Right has found a new focus in the furore around paedophilia
and the question of child sexuality. Whereas in 1962 the
Daily Mirror could run sensationalist articles on 'How to
Spot a Queer', it is members of PIE who now are mercilessly
exposed in the Sunday tabloids, and the discourse of moral
turpitude, irredeemable corruption and evil weaves around
the figure of the paedophile.
Unsurprisingly, in our society, where 'moral' issues are
being fought out, science is rarely far away, and into the
textual void around paedophilia, comes Parker Rossman's
book, calling for objectivity and understanding where the
Moral Rearmers call for blood. But it is in this seemingly
unbiased attitude that Rossman manages a more insidious
exercise of power: he creates a new sexual delinquent, the
paedophile, and then sets to work with typologies, taxonomies, discriminations, causal accounts ... in fact the whole
arsenal of positive science, through which sexuality is
analysed, regulated and controlled.
In the face of his own evidence, which remains enthralling
and intrinsically fascinating, Rossman manages to hive off
the paedophilic experience to the margins of sexuality. It
becomes the prerogative of the paedophile/paederast despite
the fact that few of the men interviewed only have sex with
boys: there is no examination of the ways in which self-image
and self-identity are acquired, nor how the rigid framework
of 'natural' sexual categories restrict the possibilities of
bodily pleasure.
Nor can Rossman get very far with more general reflections on sexuality and on the meaning of paedophilia when
he ignores ab initio women and female sexuality. Far from
being a simple delimiting of a domain of research, Rossman's
exclusion of women from his account distorts in a sexist way
the ways in which sexuality and sensuality are experienced
between adults and children. He seems unable to think the
connections between the affective intensity within the family
and between mothers and children, and the existence of the
paedophile as a category: parents and paedophiles have a
more than contingent relationship in the present emotional
economy of adult child relations.

Instead the paedophile remains a sexual outlaw, to be

known, helped, saved from temptation proscribed, all as
Rossman's erratic judgements dictate, but never a voice that
might radically modulate the discourse that tyrannises our
thinking on sexuality. And so the book, potentially so
i mportant, becomes merely an example of how not to write
about sex, and with value only as innoculation against the
plague of texts to come, as paedophilia and the sexuality of
children and young people become central issues in the
struggle for sexual liberation.

The Gay Left collective is preparing for publication a book of

essays discussing various aspects of the relationship between
the struggles of gay people and the struggle for socialism. The
vast majority of the score or so articles will be original publications, though a few of the outstanding contributions from
past Gay Lefts will be republished, revised by the authors.
BIOLOGY

Themes include the relationship between capitalism and

sexuality, the regulation of female sexuality, the role of the
state and left political parties, personal accounts by lesbians
and gay men of their coming out and of the subcultures,
aspects of gay culture, the role of autonomous movements,
and discussions of recent sexual political developments. Contributors include members of the Gay Left collective and
many others who have participated in the women's and gay
movements over the past ten years.
This book, written by lesbians and gay men, will be a
major contribution to current discussions in the gay
movement and on the left generally. Provisionally entitled-Between Two Worlds: Radical attitudes towards homosexuality, the book will be published in Spring 1980 by Allison and
Busby Ltd, 6a Noel Street, London W1 .
Gay Left 39

What's Left

Price Increase Despite raising the number of pages to 40

and incurring increased printing and typesetting costs we
have managed to hold the price of Gay Left for a year and a
half. Now inflation has overtaken us and we must raise the
price of the journal. Both printing and typesetting costs have
gone up a further 16% since the last issue, and postal rates are
due to be increased within the next month. Subscription and
mail order rates have gone up in line with these increases.
York Community Books In the last issue we gave their
address incorrectly. It is 73 Walmgate, York YO1 2TZ. They
have an extensive list of gay books and pamphlets.
Gay's The Word 66 Marchmont Street, London WC1
specialises in gay and feminist books, pamphlets and periodicals, including many imported items. Open 10-7pm, with
late evening events on Thursdays. Close to Russell Square
tube.
Minerva Books, a new mail-order firm stocking books for
feminist and gay women, has been set up by Elizabeth
Lambdon. To obtain further details of books available, please
send a sae to Minerva Books, c/o 9 Moorfields, London EC2.
Glib is a new magazine produced in Birmingham by and for
gay people, containing poetry, fiction, personal pieces and
politics. Glib costs 30p. Further information from Allan
Brayne, 137 Powke Lane, Rowley Regis, Warley, West Midlands.
LE GAI PIED is a new French monthly journal covering
local and international affairs. The first two issues have also
concentrated on recent developments in theoretical work on
various aspects of homosexuality and gay politics. LE GAI
PIED costs 5 fr. and an annual subscription is 50 fr. Available
from EDITIONS DU TRIANGLE ROSE, B.P. 183, 75523
PARIS CEDEX 11.
NORTHERN GAY
The Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA) is
now producing a regular paper, Northern Gay, which aims to
represent the views and cause of gay people in Northern
Ireland to a broad public. The Northern Gay costs l0p and
may be obtained from NIGRA, P.O. Box 44, Belfast.
Gay Left Collective 1979
ISSN: 0307 9313
Typeset by Dark Moon, 01-221 4331
Printed by East End Litho Ltd.
Trade Distribution: Publications Distribution Co-op,
27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R OAT.
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02111 USA.

THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Derek Cohen,
Emmanuel Cooper, Phil Derbyshire, Simon Watney, Jeffrey
Weeks, Nigel Young.

GAY LEFT 38 CHALCOT ROAD LONDON NW1

Gay Left 40

Contents

Editorial ...................................................................................................2
Personal Politics: Ten Years On ............................................ ....... 4
Gays at Work: Student Unions ............................................. ....... 9
Pat Arrowsmith -- Pacifist ...................................................... 11
Paedophilia -- A Response ...................................................... 13
Childhood Sexuality and Paedophilia ................................ 18
In Defence of Disco ................................................................... 20
Living With Indecency .............................................................. 24
Lost Freedoms ............................................................................ 27
The Regime of Sex .................................................................... 29
Picking up the Pieces ................................................................. 30
Edward and George ................................................................... 31
Teachers Out .................................................................................. 32
Reviews ........................................................................................... 34
Past Present ................................................................................... 35
Outlawed ........................................................................................ 36
Music to do the washing up to
37
Reviews ........................................................................................... 38

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Self and Self-Ima

THE COLLECTIVE STATEMENT
Keith Birch, Derek Cohen, Emmanuel Cooper,
Philip Derbyshire, Simon Watney, Jeffrey Weeks,
Tom Woodhouse, Nigel Young.

This editorial stems from discussions that have taken place

within the Collective of 8 gay men over the last few months
around the central theme of self and self-image. As we talked
we found that very broad patterns emerged, which in themselves raise questions which tend to be over-looked in
traditional Left discourse: how 'masculinity' is formed and
experienced, the difficulties of reconciling sexual practice
with political theory, and for us as gay men, the ubiquity of
self-oppression as a fundamental aspect of our lives, which
are themselves experienced through and through as sexual.
Thus we have tried to construct this Editorial around those
themes, deriving our analysis from personal statements which
we wrote for this purpose.
In Gay Left 8 we wrote: "it would be too easy to fall
back into a strident Left othodoxy, that would make Women
and Gays mere auxiliary troops in some romanticized attack
on state power ... The dialectic has to be maintained
between the personal and the political, between the struggle
for new ways to relate to each other now, and the building of
organisations that would effectively challenge the whole
oppressive order". Since that time the first effects of
Thatcherism have made themselves felt, and the Left has
found itself disarmed in the face of massive attacks on the
gains won by working people over the last thirty years. There
has been a tendency to turn away from considerations of
subjectivity, of how we live and experience our lives, and a
reconstitution of traditional Left campaigns that ignore
whole realms of lived experience.
It seems that some ten years' work concerning the
relationships between personal and public politics is being
threatened by a renewed emphasis on purely economic
struggles, and an elitist style of political leadership which is
unable to acknowledge that most socialists today are outside
the organised Parties. The Communist Party of Great Britain
for example is currently attempting to re-locate itself in
terms of shop-floor membership. Whilst we don't deny the
i mportance of such moves, we feel that there is a real risk of
forgetting the issues of how we communicate, and of
lowering political sights to narrow wage demands and job
defence programmes which exclude and deny the specific
oppression of women and gays.
At the same time the Socialist Workers Party
particularly in its newspaper is adopting a narrow class
line on Women's issues, for example, restrictions on abortion
are seem solely in terms of their effects on working class
women, and gay politics are seen as no more than a matter
of civil rights. This is characteristic of a general inflexibility
on the Left around all issues of sexual politics, the reaction
against which may well explain the popular appeal of recent
writings by E.P. Thompson, Sheila Rowbotham, and others.
These call into question many of the shibboleths of the
Left, questioning aspects of organisation and strategy which
the Parties themselves seem unable to comprehend, let
alone respond to.
2 Gay Left

As a part of this reassessment we propose to limit our

objectives in this Editorial to an examination of our selfimage as a group of gay men at a very particular historical
moment. We do this from a conviction that unless we can
understand the processes that form us as individuals, the
political forces that impinge upon us, and the contradictions that are bequeathed to us from living in a damaged
and damaging culture, then we are doomed, as socialists, to
planning mythic strategies for phantom armies, no longer
connecting to the felt needs of ourselves or other people.

Internalisation of Oppression
The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self
oppression. Self oppression is achieved when the gay person
has adopted and internalized straight people's definition of
what is good and bad. Self oppression is saying: "When you
come down to it, we are abnormal". Or doing what you
most need and want to do, but with a sense of shame and
loathing.
Gay Liberation Front Manifesto 1971
The concept of self-oppression emerged from the Gay
Liberation Front as a leading explanatory idea, carrying with
it a whole retinue of moral imperatives and distinctions. As
a first expression of an important insight it was very
influential, but in order to make use of it today, the baggage
of moralism and implicit assumptions has to be rejected. If
that can be achieved the concept is useful in describing a
constant feature of our lives. It may be that the gains of the
Gay movement and the liberalisation of the late sixties and
early seventies have reduced the stigma that attaches to a
self-identification as gay, but we still have to live our lives in
a society where the norms of masculinity, femininity and
heterosexuality are deeply ingrained and continue to affect
our feelings and actions.
"With straight men in many situations I can be 'gay' yes,
but not the same verging on camp queen that I am with gay
men or women. With straight men the tendency is to show
the side that fucks not the side that is fucked."
Self-oppression is the result of the negative images of
homosexuality available to us in our culture, encouraging us
to think of ourselves as failed heterosexuals. Ideologically
homosexuality is still usually defined as a psychological
category, at one level only to do with sexual aim and goal,
but at another level a general and determining feature of an
individual's being. So whilst at first it may only be our sexual
desires that are denied, that denial permeates our entire
existence, more or less consciously.
"I don't make many approaches to people because of a
general lack of confidence over my looks and sexual
performance."
"Though I feel attractive, fulfilling sexual stereotypes,
I still feel insecure. I deal with this insecurity by seeking and

demanding endless approval, usually by putting myself

down and then expecting my friends to say 'no, you really
are attractive, witty, capable' ".
We can still see the evidence of this in the subcultures
developed over the last generation. The problem in understanding these subcultures is whether we are appropriating
established power mechanisms, (for example in the development of 'macho' style among gay men) or whether we are
attempting to create something entirely new.

"By wearing a white T-shirt, black motocycle jacket,

faded blue jeans and short cropped hair I present a very
masculine image. Nothing fey or gay here . . . the real thing.
I do not want to look effeminate or queer. I gain strength
from the gayness of other men."
"It seems to me that the 'masculinity' of my image is as
much a sympton of insecurity, not only about sexuality
itself, but in a much broader sense: I cling to a manifestation
of power to offset the impotence I often feel."

"Violence is something that scares me and I am aware of

the physical violence that many gay men experience on the
streets. One of the ways I protect myself from this is by
looking a bit 'heavy'. A leather jacket, boots, can afford
some measure of protection . . . "
Homosexuality is still marginalised and gay people are
still threatened: we have evolved ways of surviving our
ostracism and of defending our vulnerability. Our personal
contradictions, the fractures that criss cross our psyches as
we seek to navigate between external oppression, the
lingering residue of our socialisation and our visions of a
socialist society, let alone our need to achieve some sort of
satisfaction in our lives now: all should be less a subject for
moral stricture and more a domain for sympathetic analysis.

"In an imperfect society it is absurd to expect the

existence of perfect human beings."

As political gays we feel a contradition between the need

for and committment to building alternative ways of relating
to each other, and the ways we have already established to
validate ourselves and to achieve some form of satisfaction
and fulfillment in our lives.

"In my head is the ideal of equality, and sexual freedom . .

I want (in my head) sex which is gentle and devoid of
performance qualities, but I seek out sex which is genital
oriented . . . I exalt the value of sex and friendship on the
one hand and somehow deny it by my thoughts and actions
on the other."
"I have always been attracted to traditionally male
images motorcyclists, cowboys in particular. Yet my
political awareness about role playing, and a fear of being
overtaken by too complete and stereotypical an image has
meant that my efforts to portray a male image have been
modified."
Inherent in the concept of self-oppression is a voluntaristic
stance, which suggests that we can transform ourselves by
simple acts of will. Our experience as gay men over the
last ten years militates against such a rudimentary conception.

"Sex for me is still a novelty. My attitude towards sex

has changed very little despite my involvement over five
years with gay liberation and its interaction with feminism."
Our relation to our own desire is far more complex. The
ways our emotions are organised are rooted in capitalist
society: we can change our perceptions of our situation, but
not necessarily our deepest needs and desires. We can no
more wish away our desire for particular types of sexual
experience, our attraction to particular individuals, than
we could wish away our homosexuality itself. However,
that recognition does little to assuage the guilt and anxiety
that can be mobilised in pursuit of 'ideal' non-exploitative
relationships, or in condemnation of those pressing desires
we feel in conflict with them.

"When an image of masculinity is appropriated by and

dominates the gay subculture, I have found it a problem
in terms of my early GLF ideas, regarding my own concepts
of myself, what it means to people. Wearing leather actually
made me feel good in a number of ways, more secure, the
sexual responses from other gays ... more confident."
"Some of these sexual delights disturb me ...I notice
that when I wank, which is whenever I sleep on my own and
my fantasies are too violent, I withdraw and feel depressed
when I've come. I don't think it's liberating to want to be
-pissed on, to want to be beaten, to want to go through pain
and degradation."
The voluntaristic stance is particularly inappropriate
when reaction is gaining momentum. Our room for manoevre
is materially constrained by what happens on the streets.

"Partly the masculinity I cultivate is a response to the

fear of physical violence against me for being seen to be
gay. In the ghetto I found I was becoming much less butch
in appearance, almost to the degree that I felt more confident
about being gay and being seen to be gay."

POWER
"I like 'pretty' guys: I am put off by leather and uniforms".
" . .. by wearing a white T-shirt and a black motor-cycle
jacket, faded blue jeans and short cropped hair I know I
present a very 'masculine' image ... I want to attract men
who are not as powerful as me."
"Being a nice middle-class man, my relationships are
dominated by intellectual and emotional power struggles,
not by physical domination."
"I perhaps gain power from never expressing my emotions,
leaving them [lovers] to make decisions, being terribly nice
and supportive when they have their crises, while trying to
hide my own."
"I am attracted to men who seem in some way rugged or
strong . . . I feel that the way to attract such men is to be
like them."
These five voices begin to suggest the sheer complexity
involved in any attempt to confront the issue of gay male
sexuality and power. All historical concepts of masculinity
and femininity have been reflected in terms of personal
Gay Left 3

appearances. What is 'masculine' in one era may seem

'feminine' in another. But such shifts in fashion rarely
question underlying power relations. Power is rarely simply
functional. In most circumstances it is both coercive and
productive. Power always presupposes motivation, a reason
or value which precedes action. We do, after all, make use of
or reject specific forms of power political, sexual,
emotional, intellectual, and so on. At the same time it is not
just the case that one person's image of power may not
coincide with another's. The range of available images of
Power is limited, and within that range the same image may
possess conflicting meanings, as is apparent from the
introductory quotations. By wearing leather for instance
one man may be trying to attract someone similar, and
another may be trying to attract someone very different,
whilst a third may be put off altogether by the same image.
In other words appearances do not have simple fixed
meanings. As Guy Hoquenghem pointed out in Gay Left 6,
wearing leather does not make a man a criminal ...
The early Gay Movement held that ALL versions and
significations of gender are basically oppressive and therefore
sexist. Gay people were supposed to somehow neutralize
their appearance and de-sex themselves. Some people have
found compromise solutions:
"I aspire to a kind of aggressive androgyny which is a way
out from the culturally given extremes of gender which both
repel and attract me. . . "
The felt need in our society for firm gender roles and the
clearly defined power relations which they represent confronts us with the major problems of gay identity. For gay
men these focus on the relations between our gayness and
our masculinity:
"The image I have grown to cultivate is one of an
ambiguous masculinity, an almost ironic butchness: Levis,
Leather, jacket, boots, all give the appearance of an active
masculinity that I don't feel I possess."
This is the source of the initial attraction of all forms of
sexual self-presentation which seem to resolve the problem
by resorting to extremes of power relations:
"It [sadomasochism] offers an attractive solution to a
series of problems: it isolates sex from everyday life etc."
At the same time gay sexuality IS cut off from most areas
of our ordinary working lives, as is shown in Ron Peck and
Paul Hallam's film "Nighthawks", and it would indeed be
surprising if our subcultures did not reflect this division. The
problem remains that gender operates in all societies as one
of the most fundamental systems of social control, control
which is legitimated in a multitude of ways in the name of
some supposedly 'natural' sexuality. The widespread adherence to conventionally masculine gender-role appearances
which have nothing to do with specific sexual practices
explains why we have developed further codes such as handkerchiefs, keys, etc. These devices derive from our vulnerability in the face of the massive moral and institutional
edifice of heterosexuality. This to some extent calls into
question the value of any analysis based on a narrow concept
of stereotyping. For it is we as gays who are stereotyped in
the first place by an anti-gay society, and much of our
culture is concerned with enriching and nuancing these
stereotypes according to our changing needs, desires, and
experience.
It is pious moralising to attack gay people for 'failing' to
establish a totally independent and coherent culture and
identity. It is hardly remarkable that our modes of culture,
sexuality and self-presentation should be various, even to the
extent of incorporating the figures patriarchal, violent,
humiliating of our own oppression:
"I don't feel guilty about sex or having it with all sorts of
people. But I do sometimes think that some of my sexual
practices are self-destructive and yet I can't stop myself
enjoying these practices."
In the parodies and pastiches of the gay subculture we
should recognize not some innate paucity of gay social
relations, but rather the constrictions and limitations in ways
that all women and men are constructed under capitalism.

4 Gay Left

SEXUALISATION
The last two hundred years have seen what could be
described as the sexualisation of the individual identity in
the western world. Sexuality has become a central focus for
the individual's sense of self and the basis of that very
individuality.
The categorisation of homosexuality has been a central
feature of this process, basing a social identity on a sexual
orientation. The definition of the homosexual has been
constructed and shaped by a variety of forces and institutions
which have attempted to regulate its character and expression. But as 'homosexuals' were defined more and more on
the basis of sexuality, subcultures have slowly developed as
focuses for homosexual identities, both within the confines
of these definitions and in opposition to them.
A growing awareness of being homosexual in this society
can lead to many different subjective responses. They can be
the ground on which a whole notion of difference may be
experienced. The result is not just a sense of sexual difference
but one that concerns the whole range of assumptions and
values.
"It seems that I have always defined myself against the
norms of whichever group that I have attached myself to,
that difference, a self-definition that I am not such and such,
which I have imputed to be a general feature of my friends,
peer group and comrades."
This growing awareness can also lead to a denial of
difference, an assertion that it is only sex, only the gender of
the sexual partner, that is at odds with social norms. Some
people may lead lives of greater conformity as a proof of
their sameness. This degree of self-consciousness regarding
our sexuality can lead to a wider sexualisation of our social
activities and experiences.
"I often find myself looking round in all sorts of places to
see if there are other gay people there and perhaps make
signs of recognition to them. It often makes me feel better in
an 'alien', heterosexual environment to know there are other
gays around."

The exclusion of an open homosexuality from most social

institutions has led inevitably to the development of a gay
subculture which has focused on the desire to make social
and sexual contacts. Sex in this context is the primary means
by which we can express ourselves and it confirms our distinct identity.
It is still the case that many gay men make their early
contacts through cottaging or chance pick-ups. This involves
becoming aware of sexual signals and codes which allow us to
identify and make contact with others; it may be merely by
our presence in 'sexual' locations or by the whole range of
our actions, language, clothes and other signifiers.

me. It is three things: Consolation, it shows you can still do

it; Confirmation, cementing friendships etc; Affirmation,
making me three steps higher."
Sex can be an affirmation of ourselves and an important
confirming part of relationships. It can also be used to avoid
emotional involvements. We can live out some aspects of our
fantasies in sexual contacts.

"My sexual practices don't scare me because I'm aware of

the limits that I want to go to. I like 'hot' verbals but I don't
really want to realise the excessive areas of my fantasies."
"I am confused by sado-masochism because, like monogamy, it offers an attractive solution to a series of problems;
it simplifies sex, it isolates sex from everyday life when
integrating sex into my life is time consuming and emotionally draining."
There have been major changes in the images that we as
gay men have of ourselves and that we present to the world.
The gradual development of the macho style in the late 70's
raises issues of the determination of cultural codes and our
changing conceptions of ourselves as gay men. The transposing of the dominant image of masculinity into the gay
subculture is in some ways an assertion of a positive identity
as 'male'. Also, macho might well be seen as one way of
negotiating the problem of aging in a youth orientated
culture.
We have to be careful though not to collapse all aspects of
gay life and the gay subculture into sex. There is a danger of
reading this into all social contacts.

"My first sexual experiences were in cottages and although

I didn't have a notion of my gayness I responded to men
masturbating in the toilet and also to the casual strollers who
seemed to spend an unusual amount of time looking at the
fauna surrounding the cottage."
For many gay men image and fashion take on a more
important and self-conscious role, often in the projection of
certain sexual types. An elaborate vocabulary of codes and
signs is used to indicate aspects of our gayness which may
also imply particular sexual preferences.

"I seek out men who are going to be good at sex. Sometimes at Bangs disco I stare at men who are classic stereotypes: tall, slim, moustaches, beards, check-shirts and keys,
because I know, or think, that they will be good at sex."
"I am still surprised by the fact that my image conveys my
interest in all sorts of sexual activity which I am not interested in."
"Having a beard or wearing a leather jacket has a notice
able effect on people's sexual responses that was both
exciting and worrying. Exciting because it's nice to feel
attractive, worrying because of perhaps getting into it too
much, using it all the time and being able to hide behind it."
This wider sexualisation can lead to stresses and conflicts
for us as individuals operating in such contexts. People who
do not fit into the dominant stereotypes can feel isolated
and anxious. Sometimes the importance of sex as a confirmation of ourselves can become obsessive and can lead to a
compulsive and consuming search for sexual partners. The
gay scene can exacerbate this search whilst discouraging
attempts to make wider contacts and build collective support.

"Having sex with other men in some ways feels less

important than having them attracted to me."
"In San Francisco where sex was easy to obtain, it lost
much of its centrality. It reduced drastically the compulsion
to pick up which underlies gay life in London, or which I
feel. The fact that gay life is still so closeted in London
focuses an urgency on encounters in bars etc."
"Sex is some form of expression of personal power for

"I increasingly question my earlier belief that one can

change radically through assimilation of political ideas. My
involvement with feminists and lesbians has not changed my
need and desire to see men as sexual objects."
"Sexually I want adventure and experiment but I also
want emotional contact and this somehow justifies the sexual
exchange."
Though based on a shared sexuality, the gay world contains all levels of social interaction, friendship and support.
Much of the impetus of the Gay Movement in the last decade
has been to challenge the limitations imposed on the gay subculture. One vital aspect of this has been the effort to construct and work through different types of relationships.

Relationships
"We are obsessed by them when we do have them and
obsessed by not having them when we don't".
Relationship is a word used to describe all sorts of
connections between people, but within the last decade or
so, (perhaps mostly amongst the young professional middle
class), it has become a substitute for such words and
concepts as affair, marraige and partnership. As gay socialists
we use it to underline a sense of, or attempt at, equality
between lovers involved in a sexual and emotional
involvement.
In our discussion we talked about our own individual
needs and what we wanted out of our relationships. There
was a sense in which we viewed our relationships as somehow
a pool of emotional support, from which we can draw from
time to time.
Gay Left 5

"to have one relationship which satisfies me emotionally,

intellectually and from which I get warm affirmative gentle
sex."
We all have a notion of relationships which has been
formed by the interaction between the given social/cultural
model, the critique of relationships offered by the women's
and gay movements, and by our personal experiences. Out
of the response of the women's and gay movements to the
heterosexual standard of marriage have come a whole
series of ideas about ideal relationships, with a strong antipathy to monogamy. Groups of people within the early gay
movement experimented with multiple relationships and
sexual relationships within a communal living situation.
There were attempts to construct a gay alternative to
compulsive monogamy. We saw ourselves as needing a whole
series of relationships to satisfy our sexual and emotional
needs. Exclusive couples were seen as oppressive because of
the difficulties of relating to the individual members of a
couple without having to respond to the 'other half'. These
problems are still with us today.
"Coupledom for me is both stultifying, against what I
believe and makes other people feel isolated and lonely if
they're not in a couple I think it's reactionary too
though I recognise other people's emotional needs are
different from mine".
In the colder reality of the late seventies maintaining a
primary relationship alongside a series of other relationships
seems an attractive solution. For us, who choose this, the
central problem is maintaining equality within a primary
relationship constantly beset by difficulties of jealousy and
trust stemming from the threat of other relationships which
are potentially primary.

" . . . somehow are less to do with sex than with an

intense desire to dissolve into the other, sex becomes
symbolic, mythic . . . "
"Romance is the nearest we can get to realising some
aspects of our sexual and emotional fantasies and in many
ways relationships are concerned with controlling, channelling, and prolonging the intensity of the romantic moment."
Words like romance, love or relationships and all the
other words handed down to us by society are loaded. We
cannot, on the other hand, provide new words, we can only
describe our experiences to an extent and suggest problems
and offer tentative solutions.
"What we want is the possibility of deciding for ourselves
the sorts of relationships which seem most appropriate to us
as gay people, rather than trying to relate to, or fit in with
the values or particular forms of relationships which society
has defined as normal and natural."
What type of relationships those are must be the choice
of each individual, all we can try to do is to explain where

that choice might have come from and the variety of choices
that can be made. Which brings us back to the opening quote.
"We are obsessed by them when we do have them, and
obsessed by not having them when we don't."

"What I do is play a balancing game . . . I can retreat from

the domination of my main relationship into a series of
other types and if my main relationship is going OK I enjoy
the other relationships all the more but they are no
substitute."
These ways of dealing with relationships come out of
an acceptance that people need to have relationships which
somehow contribute to making them into 'whole' human
beings. We all feel that we need some form of constant
exotional/sexual support, even though it seems that our
'wholeness' is illusory. Holding narrow concepts of relationships can only contribute to feelings of inadequacy and
'unwholeness' when we do not achieve our ideals.
However, despite our 'realist' statements, many of us
revealed the deep rooted hold that romance has on us.
"Then one new relationship started that developed such
an intensity ... "
"Tends to make me fantasize about an ideal lover . . if I
get depressed the absence of this perfect being gets out of
proportion."
6 Gay Left

Gay Politics in New Zealand

by Lindsay Turner

I'm often amused, and sometimes faintly irritated, by

people's concepts of gay life in New Zealand. Most people
know something about the country in general: that it's down
there in the South Pacific, just a bit to the right of Australia,
and that it persists in trying to sell us lamb and cheese at
prices that the EEC says are too low. But when I mention a
gay bar in Auckland, or a lesbian group in Wellington, I tend
to get astonished reactions. "Oh, really?" I'm asked, in tones
that suggest surprise that I'd ever seen anything more erotic
than a merino ewe before coming to London, "I didn't think
they had things like that there." And astonishment is indeed
great when I inform them that New Zealand has not only a
commercial gay scene but a National Gay Rights Coalition
with 35 member groups.
Not that I'm claiming NZ gay life to be perfect; no one
would suggest that about a country in which 300 people on a
gay pride march is something of a record. But lesbians and
gay men there live lives not too different from their counterparts in British towns and cities outside London. In fact,
there's a good case for arguing that Auckland is a lot livelier
than, say, Edinburgh or Leeds. But there are distinct
differences between the gay scenes in the two countries,
differences that are attributable to the subtle but important
variations in the ways of life. And before I write specifically
about the position of gays in NZ and the development of the
movement there, I want to mention some of the peculiarities
of everyday existence.
It's often dangerous to talk about a "national character".
This is particularly true of a country like NZ, which has a
population composed largely of British immigrants and the
descendants of immigrants, with a substantial (10%) Maori
minority. Just how different is the average New Zealander's
character from that of the average Briton? Not very, I think.
But there are features of NZ society in general that are quite
distinct from their British counterparts. NZ is a country with
only 150 years of European settlement, and for most of the
19th century was very much a "pioneer" society. It still
retains some of the features of such societies: egalitarianism,
practicality, and hospitality, for example. The class system is
less rigid, so that accent or schooling are often not reliable
guides to social background.
There's also a high degree of respect for the rights of
ordinary people, a suspicion of privilege and elitism, and the
feeling that people's worth depends on what they contribute
to the community. There's a strong tradition of social
innovation, with NZ being the second territory (after
Wyoming) to grant women the vote, in 1893. (I don't think

it coincidental that both places were pioneer societies in

which the conventional Victorian views of women as helpless
and hysterical were contradicted by people's practical
experience of women's part in building communities out of
virtually nothing.) And, today, opinion polls show large
majorities of the population in favour of such principles as
abortion on demand and legal equality for gays.

It's a small country

Unfortunately, there's a negative side to all this, that seems
to be increasingly dominant. I mean the conformity and
insularity that are the bane of small communities everywhere.
New Zealanders hate to stick out in a crowd, and they hate
others to stick out too. This means that it requires a great
deal of courage to stand up for any unpopular cause at all, or
even to act in ways that violate the mortgage-and-two-and-ahalf-kids norm. It also means that the country is very
susceptible to the kind of rightwinger who appears to
represent consensus opinion, as the Prime Minister very well
knows: he expresses his populism perfectly in the NZ idiom,
"a fair go for the average bloke". It also means that determined pressure groups can force legislation against the trend
of public opinion, which is why there is still no homosexual
law reform and why Parliament regularly tightens the law on
abortion in response to Catholic pressure.
More specifically, the sparse population of NZ (it has only
three million people in an area larger than Britain) means
that lesbians and gay men face some extra problems. Real
anonymity, for example, of the kind easy in a city like
London, is virtually impossible to achieve. Even if it's not as
true as is sometimes claimed that aversion to rugby and a
liking for the arts is enough to get a man labelled as a poofter,
small-town pressures against eccentricity, and especially
violation of gender role, are very strong. And even if you
move to a larger town at the other end of the country, you're
still likely to run into an old school friend or your uncle Bert
at embarrassing moments.
Likewise, the small size of the average town means that
commercial gay scenes have little chance to develop.
Auckland, with a population of 800,000, is reasonably well
served with bars, clubs, and saunas, but even Wellington and
Christchurch, the next largest cities, have no more than
mediocre commercial facilities, and most of the others have
nothing at all. The situation is further exacerbated by continual depletion of the homosexual population, since lesbians
and gay men in large numbers leave the country for Sydney
(rapidly fulfilling its ambition to become the San Francisco
of the South Pacific), the US, or Europe.
Gay Left 7

Legal problems are much the same as anywhere else.

Although male homosexuality is still completely illegal, the
law is not normally enforced except where minors are
involved. Its existence, though, is a convenient excuse for
periodic police crackdowns on saunas and cruising places. It
was also used to justify the exclusion of sexual orientation
from the provisions of the 1977 Human Rights Act. Very
often, lesbians and gay men are particularly victimised by
repressive legislation that is not specifically aimed at them.
Lesbian mothers, for example, are among the worst
sufferers from a law which reduces social security payments
to single parents during the first three months after the
breakup of a marriage a law that the government freely
admitted was designed to force families to stay together. And
censorship of lesbian and gay material has reached the point
where In Touch, probably the most innocuous American
glossy gay men's magazine, has been banned by the Indecent
Publications Tribunal. Even the Spartacus Gay Guide was
seized by a customs officer on similar grounds, though heavy
coverage of the incident in the news media led to a hasty
reclassification as "not indecent".

Cultural changes
The differences between New Zealand and Britain that I've
mentioned so far are essentially differences within a common
Anglo-Saxon culture. More significant are those attributable
to the non-European culture of the Maori minority, though
these differences are reflected in political theory rather than
everyday life for most European and many Maori gays. Like
the blacks in Britain and the US, the Maoris are victims of
racist economic exploitation. It has turned them in only a
couple of decades from an essentially communal rural people
into a typical urban working class. But, since they are the
original inhabitants of the country, and had a centuries-old
social system of their own before the whites arrived, their
cultural position is distinctly different from that of the
blacks in the UK.
The strong movement among both rural and urban Maoris
to preserve Maoritanga (traditional culture) has been one of
the most important political developments in NZ during the
last ten years. Maori culture was and to some extent still is
based on communal ownership of land and extended kinship, and not on private property and the nuclear family
unit. This has had a strong influence on the development of
socialist and feminist theory in NZ, for it means that there is
a living tradition of non-capitalist values that many countries
lack. As yet, these values get little more than lip-service from
the established political parties, but there's no doubt that
they will become more and more important to feminism in
particular as increasing numbers of Polynesian women
become involved in the women's movement.
There is still little available information about homosexuality in traditonal Maori society, though the evidence is
that it was tolerated if not entirely accepted. (The closelyrelated Samoans still sometimes practise an institutional form
of transvestism by bringing up a son as a daughter if there are
no female children in a family; and homosexuality, among
adolescents at least, is regarded as quite normal.) But more
and more Maoris live in nuclear, rather than extended,
families and, as is common in working-class communities,
acceptance of traditional gender roles is strong. Consequently
there are in Auckland and Wellington large numbers of
Polynesian transvestites of both sexes who live in a subculture
that is in many ways separate from that of white lesbians and
gay men. It does however, raise racial and class questions
about transvestism that the NZ movement is trying to deal
with both theoretically and practically though Polynesian
involvement in the gay movement itself has always been
minimal.

The early days of the movement

It was, however, a Maori feminist who was largely responsible
for starting the first gay liberation group in NZ, in March
1972. Although lesbians, in particular, had talked about the
idea for some time before this, it required a major violation
of gay rights to get things going. A violation that was
obligingly provided by that perennial source of harassment,
8 Gay Left

the US Immigration Service. Ngahuia Volkerling, who was

Vice-President of the Auckland University Students' Association, had applied for a US Student Leader Grant, which
was refused when she stated that the reason for her
application was her wish to study the Native American and
Gay Liberation movements at first hand. She asked for the
support of other lesbians and gay men in Auckland in her
protest at the US Embassy's action, and within three months
gay liberation groups had been formed not only in Auckland
but in Wellington and Christchurch as well.
In the period 1972-75, the gay movement in New Zealand
went through the classic problems of its counterparts in
Britain and North America: expansion with a countercultural
bang, followed by a collapse at the centre due to a lack of
real depth in organisation and commitment. There were also
the usual problems of male domination and disagreements
over tactics between radicals and liberals. The only real
difference from overseas groups was that potential splits were
papered over more often, simply because the number of
people taking any given political line at any given time was,
in absolute terms, usually tiny.
Even so, there were some serious disagreements. Radicals
clashed with conservatives, for example, over the degree to
which the movement should try to establish its respectability
by denouncing such actions as the painting of slogans on
buildings. There was also the problem of the NZ Homosexual
Law Reform Society, which at least initially regarded the
whole gay liberation movement as liable to upset its painstakingly constructed applecart of "responsible protest". The
Society had been formed in 1968, in the wake of the law
reform in England and Wales, its aim being to achieve a
broadly similar change in NZ law. In its early years, it did
perform a valuable service in educating public opinion and in
attacking some of the grosser myths about homosexuality.
But since 1972 it has increasingly become an anachronism. It
still refuses to broaden its aims (e.g. to support 16 as the age
of consent) for fear of losing the support of the doctors,
bishops and professors who make up its lengthy list of vicepresidents. Nevertheless, its membership in the National Gay
Rights Coalition means that it is often inveigled into support
of actions that go far beyond the scope of its official aims.
For this reason, gay liberationists are no longer as hostile to
it as they once were, though they still mistrust an organisation composed mainly of heterosexual liberals and closet
gays.

The turning point

In retrospect, 1975 seems to have been the turning point for
the NZ gay movement. There were several reasons for this.
Most gay and lesbian groups were fragmented and disillusioned. Financial problems had caused the Auckland
group to collapse completely. Wellington had only a token
organisation as a result of factional in-fighting. In most of the
smaller towns, groups which had been successful in providing
the kind of social facilities that did not exist commercially,
found it hard to encourage people to make the political step
of coming out publicly. But political events outside the
movement forced activists to realise that attacks on gays
were increasing rather than lessening, and that liberation
would not come about of its own accord.
The first political setback was the defeat of the Crimes
Amendment Bill, which would have legalised homosexual
acts between men over 20. The movement in general
supported the bill, even though it was on the whole a
regressive rather than enlightened piece of legislation.
Although it legalised acts between consenting adults, it
increased penalties for other homosexual activity, and
explicitly widened the definition of a brothel to cover homosexual prostitution. But, as it turned out, Parliament rejected
even this meagre concession to gay rights. After months of
submissions to Select Committees and earnest meetings with
MPs, many activists were smugly confident that the bill was
certain to pass. Instead, the debate on it was notable mainly
for the non-stop regurgitation of the same misrepresentations
of gay life that the activists had tried to refute. It demonstrated once and for all that easy assumptions that the path
to progress lay in "educating" politicians were just wishful
thinking.

The second major shock for gay liberationists, as for

everyone else on the left, was the National Party's landslide
election victory in November 1975, on a platform very
si milar to that of the British Conservatives in 1979: unionbashing, immigration curbs, and attacks on social security
beneficiaries all figured prominently. Until the National Party
victory, many gay activists had at least subconsciously been
relying on the socially progressive policies of a Labour
Government. Quite why they had been doing so is anyone's
guess. The NZ Labour Party is, in general, even more rightwing than Britain's, since it lacks an organised Tribunite left.
The only left opposition to the parliamentary party's reformism comes from the unions, who are, of course, more usually
concerned with economic rather than social issues.
The reactionary nature of the Labour Party leadership had
in fact been only too apparent during the debate on homosexual law reform. One prominent Labour MP supported the
general intention of the bill, but proposed an amendment
aimed at curbing the "excesses" of gay liberationists. The
amendment would have made anyone "who wilfully says,
writes, or does anything to any person under the age of 20
years that leads or is intended to lead or is likely to lead that
person to believe that homosexual behaviour is normal"
guilty of an offence punishable by two years' imprisonment.
This astonishing proposal, instead of being rejected out of
hand by the Government, was allowed to find its way on to
the order paper. It was only after a widespread civil liberties
campaign that the Prime Minister decided that the Labour
Party was making itself look ridiculous by allowing one of its
MPs to put forward such a nonsensical piece of legislation.

A national organisation
But Labour Party inadequacies were one thing; the election
of a consciously reactionary government dedicated to such
policies as the strengthening of the family unit and the protection of the unborn child was quite another. It was
apparent that gays would be under attack as they had not
been during the previous three years. During 1976, most of
.the lesbian and gay groups reformed or reorganised, and a
major Gay Liberation National Conference was planned for
October of that year. At this conference, a group of Christchurch activists suggested that a National Organisation be set
up. It was hoped that this would solve some of the problems
of communication , duplication of effort, and conflicting
tactics that had often weakened the effectiveness of action
on gay rights.
The idea of a national organisation had been proposed
several times before, but always as a centrally-run organisation with local branches along the lines of CHE in
England. This idea had been consistently rejected, partly
because it was feared that the city where the head office was
sited would dominate the organisation, and partly because
internal travel in NZ is often difficult, especially between the
two islands which would inevitably reduce efficiency. The
new proposal, however, was for a federal structure, in which

each group would be autonomous, subject only to the condition that it abide by the aims of the national organisation.
Representatives of most of the gay groups in NZ met in
Wellington in January 1977 to work out the structure of the
organisation, which came into being as the National Gay
Rights Coalition several months later.
This was the revitalising point of the NZ gay movement.
The NGRC now has 24 full members, all of which are lesbian
and gay men's political groups, social groups, or counselling
services, and 11 associate members, ranging from the Socialist Action League (the NZ section of the Fourth International) and the ecologically-based Values Party, to
Hedesthia, an organisation for transvestites and transsexuals.
The structure of the NGRC is relatively complex, but it is
designed to allow the maximum amount of participation by
member groups in both planning and action. All major
activities, such as Gay Pride Week, campaigns during parliamentary elections, and international solidarity campaigns
such as that on Iran, are now co-ordinated nationally. The
results have generally been successful, particularly in gaining
access to the news media: any important gay event is now
likely to get adeqaute coverage in the metropolitan newspapers and often on TV as well.
Of course, there are still many problems to be solved. The
most important of them, inevitably, is the participation of
women. Lesbian separatism has become a major current in
NZ feminism during the past four years, and the members of
several lesbian groups will have no contact with men or
organisations that include them. (The collective which produces the lesbian-feminist magazine, Circle, for example, asks
that women keep all copies of the magazine out of the hands

of men so that the energy that went into producing it stays

in the women's community.) But there are still significant
numbers of women who are prepared to work with the
NGRC provided that their issues are given sufficient importance. Consequently, the Coalition is making the education
of gay men about sexism one of its immediate priorities.
Indeed, many of the most active men in the NGRC subscribe
to a radical feminist analysis of society, rather than the
Marxist models that dominated the ideology of the movement in the period 1973-76. At the time of writing, this
policy of support for lesbian issues seems to be successful in
gaining the trust of women: three recently-formed women's
groups have applied to join the Coalition, and an NGRCsponsored lesbian weekend was attended by large numbers of
women representing most political viewpoints.
The other main problem facing the NGRC is the common
one of a leadership whose politics are noticeably more radical
than those of the majority of the members. In August of this
year, the NGRC caused a great deal of debate among gays
both within and outside the movement by actively torpedoing a homosexual law reform bill that fell short of full equality for gay men. Warren Freer, a Labour MP and the longestserving member of the House, had proposed to introduce a
bill along the lines of the one that was defeated in 1975.
That is, it would have set the age of consent for gay men at
Gay Left 9

20 though another MP had guaranteed to move an amendment to reduce this to 18. The NGRC executive asked the
member groups which of three stances it should take:
supporting the bill, supporting it but pointing out its
inadequacies, or opposing it completely. A large majority of
the groups wanted the NGRC to have nothing to do with the
bill. They argued that the experience of England and Wales
showed that such a reform was likely to lead to more, rather
than less, police harassment, and that to support it would be
a sellout of gay men who were under the age of consent.
Such was the publicity given to the NGRC's objections to the
bill, that Warren Freer eventually withdrew it altogether.
Needless to say, the NGRC's action was extremely controversial. Most of the groups endorsed it, and the Executive
launched a campaign to ensure that all lesbians and gay men
understood the reasons for this stand. (In this it has generally
been successful. Even the usually conservative commercial
magazine Out! has publicly supported the NGRC policy.)
But some groups notably the Homosexual Law Reform
Society and the Auckland Gay Rights Activists have been
severely critical of the decision, to the point where there
were suggestions of a motion of no-confidence in the
executive.

on reform legislation at the expense of gaining mass public

backing, and then finding (in Miami and several other places)
that their gains can easily be swept away by right-wingers
adept at organising large numbers of people.
I'm not suggesting that the NZ gay movement has all the
answers. It's still largely a fragile and fragmented collection
of groups that would be vulnerable to a concerted repressive
attack. But what it has done is to show that it is possible,
even in an isolated country with a conservative government,
for gays to go on the attack. It seems to me that the gay
community of a country in which bars can be counted on the
fingers is showing real strength in looking beyond superficial
gains. London has a comfortable collection of pubs and clubs
and discos. Does it yet have a gay organisation with the selfconfidence to reject out of hand any meagre concessions that
our politicians might decide to make to us?

Political confidence
But whatever the effect of the controversy on the Coalition,
the decision to oppose the reform bill shows an astonishing
growth in political confidence since 1975. Then, the movement was glad to accept whatever politicians were willing to
give it. But in 1979 the policy has been to reject reformist
window-dressing and concentrate on gaining mass public
support that will eventually result in real and significant
changes being made. This is perhaps where the real strength
of the NZ gay movement lies. Despite the many problems it
faces, it has not made the same mistakes as its North
American counterparts concentrating almost exclusively

"THE PLAY'S THE THING . . .

Ophelia by Hormone Imbalance and Who Knows? by Gay Sweatshop

Hormone Imbalance started life as a group of lesbians

who came together to do review-type performances in the
Gay Times Festival and Gay Pride Week in 1979. With `Ophelia',
written by Melissa Murray there was a move away from fragmented or loosely linked scenes to a much more ambitious
reworking of Hamlet, with an all-woman cast which although
it dealt with lesbianism also tried to raise more general questions about sexual and class power, fidelity and love.
Elsinore is transposed to a mythical future where Gertrude
reigns (Claudius having disappeared in transposition), though
her power is threatened by rebellion in the North of her
queendom, and by the machiavellian schemings of a chillingly
unpompous Polonius. Much of the action is centred on
Polonius' attempts to marry his daughter Ophelia to the
arrogant, swaggering egotist Hamlet, Gertrude's son. Ophelia
moves by degrees from a position of acceptance of the status
quo, through her growing involvement with her servant-maid,
to a rejection of Elsinore and what it stands for and to throwing in her lot with that of the rebels. Even so, the contradictions of her position as daughter of the ruling house
amongst the revolutionaries, and the new power inequality
between Ophelia and her lover do not allow for 'happy endings', and the denouement of the play is Ophelia's choice to
undertake to assassinate Polonius, Gertrude et al as proof of
her fealty: she is pre-empted by Gertrude who has chosen to
liberate herself by poisoning the men of her household, and
then committing suicide. An ambiguity remains at the end of
the play: would Ophelia have carried out her task, and if so
for what motives? That ambiguity resounds as the keynote
of the play.
Such a terse summary scarcely does credit to the richness
of the play, and to the vigour and fullness of the language,
much of it highly polished blank verse, streaked through and
through with wit and humour, and with judicious comments
on the original play. When Ophelia picks up a fragment of
Hamlet's journal and reads out 'To be or not to be' with a
wry expression on her face, her following apercus on the
nature of Hamlet's masculinist, posturing egomania are a
delight and trenchant criticism in their own right.
10 Gay Left

Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire

Who Knows?' whilst less ambitious than Ophelia, nevertheless manages to make so many points about the difficulties of coming out, the problems of monogamy, the structuring of adolescent sexuality, 'the generation gap', racism,
how unemployment affects women etc etc, all in the space of
an hour, that one leaves breathless and astonished.
The play begins with the accidental coming out of a
former head girl of a typical secondary school. Her picture is
seen in a national paper, after she had been on a gay demonstration, and is shown with glee to a small group of friends
who all knew her to disastrous effect. Gathered together
after a disco, they hold a mock trial of Claire, brutally
i mpelled by the straight gay-baiting Colin. During this (and
it's a fine set piece allowing comment on roles, stereotyping
and differential gender expectations), one of the boys, Robin
comes out with dignity and courage, appalling Colin, but
bringing Robin much closer to his straight 'best friend'. The
rest of the play is really a series of confrontations between
gay life and the straight world and its restrictions and expectations, including a very funny scene when Den, Robin's mate,
meets Robin's lover, who also happens to be black. The
potential mawkishness and tokenism of that scene is
redeemed by a wry humour, and the excellent acting of the
protagonists. The play ends with a mixed straight and gay
group going off to see Tom Robinson, whilst the embittered
Colin who has been trashed physically by both Robin and
Claire prepares to redeem his masculinity with a flick-knife.
That threat hangs in the air, as 'Glad to be Gay' plays over
the sound system.
` Who Knows?' was presented at the Royal Court Youth
Theatre, for audiences of school pupils, who, at least whilst I
was there seemed to react with enthusiasm to the out and
sexually upfront content of the play. Sweatshop hope to
tour with the play, and it would be a shame if such a finely
honed production (directed by Philip Timmins, and whose
cast are 'unknowns' who no longer deserve anonymity) did
not play to larger audiences. In much the same way, one can
but hope that Ophelia does not sink into obscurity.

Right to Rebel
AMBER HOLLIBAUGH INTERVIEW
by Philip Derbyshire
Amber Hollibaugh is a socialist lesbian living and working in
San Francisco. At the demonstration on May 21 1979 she
gave a speech defending the rights of gay people to protest
at the lenient sentence (six years) given to Dan White, convicted murderer of the mayor of San Francisco and Harvey
Milk, the out gay supervisor of district 5 of the city. She is at
present being indicted for "incitement to riot" because of
this speech, and if guilty faces a longer prison sentence than
White.
The interview is in two parts, the first part dealing with her
own politicisation and coming out, and the second with the
development of gay San Francisco over the last five years and
the implications of the victory against the Briggs initiative to
bar all homosexuals (and anyone who tried to legitimate
homosexuality) from California schools.

PART ONE
I came from a small town in California (Carmichael). I hated
it and wanted out, but not into marriage. I heard about the
Civil Rights movement, was exhilarated by it and wanted to
get involved. This was 1964. I was naive in my outrage at the
Southern community's reaction to Civil Rights, but that
naive anger is as good a way into struggle as any. I felt that
we all had to do something otherwise nothing would change.
I discovered a real sense of community through that
involvement: people were trying to kill us, which brings you
together! The Black community in the South had already
built networks of care and concern, and by being involved on
the margins of that we whites learned that survival was a
matter of taking responsibility for each other.
We worked hard and organised, but there were problems,
especially for a white woman in a Black community. So
many racial myths centre on that and I began to feel that we
put the Black community in even more danger because of
that heterosexual racism. We brought down the wrath of god:
we were staying with Black families, frequently lovers of
Black men, and certainly their friends, which was horrific in
the eyes of the surrounding white community. The violence
was incredible, people trying to shoot you all the time,
houses you were staying in getting firebombed. The last straw
for me was that the man of the family I was staying with
refused to sit down to supper if I was there: he said that he
couldn't sit at the same table as white folks, it wasn't done.
I freaked: this man would come in from working fourteen
hours working on some white man's plantation, and he
couldn't eat his meal in peace. My being there was doing him
no good at all.
So I left Mississippi, went up to New York and worked
with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee there
until Whites were expelled as the Black Movement grew into
a consciousness of its own need for autonomy and the ideas
of Black Power began to grow. That was extremely painful, a
traumatic experience where I was forced to confront the fact
of being white. Up until then I'd sort of thought that if we
could just come to love each other it would be OK. But now
people that I loved were telling me to fuck off, that it was no
good me spending six months in the South they had to be
there all the time. I was white and could pull out of the
struggle at any time.
Most Blacks had started out as naive as me, but the toll of
the struggle was a growing cynicism, a defensiveness that
chimed with the growth of a new Black nationalism. I didn't
understand that, many of us failed to understand it at all and
grew embittered. Those who survived that experience
remained politicised, and I was hooked. In the society I'd
come from I'd been taught that nothing mattered, nothing
was worth fighting for, but through that struggle I'd come to

know people who believed in something, and who were prepared to act on that belief: the right of people to be equal
... which was an extraordinary thought in a racist society.
The struggle gave me so much, and even though I didn't
know where to go I couldn't give up political involvement.

The sixties struggles

Then for the first time, whites rebelled in the sixties. In
Berkeley, Ca.., sparked by the struggle for SNCC to have the
right to raise money on the university campus, the Free
Speech Movement was born. It escalated rapidly, involving
straight students from all backgrounds and was fuelled by
the resentments of being in an alienating university. The ideas
of the Beat Movement fed into it too, and soon the Anti-War
Movement span out of that explosion.
Again my first involvement in FSM and the Anti-War
Movement was from a naive perspective. I thought killing was
wrong, but was horrified when people tried to stop troop
trains. But within the Movement politics was serious: people
had theories, could articulate strategies and tactics, and were
often explicitly Marxist. I started to learn about class, found
out what imperialism was, and felt a real commitment to
building a movement that would control our government,
which lied to us, killed people in our name without taking
the trouble to ask us what we thought. It was an exciting
time, in which I began for the first time to understand what
was happening.
But I was also working class: I wasn't a college drop-out,
and my parents weren't supporting me. I had to work but
kept losing jobs because I was a red, a commie, and
McCarthyism hadn't run its course. So I began to work as a
hooker, and led this weird double life ... over here I was
political, over there I sold my body. Slowly I began to understand the power of men over women too.
Someone in the CP had explained to me that you didn't
have to get married ... a shocking idea to me, cos I thought
you only didn't get married if no one asked you. The idea
slowly dawned though that I could be an independent
woman. But then there was the whole deal about how
women were supposed to relate to men in the Left. I was a
hooker for a living but I was also prostituting myself to the
men in the Left, for power and for education. The way you
got both in the Left then, if you were like me not so
articulate, a poor farm kid, was by sleeping with the men
who had them. You fucked for a book. They didn't even go
with me: I wasn't some guy's girlfriend, just some guy's fuck.
And there was a push in the Left then on all women to sleep
around. Those straight men got a lot! Part of the 'new world'
we were building was men and women together: you were
free with your body unrepressed basically you had to
sleep with anyone who asked you. Otherwise you were called
frigid, peculiar, or got kicked out of the movement.
Then there was the division of labour within the movement. Men argued and debated with each other, theorised,
and women went out and organised: we went door to door
and asked housewives what they thought of the war: 'Hi,
you don't know me but I'd like to talk to you about the War
in Vietnam." The reason women were so good later at organising our own communities was because we'd learned the
skills in the sixties, whilst the men were arguing with each
other.
Slowly I grew to hate men, even whilst I had to sleep with
them, all of them, communally etc. I didn't want any part of
it but I didn't know how to get out of It. So I went through
with it, and it's a dull meaningless memory now. I was lucky.
Some women were destroyed.

Women came first

Eventually I got pregnant by a draft dodger. I got an abortion
but got so sick that I had to leave with him and go up to
Canada, where we got married so that we could stay together
and he could look after me. That was one of the bitterest
times. I became all the things I never wanted to be. I'd lost
my connection with the Left, and I was trying to be married.
I managed it for nine months, and was miserable. But you
couldn't talk about it with anyone. I had no sexual knowGay Left 11

ledge. I kept asking myself "What's wrong with me?" I

couldn't make it with men: I could fuck for money, but I
could have no emotional life with men. I didn't know myself
to be a dyke. It was just barren.
So, I left my husband, organised a strike at McGill University in Montreal, and began to reclaim my political self. This
was about the time (1966) that women's caucuses first began
in the Left. I didn't want to know. I'd made a decision that
I would never sleep with a man again: I was going for power,
for leadership. I was going to be a heavy. Whilst I was married
I'd read Marx, Engels, Lenin, the lot. I came out of that at
least a thinker if not an intellectual: I was as smart as any
man on the left, and by God, I was going for the big time.
And then these women started caucuses!
I didn't want to go to them, but I was persuaded, even
though I was not impressed. I hated being a woman, which
was a lot of what stopped me from seeing I was a lesbian. I
hated what women did: I hated their dependence, their tears.
The biggest compliment to me was that I thought like a man.
Talking-with women made me feel bad, and I didn't want to
identify with them. I wanted to identify around men's
appreciation of my 'masculine' part.
Through the caucuses I began to think about my own
contradictions: outside organisations I was a nice person,
but inside I was a killer. Then at a conference I was one of
eight women who gave a paper on Juliette Mitchell's 'Women:
the longest revolution'. At the end of an eight hour conversation with one of the other women pow! I left the room
with her and we were together for five years. I fell in love,
and moved in with her. I came out then and before the
Women's Movement that's how a lot of women came out. We
didn't say-we were gay, we said we were in love. We said that
women were forming new relationships and we were a part of
that. Women came first.
Slowly many women, leftists and socialists, came to the
realisation that we had to leave the left to create a women's
movement. It was painful for me. I'd fallen in love with a
woman but I had to leave the Left. It was my revolution but
here I was organising women, with no relation to Marxism
seemingly or to any other struggles (the anti-War movement
was at its height). I felt alone and only being with this
woman made it possible. During that period I had to face my
own self-hatred, my own oppression of women, but through

12 Gay Left

that I could open up to the possibility of women in my life.

Only the strength of the beginning of feminism was enough
to confront women as tough as me with how misshapen we'd
become: we were committed to the Left but we were cold.
The brand of socialism we had was not enough. It didn't
change anyone.
We had to face what women had become. I'd fought for
power and now I realised that it was useless. I was torn ...
did we have the right to organise separately? Mitchell's
article was crucial, it gave us a theory. And the love of a
woman was crucial too, a love not based on power. Lesbianism is about that.
This woman didn't want me for the power I had, for my
status, but for who I was. And she didn't lie about the rotten
qualities I had too. There was a quality of honesty which I'd
never known before, and which women had in their gift.
Heterosexuality was all about lies, if you were honest in a
relationship you lost the relationship. Both of us could be
honest, not have to play games. She'd been wounded, had
only been tolerated in the Left by men because she was
brilliant. Tolerated, never liked, and I loved her. Neither of us
had had someone love us who'd seen us as we were. I began
to open up to being soft in a relationship, she didn't hold it
against me. Being caring, nurturing, sensual was not something I finished up having to pay for. We made a commitment
to each other for life.
But, but. Our relationship was in the closet. The women's
movement had begun by now (1967) but it hated lesbians.
We were suspected and we had to keep the illusion of
separate bedrooms. The women's movement despite its
militancy was terrified of sexuality. Everyone was being
dykebaited.
We weren't gay, not even to each other. We talked about
being in love: what it meant for women to love each other,
and we talked about celibacy we were real big on that!
Our relationship was classically closet. An enormous emotional intensity, a primary commitment and very little sexuality.
You can't have it in isolation. But what we needed from
another woman was not primarily sexual: ultimately it was a
validation of our femaleness, only secondarily sexual, primarily emotional.

Out of the closet

It was a rich time, discovering what it was to be women, in
our relationship and as part of a wider movement. We wrote
papers, organised conferences, and went through the rage
from what men had done to us. It wasn't hard to be without
men, e.g. SDS leaders who spread clap through the women's
community. We were exploring an internal women's life that
had been invalidated before. Sometimes we discovered how
damaged we'd been and there was a sadness for parts of yourself that couldn't be brought back to life. We feared that men
were so damaged that relations with them were impossible.
Radical feminism had emerged by now, but in Canada we
maintained an unapologetic marxism which, however was not
protective of the male Left. We kept race and class consciousness whilst developing our feminism.
But as dykes ... we couldn't be out. The first glimmers of
understanding what it was to be in the closet came through
the very success of creating a women's culture. We were
women together, but I couldn't be with the woman I loved in
the way I wanted to be. We'd be invited to parties, but most
of the women were straight, and you were meant to dance
with men. I wouldn't and stayed in the kitchen and got
nasty. Any man could walk up to her and say "Hey honey,
you wanna fuck" and walk off with her, but if I looked at
her with any emotion people treated me as though I was an
animal. So we stopped going to parties! We didn't have what
you might call a political consciousness of the situation!
Our relationship got more neurotic: we couldn't talk to
anyone about it. I finally had begun to realise that I was gay.
I read (surreptitiously) The Ladder from the Daughters of
Bilitis. Finally I said, "We're Lesbians, we live together, it's
obscene that we should have to hide." Her reply was that no,
never, she was not a lesbian, being a lesbian destroys you. If
you have to come out you do it alone. This was heavy. To be
out as gay meant I lost the woman I loved. To keep her I
couldn't be who I was. It was intolerable. The few lesbians in
the Toronto movement had discovered each other, quietly, 'I
won't tell on you if you don't tell on me' style, and in 1970
we decided to do a forum on lesbianism and feminsm. In it
we were all going to come out. I was to come out first, since
I was part of the leadership, with the hope that it would
somehow calm people down enough for the rest. (My girlfriend of course was freaking out: if I came out then who
was she?) So we did it. I came out, and nobody else did. Oh,
they admitted to fantasising about women and so on ...
These were stone dykes! Freak out. Within three weeks my
girlfriend and I had split, I left Canada, the women's movement ... for what. To be a lesbian, and I knew nothing from
lesbian.

A political lesbian
It was the pits. I'd left the Left for the Women's movement,
now I was leaving that for a Lesbian Movement that I wasn't
sure existed. I was back in the States, with the craziness of
the early seventies, Weathermen and so on. And I'd lost the
woman I still loved. Our relationship had been so important,
even if it wasn't gay. To be gay you have to be able to look
at your partner, know what you're doing and be glad. We
couldn't do that. We weren't proud enough to call ourselves
Lesbian.
I was confused, I had a political commitment before I had
a real understanding. I had to go through all the vulnerability
of discovering lesbianism whilst still being a politico. And I'd
lost the woman who'd been my political partner as well as
my lover. It was like being deaf and dumb.
I'd maintained some involvement with mainstream left
politics, working with the Black Panther Party and doing
draft-counselling, but it wasn't an easy glide back into the
US. I was a lesbian and I didn't want to face it: lesbianism
was harder for me to accept than anything in my life. There's
something very lonely about gay self-acceptance or leastwise there was in that period. Coming out we were defiant,
proud, angry we wore a lot of lavender, but the self-hate is
so deep that it takes you years to work through it and there's
no social movement that removes you from that pain. You
love the same sex which is horrible in heterosexual society.
No one can make that easier. For me it's taken years. I hated
being gay: I knew I couldn't change it. I knew I wasn't
straight, I was gay, but I didn't like it ... hell, I don't like
being oppressed. Being gay is not something that you learn.
At least if you're black you're raised in a culture that
explains to you what racism is and how to deal with it. If
you're gay first they try to tell you that it's really not true,
then they spend years trying to change you. You just have to
hate yourself more than straight folks do. Everything that
comes at you tells you it's sick, wrong, perverted, demented.
You never get reinforced. And what's this puny little movement. Circle-dancing deals with all this? That every straight
man wants to kill me cos I'm a dyke. Nothing deals with this.
I wasn't happy. I felt outside the Lesbian movement: I
was working class. I wasn't comfortable with middle class
assumptions that gay was good. I felt that gay was right, I
was defiant but I had an enormous amount of self-hate. I was
socially conscious, I felt I had a right to be gay, but in bed,
alone at night I did not like being a lesbian. I kept saying "I
can't help it", and felt that I was going to be alone, without
a stable relationship. Even being a communist you feel normal, being a lesbian though ... through and through you're
abnormal, or that's what they tell you and what you believe.
I left Boston, came to San Francisco. I knew if I was going
to find an answer it was going to be here. San Francisco has a
diversity: there are working class lesbian bars, something I'd
not known. There are so many different ways here to work
out who you are within the definition "gay". There are all
races, ages, types of lesbian, and there's a strong women's
movement here too. I was also coming home. And I've been
here seven years. San Francisco allows you to be a whole lot
of things without hating yourself. I feel that I've worked
through that self-hatred. I've accepted my lesbianism and
also feel that I have some control: my lesbianism isn't some
alien thing apart from me. I feel I've reconnected to who I
am as a marxist, a lesbian and a feminist. Ultimately, "the
revolution will have come when I can go to a party and be all
the things I am". Contradictions are there but I feel I am
more whole. San Francisco gives that to many gay people. It
gives you a community to work through who you are and
who you want to be.
Gay Left 13

PART TWO
When I came to San Francisco in 1972, the lesbian community was pretty submerged. It thrived in the space between the
gay male community and the Black community. But there
was a space: San Francisco has always had large communities
of Black, Chinese, and Latino peoples, a thriving women's
movement and a large Left focussed more around working
class struggles than around the War.
The gay male community centred on Polk Street was
seedy, flashy and almost a parody. The Castro was a quiet,
residential district. I was removed from it, having a more or
less separatist position, although feminism in that form was
beginning to fall apart from class contradictions, and I was
beginning to feel uncomfortable with that brand of feminism.
My lovers were coming out of the bars, not from the movement. There was a contradiction in that I hadn't come to
lesbianism as a political alternative. I feel my own history as
somewhere between old and new dyke lifestyles. Old dykes
were lesbian in isolation they figured out that they loved
women and that was that. New dykes came out on the upsurge of feminism. A third group to which I belong, connects
to both parts: we were dykes before the Lesbian movement,
but were political as well.

Working together
My political confusions began to resolve themselves when I
began to work in the gay caucus in the organising committee
for the July 4th Anti-Bicentennial in '75/'76. I chose to work
in the gay caucus as opposed to the women's caucus, a
moderately scandalous choice. I was the only woman with
eleven gay men, mostly political white gay men. My
experience with them was good. It gave me a sense that there
were men committed to struggles against sexism: men who
were as moved by feminism in their own way as I had been.
Not because they were guilty about being men, about being

14 Gay Left

oppressors, but who were moved by the idea of a new way to

be men. I hadn't met men like them before: I'd met gentle
straight men but wasn't convinced. I hadn't met men before
who passionately identified with parts of feminism as their
own. I got a real sense of feminism reaching out beyond
women, and touching and changing men and how they
wanted to be, and impelling them to work against sexism.
Feminism was bridging gaps between lesbians and gay men,
and I began to spend more time in the Castro, and though the
faggot lifestyle there was alien, it wasn't threatening.
Then the attacks started, and lesbians and gay men started
to come together. First Richard Hillsboro was murdered and
the Bryant thing started. There was a changing wind in the
country. Harvey Milk was elected but he was virtually the
only out gay official, proud to be a faggot and a progressive.
As the repression increased there was an explosion of gay life
that was more positive. People fled to San Francisco trying to
figure out what being gay was all about, but with a consciousness that homosexuality was being threatened. The city
wasn't mecca, and we had consciously to see that we were
being attacked and that unless we fought back we weren't
going to survive. Lesbians knew that before gay men, and
Lesbian School Workers formed as an organisation knowing
where the attacks would come. The Lesbian community by
now was the biggest in the US and it was a deeply politically
conscious community.
And Bay Area Gay Liberation existed which was a socialist primarily faggot organisation that set the tone of struggle,
maintaining links between the gay male community and the
Third World communities. There was a model for coming
, together, and taking up sexism and racism. The Castro area
exploded, and is now the gay capital of the US. It reflects a
new way of being out, proud, defiant, very sexual and cruisy
for gay men. For men it's very butch, and raises a finger at all
the straight stereotypes. As the street evolved lesbians were
often unsure about how they fitted in, but at least we weren't
hassled: it was OK to be gay and hence OK to be dykes. It
isn't enough but it's not tiny.

The political fight

The change was the Briggs initiative. It was an explicitly
political struggle. The gay left gave a lead, didn't trail behind.
The liberal strategy was exposed for what it was - a cop out.
They argued that gay people should go back in the closet,
and straight people should do the advertising and so on; that
being gay wasn't really different, only a matter of sexual
choice.
The whole strategy was overturned and issues of homophobia were debated. Before that every campaign that had
been fought in the US had adopted that liberal strategy and
we'd lost every time ... in Eugene, in Dade County, in
Minneapolis. Everyone knows that being gay is different. If
we were afraid to confront our own fears we couldn't face
others'. And we had no answers; if someone asked "Don't
you want to recruit children?" we'd say "NO, we don't want
anyone to be gay": but of course we did. We wanted other
people to be gay because we were glad to be gay. We had to
confront the repressive notion of recruitment but we
couldn't dodge the real issue. Bryant and Briggs said if we
can take them on in California and win, we can win everywhere. We knew then that if we lost, we lost everywhere. It
was frightening, a statewide confrontation. California is huge,
a rural farm state. Farmers vote here, agribusiness controls
things here. Doing publicity meant going to small farm towns,
facing very conservative working people. We figured that
even if we lost, if we told the truth we'd convince enough
people that we could fight back some time and win.
In the face of the repression we became very gay to each
other: we didn't know if we'd make it, and the only people
you could trust were other gay people. It changed Castro: we
were being filmed, photographed, interviewed, asked questions all the time, and we had to think, to come to see each
other and the street, the community as survival. You couldn't
trust straights, no movie stars flocked to our banner, no
active liberal support would run the risk of being called dyke
or faggot. All the other campaigns had lost cos they'd relied
on getting the liberal vote out and it hadn't come through:
they hadn't gone into working class communities and tried to
change people's minds. We went to the farmers, to the union
locals, to the schools to the hopsitals, the childcare units, all
the places we hadn't been before and we came out and forced
people to think.
Gay people who'd never been political before took
amazing risks ... everybody took three steps further out. If
you weren't out you came out: if you were out to three
people you came out to three more and so on. It changed our
community because we began to respect each other: we were

militant, fought and defended each other. The specific people

who Briggs named, his accusations blew up in his face. For
example. Larry Benner, a schoolteacher in Healsbury, a tiny
town. Larry's fifty, a schoolteacher of thirty years standing,
a communist and also a well known and respected member of
the town. When Briggs attacked him, Larry was well grounded in the community, very out, was proud of being gay and
got a lot of support and Briggs was discredited there. And it
was the same everywhere. Gay people started taking care of
their own people, their own community, saying, "We've had
enough. We're gay, we have a right to be gay, and if you can't
take it that's your problem."
And we won, won in every single area of the state where
we went and did work. We won because we came out, and
the community was politicised. A huge number of gay organisations sprang up, it was a real flowering of the movement.
Lesbians and gay men worked together and created a
renaissance of gay life in San Francisco. 2,000 people stood
in line for a film benefit for the NO on 6 campaign. Everyone
took literature and used it. If you used traditional political
methods you didn't understand the significance of what was
happening. People went out where they had to confront
homophobia in their own lives not going to meetings.
Telling your mother, talking to the busdriver on the way to
work . .. No one knows how many people did things and
told no one, took no credit, just acted in their own lives. We
won and we created a self-conscious community in San
Francisco, lesbians and gay men with a different level of
respect for each other.
Then Harvey was killed.
He was important, a faggot, proud and a socialist. For
Harvey to be killed by a man who was the epitome of a
homophobe white working class ex-cop, family man and a
Christian was too much. In San Francisco, where it was
wonderful to be gay, where you came because you couldn't
be gay anywhere else, what did they do they murdered one
of us. We were none of us safe. The murder forced people to
confront the ugliness of homophobia. Under our noses
Harvey was killed by someone who felt he was safe to do
that in San Francisco. And ultimately he was proven correct
he got six and a half years.
That action, on top of the sense of community -that we'd
built during Briggs, galvanised the community. It was dramatic, if unstated. If they could get Harvey then we were next.
40.000 people marched on the night of his murder, two
hours after his death, they marched to City Hall to mourn
him. Everyone knew it could be them. When Dan White was
found guilty with such a light sentence, it was intolerable.

Gay Left 15

Gay councillor Harvey Milk. His

assassin gets three years Jail.

The day after the riot was amazing. If you catch a bus,
normally you're nervous if you look gay, wondering who's
going to jump you, who's going to sneer. The first thing next
day I got on the bus, went to the back and there's these two
black kids, sitting there. One said "Are you a dyke?" I said
"Yeah, so what?" and this kid said "Hey you people are OK,
you know how to kick ass. I didn't know dykes and faggots
could do that." For a couple of weeks gay people knew each
other and just grinned at each other. And other people
responded.
Even people who felt unsure about the kind of violence,
somewhere they thought we were right, were proud we
hadn't taken it one more time. We had the right to be that
angry, we felt we had the right, and feeling that makes being
gay a whole different thing. We don't have to die to be gay,
they don't have the right to kill us. The gay community too
often doesn't resist, and doesn't respect the gay people who
do. Sometimes we are our own worse censors. But not this
ti me. 15,000 rioting queers at City Hall: we didn't burn
down our own ghetto, we went to where the power was and

we burned it. Which was why they were terrified and why we
weren't murdered. If we'd stayed in the Castro they'd have
machine-gunned us. But they didn't want a massacre on their
property, it's a different thing from killing people in their
own ghetto separate where no one sees it, and it can be forgotten. Gay people moved from the Castro and said "You
can't keep us home, just let us be gay there: we're coming
here because you're here straight San Francisco."
The violent reaction we had to that violence also changed the
community. People said "Fuck that! they can't do this ...
we're gay but we're not going back. We're going to be gayer
than ever before, we're going to be queerer, more militant,
we're going to take self-defence lessons. WE're gonna kick
ass! You can't push us anymore."
"We're going to be gay everywhere, we're not going back."
It was the first riot by white folks. It was a revolutionary act
by 15,000 gay people. It transformed the expectations externally about what the gay community is like, and it's transformed us: we have a different sense of how we're gay in this
town. Not only gayer in the Castro, but gayer everywhere.
And that's a nice place to start from.

The Charming Passivity

of Guy Hocquenghem
by John de Wit
This article continues the debate on the work of
Hocquenghem begun in Gay Left No. 7 (review of
Homosexual Desire by Philip Derbyshire).
This article deals with Guy Hocquenghem's theories of hompsexuality. 1 These theories can be seen as an application of the
schema developed by the French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari in their controversial hook L'Anti-Oedipe. 2 The
concretisation of this theory in Hocquenghem also illustrates
some of the problems in it. This paper has two parts. In the
first part I will try to explain some aspects of the theory of
Hocquenghem, and talk about: his views on the slogan "the
personal is political" and his views on sodomy and on "the
16 Gay Left

subject"; the practical consequences of his views, especially

the relation between the feminist movement and the gay
liberation movement; the relation between the struggle of the
proletariat and the struggle for sexual emancipation; and his
anarchist political views that turns him right against the
contemporary banalisation of homosexuality. In the second
part, some criticism will be given. Hocquenghem will be
criticised for his petty bourgeois idealism, for his elitism;
also some criticisms from others will be reproduced.
1.

A survey of the theory

This survey must necessarily be schematic, because some

changes have been taking place during the evolution of
Hocquenghem's theory. (Two recent works by Hocquenghem
are not yet to hand.)

Personal life is political

According to Hocquenghem, our society neglects the free
course of desire, which directs itself in a non-limitative and
non-exclusive manner to various organs. Our society has
chosen one organ, the Phallus, and placed it as a despotic
signifier above all other organs. The Phallus fulfills the role
of money in capitalist society: a universal point of reference
for all activities. Similarly, all pleasure is measured according
to phallic pleasure: here is the myth of the perfect orgasm.
From this point of view Hocquenghem denounces the
theories of Wilhelm Reich and the bio-energetic approach of
Masters and Johnson, precisely because of their inherent
ideal of the perfect orgasm.
The relationships that are connected with this supremacy
of the Phallus are hierarchised relationships of competition.
Our society is a struggle between different possessors of the
Phallus. One can only own the Phallus through recognition
by others: so one's situation is constantly threatened because
other people can steal one's Phallus.
Whereas the Phallus is extremely social, the anus is
extremely privatised. According to Hocquenghem, the first
thing that was privatised in western society was
defecation: people went to the toilet in a special place, a
place where no one else was allowed. The anus became
viewed as a functional organ, an organ that is to secret
excrements. It became deprived of all its lust-functions.
Freud claims that in the anal phase conceptions of activity
and passivity are learned (by holding up and secreting afterwards); also the distinction between public and private life is
learned, because of the separate place where the defection
has to take place: the child learns that it cannot defecate
anywhere or anyhow; it has to discipline its desires in this
field: it has to train its muscles. This creation of a difference
between something public and something private is the
cornerstone for the creation of "the subject". From this
point of view anality has not to be sublimated, but every sublimation is anal: the anus does not enter in any social
relation: it organises the social on the canvas of the private
individual.
The anus can be viewed as the source of energy from
which the social sexual system and its oppressive components
are generated. If one would use the anus in another than a
sublimated way, this would destroy the difference between
the sexes: looked at from behind, we are all of the same sex.
By sodomy the difference between the private and the public
bursts out. De facto, by homosexual sodomite behaviour, the

essence of man is destroyed: one directs his desire to

different things, no more to different essentialised persons.3
What is now Hocquenghem's vision of the subject? According to Hocquenghem, the 'gay' as a unity does not exist.4
He claims that this concept is the product of a disciplinarisation and also a restriction of desire (this disciplinarisation
starts with the training of the secretive muscles in the anal
phase). For a long time it has been thought that the
individual subject formed a unity with some basic needs (it
was a free and creative subject, responsible for its deeds; it
possessed a certain potential, a set of possibilities that it
could realise or not). According to Hocquenghem, this is a
myth: for him only 'desire' exists, that flows endlessly in all
directions, that is directed to ever changing organs, but that
can never form a unity.
Identity is always changing. This is a plea for narcissism as
a revolutionary strategy. One can compare his conception of
human identity with a person sitting in a train: it is impossible for somebody sitting in a train to perceive everything
that passes (houses, trees, cows, stations ...); neither can one
perceive from all possible focusses (one must necessarily sit
on one singular place, which restricts one's point of view):
thus perception must be very fragmentary, it forms no unity,
it changes endlessly and is very fortuitous. The same goes for
sexuality according to Hocquenghem. There is no clear outlined homosexual identity: by believing this one neglects the
symbolic meaning of anal sexual contacts, namely the
abolition of the privatisation of the anus by redefining its
lust function. People who believe in an homosexual identity
do also believe in the basic myth of psychoanalysis (namely:
the unity of the subject, determined by oedipalisation): they
have an oedipalised view on homosexuality .
Hocquenghem is against a view of sexuality that is
focussed on persons. He claims that it is a mistake of psychoanalysis and of contemporary thought to standardise a sexuality with an exclusive sexual choice (directed to one 'person')
and a choice of a 'person'. In sexual matters, one doesn't opt
for a person, but for an organ or a thing. Bourgeois romanticism suffuses sexual experiences with a sauce of love ("we are
honest, we love each other as much as we can, we feel ourselves responsible for each other .. .").
Hocquenghem believes the richest form of experience of
sexuality to be in "cruising" because of its non-exclusivity:
one directs one's desire immediately to the object of one's
desire without exclusion of other objects; sexuality here is
not personalised: one can fall in love with somebody's face,
clothes etc. Besides, cruising is a form of inter class sexuality:
one meets persons of all possible layers of the population and
one is not directed to people of one's own social rank (as in
the 'nouvelle homosexualite'). In Hocquenghem's view the
so-called bourgeois family is a clear impoverishment of the
sexual desire because it disciplines it. 5 Women's Liberation
has developed in the wrong way, especially because it is too
moralistic. Hocquenghem believes this is a dangerous
evolution.

Relationship with the struggle of the working class

Except from wild cat strikes, Hocquenghem believes there is
no relation between the problem of the liberation of sexuality and the struggle of the working class. This struggle is a
struggle of the masses that proceeds in an organised way (by
representation through political parties: "the molar field" of
Guattari)7; the struggle for the liberation of homosexuality is
a struggle against civilisation: in fact the whole value pattern
of a society is questioned (honesty, responsibility, gossip ...).
this value pattern should be seen as a weapon of the powerholders to reduce a structural problem into an individual set
of problems.
Many people in leftist movements embrace the values prevailing in society, and in Hocquenghem's view militantism is
a disciplining of desire: one can explain the rise of homosexual movements and ecologist movements through the fall
of the 'serious' militantism after May '68. 8 Hocquenghem
deplores that the spontaneous elan that broke out in May
'68 was so quickly fixed into a marxist jargon, by which it
can be accepted by traditional society. According to

Gay Left 17

Hocquenghem Marx narrowed the conception of production

of Charles Fourier: in Fourier's view the concept of production is not merely economic, but also implies the production
of one's desire; it can be seen at the same level as the concept
of 'desir' in Deleuze and Guattari.9
In later interviews Hocquenghem claims that capitalism is
the best system to live in for gay people. He likes the
americanisation of desire and sees it as a good solution for
the problem of homosexuality. So there is no socialism, but
just New York!

Hocquenghem's view on the evolution of feminism

Hocquenghem is radically opposed to some tendencies in
feminism concerning rape. Some feminist groups demand a
criminalization of rape; they have directed most of their
action to this topic: e.g. by bringing rapists to trial. Their
reasoning in doing so is as follows: rape is a typical
expression of male domination over women: the male looks
at the female simply as an object to 'fuck'. Hocquenghem
objects to any punishment at all as do Foucault, Deleuze
and Guattari because he does not agree with the ideology
that lies behind it (when a subject cannot be viewed as an
identity, what one does at one moment need not be a consequence of what one has done before).
6
They explain their point of view as follows: that the
reasoning on which these feminists base their claim for more
severe punishments is in itself phallocratic, since it implies
that there are some bodily organs that are more important
than others, i.e. the sexual organs. On account of this
approach they fall in the same trap they want to avoid.
According to Hocquenghem rape should be viewed as a normal fight. But in fact Hocquenghem and his group are
opposed to every form of punishment because punishment
would imply that man is a unity; on the contrary, every fight
should be seen as a car accident: purely fortuitous. Women's
Liberation shows an evolution in a moralistic and anti-sexist
direction (completely the adverse of the gay liberation movement). Besides this, in Hocquenghem's view, these punishments have no utility: they do not correct the rapist
(criminological research can prove this: the longer the punishment, the more recidivism); these punishments do not solve
the problem, they just individualise it. People who are
brought to trial mostly belong to the lower layers of the
population.

Function of a gay liberation movement

All that has been written above does not mean that work for
the emancipation of homosexuality is not necessary. In
Hocquenghem's view, it depends on the situation. When the
pressure of the heterosexual label is overwhelming, then it
can be necessary to focus on homosexual identity as a
negation of every sexual identity. Hocquenghem sets three
tasks for the gay liberation movements: to abolish the difference between private and public life; to abolish and destroy
`civilisation', and to be wild, rough and "sexist"; to contribute to the collapse of the whole imaginary affective apparatus
of this civilisation.
Hocquenghem's thinking lies perfectly in the tradition of
Charles Fourier: the struggle of the gay liberation movement
should confront normal men with the fact that their form of
experience of sexuality is an impoverished variant, because it
is directed to persons and made exclusive. In these days however, Hocquenghem believes that the gay movement is dead
as a movement: it has dispersed into very different movements and groups (sado-masochistic groups, groups of
effeminists, transvestites etc).
Hocquenghem wants to warn the gay liberation movements about two things in particular: first, a possible
evolution of moralisation, as we can see at work in feminist
groups; secondly, what might be called the 'nouvelle homosexualit: homosexuality may be accepted within the
categories of our civilisation; it would then be a personalised,
romanticised form of love between men of the same societal
layers. Hocquenghem fears at most a certain banalisation of
homosexuality: the liberated homosexual with the white
pants, the moustache and the dispatch-case, with his own

18 Gay Left

house and his affection on account; stereotyped within

disciplined patterns.10

2. SOME CRITICISMS OF HOCQUENGHEM

Some of the criticisms given here are directed against Deleuze
and Guattari: they are dealt with at full length because they
also affect the works of Hocquenghem, because he uses their
model in his theoretical approach.

Criticism by Jeffrey Weeks 11

In the English translation of 'Le desir homosexual' (Homosexual Desire), Weeks gives a few remarks on the theory of

Hocquenghem specifically: Hocquenghem does not talk at all

about lesbianism; his theories do not explain why some
oedipialised people are homosexuals, while others are not;
his theories do not explain why there has been any change in
the forms that repression of homosexuality takes (from pure
extermination in the concentration camps to so-called
repressive tolerance); research has proven that sodomy is still
a big taboo even amongst homosexuals (in Germany, only
one-third of the homosexual population declares to practise
it); Hocquenghem has a very hydraulic conception of the
libido (as illustrated when he deals with the anti-homosexual
paranoia and when he deals with sublimation).

Criticism by Jean Baudrillard 12

'
Baudrillard rejects the 'production-principle which is central
for the theory of desire of Deleuze and Guattari. Desire has
to produce experiences: as much as possible, as intensive as
possible and as varied as possible. In exactly the same manner
capital should flow as fast as possible and as much capital as
possible should be accumulated. In the view of Baudrillard,
Deleuze and Guattari have asepticised psychoanalytic theory:
they have thrown away its most annoying rubbish (the
Oedipus complex) to illustrate the flowing productivity of
desire as such. Deleuze and Guattari still believe in a kind of
use value (that does not exist, according to Baudrillard, but
that functions as an alibi for the exchange value): namely
pleasure; they still believe that as much pleasure as possible
should be produced.

Criticism by Robert Caste 13

Castel warns against the myth of recuperation. He stresses
that most psychoanalysts believe that the original discovery
by Freud of libido as polymorphous was a revolutionary one,
but that this discovery is recuperated by bad society. He
claims that a purging of desire from the oedipal framework
does not mean that the social implications of the frame of
reference for analysing people or society (through 'schizoanalysis') has changed, it has purely diluted: from this point
of view, Deleuze and Guattari are the logical evolution after
Lacan and Freud. He also denounces the elitist character of
these theories: they are a means of cultural integration,
because so many things are supposed to be known and also
because of the esoteric style of most of the texts.

Other possible criticisms

Every plea for rejection of every restrictionof desire through
some normative standards is untenable, because it leads to a
pressing forward of certain normative standards by the most
powerful, so it leads to fascism. This is the classical problem
of anarchism. The idea that everyone should freely live one's
desire at all moments is an elitist idea in two fields: it can
only be applied to a restricted group of persons because a
society needs to fulfil certain basic needs and one must work
for them. One might reply that it is "the old theory of the
schoolteacher that does not allow a person to go into the
streets during recreation: 'if everyone would do so school
would become a chaos'; but everyone does not go into the
streets!" It would also exclude whole categories of people
from sexual gratification.
Hocquenghem ' s theory is completely fatalistic because
desire can change at all moments, because there is no unity in
the subject, because there exists no borderline between reality and phantasy, it is useless to talk in terms of responsibility
of an act. If someone murders you when you were cruising

(as happened to Pasolini) you have to consider this as 'bad

luck': you have to perceive this as you perceive a car accident.
The murder happened by accident, by a specific constellation
of the desire, that changes continuously.
I don't say that Hocquenghem is wrong when he defends
his view on "the subject": on the contrary, I believe he is
right. I just want to stress that theories as those of
Hocquenghem are not workable for a society like ours.
Hocquenghem seems to me philosophically idealist The
expression of your 'true' desire is a revolutionary act ipso
facto. Hocquenghem does not differentiate between
situational and positional contexts (and it may be true that
different societal positions are the expression of the despotism of the phallic signifier that dominates our society, but
this theoretical statement does not change anything in our
problem: these different positions do exist and one has to
take them into account when building a theoretical framework). In some rightist groups one also expresses freely one's
desire at decadent parties, but this has nothing of a
revolutionary act. And, although one has to admire
Hocquenghem for the work he undertakes for the liberation
of homosexuals, it has become very easy for him: every word
that he pronounces in this domain will be reproduced by 'Le
Nouvel Observateur' and by the whole "clique mondaine" of
the elitist university of Vincennes, as a 'great revolutionary
action'. But it is very different if the son of a mentally
handicapped farmer falls in love with some phallocratic
working class guy. It also makes a big difference if one is
being tortured as a Chilean prisoner!

NOTES
1. Hocquenghem is a lecturer in philosophy at the university
of Vincennes, near Paris. He is one of the founders of FHAR,
a leftist movement for the liberation of homosexuality,
founded in 1971. He has written, among other works: Le
desir homosexuel, 1972, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 125p.
(English translation, Homosexual Desire, London, Allison &
Busby, 1978); L'Apres-mai des faunes, 1974, Paris, Grasset,
204p. Co-ire. Album systematique de l'enfance, 1976,
Fontenayesous-Bois, Recherches N 22, 146p (in collaboration with Rene Scherer); La derive homosexuelle, 1977,
Paris, Editions Universitaires, 158p. Comment nous
appelez-vous deja? Ces hommes que l'on dit homosexuels, 1977,
Paris, Calmann-Levy, 237p (in collaboration with Jean-Louis
Bory).
Hocquenghem recently wrote: La beaute du metis, 1979,
Paris, Ramsay, 176p. Race d'Ep, 1979, Paris (in collaboration
with Lionel Soukaz). I don't deal with these two last works,
because I haven't received them yet. I will deal with them in
a follow-up to this article.

Neither do I deal with Hocquenghem's 'historical' work.

Indeed, he recently published a history of the birth of the
concept of homosexuality, on which he also made a film in
collaboration with Lionel Soukaz. See: 'La naissance de
l'homosexualite' in Liberation, 8, 11 September 1978 (translated in German: 'Die Geburt der Homosexualitat' in Him
Applaus, 1979, the months of April, May and June.
The best introduction to his theory is published in
German: W.W. Werner, 'Ueber das homosexuelle Verlangen,
bei Guy Hocquenghem, bei mir, bei alien Mannern' in
D. Kamper, Ueber die Wunsche. Ein Versuch zur Archaologie
dur Subjektivitat, 1977, Munchen, pp.82-97.
The theory of homosexuality of Guy Hocquenghem contains a lot of contradictions: it forms no unity itself. Just to
set up two of them: (1) On the one hand it is a kind of
fatalistic theory of desire: desire flows in all directions and
there is no unity in man. No one can be held responsible for
his deeds because he is another man after committing his
deed. On the other hand homosexuality is a kind of free
choice the individual makes or not. At a specific moment one
chooses to accept the lust-principle and this implies one
becomes a homosexual. See g. Hocquenghem, 'Das schwule
Paar, das Bich wirklich liebt, existiert vielleicht sechs Monate'
in Him Applaus, February 1979, pp.10-13.
A second contradiction: when he gives the ideal example
of liberated sexuality, he points at the young Torless from
the novel by Musil, although this person is imbued with the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, who analyses and sublimates
sexuality, and who doesn't live it physically. So Torless can
never be an example of a sexuality that flows in all directions,
simply because he is an example of the contrary.
2. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe. Tome I:
Capitalisme et Schizophrenie
, 1972, Paris, Minuit, 494p. In
L'Anti-Oedipe, Deleuze-Guattari claim desire has no structure: desire does not direct itself towards an ideal object
which would only exist in one's phantasy (in Freud's terminology this object is the Phallus); and where real objects would
only implicate a defect. For here one introduces a platonic
rest (namely the existence of an Idea, a reality, which would
be the absolute good object [the Phallus] and the existence
of a dull reality, which would only be a lacklustre reflection
of the Idea). There is no characteristic structure in desire,
'
because a human essence does not exist: everything is production. However, the fact that the Oedipus-complex has
been elaborated for years and has now been consolidated by
the structural establishment of psychoanalysis, caused it to
refine itself continuously and to develop into a very theology
that's hard to refute: the psychoanalysts usually have their
reply to the critics of the Oedipus-complex ready. DeleuzeGuattari claim the Oedipus complex is a structuring of a certain problem, and other structures could just as well be
invented. One could say, 'desire' in the philosophy of
Deleuze-Guattari is what 'elan vital' is in the philosophy of
Henri Bergson.
3. Especially: G. Hocquenghem, Le desir homosexuel,
pp.57-78; La derive homosexuelle, pp.38-57.
4. This is not quite correct. Hocquenghem distinguishes
between two kinds of homosexuality: the oedipalised homosexuality, which is an homosexual identity; and the 'gay'
which is the desire that flows creatively in all directions and
which is of course no identity.
5. Especially G. Hocquenghem, Le desir homosexuel,
pp.78-99.
6. M. Ronat, 'Enfermement psychiatrie prison. Dialogue
avec Michel Foucault et David Cooper' in Change, 1977,
No. 32-33, pp.76-110. G. Hocquenghem, 'V-I-O-L' in
Liberation, 29.3.1977.
7. About the distinction between the molar and the molecular: F. Guattari, 'Psychoanalyse et politique', in G. Deleuze
& F. Guattari, Politique et psychoanalyse, 1977, Paris, Des
Mots Perdus.
8. G. Hocquenghem, 'Suversion et decadence du male
d'apres-Mai' in Autrement 12, February 1978, pp.157-164.
9. G. Hocquenghem, Le desir homosexuel, pp.101-117;
L'apres-mai des faunes, pp.65-73.
10. G. Hocquenghem, L'apres-mai des faunes, pp.187-204.
11. J. Weeks, 'Preface' in G. Hocquenghem, Homosexual
desire, 1978, London, pp.9-35.
12. One can find Baudrillard's vision on sexuality in
J. Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l'economie politique du
signe, 1972, Paris, pp.95-113; L'echange symbolique et la
mort, 1976, Paris, pp.145-189. His criticisms on Deleuze and
Guattari are published in J. Baudrillard, Oublier Foucault,
1977, Paris, 88pp .
13. R. Castel, Le psychanalysme. L'ordre psychanalytique
et le pouvoir, 1973, Paris, 440pp.

Gay Left 19

Some ten years ago I embarked with more enthusiasm than

prudence upon a PhD thesis ringingly entitled Literature
and the Homosexual Cult, 1890-1920. Blowing the dust off it
now and turning its (unfinished) pages occasionally with a
frisson of unexpected pleasure at a neatly turned phrase,
more often with a shudder of embarrassment at a resoundingly empty one what strikes me most is how many of its
basic questions remain unanswered. Invited some months
ago by the Gay Left collective to "write us something on the
lesbian in literature" I recognized uneasily even as I accepted
that some of those questions would have to be asked again
with little reason to suppose that, this time, the answers
would be any easier to find.
First, and always, who is she, this lesbian in literature?
And do we mean the lesbian in it or the lesbian who writes
it? Or both? Will I know her when I see her? Will she look
like me, feel and think like me? What did she know herself
as? 'How' did she know herself, how express herself? Does
she count as a 'real' lesbian if she has been created by a male
author, or by a heterosexual woman? Could she recognize
herself from today's descriptions of her?
The process of discovering or deciding who lesbians were
and what lesbianism is or has been is very similar to all the
other `uncoverings' with which feminist history concerns
itself. It presents the same problems. Briefly, that there are
too few facts; that there are the Right Facts selected and
presented by the Wrong People; and that there are Wrong
Facts, (that is, not facts at all) misguidedly presented for the
best of reasons by the (almost) Right People.
So, this lesbian. Who and what is she?
She has been many things, and most of them created by
men. It is rare indeed that we can turn to an Aphra Behn and
listen to a woman's voice telling us in ardent, guilt-free verse
what it was like to love and make love to women in the last
years of the seventeenth century. We are more likely to hear
that we are a manifestation of Beautiful Evil, loved and
feared by generations of writers and artists throughout
Western Europe from Baudelaire to Balzac, Moreau to
Beardsley. Or that we are the daemonic evil which so
haunted Strindberg that he returned to attack it again and
again because a beautiful red-haired actress who 'stole' his
wife became a symbol for him and many others of all that,
was degenerate and obscene in late nineteenth century
Europe. For men like him we are cruel, rapacious, sexually
insatiable but emotionally cold, and cleverer than any woman
has a right to be: we are, in fact, the complete and fearful
opposite of everything which marks the Real Woman.
Sometimes we are the objects of passionate admiration
for men who prefer their women tough (but ultimately
vanquishable) and that's as true of Diderot's nuns (La
Religieuse, 1780) as it is of Ian Fleming's lesbian interrogators (From Russia With Love), as true of De Sade's sapphic
tormentors as it is of George Macbeth's secret agent, Cadbury
(The Seven Witches, 1978). And sometimes we are the object
of compassionate affection from men who feel that their
sexuality, like ours, is 'flawed'. So Swinburne, 'marred' by
his need of flagellation, produces lovingly his doomed
creation, Lesbia Brandon ( written between 1864 and 1867,
but not published until 1952), setting her in symbolic landscapes of sterile beauty amid heat and light which parch
rather than nourish and consigning her to a series of abortive
relationships which bring only pain and humiliation.
On the rare occasions when we are happy it is only
because we have been transported to a different century (as
when Pierre Louys takes us to ancient Greece in Aphrodite
or the Chansons de Bilitis and makes us represent the grace
and easy sensuality of pre-Christian morality. It is, needless
to say, ancient Greece seen through the eyes of very worldly
Parisians for whom a little dash of lesbianism added spice to
a jaded world.) And sometimes we are happy because we are
truly in Utopia (or 'no place'), as we are when Theophile
Gautier makes one of us the hero of Mademoiselle du Maupin
(1835), setting her down somewhere, somewhen, in the
woods and chateaux of a fairy-tale, pre-Revolution France
with more than a touch of the Forest of Arden about it
20 Gay Left

Lesbiansi n

by Alison

There he leaves her to weave her irresistible spells over

women and men alike, crediting her and us with all the magic
of the androgyne.

Support or attack
For men uncertain of their own heterosexuality, we are disquieting and to be attacked as Henry James attacks us in The
Bostonians (1886), heaping his ponderous doubts upon the
head of Verena Tarrant, a feminist and strong-minded. She
represents, for James, the dangerous ascendancy of the
feminine in public life, with its inalienable qualities of
"nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting", its "false delicacy
and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities" leading
inevitably to "the reign of mediocrity". Condemned so
roundly, is it consolation to find that for those men who
welcomed the new feminism we were the vanguard heralding
the new age, our dilemmas and anguished battles watched
with sympathy. (I still find George Gissing's 1893 novel, The
Odd Women, remarkable for its support from an unexpected
quarter.)
Often where we might have looked for support we find
only attack. We learn the hard way that defenders of sexual
freedom are often only really interested in male freedoms.
We realize ruefully, for example, that to D.H. Lawrence we
are part of the spiritual corruption against which he inveighs.
Our lesbianism is an eternal affront to him and he can never
forgive it. With undisguised pleasure he kills one half of the
lesbian couple in The Fox to clear the male's path to the
woman who is 'rightfully' his and ends the novella in a swirl
of purple praise glorifying The Male Principle. (And somehow, even though I know, thanks to Emile Delavenay's 1971
D.H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter and Paul Delaney's
1979 D.H. Lawrence's Nightmare, that Lawrence had his
own pressing difficulties with homosexuality, I find it
difficult to forgive him.) Mercifully he usually stops short at
murder, and is content with the jibes and sneers at lesbianism
which characterize The Rainbow (1915). (When, by the way,
will somebody tackle the fascinating subject of the love-hate
relationship between Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield,
recognizing that the major tensions sprang from the
unwillingness of each of them to recognize their homosexuality?)
Not everybody jibes and sneers. Many a heterosexual male
author looks with Tender Pity (or something like that) at
two victims of male lust briefly seeking peace and solace in
each other's arms. (Zola's numerous studies of lesbian
liaisons often came dangerously close to that Nana and
Pot-Bouille, for example.) And always there seems to be the

nLiterature
son Hennegan

i mplicit thought that if man's brutality to women can have

such charming side effects who would seek to check it?
Some male authors, it's true, love us as themselves, for the
si mple reason that we are themselves or the men they love.
( Yes, that is what I said: I'm thinking, for instance, of
Proust's Albertine and all those enchanting girls who fill the
budding groves of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, every
one of them, if Proust's biographer, George Painter, is to be
believed, in origin an enchanting youth.)
And still we can be more. Murderous (as in classics, like
Balzac's La Fille Aux Yeux d'Or, or as in pulp, like innumerable detective novels, but especially those by Dorothy Sayers
who had it in for us, probably because she was a fag-hag as
evidenced by her creation of Lord Peter Wimsey. (Alternatively, and the theory I prefer, she was herself homosexual
and created Wimsey as an alter ego.) Or we can provide the
material for High Comedy, as with Compton Mackenzie's.
romans a clef based on the ex-patriate lesbian colonies in
Capri and Anacapri (Extraordinary Women, 1928, and Vestal
Fire, 1927). From E.F. Benson's 1920s' six-volume saga of
English shabby-genteel life come the bitcheries and betises of
Lucia and Mapp and "dear Irene", fresh from the Slade and
esconced in happy domesticity with her six-foot tall parlour
maid who doubles as model when her mistress does Studies
From the Life. This is comedy with the added sting which
one has come to expect from a gay brother.
But what we are most often, of course, is a frisky interlude in a pornographic tale, the soft-focus lull before the
storm of the hero's revived sexual powers bursts upon us.
And now that more women are feeling able to take sexual
initiatives, we're seeing the growth of women writers who
use lesbians in the same way. Is Erica Jong's account of a
lesbian relationship in How To Save Your Own Life (1977),
for instance, very much more than a ritual and now obligatory encounter with a make-shift before she returns to the
Real Thing? Perhaps that's unfair: let us rather say that for
women whose sexual emotions are centred upon men, other
women can never be more than a temporary refuge, an
occasional pleasure. Even Colette deeply though it hurts to
say so when I love her so much often seems to see lesbian
relationships in that light.

Recognition?
Is there, indeed, any reason why we should expect that
women authors will have recognized lesbians more clearly,
depicted them more objectively than male writers have
done? Certainly we owe some of the most unpleasant lesbians

in fiction to women's pens. Clare Hartill (note the name), the

central character of Clemence Dane's 1917 novel, Regiment
of Women, is a monster of egotism: callous, manipulative,
incapable of giving or receiving love, she uses her profession
of schoolteacher first to ensnare then to reject her besotted
pupils. She causes the suicide of one girl upon whose
emotions she has played expertly and brings to breakdown a
devoted young teacher, Alwynne, who all but misses her
true destiny of mart, marriage and maternity, such is the
strength of Clare's almost irresistible attractions. Only the
intervention of Alwynne's aunt (good but not clever), averts
disaster. Clare (clever but not good) is incredulously defeated.
(The fictional Clare, by the way, bears a remarkably strong
resemblance to a woman whose case history is cited as A
Terrible Warning To Parents in Sex And The Young (1926),
written by that intransigently anti-lesbian proponent of birth
control, Marie Stopes, and there are also Clare Hartills in
abundance to be found in many of the non-fiction works of
the period which claim to document the lesbian temperament. Such a confusion of fact and fiction raises some
pertinent questions. Objective fact or beastly anti-gay
propaganda? Clemence Dane (or Winifred Ashton, to give her
her real name) clearly had something to work out of her
system, for her 1919 novel, Legend, again involved a spoilt,
capricious woman, the centre of an unhealthy circle of heroworshipping women. Even more influential was Geraldine,
the swarthy, broad-shouldered lesbian of Rosamond
Lehmann's once notorious novel, Dusty Answer (1927), who
spreads chaos by wrestling in Ash Court and patrolling the
corridors during her weekend visits to Girton. (Ah, it wasn't
like that in my day, nor, as a Don in her seventies confided
to me, in hers, neither.)
And the anti-lesbian tradition in fiction was already an old
one. Eliza Lynn Linton, best-seller of an earlier generation,
had made interminable attacks, notably in her 1880 novel,
The Rebel of the Family, in which, unfortunately for her,
Bell Blount, the lesbian anti-hero, is amongst the most attractive characters in the book. For fifty years Mrs. Linton
fought a spirited battle against women's suffrage and all
attempts to change the established sexual order. Such are
life's ironies that we need not be surprised to learn that the
emotional centre of her own life lay in her passionate friendships with younger and usually beautiful women.
Certainly those women who felt that their own lives were
vulnerably unusual or unrepresentative had reason to attack
loudly and clearly the more conspicuous 'unnaturalness' of
homosexual women. (One thinks of George Eliot's anxieties
about the hordes of adoring young women who surrounded
her and her distinctly chary attitude to the older, more selfaware and probably lesbian Edith Simcox who for ten years
regarded Eliot as "my Darling and my God". Eliot had fought
one vast battle with mid-Victorian society over her failure to
marry the man she lived with. A second struggle was too
much. (K.A. Mackenzie charts the vagaries of the two
women's friendship in Edith Simcox and George Eliot,
Oxford, 1961.)
George Eliot's are not the only vested interests we have to
reckon with in our attempt to find the lesbian in literature.
Accounts by contemporaries and the endeavours of critics
and biographers (past or present) ought to help us. Often
they don't. Too many have good reasons for ignoring or
obscuring lesbianism in their subjects. And autobiographies,
consciously or not, help to confuse us. And we confuse ourselves by taking our own prejudices and assumptions to such
scanty evidence as there is. We may not cry "Oh, but she
can't be. She was married". But we may say, "Oh, but she
can't be. She was happily married", as, indeed, were both
Vita Sackville-West and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac -to their homosexual husbands. We may spend so much time
listening to Marie Corellie's claims that she wants a husband
that we fail to notice that the endless best-sellers which made
her fortune from the 1880s to the eve of the First World War
contain headily voluptuous and keenly-felt descriptions of
languorous female beauty and rather cursory accounts of
male attractions. Having once noticed it, we find ourselves
attaching rather more weight to the otherwise easily overlooked but devoted friendship which she shared with her
companion, Bertha Vyer. And here we tend to find ourselves
Gay Left 21

her possible homosexuality is disclosed. Think of all the little

flurries of panic each time Christabel Pankhurst's sexuality is
questioned and of all the sighs of relief when David Mitchell's
recent biography came out on the side of the angels and
declared firmly that she was not, repeat not, a lesbian. Oh
for the refreshing and all too rare candour of Sybil Morrison,
the octogenarian suffragette, who said in a recent television
interview that if anyone had ever asked her, of course she
would have told them she was a lesbian but, frankly, it had
never occurred to her that anybody could be so stupid as not
to realize.

How do we know?

caught in a double bind. On the one hand we are impatient

with the idea that relationships matter only when they are
sexualized. We know all too well that bonds between women
have been ignored, trivialized and ridden over rough-shod
precisely because they were 'only' friendships. On the other
hand, we know equally firmly that those of our unions which
are sexual will also be trivialized or dismissed because lesbian
sex isn't 'real' sex. Paradoxically we find ourselves equally
bound to assert the importance both of sex and of no sex.
Recognizing the paradox helps us, for example, to sympathize with the plight of poor Edith Somerville when confronted with Dame Ethel Smyth in particularly rumbustious
mood. Edith Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin had
enjoyed an unusually close personal and professional union.
Writing as 'Somerville and Ross' they co-authored extremely
popular novels and short stories, mainly set in Ireland and
based on the lives of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy to which
they themselves belonged. Their stories of "An Irish R.M.
[ Resident Magistrate] " (first published in 1899) are
indubitably the best known but their output included
historical novels and semi-autobiographical accounts of an
art student's life in Paris and London. When Violet ('Ross')
died in 1915, pre-deceasing Edith by some thirty-three years,
Edith continued to write and, claiming that she was in
spiritual communication with Violet, insisted that both their
names should continue to appear on the title pages of new
books. After a spirited tussle her publishers Longmans
yielded gracefully. Clearly a woman to be reckoned with.
But she was no match for Ethel Smyth who fell in love with
her, and whisked her off on what was to be a honeymoon
tour of Sicily, only to become distinctly huffy (and really
rather rude) when she discovered that Edith was sexually
completely inexperienced and had no idea of what was
expected of her. Once it was explained, Edith remained
(politely) unconvinced and firmly unco-operative. She was
clearly distressed to realize that the life she had led so idyllically with Violet Martin was, in Ethel's eyes, open to only
one interpretation.
But then Ethel Smyth was always unusual in her robust
acceptance of her homosexuality. Forcibly she raised consciousnesses in all directions as she swept into, through and
out of the lives of women as diverse as Mary Benson (the
mother of E.F. Benson who caricatured Ethel as 'Edith
Staines' in his 1893 novel, Dodo), Mrs. Pankhurst and
Virginia Woolf. Unlike Dame Ethel, most people have sought
to disguise either their own homosexuality or other people's.
Perhaps the protected per s on is too precious to be allowed to
suffer 'taint'. Think how long it has taken for Virginia
Woolf's lesbianism to be ac knowledged. Or perhaps, it is
argued, important causes which she led will be undermined if
22 Gay Left

Yet even when we're not lying through our teeth nor being
wilfully stupid, we may often be excused for not realizing,
and as we go further back into literary history the excuses
grow. There are the women writing under men's names, the
women writing as male characters, the women living and
dressing as men. There are, too, good sound, common-sensical
reasons for all those things and those are the ones we usually
hear. In an age predisposed to dismiss women's writing it
makes sense to use a man's name and once you've done that
you might as well write of men's experiences. If you want to
see the world you're safer in men's clothes. But is that really
all there is to say of Emily Bronte's love poems addressed to
women? Is there really no more to Eliza Lynn Linton's
`fictional' Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885)
with its careful analyses of love relationships with women
which bear a marked resemblance to her own experiences
with women? Does that explain the cross-dressing of George
Sand and of the animal painter and diarist, Rosa Bonheur?
Sometimes, as with Bonheur, our incredulity is justified
by secondary evidence. The official story says that she
needed to wear men's clothes to attend, without fear of
insult or assault, the sales of livestock and the assemblies of
horse-copers where she found her subjects. For that reason
and that reason alone the Paris Prefect's office gave her the
Permit she needed for male attire. As it happens, however,
we also know from another source that Bonheur submitted
an account of herself as "a contrasexual" (lesbian) to Magnus
Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology in Berlin. Here hunch is
validated by fact. But so often hunches remain just that. And
indeed the camouflage is often excellent. George Sand, after
all, had two men to her credit: Alfred de Musset and Chopin.
The fact that both men were less than a hundred percent
heterosexual is neither here nor there. They were men and
she was a woman and, in theory at any rate, that means
heterosexuality. It was a relief, nevertheless, when recently
published researches showed us that what we had always
known by the pricking of our thumbs was true; that she had
had numerous sexual realtionships with women including the
Adah Isaacs Meneken whom Swinburne loved so hopelessly.
I say "it was a relief" to know because for many of us
there is a great need to establish a sense of continuity with
the past, to affirm for ourselves that we are part of it rather
than an aberration from it. The need for some sense of a
shared past is so great that some of the best modern writing
on lesbian themes has been devoted to recreating one. It may
come in the guise of non-fiction works such as Elizabeth
Ma y or's The Ladies of Llangollen (1971) which relives the
fifty year 'marriage' which united Lady Eleanor Butler and
Miss Sarah Ponsonby from the time of their elopement in
1778 until the death of Lady Eleanor in 1828. More often it
comes in the form of novels and short stories.

The theory
Few will take on as much as Radclyffe Hall attempted in her
short story, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926) which is
particularly interesting for its fictional use of contemporary
theories about the genesis of homosexuality. She wrote the
piece as a trial run for certain of the themes which she later
intended to expand in The Well of Loneliness (1928), defined
by her as "a serious study in congenital sexual inversion" and
the quasi-scientific language, familiar to us from Ulrichs,
Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and other predominantly nineteenth century sexual theorists, gives us the clue. Miss Ogilvy,
a misfit with no apportioned part to play in the modern,
ruthlessly heterosexual world, has had her one brief hour of
glory during the First World War. There her 'masculine'

qualities of quick judgment, leadership and physical courage

made her (like Stephen Gordon later in The Well of Loneliness) a valued member of a Front Line ambulance unit:
desperate ills demand desperate remedies and in a period of
'
'unnatural' chaos, 'unnatural women such as Miss Ogilvy
can be gratefully accommodated.
But Europe's return to 'normality' leaves Miss Ogilvy once
more a redundant and embarrassing anomaly, chafing at her
uselessness, humiliated by her pitiable irrelevance and
wretchedly aware that the qualities which made her valuable
in war now make her risible and more than a little indecent
to 'ordinary' people. Using a mixture of fantasy, time-travel
and retrospective reincarnation, Radclyffe Hall takes her
character back to a prehistoric world where she discovers
that she and her sexual temperament are a vital link in
the chain of human evolution. Despite some deplorable and
unintentionally ludicrous passages including a "Me Tarzan,
you Jane" episode when the metamorphosed Miss Ogilvy
first meets her female soulmate we can see ideas thronging
in from all sides to feed and shape this short story. Edward
Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex (1908) and Intermediate
Types Among Primitive Folk (1914) are there, as is the predestinarian belief of many nineteenth century sexologists in
'the real homosexual', plus, of course, a strong dose of the
contemporary concern with matters psychical (Radclyffe
Hall and her lover, Una Troubridge, were for many years
hard-working members of the Society for Psychical Research).
Locating itself more precisely in history, Isabel Miller's
Patience and Sarah (1969) recreates the pioneering battle for
autonomy and freedom fought by one of America's early
nineteenth century primitive painters and her lover. "To Miss
Willson and Miss Brundidge who, quite a while ago, lived
something like it,"this book is lovingly dedicated" reads the
author's prefatory inscription. "Lived something like it" is
the key to a work which fulfils abundantly one of literature's
functions to create, through the extending power of the
i magination, characters and events which convince us of their
psychological truth and value. It is also the key to our often
quietly desperate need to know, or to believe we know, that
we ourselves are simply following on, sexually and emotionally, rather than blazing trails.

we find ourselves floundering. There, women "fall in love"

with each other, "lose their hearts" to each other and accept
a "marriage" relation between them. We struggle with the
perfervid "sentimental friendships" which express themselves
in language of deepest purple, with echoes of The Song of
Songs and the Ceremony for the Solemnization of Matrimony. "Those whom God has joined together let no man put
asunder", writes one half of 'Michael Field', the aunt-andniece writing team made up of Katharine Bradley (18461914) and Edith Cooper (1861-1913), whilst Florence
Nightingale writes almost daily to her "Goddess-baby" (Miss
Rachel Williams, one of her nurses) and to her "Dearest ever
Dearest", Miss Pringle, her "pearl". We watch as women
"mother" each other with a degree of erotic passion which
would leave Oedipus gasping. ("I have my love close to me
... Looking across at Sim's little bed I realize she is a
goddess, hidden in her hair Venus. Yet I cannot reach her
... I grow wilder for pleasure and madder against the ugly
Madchen" [the nurse] writes Edith Cooper from her German
hospital bed when scarlet fever and hospital decorum conspired to keep her briefly from Katharine. We grow accustomed to finding the phrase "maternal affections" used to
describe physically passionate relationships. Little wonder
that in Radclyffe Hall's magnificent and quite unjustly
neglected novel, The Unlit Lamp (published in 1921 but set
in late Victorian England onwards) the luckless Joan Ogden
should be ardently courted by her mother and conscientiously mothered by Elizabeth, her (chaste) lover.
It's not only the difference in language which jolts us. We
also find ourselves looking at the lovingly entwined and
sensuously preoccupied female couples in the photographs
which Clementina, Lady Hawarden, dared to exhibit in the
1860s. (See for yourself in Graham Ovenden's Clementina,
Lady Hawarden, 1974.) And, as we look at the 1916 Life
and Letters of Maggie Benson ( written by Arthur Benson,
brother of E.F., son of Mary) we find ourselves wondering
how many of today's biographies would dare to include the

Closer to home, Barbara Hanrahan's The Albatross Muff

(1977) takes the grimmest basic facts of Victorian women's
lives loveless marriages of convenience, unrecognized
syphilitic infection, death in childbed and sets them against
a softening, but basically powerless, background of intensely
erotic female love relationships. She avoids an over-simplifying polarization whereby male sexuality equals Evil and
female sexuality equals Good. Instead she is at pains to show
that no Alternative (in this case, lesbian love relationships)
can fully escape the flaws and cruelties of the Norm (malecentred sexuality) from which it flees. Those women in the
book who theoretically condemn male power yet continue to
accept their sense of personal worth from the men who
confer it can form only half-hearted and ultimately treacherous links with other women. Inevitably, the woman most
betrayed is Edith, the only 'real' lesbian amongst them.
Past and present fuse in Michele Roberts' first novel, A
Piece of the Night (1978) where she uses a love relationship
(broken eventually by marriage ) between two late Victorian
women as the sub-plot which runs round and through her
main and very modernly lesbian characters. Her account of
the older women's relationship is elusive, fragmented,
tantalizingly incomplete. Necessarily so. How can it be otherwise when so many of the concepts and values which meant
most to them are all but lost to us? How can it be otherwise
when half the language in which we define and explain ourselves today was uncoined then? Take away from us the
words 'role-model', 'gender identity', 'stereotype' and then
see how far we get in our attempts to understand Radclyffe
Hall's life-long pursuit of gentlemanliness, Colette's fascination with the hermaphroditic, George Eliot's fears of her
i mperfect womanliness and Vernon Lee's battle to accept
and express the 'man' in her.
Conversely, take ourselves back into a world of preFreudian biography, letters, journals, poetry and novels and

Gay Left 23

lost our innocence. As we grow older, read more and think

harder we know those critics lied. We realize that our preFreudians suffered quite as much from anguished introspection over the wayward nature of their affections as any
aspiring analysand might do. We discover how upset the
reviewer in The Times became over Tennyson's "unhealthily"
passionate grief for Arthur Hallam whom In Memoriam
(1850) commemorates. We learn that the guardians of
children's literature deplored the "un English" degree of
osculation (too many kisses) amongst the schoolboys of Dean
Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little (1858). We discover that the
mid-Victorian resurgence of classical Greek studies was
attacked in some quarters because critics believed that eager
students were drawn less by the great texts' promise of
literary perfection than by the hope of homosexual passion.
We recognize, in fact, that it was a century bedevilled by
sexual uncertainty and doubt.

photograph in which Nettie Gourlay stands behind Maggie,

her chin resting soulfully on Maggie's shoulder, her eyes
closed in some undefined, but definitely guessable, nearecstatic state. How, basically, did they get away with it?

Innocence or invisibility
Perhaps, you say, there was nothing to get away with?
Perhaps. When we are very young and gullible we believe
those critics and social historians who tell us breezily that
linguistic conventions change; that sentiments which seem to
us extravagant were once part of common currency; that
verbal and physical expressions of affection often intense
between people of the same sex were then freely given and
received. That, in short, we have suffered Freud and .thereby

24 Gay Left

So how, then, did the Maggie Bensons and the Nettie

Gourlays survive? Partly, perhaps, by taking advantage of the
period's own contradictions. Theirs, after all, was an age in
which, according to Acton's notorious dictum, "decent
women have no sexual feelings". Or, to put it another way,
provided you know that you're a decent woman, whatever
you're feeling can't be sexual. All very reminiscent of the
tireless campaigner against masturbation who, so Havelock
Ellis enchantingly tells us, was appalled to discover late in
life that the pleasantly soothing practices with which she
lulled herself to sleep each night were part of the very evil
she condemned. (This poignant anecdote comes in the introduction to the section on auto-eroticism in volume 1 of
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, revised edition of 1920.)
Possibly by such redeeming ignorance many lesbians escaped
the weight of guilt which knowledge would have brought.
But others almost certainly found themselves intolerably
burdened by the menacing half-knowledge conveyed by the
period's vague talk of "morbid sentimentality" and
"
neurasthenically intense" relations between girls and
women. Some suicides in particular arouse our suspicions:
Amy Levy, the young poet and protegee of Wilde who killed
herself in the late 1880s; Charlotte Mew who took her own
life in 1928. And it's impossible to know now to what extent
Maggie Benson's own eventual descent into 'madness' was
linked with her struggle to reconcile her homosexuality with
her Christianity. No easy task for the daughter of an Archbishop of Canterbury.

And when we tire or despair of goading the past into

yielding up its secrets, there is always the future which, in
terms of literature, we are free to do with as we will. Already
lesbians have claimed large chunks of it as in Marge Piercy's
lesbian-feminist vision of a non-sexist, non-racist utopia in
Woman on the Edge of Time or Zoe Fairbairns' Benefits
(1979) where lesbians provide the force which spearheads
radical political change in an ailing twenty-first century
Britain. Positive images, created by women who are themselves openly lesbian or genuinely at one with lesbians: and
not before time, either. But, as Marge Piercy herself said in a
recent Gay News interview, we don't want "comics for
lesbians", nor do we want another set of equally distorting
albeit vainglorious cliches to replace the fiercely hostile ones
fashioned by our enemies.
So now, some pages and several hundred years from my
original starting point, I find myself asking: this lesbian in
literature who will she be?

The Flesh Made Word

A review of Faggots by Larry Kramer and
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran.
Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire
The relations between an oppressed group and the cultural
products that articulate the experience of that group are
complex and contradictory. The uses and meanings of those
products, both within the oppressed group and the society
within which that group is subordinate, are equally contradictory and often confused. The issue is made more complex
with gay culture in that it is only recently that a conscious
understanding that we are oppressed has become current,
and that prior to that, our culture was almost exclusively
articulated within the terms of sickness, abnormality,
adjustment, that is within the discourse of a dominant
heterosexuality that assigned homosexuals a particular and
subsidiary place.
Equally, however, the cultural products of an oppressed
group do not remain uninfluenced by formal innovations
or thematic concerns that have their origin within wider
social and artistic developments: the mere fact of production
within a particular social context, and with specific problems
is no guarantee that the product will remain bounded by
the limits of that context and problematic. To that extent,
to talk about, say, gay literature, whilst it might be useful in
pointing to some similarity of theme and concern, is not to
talk about an absolutely demarcated field, is not indeed, to
equate articulation with a total determination by sexual
disposition.

In the same way that there is no black literature, i.e. a

body of texts whose essence corresponds to an imagined
exclusive property of (culturally various) black people, so
there is no gay literature i.e. a literature which typifies and
articulate the essential experience of being gay. What,
instead, there is, is literary exposition of differing responses
to the fact of homosexuality, situated within historically
shifting homosexual subcultures, and generated to satisfy
differing needs within those sub-cultures.
These brief remarks, which I hope to develop in another
article, are by way of a rebuff to the extraordinary moral
invective that attends discussion of books and films in the
wake of the Gay Liberation Movement. For instance, Ron
Peck's and Paul Hallam's film was savaged for not providing a
"positive" image of gay people, for ' pandering' to straight
visions of homosexuals and so on. Instead of an immanent
critique (incidentally excellently provided in a review by
Marion Shapiro to appear in Screen) "Nighthawks" was
judged by an external standard of political rectitude which,
in its insistence on optimism in the face of oppression, occludes
discussion of actual contradictions within our lives, and
relegates cultural production to the realm of a facile
propagandism.
Gay Left 25

When Faggots was published in the States this year, a

similar storm was generated as the book was slagged for
misrepresentation, caricature, reactionary politics and
partiality. However many of these criticisms might be valid
(and there is some truth in all of the charges), the point is
missed both that Faggots is a best-seller, an important fact
for any marxist looking at a cultural product, and that
Faggots might illuminate the material conditions that made it
possible and expose the ideological forms through which
those conditions are seen. Again moralism substituted for
analysis, and the polemic by gay organisations was merely
the obverse of the uncritical paeans to Dancer from the
Dance in Gay News when it appeared in this country a few
months ago.

Significant departures
It seems to me that both these books mark significant departures from 'traditional' gay male novels, whilst uneasily
maintaining continuities of theme and vantage point with
that tradition. A similar contradiction can be seen in Rubyfruit Jungle where lesbianism is affirmed, but within a
tradition of individual solution and victory. Molly has much
in common with Mark Twain's heroes, indeed with a whole
series of American archetypes, not least the loner cowboy.
And yet it is in that break that the importance of the novels
lies, and not in either their attempted typification of the 'gay'
experience, nor in their particular stylistic treatments.
On the first count they obviously are partial (but in this
sense all gay novels are partial, are genre fiction), and on the
second mostly they are uninventive. Faggots is written in a
style that owes much to Burroughs, Joyce and the structure
of film scripts, though it is possible that the style conveys the
fragmented, frenzied consciousness of poppers, angel dust,
dope, speed and the other psychic props of the milieu
described. Dancer moves easily within the tradition of romantic writing, the decadent prose of Huysman and the late nineteenth century: languorous and overwritten melancholy, a
pervasive odour of doom and decay. But again there may be a
unity of theme and style, of the inevitable tragedy of the protagonist and the prose of a declining class. What is more
important though is the pervasive element of pastiche in
those styles, the ambivalent reappropriation of other forms.
The signal difference within these texts, though, is the
presence of the gay world. In previous gay male novels, even
recent accounts as by Patricia Nell Warren, the gay male
world is peripheral, a place of sojourn until one finds a lover.
The social roots of our lifestyle are obscured and invalidated.
26 Gay Left

In Faggots and Dancer on the other hand the gay male world
is present, multifarious and a constant, constructing environment. Granted, the stances taken toward this world are
hardly uniform and rarely affirmative. But the move from
literary representations of homosexuality as a psychological
property with the thematic emphasis on coming to terms
(and possibly living happily ever after) with it, to one in
which gay men are plural, engaged with each other, creating,
choosing, changing partners, are social, seems to me to be of
emphatic importance, a measure of the shift that has been
achieved by the movement, and by the spontaneous actions
of gay people. It marks the entry of homosexuality into
society, and thereby creates the possibility of deprivatising
the experiences of homosexuals.
That break though cannot be explored fully within the
forms that Kramer and Halloran have chosen. In Faggots the
protagonist Fred Lemish (seemingly an authorial persona
who engages in a typically American autobiographical spiral:
Kramer is writing about the gay world, which includes
Lemish writing a filmscript around his own experience in the
gay world) grows sickened with the slick world of New York
discos, bars, baths, boutiques, beaches, and with his inability
to find love in that world. He undergoes a mystical affirmation of his own self and retreats, separates himself from
other gay men.
In Dancer Malone the paragon of beauty who is devoured
by his futile pursuit of love apparently commits suicide.
Whatever contradictions the gay world may contain are not
transcended, rather they are avoided by individual choices to
leave it. Here is the continuity with the self-oppressive novels
of the sixties and fifties. The homosexual is still individualised, cannot construct a common identity with other gays
and is sickened and appalled by the extravagances of the
Other.
The paths that lead to that renunciation of common
interest are etched across the novels. The gay world is
presented as cut off, spectacular, sexually obsessed and most
importantly monadic. It is as though there exist no other
connections between individual gay men than sex and the
quest for 'love'. No relations of friendship (though there is
praise of those you dance with, the companion in Dancer),
work, politics. No occupation other than dancing, cruising
and having sex. In such a world it is unsurprising that 'love'
becomes reified and fetishised: it has to make up for all other
absent relations. The place of 'love' is pivotal: it acts as a spur
to action, to involvement in the world, but its absence is used
to criticise that world. From the viewpoint of the novels, its
absence in an innate feature of gay male society, rather than
a product of the particular constraints under which that
world is constructed. Thus, contradictorily, the very judgement that the books would use in a reactionary way to
undermine the world that they maintain an ambivalence
towards, rounds on itself and begins to raise questions about
how that world is formed, by what interests, and how it can
be changed. The authors cannot take that route; rather it is
we as gay socialists who must supply the words to describe
the processes that Kramer and Holleran leave in silence.
That the world of Faggots exists is undeniable, as is the
possibility that a vision of that world may be one that
inspires gay men to come out and end their isolation. For,
above all, sex itself is explicit in both novels, out and obvious.
No hinting at what men do in bed together, no coy kisses and
then three dots. The ambivalence towards sex, alternately
glorified, then seen as an all-devouring monster, the anxieties
as the sex-love dyad fractures and the uncertain response to
the possibility of pleasure filled leisure, cannot disguise the
efflorescence of sexuality in the gay world nor exclude the
possibility of more affirmative responses to that efflorescence.
Faggots and Dancer are both products of the new subcultures of self-defined and self conscious homosexuals, are
certainly transitional and contradictory within the development of those subcultures, but yet merit attention as much
as for what they say as for their silences, for what they
obscure as well as reveal. Simple affirmation or repudiation
are worthless, betraying in the very ease of judgement an
undialectical view of the relations between literature and
sexual politics.

Out! Out! Out!

A review of ' Outrageous' and 'Word is Out'
by Richard Dyer

Outrageous! and Word is Out are both very warming films.

My immediate reaction to them, and that of most people I've

spoken to, is one of feeling good. Here at last were films with
gay characters in them that one could happily sink into,
without having to sit there on tenterhooks waiting for the
anti-gay jibes; here were films you could send people to,
especially non-gay people, without having to making all sorts
of previous warnings. A lot of the pleasure that many people
have got from both films must be due not so much to their
intrinsic delightfulness as to the context of other films
dealing with gays.
If Outrageous! and Word is Out are warming, gay films
generally are depressing. This feeling of depression takes two
forms, both of which can be evoked by the same film. If you
listen to gays talking about, say, The Killing of Sister George
or Fox or Les biches or Nighthawks, they nearly all find the
fil ms depressing, though the reasons for the depression divide
between those who see the films as yet more put-downs of
gays and those who see them as statements of how god-awful
gay life is. In this context, we are grateful for small mercies,
anything that's reasonably positive, and Outrageous! and
Word is Out seem to me to do more good than harm politically, for the time being. If, as many people have pointed out,
they heroise (Outrageous!) or glamorise ( Word is Out) a
promotion of 'gays are wonderful' as distorted in its way as
`gays are evil/sick' then, all the same, I'm happy to have a
few such glowing statements for a change, just to be going on
with. Again, if, as Ray Olson points out in his article on
recent gay films in Jump Out number 20, Word is Out (and
Outrageous!, though Olson does not discuss it) celebrates
homosexuality rather than analysing homophobia, nonetheless it does celebrate it, and we are going to go on needing
celebration as well as analysis for the foreseeable future.
( Olson's belief that we are past that stage now seems both
premature, and also to lose sight of the degeneration into
bureaucracy and repressiveness that political movements give
way to when they drop the moment of celebration from their
strategy.)

Realism and pleasantness the problems

Nonetheless, there are problems with both Outrageous! and
Word is Out, and these have to do with both their pleasantness and also with their 'realism'. The applicability of this
latter term by which I wish to indicate the convention the
fil ms work within, rather than to assert their definitive
relation to reality is obvious enough as far as Word is Out
is concerned. Documentary just is a realist form, and the
'talking heads' kind of documentary has acquired a particular
authority in the context of the emphasis in sexual political
movements on 'consciousness raising' speaking out one's
experience, telling it like it is, giving the oppressed a voice
and hence, bringing the word out. (Just how far Word is Out
is comparable to consciousness raising is discussed below.)
The realism of Outrageous! may be less obvious, since it is
clearly a fiction film and even a slightly fantastical one at
that, with our small town hairdresser queen becoming a star
in 'New York, New York'. (I'm not sure if what is fantastic is
this progression itself, or the fact that Craig Russell is so
charismatic that it is hard quite to believe in him as a
nobody.) The style of the film is nonetheless realist, above
all-in the use of the type of grainy film stock associated with
naturalism in the cinema and a soundtrack which does not
filter out, as Hollywood classically did, the bumps and
rustlings that the ordinary tape recorder picks up. The acting
and especially Hollis McLaren's (Lisa) has the characteristic improvisatory feel of post-Method performance style,
and the film is shot mostly on location. Even the drag
routines, in themselves a most blatantly illusionistic sort of
performance, are still within the film's overall realism,
because they are signalled as shows indeed, most of the
drag sequences have the look of cinema verite night-club
footage.

The reason why these films' combination of pleasantness

and realism is a problem lies in the kind of position we are
invited to adopt in relation to their representation of gayness.
Because the films are pleasant, we want to believe that how
they show gayness is true, or at least possible. And because
they are realist, lo and behold, what we want to believe could
be so we are assured is so. This makes both films doubly
difficult to argue with, to resist, and yet there is much about
both that we need to contest.
In the case of Outrageous!, the big problem seems to me
to centre on the question of gender. There are problems with
the essentially individualistic perspective of the film (though
there is also some sense of a gay community in the film), and
the film's equation of gayness and madness, both seen as
healthier and saner than straight (in all senses) society, seems
si mplistic and somehow anachronistic, an easy late sixties
ideology for the difficulties of our late seventies situation.
But, because more obvious, these are less of a problem than
the way the film deploys categories of 'femininity' and
` masculinity', particularly as the mesh with male homosexuality.
At first sight, Outrageous! seems rather progressive in this
regard. On the one hand, our hero is an effeminate homosexual man and, on the other, once the film gets to New
York, there is an almost self-conscious refusal to conflate
male homosexuality and 'femininity'. The first man Robin/
Craig Russell meets in New York is a bearded taxi driver, and
we are as surprised (or meant to be) as Robin is to discover
that this 'masculine' looking man is gay. The films upturns a
stereotype (a well-known ploy of realist film) and this is all
the more interesting in the light of mainstream contemporary
cinema, where gayness is used primarily to reinforce rather
than confuse notions of gender identity. Thus 'buddy' films
of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid variety tend to
throw up a simpering queen so as to dissociate the male
couple at the film's centre from that sort of behaviour, while
the more recent 'liberated women' films, such as Julia, An
Unmarried Woman and Girlfriends carefully assure us that
there is no taint of lesbianism about their female protagonists
( Julia does this almost programmatically). Outrageous! is
prepared to say both that it's O.K. to be a queen and that
masculinity and gayness can go together.

Masculinity and femininity

There is however a price to pay for these assertions, and this
is, first, an unquestioning acceptance of the categories of
masculinity and femininity as they stand, and secondly, a
definite polarisation of the two, with the 'feminine' coming
off worse. The male gay world of Outrageous! consists almost
entirely of camp queens into drag and macho guys into
leather and denim. (The possibility of an alternative male gay
style, clearly gay but neither denying nor exaggerating
biological difference, is perhaps glimpsed in the Toronto gay
bars we see.) The film shows the male gay world as reproducing, even increasing, the gender polarisation of the
straight world, and with 'femininity' as distinctly the downgraded end, Robin as hero notwithstanding. Actual women in
the film are either mad and pathetic (Lisa) or predatory/
bitchy lesbians, and the image of woman enacted in drag is
just as dubious.
The film dazzled perhaps by Craig Russell's fabulous
i mpersonations not only does not confront the highly
ambivalent phenomenon of drag in gay culture, but even
refuses the ambivalence. Robin talks of the women he impersonates at one point, and says how wonderful they were,
how they had guts, how they knew how to enjoy themselves.
Thus we are asked to treat the image of woman he and the
fil m offer us in the drag sequences as a representation of
what these women were really like, and this effectively
scotches any argument that might see drag as attacking
female roles rather than women. (It's a difficult argument at
the best of times.)
In principle, Robin's/Russell's impersonations celebrate
rather than attack his chosen line-up of stars, but this too is
problematic. His impersonations don't mock the stars in
question and his Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerlad are clearly
a straightforward tribute to their musical gifts, as is his Bette
Gay Left 27

and style that constitute those categories remain unchanged.

Two things are altered, however. First, the possibility that
the gender categories can include gayness is allowed, rather
than, as hitherto, being crucially defined by their exclusion
of it. Second, we are asked to take up the position of
femininity by identification with Robin (and perhaps Lisa,
though the film rather loses sight of her two-thirds of the
way through), and to place masculinity as the object of
desire an exact reversal of the traditional heterosexual
fiction film.
Yet, as I've said, these reworkings of gender in relation to
gayness and desire do not fundamentally alter the definition
of what 'femininity' and 'masculinity' are; and they remain
ultimately defined in terms of each other, that is to say, in
terms of the subordination of femininity to masculinity. All
of this is an undoubted tendency of contemporary male gay
culture, and to that extent Outrageous! is merely part of the
tendency. But this brings us back to the problem of its
realism or rather, its particular form of realism which,
despite the fictional narrative, wants to be taken as an
unmediated grasping of reality, the way things are. This is a
problem because, even if the masculinisation of gay culture is
a real tendency, it is only a tendency.

Midler to her pep and bezzazz. Yet his choice of stars elsewhere is revealing. His Barbara Streisand emphasises her
neurotic egocentricity, while his Bette Davis and Judy
Garland, key icons of male gay culture if ever there were any,
are significant for the precise reference they make. It is the
Bette Davis of All About Eve, not Now, Voyager or The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and All About Eve is
the film in which she plays an aging, bitchy actress who
finally acknowledges her inner emptiness for lack of a man.
Again, it is not the Judy Garland of The Wizard of Oz and
Meet Me in St. Louis but of A Star is Born and the later
period of her career as a stage performer, in which her body
appeared, no doubt was, ravaged by pills, alcohol and
marriages and she seemed to perform with all her nerve ends
exposed. In other words, what Robin's/Russell's drag act
predominantly constructs is an image of woman as neurotic.
His women are resilient in their neurosis, and admirable for
that, but this is still a bleak view of the destiny of femininity.
If his women are 'wonderful', they are also a mess.
The final blow Outrageous! deals to femininity, and
especially to 'feminine' men, is sexual. In the male gay world
of the film, to be feminine is to be discounted sexually.
There is a small scene about a quarter of a way in, where
Robin has picked up a man after his first successful public
drag appearance. In terms of furthering the plot, the prime
i mperative of mainstream feature films, this scene is superfluous, but it has a crucial point to make. By revealing that
the (narcissistically butch) man is a hustler and in the
exchange between them, the scene implies that Robin could
not possibly get sex except by paying for it.
Later, it is made clear that the taxi driver who becomes
his agent spends his spare time scoring with other macho
guys. The visual presentation of Robin emphasises his lack of
sex appeal when not in drag, he's either shown in shapeless
old clothes (the resort of those who have been taught to hate
their bodies) or, in the party scene, in a white jump-suit that
is too tight for him and makes him look podgily unattractive.
In Outrageous!, to he sexually validated is to he macho, however much of a star you may be in other regards.

Changing attitudes
Outrageous! makes use of the traditional 'masculine':
'feminine' gender opposition but the kind of attitudes, values
28 Gay Left

Outrageous!'s realism however tends to freeze and solidify

this dynamic of gay culture, so that instead of showing it as a
way that things are in process, it has the effect of presenting
it as the way things are. ( We need films that analyse why this
masculinisation is taking place, to the degree that it is, what
it signifies and also what other directions and potentials there
are for gay culture. An unreflexive realism could not deal
with these themes, but these lie beyond the scope Outrageous!
quite legitimately set itself.) Into the bargain, Outrageous!
asks us to like this narrowly particular possibility of gay
culture, and to find pleasure in identifying with a hero who is
also a sexual no-no.

Realism and pleasure

The problems of Word is Out have been analysed elsewhere.
Cobbett Steinberg in Cineaste vol VIII, no 4 points out how
this cross-section of gay experience nonetheless misses out on
group activity and promiscuity, concentrating instead on the
couple and sex as romance, and Ray Olson, in the Jump Cut
article already mentioned, stresses the film's lack of any
analytical perspective. As both point out, despite being
divided into three sections, the film is overall somewhat
incoherent, and at over two hours it often courts boredom.
These points are so well made by Steinberg and Olson that I
will concentrate here on the question of realism and pleasure.
There are points in Word is Out when the film does seem
to want to counteract the tendency of most realism to
present itself as unmediated and transparent. This is most
obvious in the sequence with the slightly outrageously
'faggoty' actor who sits in front of a large mirror in which is
reflected the cameraperson. When the shot zooms in on the
actor, we can see the cameraperson turning the zoom handle
to effect this shot. Thus we are reminded that we are seeing a
fil med interview, rather than talking directly to the preson
(the illusion of transparency). This also occurs once in the
interview with Pam and Rusty (the couple who both have
children from previous marriages).
Elsewhere the way that self images are socially constructed
is signalled by cutting in of earlier snaps of the interviewee
and, at one point, pin-ups of stars as gender ideals (though
this never goes as far as Jan Oxenburg's brilliant short film
Home Movie). Sometimes the film delays information about
its subjects we don't at first learn that Pam and Rusty, or
the older male couple Harry and John, are connected, or that
the man who speaks of his experience of aversion therapy is a
successful local politician and this again foregrounds the
way that the film is constructing these people for us in much
the same way as a feature film constructs fictional characters.
Cobbett Steinberg points out that 'the black lesbian
activist in the film was obviously included to fulfil three ...
requirements: black, female, radical' and this is probably
true, but very near the beginning the film-makers do use
footage of this woman raising the question of her represen-

tativeness and there is a similar questioning of the film's

procedures in Elsa, the elderly woman poet's, discussion with
a group of women about what use they are going to make of
her in the film.

fil m-makers intervene at all, it is as interviewers, sympathetic

and friendly yet clearly placed differently from the interviewees them, the film-makers, looking at, investigating,
them, the gays (us).

Reflexive realism
There is a sense then in which Word is Out moves towards a
reflexive realism, an awareness of itself as a film, as partly
constructing rather than purely revealing the persons it offers
us. Yet discussions of the film clearly show that that is not
how the film works for audiences. Apart from more general
considerations it's too long, it makes things seem too rosy
etc. what most people comment upon is the people they
liked in the film and the people they didn't. In other words,
we tend in practice to treat the film as if utterly transparent
as if we make a direct contact with these people and respond
to them in the same conditions as we do to people in real life.
Paradoxically perhaps, the cinematic strategies outlined
above, which may be meant as reflexive devices, actually
encourage this response. Showing the camera in mirrors can
be taken as a further sign of authenticity i.e. "this is not
someone playing a part, but really the person talking about
her/him self"; delaying information about the person concentrates on the person in isolation from her/his embeddedness in social reality; the snapshots can be taken as
emphasising the unique personal history of the speaker
(though the shots of stars necessarily point outward to a
wider social reality); and even the two women who address
the way they are being used by the film emphasise a desire
not to be representative but simply to be 'themselves'.
What all of this points to is the ideology of individualism,
the notion of the individual as somehow outside of and even
predating society and history. We are enjoined not to see
these people as representative but rather as unique individuals,
and hence this is predominantly how people respond to the
fil m. If they are representative of anything, it is of uniqueness and individuality that is, they represent the degree to
which gays, like everyone else, represent nothing but themselves. Moreover, because the film remains predominantly
unreflexively realist, it suggests that individuality constitutes
reality.

Political practice
This is not necessarily how we use the film in (political)
practice. There must be a strong sense of shared experience,
of responding to various interviewees with "yes, that's how it
was for me, too" or "so I'm not the only one who felt it like
that", of feeling that for once part of oneself was up there on
the screen. In this way, the film is perhaps akin to consciousness raising and especially when it is used as a basis for group
discussion (whether formalised or simply in the way it gets
people talking together afterwards).
Yet the film never goes so far towards being like consciousness raising as similar films that have come out of the
women's movement. In an article on 'the Political Aesthetics
of the Feminist Documentary Film' ( Quarterly Review of
Film Studies, Fall 1978), Julia Lesage discusses these films
(which include Janie's Jane, The Woman's Film, Three Lives,
We're Alive, Self Health and Rape; British equivalents would
include Women of the Rhondda, Women Against the Bill,
An Egg is not a Chicken, and Women in Focus) and notes a
number of characteristics that make them the filmic equivalent of the political strategy of consciousness raising. Few of
these characteristics really seem to hold true for Word is Out.
The feminist documentaries are addressed to women
viewers, whereas it is unclear to whom Word is Out is
addressed. Secondly, in the feminist documentaries, there is a
clear identity between film-maker(s) and subject(s), the filmmaker's political point-of-view is identified with that of her
subjects. This is only partly so with Word is Out. The film
lacks what professional media ideologues call 'balance', in
that it unambiguously promotes the speakers' right to speak
for themselves about what it is to be gay no 'experts' are
wheeled on to 'explain' us (away); in the sequence in which
Elsa discusses the film with some of the women making the
fil m, she returns their questions to them, and this helps us to
place them as lesbian. Yet for the most part, in so far as the

A third characteristic of feminist documentary that Lesage

notes is what she calls 'a shift in iconography', whereby the
narrow traditional modes of representing women in the
cinema are upset by showing both a wider range of women
and also by looking at familiar aspects of women's lives 'in a
new, uncolonised way'. Domesticity, for example, a real
aspect of women's lives, is represented in patriarchal culture,
but always in terms of what it means for that culture rather
than, as in feminist discourse, for what it means for women,
as oppression and resistance, subordination and subculture.
The femininist documentaries are part of a process of reGay Left 29
seeing women's lives.

There is cinematic re-seeing in Word is Out, but it is not

of the same kind as that Lesage points to. We see a wider
range of gays than we get in mainstream, heterosexist cinema,
but we don't see them in identifiably gay settings. The visual
style of the film is a combination of all-American (e.g. scenes
of lesbian family barbecues; groups of women in lumberjack
jackets felling trees) and glossy magazine (above all, the soft,
glamorising colour stock and the use of flowers and fabrics to
give a light, pretty look). This is a play on iconography, for
we are seeing overtly gay people in situations and settings
deeply redolent of straightness; but this has nothing to do
with decolonising gay space. (Cf. Cobbett Steinberg's dis'
cussion of the film's avoidance of gay 'promiscuity rather
than engaging with or redefining the experience of gay sexual
encounters.
The film thus makes one move "gays are human too"
but then settles for the dominant ideology's definition of
what it is to be human, which in this context is to opt into
the American dream, a dubious proposition. (At the same
ti me, it is disappointing that it does not give us more of the
one interviewee who has consciously opted for the American
dream, the gay businessman; the film prefers the vaguely
`alternative' life-styles, which are implicated in bourgeois
ideology as is the businessman's.)

Privatised experience
A final characteristic that I'd like to pick out from Lesage's
article is her reference to a common narrative structure to the
women's autobiographical accounts in the films, namely, 'a
women struggling to deal with the public world'. Word is Out
tends to cut across the unfolding of individual stories, and
one would think that its emphasis on coming out would be a
paradigm of 'struggling to deal with the public world'. Yet
w hat coming out means in this film is accepting one's gayness, meeting other gays and falling in love and/or living with
them.
In other words, coming out remains a privatised
experience. We do see marches and rallies, but the struggle to
achieve these is nowhere recounted or shown, they just take
off from the private self-acceptance of gayness the sexual
political equivalent of workerist spontaneism. Above all,
there is no acknowledgement of the struggle with non-gay
society once you're out, in the film's narrative, troubles
melt like lemon drops (as Judy said of Oz).

30 Gay Left

The view that gayness is purely private, that gays are just
like everyone else and everyone else is O.K. and that coming
out is just a matter of accepting yourself in a familiar enough
package, and one that is as entitled to a hearing as any other
within the spectrum of gay politics (though the conspiracy
theorist in me can't help feeling that this view is far more
likely to get air space, funding etc.). Yet, because of the
pleasurable realism with which it is presented, this particular
political position comes across as not just a position but
reality itself.
Of course, one can reject it even the most overwhelmingly realist film can be disbelieved, and in this respect we
live in an age of marked cinematic sophistication (or cynicism). But this is where Word is Out is even more of a problem
than Outrageous! The latter one can dismiss as 'only a story';
but Word is Out allows us to dismiss its position in its own
terms, as 'only about these twenty-six people'. But then that
is precisely what the film's position is, secured by its talking
heads realism a return of everything to the individual and
her/his experience as the fount of reality.
Outrageous! and Word is Out are enjoyable, warming films
that make you feel good about being gay. They are almost
certainly necessary at this point of (political) time. But they
are not models for where gay cinema needs to go, and not
only for their specific politics but for their form. This is not
a question as I am appear to have been saying, of pleasure
and realism always being inappropriate artistic strategies. On
the contrary, giving pleasure, addressing the real these are
the proper political aims of art. The question is how you do
it.
The danger, as far as realism is concerned, is to treat the
relation between film and reality as unmediated or direct.

There must be, as Sylvia Harvey puts it in her book May 68

and Film Culture, a 'productive tension between means of
representation' (whose conventions and inner logic are
necessarily ideologically determinant) 'and that social reality
which the means of representation strive to analyse and
account for'. Paradoxically, the most 'real' film is constantly
aware of its difficult relation to reality it problematises its
own realism.
Equally, pleasure has a vital political/aesthetic role in
recharging our energies, both by giving us time away from
struggle but also, more importantly, in suggesting where the
struggle might lead, in giving us a utopian vision. But such a
vision must maintain a gap between what we want to achieve
and where we are at here and now. Word is Out and Outrageous! are utopian in their sense of what it could be like to
be gay, but this proper utopian impulse is conflated with the
fil ms' realism to suggest that we've already achieved this
utopia.
This inevitably means utopia in the terms set by bourgeois
patriarchal society hence the retention of gender categories
in Outrageous! and the privatisation of sexuality in Word is
Out. The gap between what could be/should be and what is
is narrowed, and the leap beyond gender and privatisation
that the sexual political movements were poised to take is
stymied. However useful in the short term, in the long term
these films invite us to want what we've already got, to want
what we don't really want at all.

GAY
MEN'S
PRESS_ -

For a long time we have felt that there was a need for a
publisher of books related to the gay men's movement. We
were also looking for some contribution to the movement
that we could make ourselves after a long spell of relative
inactivity, and this seemed a good way of using certain skills
and experience we happen to have between us. Last summer
we began seriously investigating the concrete problems
involved in starting a publishing house and by September we
had decided to take the plunge.
We intend to publish about four titles a year and hope to
bring out our first in May 1980. Those we are currently
working on include The Army of Lovers, the book of a
documentary film on the American gay movement by the
German film-maker Rosa von Praunheim; a theoretical work
by Mario Mieli, translated from the Italian; a collection of
articles from Come Together, the first British gay liberation
newspaper (1970-72); and a book of interviews with gay men
from different walks of life. As you can see, these all fall into
into the category of non-fiction, though we hope later to
broaden out into publishing fiction as well.
Our policy will not be only to publish books that we
completely agree with: we want to serve the gay movement
and provide an outlet, as far as our means permit, for all gay
men writers who have something to say. At the same time we
have no intention of publishing books that proclaim male
supermacy or promote pornography and exploitation. We
know we are bound to face problems in our editorial policy
as well as in other respects, but we can only do our best to
meet them honestly when they arise.
We hope to have our books on sale in all good bookshops
and will also have mail order facilities. We'll advertise further
information in the gay press as our first publication date
draws nearer.
We hope in particular that no one who has an idea for a
book will feel shy of getting in touch with us. Our address is
27 Priory Avenue, London N8 7RN, telephone 01-348 2669.

the play when he argued that it was his belief that our society
now treated gays like the Nazis treated their opponents and
those of whom they disapproved.
In his view criticism, for instance of the Jewish aspects of
the play, was basically irrelevant, since the central power of
the metaphor was alone able to bring home the issue to
audiences. For it was only such a stunning comparison that
could adequately convey the suffering of gay people in our
society, which still remained hidden from the consciousness
of most people. Thus any form of information was justified,
however much some might consider it as shocking and crude
propaganda. Ian McKellen, who was Max in the play,
appeared to go even further by suggesting that Britain, or
even more Northern Ireland, might be considered a "concentration camp for gays". These views found more or less
general endorsement in. an editorial published in Gay News
No. 167. The implication of all this seems to be that the continuing oppression of gays necessitates a 'political' rather
than an aesthetic view of the play. But any sensible criticism
must take into account both aspects, the method of presentation as well as the quality, consistency and clarity and
veracity of what is being said, since the play remains theatre
rather than reality.

Bent
A Play by Martin Sherman

Reviewed by Barry Davis

Martin Sherman's play "Bent" was first presented at the
Royal Court Theatre in May 1979. Subsequently it was put
on at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. In it Max, a
dissolute 'fixer', and Rudi, his dancer boyfriend are arrested
because of Max's momentary involvement with the boy lover
of a prominent SA figure. For it is the Berlin -of 1934 in the
wake of the Roehm purge. En route to a concentration camp,
Max is forced to participate in the brutal murder of Rudi and
forewarned by Horst, an experienced Pink Triangle, and fearing his fate as a homosexual, 'proves' his heterosexuality by
having intercourse with the still-warm corpse of an
adolescent girl. For this he is 'rewarded' with a Star of David-,
supposedly a preferable fate. In the camp Max helps Horst to
work with him, moving stones, and Horst, the avowed homosexual, breaks through Max's defences, teaching him gentleness and showing love, enabling the 'closeted' Max to find a
dignity and self-esteem he has denied himself in the past.
When a German officer discovers that Max has tried to help
the ailing Horst, he gets him killed. Horst's death makes Max
realise what he has lost and releases his long-suppressed feelings. He casts off his Jewish uniform, puts on Horst's Pink
Triangle, defiantly displays it to the guards and immolates
himself against the electrified barbed wire fence.

The contemporary situation

Much of what Sherman is trying to say is meant to relate to
the contemporary situation of gays as well as being an
attempt at an historical reconstruction of the situation for
Homosexuals in Germany in 1934 and after. In a discussion
with Nicholas de Jongh, reported in The Guardian, Sherman
alluded to the sado-masochistic elements that he sees as a predominant element in the contemporary American (and
doubtless British) gay sub-culture. Clearly in this play he is
trying to transpose to the Germany of the 'thirties his often
perceptive observations of the gay experience today. Nicholas
de Jongh pushed further this idea of the contemporaneity of

Some inept attempts to protect Sherman from criticism

came in Gay News ( No. 167). Alison Hennegan and Keith
Howes, interviewing the playwright, stated that "ironically"
most of the critics of the play "have been either Jewish or
Gay or both" and the accompanying editorial exhorting the
attendance of gays at the play, underlined that "irony" ...
"since Martin Sherman is himself Jewish". Peter Bennett, the
paper's own drama critic, in obvious disagreement with the
editorial, and with the comments in the interview, wrote a
sharp letter which was published in the following issue. Keith
Howes in answer to Bennett, and in an attempt to clarify his
position wrote that most of the "good notices" of the play
"came from critics not not iceably Jewish or gay". He meant
good notices in the specific sense of those which did not
"attempt to trivialise or denigrate the play solely on the
grounds of its equation of Nazi persecution and homosexual
suffering".
I am not myself sure what "noticeably Jewish" means.
Perhaps he intended to mean explicitly or avowedly. Of such
the most appropriate example is perhaps that of David
Nathan in the Jewish Chronicle of May 11th 1979. There was
little symptomatic of "hysterical fear" as anticipated in the
Gay News Editorial. The review was not adulatory yet it did
not diminish Sherman's efforts: "There is no doubt about
the play's integrity, its passionate shout for justice ..."
Nonetheless the play was judged to have failed in its purpose
"What should have been tragedy is merely horror". Hardly
the Jewish angst momentarily stirred in its aspic, as was
i mplied by Howes. Of all the reviews so far, there has been
little hysterical fear, except "ironically" in Gay News.

The Jewish identity

I believe that Sherman has obscured so much of our under-

standing by involving us in the metaphor of the Jewish identity. To take on such an identity voluntarily was unlikely in
any case, except of course in theatrical or literary contrivance
(as in Frisch's Andorra) or when it was clear that this was a
gesture and not reality (as when the King of Denmark and
many of his subjects donned the yellow star in defiance of
the German anti-Jewish measures in 1943). Moreover of all
prisoners in the camp 'hierarchy' it was the Jews rather than
homosexuals who generally occupied the lowest position,
though in some camps and for specific periods, such as
Buchenwald from 1938-1942, homosexuals were the lowest
"caste".
One of their greatest weaknesses was that unlike other
groups of prisoners they failed to organise to protect their
interests and status, where this might have helped their survival. They were more often picked upon for sadistic brutalities by the guards, and compared to other categories of
prisoners their survival rate was amongst the lowest, though
again with the Jews far lower. 1 Further, Sherman takes the
point of 'gay liberation', for such was the understanding of
Gay Left 31

we were given a leaflet with the background of modern

German history, and a bibliography for further reading.
Sherman has alluded to the influence of Bruno Bettelheim on
his view of the period, particularly relating to life in the
camps. Bettelheim, a writer and practising psychoanalyst, is a
Viennese Jew imprisoned early on by the Nazis. He was then
released and managed to flee to the United States, where he
now lives, thus avoiding the later excesses of the Final
Solution.
Yet though many of the singular incidents in the play are
probably based on some particular event furnished by Bettelheim himself or perhaps from the files of the Wiener library
in London, the particulars do not seem to add up to a convincing whole, and as argued above, singular truths are not
always sufficient to sustain a general argument. Sherman
seems to argue that suffering can produce love, can ennoble
an individual, and seems to imply that the suicide at the end
of the play is in some sense a fulfilment of that love, a sort of
martyrdom. Yet it all depends on the type and the extent of
the suffering, and of course the character of the individual. I
would feel, and this is confirmed by my reading of Bettelheim, that most people were diminished and depersonalised
by their suffering, their feelings blunted. The love that
blossomed was the exception, and here there is an obvious
distinction between this and sexual release. Most of those
who died were victims, not martyrs, since they were rarely
given any freedom to choose anything.
They sought of course to survive, and could do so for
longer rather than shorter periods, depending on personality
and external pressures. Bettelheim quotes one survivor, Paul
Celan, who committed suicide about five years after his
liberation from the camps. He wrote in his poem "Shadows":
They dug and heard no more,
they did not grow wise, nor contrive any song,
or any kind of language.
They dug.2

many of the audiences, as the casting off of the "Jewish

gaberdine", and I find this misplaced and inept.
There is then a reasoned basis for any criticism of the
"Jewish" aspect of the play. There should not, as Howes himself contends, be a Jewish 'copyright' on suffering, but
neither should there be a mercantilism of compassion, and
therein lies the tendency of this play. Whatever Sherman's
intentions, he appears to diminish the suffering of one persecuted group to highlight the suffering of the other. Much
has been made in his defence that being both Jewish and gay,
he writes with a "Jewish sensibility" as well as a "gay
sensibility". I am not sure that being something automatically
entails possesion of a particular sensibility, or indeed of what
'
exactly in this context Sherman s Jewish sensibility consists.
Whether the two "sensibilities" are balanced in his mind I
cannot say; they certainly are not in this play.
It sets out, I think, to be a gay play, not a Jewish one,
though it was made into something more general an
attempt to efface the human spirit and human feeling
emphasised by McKellen's particular reading of and performance in the play. The television series "Holocaust" did
spread a certain awareness of the events of this period,
though it did a profound disservice to the actual facts of
suffering of the Jews and of others, perhaps in the interest of
commercial viability, perhaps to make some naive political
points. Many argued that it was considerably useful. Yet perhaps it created more heat than light, sensation and shock
rather than enlightenment. "Bent" appears to me to do something similar, though the mitigating excuse here appears to be
gay liberation, a sobering reflection.

Historical authenticity
Martin Sherman is naturally keen to demonstrate the historical authenticity of his play . Apart from what we are told
from the stage, much of it in the breathless history of the SA
and the SS provided by Greta, a transvestite nightclub owner,
32 Gay Left

Max certainly seems to develop a deeper understanding as

a result of his experiences in the camp. Both he and Horst
were not coarsened by their struggle for survival, and somehow their dignity was enhanced. Indeed a sort of emotional
strength develops as the counterpoint to the physical decline.
There was no sense of the self-denial of what Max has to do
when he "goes down on" the German officer to get the
medicine for his ailing lover. It is as though nothing physical
matters any more, since their entire relationship is without
any form of physical contact, indeed its sexual consummation
is purely verbal. Yet was not Horst's disgust meant to be
mingled with relief and ultimately forgiveness, but forgiveness for what when the act seemed so trivial. There is in any
case little horror left for us for the rest of the play when so
much has been expended in the contrived shocks earlier on.

Horst and Max almost become more refined, Max develops

his awareness, tutored by Horst, and his unthinking antisemitism dissolves in the realisation that the Jews are fellowvictims. But not before the author has us get the point in
Greta's hollywoodesque "you're just like the Jews, unloved
Baby, unloved". The Jews, however, continue to retain their
anti-gay attitudes, even in the camps, a deeper prejudice no
doubt.
There is the one "good Jew", whom Horst has met, a
kindly old Rabbi, doubtless with a long white beard.
Sherman does of course allow that some gays are positively
evil. Max is able to temper Horst's naivity (the one failing of
the good nurse) with the realistic assertion that some Nazis
were gay "You don't like that, do you?" We have of course
already been clearly informed by the omniscient Greta that
the SA was a bastion of gays.

The characterisation
So much of this play is presented in terms of cliche and
caricature. There is the shallow characterisation of the Nazis
(and some of the dialogue) that could have been taken from
the war films of the 'forties and 'fifties (or indeed the
'sixties and 'seventies), and a rather lame and all too familiar
pastiche of "decadent Berlin". There was a mannered though
compelling performance from Ian McKellen as Max, and a
moving performance from Tom Bell as Horst, the righteous
and right-on gay. Richard Gale gave us a masterful cameo of
Max's closetted uncle Freddie, still preoccupied with picking
up the odd "fluff" and displaying an obsessional triviality
in the face of mounting catastrophe.
Yet there was much stylistic confusion in the play. At
ti mes it was naturalistic, at times "epic" and at others
symbolic. There is of course nothing wrong with mixing
styles if it enhances and clarifies the basic message of the
play, but here it tends to stress the overburdening of the
play with its many different messages about gayness,
about love, about violence and about sacrifice as it hiccups
from one style to another. The abrupt change is meant to
shock, to open the audience to a new sort of awareness that
the author is trying to promote. But the feeling for me was
rather one of strain, never quite able to be released, and
which oscillated from melodrama to farce.
Whenever it is used the reiteration of the Nazi experience
produces a sort of Pavlovian horror response which can then
be harnessed to something the progenitor wishes, and in
this case it is gay suffering. An increasingly disturbing
response, however, is one of a certain intrigue and even
admiration, and this is something of which Sherman is well
aware, for particularly with regard to gay people there is
today a sort of mindless camperie associated with the Third
Reich. In some ways he tries to deal with all of this in his
play, for example in Rudi's remark "I know violence is
very chic, but it hurts". But again he only skims the surface.
Martin Sherman has tackled a large and an important
subject. Clearly there is much to be done to make people

Horst (torn Belt) Max (Ian McKellen, right)

aware of the sufferings of homosexuals under National
Socialism, which one German author (W.S. Schlegel) has
called "The Great Tabu". But Sherman I think tries to
encompass too much. Had he tried to say less, he might
have done so more effectively. The German section of Gay
Sweatshop's "As Times Go By" managed better with a play
in the same context, but more limited with a more specific
and narrow message for gay people. It may be a pity that
there is such a limited appeal, but plays can rarely work well
for everyone. But just as propaganda might be necessary, it
will lost its effectiveness if it does not do justice to the
truth, and if it distorts it, for dramatic or didactic effect,
it then becomes absurd.

FOOTNOTES
1. R. Lautmann et al, 'Der rosa Winkel in den nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern ', in R. Lautmann (ed),
Gesellschaft and Homosexualitat
(Frankfurt-am-Main 1977).
2. B. Bettelheim, Survival and Other Essays (London 1979),
pp. 98-9.

Gay Left 33

Gay Left 33

Celtic Twilight
Two issues ago we began a discussion around sexual politics
in Ireland. This is a further contribution to that debate
taking up some of the questions raised in Tom Woodhouse's
article Lost Freedoms in Gay Left 8.
Tom Woodhouse's article attempts to "clarify some points
about the history of Ireland which are rarely discussed and
little understood. " It does make some very interesting
comments on Gaelic Ireland, such as the homoerotic
elements in the Tain. At a more general level Tom Woodhouse attempts to depict Irish Celtic society as an almost
ideal society within mediaeval and later culture, with freedoms undreamt of in the rest of patriarchal Romanised
Europe. In particular, the position of women is his barometer. Tom Woodhouse also implies in the article, that his
vision of Irish history is linked to his nationalism.
Certainly Irish society presents features in this period
which are unique and fascinating, some of which are not
even found in other Celtic societies. In the article Tom Woodhouse appears to regard Irish society down to the 17th
century as one, static, solid unpolluted Celtic block. The nonChristian society of the Tain, which might well refer to a
period hundreds of years before the historical period, has
little to do with the operation of Irish society in the 16th
century. In the Tain a barbarous and militaristic society is
shown, interestingly with a very aggressive queen, Medb,
dominating the political situation. However, the society outlined in this epic is not corroborated by the evidence of other
early historical sources.
From the 5th century, Irish society became increasingly
Christianised. Tom Woodhouse attempts to devalue Irish
Celtic Christianity as proceeding along "very unRomish
lines". Irish Christianity was by no means cut off from the
rest of Europe. In the middle ages the extremely ascetic
Columbanus played a vital role in founding new monasteries
on the Continent. Irish society down to the 17th century was
open to many influences and changes. Muirchetach O'Brien
attempted to move toward a continental style centralised
kingship. More broadly, the Viking and 'Norman' onslaughts
had serious effects on Irish society.
Against Tom Woodhouse, it can be argued that there was
no straight conflict between Celtic and Anglo-Norman
values, rather a mutual interaction, with English conceptions
of lordship fusing with Irish conceptions of succession. To
Tom Woodhouse, nearly every aspect of Irish Celtic society
is acceptable, or rather ideal when compared with the results
of English influence on Ireland. Many features found in
English society at the time are to be found in Ireland. Both
countries had aristocracies both with a privileged place in
society. Celtic society was intensely aristocratic and conservative. In the Gill History of Ireland, O'Corrain noted that
"Irish literature ... (was) ... aristocratic to the core". There
was little interest in ordinary people in such literature.
Lineage was very important in such a patrilineal society.
Great care and effort was taken to preserve the genealogies of
all the leading families. Most offices and functions were
hereditary. One family tended to specialise in one field, for
example law or genealogy. Therefore no one, including
women, could select freely and 'art or science' to practice.
It was of great importance to this society for each family to
continue the line. In the early tract called the Timna
Chathair Mair, Cetach is given a secondary role in this
militaristic society even though he is a "warlike leader whose
deeds are mighty" and the King's eldest son because he
himself had no sons to carry on the glorious line.
In certain respects Irish society in the mediaeval period
did enjoy more 'sexual freedom' than the rest of Christian
Europe'. However this applied only in a superficial way to
34 Gay Left

by Glenn McKee

the upper part of society. In the 12th century the anti-Irish

Gerald of Wales pays tribute to the exemplary chastity of the
run of Irish priests. In the Irish law tract, the Senchus Mar, it
is stated that the son of a king by a slave-woman, a cumal,
cannot succeed to the kingship. It also notes that a father can
repudiate a son for 'depravity or criminality'.
A 'sexually free' society does not mean a society in which
women are free. An examination of the position of women in
the law tract reveals that in certain circumstances women
had some legal rights, but these were very much hedged
around by conditions. A woman's position depended on her
relationship to her husband and her property (and it should
be noted that a woman did not cut her connection to the
`paternal' family on marriage). The best way for a woman to
guarantee her position and status was to have sons. The
Senchus Mar notes that every woman must have a legal
guardian: father, husband, sons or the Church. Indeed, some
Irish historians have seen the Church as having a liberating
effect in that it gave women a certain amount of influence,
independence and control of property. The Senchus Mar also
explicitly states that it is wrong for a single woman to be in
the household of any man, not having a husband to protect
her.
At a broader level, looking at the political scene, women
played very little part in politics. The Annals of Innisfallen,
for example, mention few women in comparison to the huge
number of men on every page. It notes the death in 795 of a
Leinster King and his Queen. In 1259 the Annals note the
death of the Abbess of Ceil Eoin, but presumably on the
grounds of her descent from a noble family. The only other
types of reference to women are those royal wives stolen by
other Kings.
In a short reference to the tenurial system in Gaelic Ireland, Tom Woodhouse also seriously misinterprets the
evidence. It is a partial judgement merely to state that Irish
Celtic society was based on common rather than individual
ownership of land. Land was 'owned' by the 'clan', which
was a family unit based on a common great-grandfather. It
did not include all the people of a particular locality. During
the period in question, the clan changed in size to include
only the descendants of a common grandfather. The clan
could also be represented by one person. This small unit was,
according to the legal texts, the basis of the Irish social structure. Therefore at a purely local level a noble or royal clan
would control most of the land and economic resources. In
this intensely hierarchised society the unfree 'peasant' clan at
the bottom of the social pyramid was almost completely in
the economic control of the local rulers.
The arguments that Tom Woodhouse puts forward concerning the position of women, sexual freedom and 'ownership of land' are unsubstantiated and thus a distorted vision
of "Irish Celtic society" emerges. It is unfortunate that such
a vision of an essentially aristocratic, Christan and conservative society, far from ideal, should inform a contemporary
nationalism.

Gay Watching
HOMOSEXUALITY IN PERSPECTIVE
by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson
Little Brown, 1979
Reviewed by Dennis Altman

over 5,000 homosexual women and men, and reported in Jay

and Young's recent book The Gay Report. But the
undoubted scientific, not to say heterosexual, reputation of
Masters and Johnson will undoubtedly mean that their find.
ings will be accepted where those of Jay and Young will be
ignored.

One of the few remaining growth industries in the present

climate of economic recession is that of sexual research and
counselling. Indeed if I were to be very cynical I would
suggest that the present stress on sexuality is part of an updated 'bread and circuses' approach by our rulers to buying
off protest, rather as Marcuse foreshadowed in his concept of
'repressive desublimation'.

And of these findings, two in particular stand out: first,

that homosexuals are by and large more accomplished and
have more pleasure in sex than heterosexuals; second that
there is very strong evidence for basic human pansexuality.

In this the Americans, as one might expect, lead the field.

And the dominant figures here are the dual research team of
William Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose institute at St.
Louis, Missouri, has replaced the Kinsey Institute in
Bloomington, Indiana, as the mecca of sex research. (It is
interesting that both institutes are found in the American
heartland; Masters and Johnson are on record as saying they
went to St. Louis to dispel the doubts that would be created
were they working on the more liberal east or west coasts.)
In their earlier works, particularly Human Sexual
Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, Masters and
Johnson pioneered a number of then revolutionary concepts,
most notably the multiorgasmic and clitoral nature of female
sexuality. Now they have turned their laboratory and clinical
techniques to homosexuality; not, they stress, because they
want to find either 'causes' or 'cures', but because it is a
legitimate and relevant part of sex research. Indeed, as they
conclude:
"14 years of laboratory and clinical investigation of
human homosexual function and dysfunction have provided broad-based support for the Institute's major premise that from a functional point of view homosexuality
and heterosexuality have far more similarities than
differences. Yet today, many decades after cultural
dictum originally introduced the concept that important
functional differences do exist between the two sexual
preferences, the overwhelming pressure of public
opprobrium still blindly reinforces this false assumption.
The general public as well as many segments of the
scientific community remain convinced that there are
marked functional disparities between homosexual and
heterosexual men and women."

As to the first point, Masters and Johnson are emphatic;

both among their male and their female couples they find
more relaxation, more involvement, more 'exchange of
pleasure at all levels of sexual excitation', more communication. This is particularly marked when compared with the
experience of women in heterosexual intercourse, the point
that so enraged male commentators when it was made by
Shere Hite. Homosexuals, both women and men, were even
found to have a 'more active and diverse fantasy patterning
than their heterosexual counterparts'.
Now this is an especially striking phenomenon when one
considers that the homosexuals Masters and Johnson looked
at engaged in a very restricted range of sexual activity. Most
noticeably very little notice is taken of anal intercourse,
which is presented here as of very minor significance to male
homosexuals. Now this is completely contradicted both by
Jay and Young's findings, and by the evidence from doctors
at VD clinics, who do see a very large sample of sexually
active people. Moreover Masters and Johnson seem on very
shaky grounds when they talk about anal intercourse, completely ignoring, for example, the specific pleasures engendered by stimulation of the prostate that is, of course, only
experienced by men.

Homosexuality in Perspective is essentially a report of

these fourteen years research and counselling, and despite
being written in a style that is both obtuse and convoluted
Masters and Johnson appear to adopt this style deliberately
as if to stress their commitment to the 'health care profession
and to put off any reader who might be seeking salacious
enjoyment the book does contain certain very important
findings.
There is, of course, a very basic problem with all of
Masters and Johnson's findings, as with most so-called
scientific sexual research, and that is their sample. Essentially
their data comes either from people who agreed to spend
considerable time having sex under laboratory conditions or
who came to the institute in search of help for some sort of
sexual problem. Neither is likely to be a very representative
group. Indeed the moralistic objections often made against
promiscuous homosexual cruising, objections that Masters
and Johnson imply they share, seem to me even more
applicable to those people who are willing to have sex with
an assigned partner under the glare of lights, wires and closely
observing sex researchers. However it is good to know that
science has provided at least some people with an excuse to
act out their fantasies.
I suspect that Masters and Johnson's evidence is thus less
useful than the evidence collected through a mail survey of
Gay Left 35

But Masters and Johnson are really quite naive when it

comes to the details of homosexual sex; perhaps they might
profitably spend a couple of nights in a St. Louis gay sauna.
Thus they argue that homosexual sex is essentially of a 'my
turn, your turn' nature as compared with the 'our turn'
nature of heterosexual coitus, which ignores the mutual
orgasmic potential this being the sort of language they
employ of mutual cunnilingus and fellatio. More crudely,
what is '69ing' if not an 'our turn' activity?
Be that as it may, Masters and Johnson have provided, as
Martin Duberman wrote in The New Republic, 'The most
substantial case for gay chauvinism ever made'. As one of the
most effective ways of oppressing homosexuals has been to
suggest that somehow we are deprived of the ultimate sexual
experience what, if not this, is the classic remark that 'all a
lesbian needs is a good man'? they should he given credit
for this.
Their evidence for the innate potential of all people to be
stimulated both homo- and heterosexually comes in two
basic forms: their discussion of 'ambisexuals' and their discussion of fantasies. Now 'ambisexual' is a term coined by
Masters and Johnson to mean 'a man or woman who unreservedly enjoys, solicits, or responds to overt sexual opportunity
with equal ease and interest regardless of the sex of the partners, and who, as a sexually mature individual, has never
evidenced interest in a continuing relationship'.
I am not sure why Masters and Johnson want to telescope
two quite different characteristics, namely sexual interest in
both women and men and disinterest in binding relationships,
into one type, unless it is because they have some sort of gut
dislike of people who fit this type. There are, after all, many
people who fit the first part of this description but not the
second, and vice versa. In fact, I found the discussion of
ambisexuals the most unsatisfactory in the book, for it is too
replete with moralistic assumptions to be very useful, and
requires considerable stretching of the data to support the
definition. (Thus one woman had a few months' "marriage of
convenience" during which time she "maintained an open
lesbian relationship". This would seem incompatible with the
claim that ambisexuals "have never evidenced interest in a
continuing relationship".) Combined with the evidence on
fantasies, however, it does add up to strong support for the
bisexual potential of all of us.
Thus fantasies involving both sexes were found among all
groups studied, which Masters and Johnson seem perplexed
to explain. However, given their strong discounting of a
genetic basis for homosexuality and their scepticism of a
hormonal cause, it seems to me clearly further evidence for
the Freudian-derived argument that we could all be bisexual
were we less restricted by social pressures.
Given this it does not seem to me at all surprising that
Masters and Johnson were able, as they put it, to 'convert' or
'revert' homosexuals to heterosexuality. Indeed, given the

36 Gay Left

rigid screening procedures they used before accepting people

for such procedures, their failure rate of about a third is, as
they admit, too high.
One may well question whether because someone is under
social pressure to 'become' heterosexual this is sufficient
reason to attempt the transformation. Would Masters and
Johnson change the skin pigmentation of a Negro who was
experiencing similar social pressures? And should clinicians
seek to influence such people to fight rather than accept such
social pressurs? I myself have never doubted that the right
sort of social engineering can cause people to respond in all
sorts of ways sexually; this is, after all, the implication of the
Freudian belief in an inherent pansexuality that is restricted
by society. But because it can be done is not in itself
sufficient justification for doing it.
Like most of their American counterparts, Masters and
Johnson are blinded to such ethical problems by their allpervasive behaviourism. There is a certain irony to the fact
that despite this their book provides enormous ammunition
for some of the more radical tenets of gay liberation.

Fighting Fascism
GAY ACTIVIST ALLIANCE PUBLICATIONS
Reviewed by Philip Derbyshire
Gay Activists Alliance have produced two publications, their
Anti Fascist Handbook and the submission they made to the
Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure. Both are available
from London Gay Activists Alliance, 5 Caledonian Road,
London N1 priced 70p and 30p respectively.
Much of left activity in recent years was centred around the
fight against fascism, and the Anti-Nazi League was one of
the most significant mass organisations of that period,
phenomenal in its growth, and in its loss of impetus. One of
the contributory factors to its decline was the lack of discussion of what fascism was, and its insistence on a strategy
of rationalistic revelation. The point consistently was to show
that the National Front (NF) were Nazis, an alien growth on
the body politic, who were duping the majority of their
members. That type of political tactic both mystified the
actual political form of contemporary fascism, and made the
appeal that fascism had inexplicable.
The contribution of feminists and radical gay men was to
argue against the simplicity of the dominant anti-fascist
strategy, and to demand a more rigorous analysis of how
fascism mobilised not only through economic resentments
but through the exploitation of unconscious anxieties.
The Anti-Fascist Handbook suffers from contradictions
engendered by its situation in those debates. On the one
hand it is an agitational pamphlet aimed at gay people in
order to get them involved in the struggle against the NF. On
the other it, is an attempt to make an intervention in the
discussion of what fascism is. So that the first section takes
up the revelatory line, exposes the NF policy on gays, and
links that with the NF's historical modelling on the Nazi
Party. There is also a discussion of the sexual politics of the
Nazis. The third section gives useful info on how to fight the
fascists and suggestions for propaganda and activist work.
Both sections are worthwhile, even if it is stretching the term
fascist to include organisations like the National Festival of
Light (NFOL) and Society for the Protection of the Unborn
Child (SPUC).
It is in the second section where the contradictions are
most acute, with several different accounts of what fascism is,
and how it organises the politics of sexuality. Dave Landau's
piece argues that the Nazis militarised society, smashed the
family and proscribed homosexuality because it threatened
the mystic 'fraternity' that was a fundamental mode of
emotional organisation of the Nazi state. His piece is next to
an article that argues that the fascists strengthened the family,
and which sees fascism as a timeless essence with no differences between contemporary Britain and '30s Germany.
Whilst it is not incumbent to produce a unified 'line' in
such a publication, it might be helpful to the reader, if
articles which have opposing theoretical positions do not just
flow into each other without some indication of their difference.

The historical material is fascinating but errs on the side

of too much detail and a weakness of overall coherence.
Again, there are inaccuracies: were women really pushed out
of the labour force in Nazi Germany as Tony Deane suggests,
or pulled into industrial production perforce as men went off
to the front?
Overall, the pamphlet is a worthwhile attempt to gather
together information and analysis on fascism, even if someti mes it becomes intensely confusing: but it might have been
more sensible to clarify the aims of the pamphlet, as agitation
or as theory instead of blending the two.
The Submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal
Procedure is a well argued lucid account of the way the law
discriminates against gay people. We all know it does but it is
eye-opening to realise the extent, and entrenchment of that
discrimination in both sentencing, rules of evidence, and
police and court practice. The submission also draws out the
ways in which children are discriminated against and
oppressed especially around questions of sexuality and makes
a strong case for the abolition of the Age of Consent laws
which function less to protect children than to oppress them.
The submission marks another stage in the demystification of
the legal constraints around sexuality, and like the recent
Law and Sexuality is a very valuable resource.

GAY LEFT BOOK

The Gay Left book is now ready for the press and will be
published in the second half of 1980.
The book is a collection of original articles which break
new ground in the analysis of gay oppression. There are
articles on sexuality and femininity under capitalism, the
lesbian subculture, developments in the male gay subculture,
gays at work, autonomy and socialist organisations, the
contradictions of gay culture and much, much more.
This book is an important intervention in socialist, gay
and feminist debate. It will be published by Allison and
Busby, 6A Noel Street, London W1 .

Gay Left 37

on the part of the child. Concerning sexual relations how

is paedophilia possible at all if it is not that, say at the level
of representation, children and adults are capable of getting
in touch with each others sexual feelings? This, clearly, does
not presuppose that adults and children have the same feelings or that adult sexual categories need be projected ( what?)
onto children.

The sexual politics of childhood

Dear Gay Left,
I have put together a few thoughts, some of them critical, in
response to your leader "Happy Families Paedophilia
Examined" (GL 7) which, as you will see, stimulated me
greatly. I submit these in the hope that they cohere
sufficiently to be of some value to the ongoing debate.
Possibly the best way to begin is by summarizing what I felt
to be the salient points contained in your discussion. a) Since
there is so great a disparity of experience, needs, desires,
physical potentialities etc.between adults and children it is
unlikely that paedophile relations, like other child/adult
relations in society, express anything other than unequal
relations. 2) The problem then, given that we accept the
validity of the paedophile category, is to change attitudes to
sexuality in general so that these disparities might in some
way be eroded and replaced by a climate for mutual consent.
Naturally this development requires some ability on the part
of the child to "recognize some of the significance in social
and sexual terms of her/his actions." which you see as not
emerging before puberty.
So the $64 question is how do we go about transforming social mores? And it is precisely your proposals in this
respect that I find unsatisfactory and in need of some
scrutiny.
I'll start with the question of "disparity of experience".
No one can deny that these disparities exist or that in attending closely to them they assist us in articulating the particular
problem of sexual relations under capitalism, and also reveal
to us how such relations are historically generated. However
once these issues have been made intelligible in this way and
we next address ourselves to the search for solutions and to
the task of establishing a politics aimed at change, then it
. seems to me crucial that we widen rather than narrow the
scope of the debate to include other equally significant
aspects of lived experience. That is to say we must guard
against setting about solutions which are wholly dictated by
the terms in which the problem has been clarified or has been
observed to generate.
This your discussion fails to do. Throughout the basic
socially constructed category of "childhood" is kept at the
centre of the solution seeking debate; issues of "consent"
and "mutual agreement" thus emerge to my mind artefactually as the most compelling outcomes for any ideal
paedophile relation. Not that these outcomes are in themselves undesirable but what I fail to see is how, in attaining
them in the manner you suggest, they avoid being an "adultcentred" solution.
How is giving children more of what adults already have
(autonomy) not adult-centred? (Can the feminist struggle,
similarly, be reduced to giving women more of what men
already have?) Moreover how is this strategy likely to produce any real change.
Change, as I see it, is far more likely to accrue by comprehensively acknowledging and drawing out into the open
the many "dialogues" between children and adults that
already exist and which are constantly on the go. This, it
seems, is a far more 'disturbing' strategy for capitalists and
socialists alike. But this is exactly how the power balance can
effectively be redressed. If only we could harness a little
more than the cerebellum to the problem widening rather
than narrowing the range of debating tools then perhaps it
might become finally apparent that in actual lived experience
the respective worlds of the child and adult do coincide and
in ways which do not preclude but necessitate certain powers
38 Gay Left

Children even infants possess remarkable capacities

(powers if you like) for instigating and participating in early
social relations which tend to be masked by ideological
apparatuses, not least by the ideology of Child Psychology.
The first step in valorising these powers is taken by spelling
out the correlations and continuities within existing child/
adult relations. This is a kind of democratising process in
which the conditions of existence for power imbalances are
undermined thus making possible alternative modes of social
relations. It is well to note that this strategy itself implies a
fundamental change in the way in which we think about
children who need to be regarded less as mechanistic,
aggregative, purely passive objects of socialisation. Any
sexual politics aimed, as in the present case, at changing
social relations between adults and children must also involve
a politics of changing how we think about these relations. No
demystification is otherwise possible.
Trevor Lubbe

Sexuality and Fascism

Dear Gay Left,
I would like to reply to Colm Clifford's review of the Big
Flame pamphlet Sexuality and Fascism. Firstly, Colm fails to
explain that the pamphlet is only documents, the speeches
given at a Day School on Sexuality and Fascism in November
1978. These "contributions to discussion" were only that,
and by not mentioning this, Colm gives a very false impression
of the aim of the pamphlet.
Secondly, and this is more important, he doesn't grasp in
his review the central point of the three speeches: they were
united in the belief that fascism, past and present, attempts
to subjugate all sexuality to the service of the state, with the
intention of creating so-called Master Race children. As such
any other kind of sexual expression is severely stamped on.
Abortion for white "Master Race" women becomes a crime
while for black women, almost compulsory.
Women's Liberation in any sphere of life at home, at
work, in relationships, is seen as a threat. Sexual relations
between men or between women are considered beyond the
control of the state and not harnessed to the purposes of the
Fuhrer so they too, when fascism is in power, are treated in
the most vicious and brutal way possible. I think one Nazi
leader actually said that decapitation was not good enough
for gays!
Colm shows his failure to appreciate this general understanding of fascism by his token treatment of the documents
on women. For example, "From my perspective as a gay
male, both sections on women are interesting and informative". He doesn't seem to see the threat posed to all worthwhile sexuality by fascism.
One of the documents , "Men and Fascism" breaks almost
new ground, daring to suggest that we men must look to
changing ourselves if we intend to contribute to making
fascism irrelevant.

Co1m , with some justification, heavily criticises the discussion of how it is homosexual men are often mixed up
with fascist organisations. He is not happy with the analysis
that a trend amongst all men to see men as superior beings
and women as nothing (masculinism) fits neatly into the fast
fascist scheme of things, especially at a time when male gangs
try to conquer the streets to enable a fascist takeover. Nor is
he happy with the document's conviction that the saving
grace of today's male gay movement is its sensitivty to
feminism.
Well, neither am I, but it is a start, trying to face up to a
real problem. It's little wonder that this pamphlet should
immediately sell out and need to be reprinted.* At the
moment, the crisis in the National Front is taking a viciously
anti-gay form, attacking Martin Webster on the grounds of his
sexual orientation while attacking the failure of the NF's
election strategy, which he masterminded.
What should be the reaction of the Left to this? Let's be
honest, we are grossly unprepared. The Anti Nazi League's
propaganda, for example, was of the shock-horror variety,
casting gays in the role of victims. We need to be taking these
issues up in a positive way that affirms gay sexuality as good,
not as something which present society 'tolerates', arid,
fascist society wouldn't.
In solidarity,
Keith Venables
* Available from bookshops, 25p.

LOST IN THE MUSIC?

Dear Gay Left,
Richard Dyer's "In Defence of Disco" must be the most
boring and lengthy piece of theoreticist self-justification that
I've read for a long time. He admits that he's always liked
'the wrong music', so why must we be subjected to his endless reams of quasi-marxian terminology so that he can
explain a reactionary culture away.
To start with, those who criticise disco do not single it out
for special treatment. It is merely that disco is the epitome of
a popular commercial culture that fails to meet two vital
political criteria:
i) a real origin among ordinary people as their cultural
response to their lifestyles that is accessible and
participatory,
ii) a message which is progressive and not perpetuative of
reactionary, oppressive or exploitative behaviour.
Most disco fails on the second count, but all fails on the
second. Disco, unlike reggae, early rock, mod, ska, punk
all the various waves of youth culture we've seen since the
1950's has no basis as a product of youth. The complex
social processes which produced youth cultures have not
shaped disco. It's basically commercialised soul music, produced for maximum possible profit by the multinational
entertainment monopolies. Disco doesn't even involve the
minimum participation entailed in a performer(s)-audience
dialectic: a song will sound the same where and whenever it's
put on. In fact the basic characteristic of disco is its inaccessibility. The artist is a chic superhero, s/he is ultra feminine/
macho, an always elusive, unattainable stereotype an epitome
of commercial 'perfection'.
As for the musical structure, it is highly engineered, carefully and deliberately designed to sound sensuous, erotic
without ever being pornographic: in a word titillating. True
enough, disco isn't `phallocentric' a 'whole body eroticism'
might sound a little less macho, but it's just as capitalistic
when produced for profit.

Other cultures can be criticised on either criterion. But

rarely (in comparison) are bands guilty of both a redundant
message and an inaccessible musical structure. Surely, if we're
involved in politics, we should be actively promoting the
most progressive cultures around, not the most reactionary.
Punk has now become commercialised, sometimes chic
and often bourgeois. But its roots were (and still are) in the
right place with the kids, not the monopolies. The musical
structure of punk is very simple, it allows virtually anyone to
start a band and start expressing themselves. Cultures are
supposed to be participatory. Involvement was the ethos of
punk.
"If it's easy and cheap go and do it!"
go and join a hand"
`Desperate Bikes'
Punk clothing rebelled against the sexist and oppressive
concept of beauty. Its message was rebellious, anti-materialist,
often left-wing. Punk is the youth culture which has produced Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Sexism and
developed the alternative production and distribution structure of companies like Rough Trade.
As a mass youth movement, punk has long since reached
its peak. But new wave continues with a plethora of small
bands like Scritti Politti and Gang of Four, who are using less
structured and more accessible forms to express radical
political ideas. The Raincoats were a young feminist band.
Even the now pretty commercial X-Ray Spex sing about the
pressures on youth Germ Free Adolescence tells how
unattainable the clean images of the media are.
Reggae is another progressive culture, an organic and still
largely uncommercialised response to oppression. Its musical
form is simple but allows scope for virtuosity as well as for
participation participation like providing dub tracks on the
B-sides of singles so that you don't even need to play an
instrument to be able to express yourself. Much reggae is
sexist. But at least the accessibility of the culture may allow
us space to change this.
And with these two progressive cultures around, Richard
Dyer is into disco! A gay socialist is defending sexist, capitalist music!
Richard says that the adoption of disco by gay men is
`subverting' it putting it to an end not envisioned by the
capitalists who produced it. This entails that homosexuality
is automatically or inherently progressive. It isn't. Redefining
society's concept of sexuality would be revolutionary. But
it's obvious that gay culture is not in any way revolutionary
when its predominant feature is the meat-market of the
commercial disco. The gay disco is no better than the straight
one: both are reactionary and offensive.
`Disco's eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies' says
Richard. But punk did that in a far better way two years ago
ATV's "Love lies limp " is iust one example. Punk was
often about a non-discriminating sexuality anyone or
everyone, beautiful or ugly, male or female. Miles ahead of
leather-clad, male gay culture `machodom'. Disco's 'rediscovery' is merely a technically produced narcissism 'I'M so
beautiful fuck ME.'
No, disco is definitely not progressive in any sense, let
alone a gay one. How many gay disco tracks are there that
express our feelings, our problems. None. Disco's made for
passive consumption, ingestion by unthinking recipients, not
for the involvement of gays, or anyone else.
As gays and socialists, we ought to be applying our politics
to our culture developing a life-style that fits our politics
and draws others into our struggle. Not spend our energies
trying to defend a part of being gay that most of us haven't
yet started to question, let alone change.
John Munford

Most of the disco artists express little more than a useless,

perpetuative and sexist message of 'look good, get yourself a
fuck I want your body.'
Gay Left 39

What's Left
GAY SOCIALIST CONFERENCE
Gay Left is planning a gay socialist conference hopefully in
the Spring of 1980. The purpose of the conference will be
for gay socialists to assess and respond to the situations we
find ourselves in under the new Thatcher regime. We would
welcome any papers, thoughts, ideas and suggestions for the
conference. Please write with s.a.e. to Gay Socialist Conference, c/o Gay Left, 38 Chalcot Road, London NW1.

GAY CALENDAR

"What do revolting dykes, Jeremy Thorpe and an elephant

riding a bike ringing a bell have in common? They are all in
'A Gay Calendar for 1980', published by Homosexual Posters.
The other nine months cover some of the events and issues
that have faced or are still facing us as gays gay pride, gay
anger (over the Dan White acquittal), gays at work, child
sexuality, cottaging, aversion therapy, gays in the concentration camps, gay theatre. There are two songs, an information sheet and glowing colours throughout! 'A Gay
Calendar for 1980' is A3-sized and costs 1.50 from bookshops or 1.75 (inc. p&p) from Homosexual Posters,
145 Railton Road, London SE24 OLT."
Open Gaze Bookshop sells many titles of interest to gay
women and men with an emphasis on non-fiction. Recent
expansion has included non-gay left analyses of society.
The shop operates within the Information Centre,
60 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3SA.
A Gay Humanist Group has been set up in the United
Kingdom as a direct result of a private prosecution brought
against Gay News for blasphemous libel by Mary Whitehouse.
When the case came to trial, Whitehouse was shaken by the
strong feelings ordinary Britons expressed against the prosecution, and on several occasions she claimed that criticism
of her action was being co-ordinated by vociferous members
of the "homosexual/humanist lobby".
Anyone requiring more information about the Gay
Humanist Group should write to the GHG at 45 Telford
Avenue, London SW2, enclosing a stamp.
Masques: Revue des Homosexualites
Masques is an ambitious and extremely well produced new
French magazine of gay sexual politics, produced by a
collective of lesbians and gay men. The first two issues hare
contained articles, interviews, and theoretical pieces on a
wide range of international topics concerning history, sexuality, and ideology. Masques costs 20F for a single issue. An
annual subscription (for 4 issues) costs 100F, including
postage and packaging. Masques may be obtained
c/o Librairie ANIMA, 3 rue Ravignan, 75019 Paris, France.

Contents

Collective Statement .......................................................................

Gay Politics in New Zealand ..............................
The Play's The Thing .......................................................................
Right to Rebel: Interview ................................................................
The Charming Passivity of Guy Hocquenghem ......................
Lesbians in Literature .....................................................................
The Flesh Made Word ......................................................................
Out! Out! Out! ...................................................................................
Gay Men's Press ..................................................................................
Bent .........................................................................................................
Gay Watching ......................................................................................
Fighting Fascism ................................................................................
Letters ....................................................................................................
What's Left

2
7
10
11
16
20
25
27
30
31
35
37
38

THE COLLECTIVE

This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Derek Cohen,

Emmanuel Cooper, Philip Derbyshire, Simon Watney, Jeffrey
Weeks, Tom Woodhouse, Nigel Young.

BACK ISSUES
Gay Left No 3
Women , in Gay Left, Gays and Class, IS Gay Group, Gay
Workers' Movement and usual reviews etc.
Gay Left No 5
Why Marxism, Images of Homosexuality in Film, Lesbian
Invisibility, Gays and Fascism, Gay Theatre Past and Present,
Politics & Ideology, Gay History, Future of the Gay Movement.
Gay Left No 6
( Gays) In the Balance, The State Repression and Sexuality,
Looking At Pornography, Working Class Lesbians, Gays at
Work, Motherhood, Fighting Fascism.
Gay Left No 7
Paedophilia Examined, Gay Art, Greece, Northern Ireland,
Camp, Tom Robinson, Gay Sweatshop, Nighthawks,
Chemical Castration, Reviews.
Gay Left No 8
Personal Politics, In Defence of Disco, Childhood Sexuality
and Paedophilia, and Living With Indecency.

GAY LEFT 38 CHALCOT ROAD LONDON NW1

GAY LEFT RATES
Inland
70p each
Overseas Airmail 1
or $2 (Sterling, US or Canadian
cheques only)

Gay Left Collective 1979

ISSN 0307 9313
Typeset by Dark Moon, 01-22r4331
Printed by East End Litho Ltd.
Trade Distribution: Publications Distribution Co-op,
27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R OAT
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Boston, Mass. 02111 USA.
40 Gay Left

SUBSCRIPTIONS
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three issues. Longer subscriptions pro rata. Subscriptions ma
include available back issues. Donations always gratefully
received.
Make all cheques (Sterling or US or Canadian dollars only)
payable to Gay Left, 38 Chalcot Road, London NW1 Englan

example in the interwar years between the Communist Party

and the ideology of Labourism. Today, we are faced with
multiple and incompatible visions of what society is, what
its alternatives are and how we move from the present to a
more democratic future.
There is an absence of a single legitimated and generally
accepted socialist strategy. Neither the Labour Left, the
Eurocommunist tendencies within the CP nor the Far Left
groupings offer an adequate and comprehensive account of
the dynamics of this phase of capitalism which can be
accepted by the others. Within each of these groupings there
are different and often antagonistic theories each advanced
ME COLLECTIVE STATEMENT
with much energy and fervour, but all failing to reach more
than a tiny section of the population. The traditional Left
With this tenth issue of Gay Left, we have completed five
alternatives have failed to provide new socialist visions to fill
years of publication. Throughout these years, in every issue,
the crucial space opened by the political collapse of social
we have attempted to develop a coherent political position,
both in the editorials written by the Collective, and in the
democracy.
selection of articles. This does not mean that during this
This political disarray is matched by a disintegration of
period we have not developed our ideas or changed our
the unitary theory of Marxism. Marxist and non-Marxist
minds: neither have we necessarily completely agreed, as a
thinkers as diverse as Fernando Claudin, Nicos Poulantzas,
Collective, with all the articles published, or indeed with each
Rudolph Bahro, Edward Thompson and Michel Foucault
other. But our policy has always been to publish material
have contributed to the creation of conflicting schools withwhich would contribute to what we have expressed since our
in Marxism, by reformulating such concepts as the State,
first editorial as our prime tasks: to develop an analysis of
power, political organisation, class, the nature of already
sexual politics and its relation to socialism; to help make the
existing socialism and history. The result is an apparent
gay community aware of the relevance of socialist politics;
dissonance within Left theory. Adding to the confusion is
and to contribute to the development of a socialist politics,
the production within autonomous movements of theories
which would embrace, and hence be transformed by, the
which claim to account for specific oppressions but which
experiences and ideas of the feminist and gay movements.
are at the same time generalised and contend with Marxism
To do this we have tried to explore a series of issues ranging
for total explanatory status. A clear example is the use of the
from the structural forms which shape the oppressive cateconcept of patriarchy not only to explain the oppression of
gorisation of homosexuality, through the subcultural changes
women but also the genesis of all class societies.
of the past ten years which have substantially changed the
In an otherwise static or regressing political situation, the
possibilities of being gay in our society, to the ostensibly
autonomous movements have often been very successful in
"
mobilising people both around particular issues such as race,
"individual issues which nevertheless sharply illuminate the
ways in which the multiple forms of power limit the
housing and the environment, and the wider questions of the
possibilities of "new ways of living".
relationship between the individual and society. The Women's
movement and the Gay movement have politicised and
Recently, the project of Gay Left has come under sharp
radicalised sections of the population untouched by
attack. A number of lesbian feminists have challenged us for
traditional socialist organisations. The fact of the the relative
accepting too readily and hiding behind the cultural vest'
success of these movements in expressing perceived needs
ments of 'masculinity . They have seen in our rejection of
coupled with the atrophy of traditional socialist organisations
what we termed in the last editorial as a moralistic politics a
poses the major question; should these struggles be unified
refusal to contemplate the possibility and necessity of
and if so how: what can be drawn from these struggles for
personal change. We have also been criticised by some gay
the revitalising of the broader socialist movement? These
socialists who work within Far Left organisations for being
questions are pressing in that, for all the advances of socialist
too individualistic, too concerned with 'the politics of the
theory, the popular images of socialism are bankrupt and
personal ' . and ignoring the massive Right onslaught of
discredited. Social Democracy in Britain has been socialism
Thatcheriesm. We publish two letters in this issue which
and its systematic failure through twelve years of Labour
clearly put this latter position.
government has destroyed the general credibility of a socialist
We are aware as any outside the Collective of the problems
alternative. Nationalised industries have not meant workers'
of being both gay activists and socialists, and about the
involvement in control and organisation nor a responsiveness
'
.
Nonetheless,
problematic nature of the term 'gay socialist
to community needs. Many aspects of the Welfare State
we still feel there is a relevance to the label which goes
have been experienced as huge bureaucratic institutions
beyond the fact of being both gay people and socialists. In
both by clients and those working in them. From council
this editorial we wish to argue against those who believe that
housing to comprehensive education, the reforms of social
any socialist project must inevitably be male dominated and
democracy are experienced as undemocratic and
therefore oppressive, and against those socialists who deny
unresponsive.
the relevance of exploring the social construction of the
personal.
The idea of socialism does not involve a uniform programme nor a preordained hierarchy of tasks. Advanced
capitalist society produces various types of power relation
which in turn give rise to varying levels of struggle. For us,
socialism demands changes to be in both the personal and in
the structural relations of power. To ignore the former is
actually to inhibit the latter.

Democracy,
Socialism &
Sexual Politics

Problems of socialism
The critisisms of Gay Left nevertheless highlight real

problems faced by the Left, resulting from a fundamental

lack of coherence within the socialist project as currently
posed. This incoherence is manifest at all levels: theoretical,
strategic, organisational. Unlike previous periods there is no
longer a simple choice between two total views and strategies
which compete for dominance on the Left, as there was for

2 Gay Left

The failure of Social Democratic politics with this unappetising emphasis on bureaucratic efficiency and statism,
provided the base for the new Thatcherite bloc to seize the
initiative. Its selective call for individualism, its demagogic
attack on the Welfare State and Trade Unionism offered a
reactionary response to real problems. Not surprisingly it has
been all too easy to draw analogies between social democratic
paternalism and the bureaucratic formations of the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. The success of anti-socialist
propaganda is built on a real popular distrust of authoritarian
communism and its apparent parallels within Welfare
Statism.
The socialist alternative has to be built in opposition to
both the authoritarian populism of a precarious capitalism
and to the paternalistic state of social democracy. This has to
be done in a climate of increasing social anxiety which leads
to the closing of ideological space that space in which new
perspectives can be developed. It is harder now to rethink
political conceptions, harder to find points of access to the
political process. There is an entrenchment of old ideas and
an atrophy of innovative practice at all levels, as concerns
about employment, housing and education come to preoccupy most people in their daily lives. The stage management of this anxiety by the Right, its focussing on
'scroungers', 'reds', 'deviants', is one of the most frightening
achievements of Thatcherism, and the one the Left seems
least able to counter. The existing forms of socialism fail to
speak clearly to people's needs and in that failure abandon
the political and social terrain to domination by reactionary
i mages, models and philosophies. The continued repetition of
slogans calling for example for a general strike, is limited and
idealist in so far as it fails to connect to how people really
see their lives. It is true that the Thatcherite offensive will
create new points of resistance, new areas of struggle, as it
cuts back the material basis of people's lives but the coordination of these struggles and their conceptualising into a
new model of socialist politics requires strategies and tactics
which have yet to be agreed on and developed. Whether, and
how, people struggle is as much a question of how they see
themselves as of their being propelled into action simply by
their material circumstances.

The Significance of Gay Politics

This is where the significance of gay politics lies. The
oppressive regulation of homosexuality has been a feature of
society for a very long time, yet it is only in the last ten years
that the struggle for redefinition of our sexuality and sexual
practices has scored major victories. The central focus of gay
politics has been the attempt to redefine sexuality, and hence
to take control over our own bodies, our own pleasures and
the direction of our own lives. The struggle for definition,
within the established categories, yet transcending them is a
model for, at least some, aspects of the new socialist project.
It has involved collective action, and a transformation of
self through a variety of political practices. In reaching out
for control of the institutions that produce and reproduce
those definitions and categories, these practices challenge the
existing order in a basic way.
The grounds for the changes in sexual attitudes have been
developments within capitalism itself, yet these changes have
not been automatic and there is no immediate identity
between our struggle and the interests of capital. True,
capitalists, straight and gay, have intervened in the space gay
people have created but it would be fatalistic to assume the
cooption of the gay struggle. Rather there is a shifting and
unstable relation between our interests as gays and the space,
facilities and constant redefinitions created for us by capital.
Capitalism is a complex unity that does not work with a
single agency or effect. One of the failures of the theories of
the Left has been the inability to conceptualise politics in
other than dualistic terms. Right/Left, Capitalist/Socialist,
Good/Bad, Reformist/Revolutionary: static dichotomies that
barely describe let alone prescribe the ways struggle actually
goes on. Capitalism, in its multiplicity of contradictions, is
not something that can be abolished overnight, nor is it

something that produces its own antithesis, fully formed

pure and innocent, awaiting its historic destiny. There is an
innumerable series of struggles and points of opposition
which interact to produce shifting configurations of power,
advantage gains and losses.
Sexual politics opened up new areas of struggle, conceptualised anew the forces acting on members of society,
especially in the rubric "the personal is political". What we
mean by this, is not that every action we perform is political,
but rather that our 'private' lives, our selves and our desires,
are targets for intervention by social forces definitions,
models, rules, woven in ideology and lived by us. In opening
up that area as one of struggle, gay politics has also revealed
the necessary antagonisms that operate within apparently
homogeneous categories: the divisions between lesbians and
gay men and the dissonance of those interests; the operation
of race and class as lines of power within the gay world; the
hierarchies contradictorily constructed around age: all
these have surfaced as gay liberation has developed, and
these problems of intimate power relations continue
to be the concern of personal politics.
Perhaps, our signal contribution to the redefinition of
socialism is the insight that the transformation of our most
intimate desires, and of the conditions of their satisfaction,
has to be part and parcel of the new society for which we are
working. Those intimate needs, wishes, fantasies are the
substance of struggle why we fight in the first place. Gay
politics speaks with a sensitivity to our felt needs and the felt
restriction of those needs. It is with a similar sensitivity that
we conceive of a socialist politics gaining mass legitimacy.
That legitimacy will be built through time and within
capitalism. It is not a luxury, nor something that can wait
until after the seizure of power by a self-elected vanguard.

Rethinking Socialism
Socialism is offered as an alternative to the capitalist organisation of social and economic life. In the classic Marxist
version it is the necessary, and in some variants, almost preordained antithesis of capitalism. But what it is more than
that is left vague. Marxism has been traditionally hostile to
Utopian system building. So when the self-described Marxist
regimes have captured state power with popular backing
(Russia, China, Yugoslavia) been elected to it (Chile) or
si mply been imposed on countries (Czechoslovakia etc) they
have faced the problem of what to do with it. Different and
often appalling results have followed, and socialists outside
those countries have often been unsure of their reactions: is
`defence of the revolution' more important than defence of
democracy? Is state planning to transform an undeveloped
economy more relevant than workers control? Is the control
of sexual relations in the interests of building socialism more
vital than the 'right to choose'? Such questions are to the

Gay Left 3

fore over Afghanistan. Many socialists think it more

i mportant to defend the 'building of socialism' there even if
it is being enforced by Soviet troops. Others feel that the
defence of the right of a nation to self-determination is more
i mportant. In other words, there is no simple series of
ultimate goals which can be used as guides through the maze
of current political dilemas. Hence the attraction of a
socialist politics which concentrates on an easily delineated
(if elusively difficult) task: the attainment of power.
We would affirm the necessity of developing a socialist
vision as against the aridity of what passes for marxist analysis, and against the concentration on party building in
which the immediate task obscures the ultimate goal. But
this does not remove from all of us who describe ourselves as
socialists, the task of understanding the actual workings of
capitalism. For we would agree that a socialist politics cannot be a simple opposition to all things capitalist, but has to
be a product of the struggles actually produced within
capitalism: that is capitalism is not a single entity to which
can be counterposed another, socialism. It is a highly
complex set of relations: economic, social, geographical,
ethical and gender.
Whilst the workings of the economic and social relations
define the parameters of possible actions, there is no unitary
determination of beliefs, behaviour, ideology or sexual forms.
Multiple struggles develop at all levels of this complex
structure, at all points of power. They have one thing in
common in that they are attempts to resist and challenge
the workings of the relations of power and to gain control
over them. We would argue that the main task of socialists is
to ensure that this struggle for control is democratic in all its
phases, that the goal of the socialist project is the democratisation of all social processes in order to gain popular control
of the shaping of individual and collective existence.
The possibilities of democratic control are inhibited in
society as it exists now, despite its calling itself democratic.
Bourgeois democracy rests on a representative parliamentary
form which actively discourages people from taking decisions
and initiatives themselves. Real economic power and
decisions remain outside of even these limited democratic
forms. The anarchic, crisis-ridden market forces of capitalism
and the power of multi-national corporations are not
accountable to us as producers, consumers or 'citizens'. Real
democratic control of the workings of the economy is therefore a prime task for socialists. At the same time we cannot
ignore the level of the state. The state, though, is not simply
a clique of the ruling class: it is more a space of power than a
single source of domination. It is always a potential site for
intervention and contestation. But this does not mean that
the repressive state apparatus, military, police, judiciary, can
be wished away. Processes of democratisation can be reversed
or halted by these agencies and the various forms of class
domination, as the example of Chile all too clearly shows.
Ultimate control of the state by democratic forces is vital.
The exact form that the process of gaining democratic
control will entail, and the political forces that can achieve it
(party or parties for example) lies at the heart of
contemporary socialist debate. All we can say is that

4 Gay Left

socialists who ignore the moment of state power are in

danger of losing their socialism and perhaps their very lives.
The struggle for democratisation requires more than the
establishment of a 'socialist state': it requires the building of
effective popular control in all aspects of social existence.
This means that challenges must be made at all points of
oppression, which cannot be reduced to a pale reflection of
bigger oppressions, and must not be subordinated to a 'more
i mportant' struggle. They are the struggles with which people
can identify, the oppressions they feel in all areas of their
lives. If socialists fail to recognise the validity of the microstruggles at the point of oppression, the discontents that give
rise to them will be taken up, colonised and utilised by the
Right. This is what is happening under Thatcherism and other
forms of Right populism in various parts of the world.

Control of our Bodies

Feminist and Gay politics are an essential part of people
gaining control over their lives, the part of the process whose
aim is control over decisions concerning our bodies and
identities. The sexual political movements have pinpointed
these areas as crucial for democratic struggle, and they have
offered a series of insights into the ways this can be done in
collective activity, often in small, pluralistic struggles.
Beginning with the immediate experience of oppression, they
are responsive to felt needs rather than guided by abstract
slogans. There are, however, problems. Pluralism can often
lead to a total lack of coherence. Success in one area can
have totally demobilising effects in others. One of the effects
of the early Gay Movement was a major expansion in the subculture, which achieved some of the aims of GLF, though
on a different basis, and very many gays fail to see the need
for further struggles.
But, we believe that the many struggles around sexuality
have been very important in pointing to two issues central to
any socialist project. Firstly they have underlined the vital
i mportance of understanding the ways in which the different
forms of power shape and inform individual meanings and
identities. Secondly they illuminate the determined ways in
which individuals can resist and begin to transform oppressive
definitions. There is a third point: in our very marginalisation
we have attempted to work out different ways of living
relationships and sexuality which question many basic
attitudes that cement existing patterns. Feminist and Gay
politics provide a subversive challenge to conventional
ideologies and aspirations, and socialism cannot grow without such challenges.
We have only touched briefly upon wider issues which are
central to socialist advance, particularly the unification of
disparate struggles and the necessary incompatibilities within
them. this never going to be easy to hold together such complex unities as 'sexual politics' and 'socialist politics'. We
believe that criticisms that stress our inability to offer a
si mple strategy are misplaced. All we can offer is an investigation of the problems as we see them. These problems
whether of our sexual lives or of the political allegiances of
our sexual radicalism will not disappear. They still have to
be explored. And if gay socialists don't do this, who will?

Work place politics: Gay politics

by Nigel Young

In March a Gay Rights at Work Conference was held in

London to discuss and organise a new gay rights at work
campaign. A conference motion was put forward which is
printed here in full. The Conference and the motion raised
important issues about a gay rights at work campaign and its
relationship to the gay movement. This article looks at gay
rights at work and the wider issues involved.

their job or in the region they work in to act upon them. The
union might be too weak, too oppressive or non-existent for
any of these questions to be relevant. Many lesbians and gay
men, in the home, the unemployed, young people and old
people have no rights as far as trade union organisations are
concerned; you only have rights in these terms as long as you
have labour which you sell and you can withdraw.

Gay Left has printed in previous issues a series of articles on

lesbians and gay men's experience in the work place. These
articles have looked at the problems and successes of
individual lesbians and gay men who have come out at work.
These "personal" accounts have also spoken to our own and
others' experience enabling us to comprehend the myriad
ways we can be oppressed at work and influencing how we
can fight that oppression. What is also interesting about those
articles is that the gay movement which helps to shape part
of our consciousness and is the major force behind us saying,
"No, I'm not going to hide any more, no I'm not frightened
or ashamed to come out" is taken for granted. In one sense
this implicit acceptance of the gay movement is fine; it
suggests security, a feeling that the movement has been
around for ten years and whatever its current problems, it
won't disappear overnight. In another sense, though, this
i mplicit acceptance is dangerous because without consistently
placing the messages, critiques and questions of the women's
and gay movements into our accounts of our workplace
struggles, we lose sight of those things in future campaigns
and organisations around gay rights at work we lose a part
of our history.

Conference debates
So when the Gay Rights at Work Conference was being
organised, I expected some of these difficult questions to be
raised and some attempts made to look at the central
problem of what the relationship between a gay movement
and a gay rights at work campaign and organisation should
be.
I went to that conference as a committed trade-unionist
and someone who has worked as a socialist/activist in the gay
movement for seven years, and as a militant trade unionist
for even longer. Therefore the question wasn't an academic
one for me; it is part of a very difficult problematic
because although I'm aware of the need and a believer in a
strong rank and file trade union movement, I'm also aware of
the importance of a strong women's and gay movements
which have quite rightly criticised the oppressive and sexist
structures of the trade union movement and the oppressive
and sexist nature of most work situations.
Unfortunately this central problematic was never
addressed. Actually that isn't quite true. It was addressed,
but with such a furious side swipe at the gay movement by

In this article I want to concentrate on some of the

questions those individual experiences beg especially in the
light of a new gay rights at work campaign and organisation.
I also want to try to restate for us as gay socialists the role of
autonomous movements in relation to any new campaigns
around gay rights at work, and finally I want to explain my
opposition to the Gay Rights at Work conference motion and
the politics which lie behind that motion.

Difficult questions
Any gay rights at work campaign has to ask itself a whole set
of difficult questions: what are the different ways we
experience oppression in the work place? Where does that
oppression come from? Are there different categories of
oppression, for instance, between lesbians and gay men? Are
there class differences? Are there regional differences? In
response to these questions we are led to more general ones
like, what does this imply about the way we struggle? Is it
the same regardless of the situation?
At the same time as trying to answer these questions we
have to look at the structure and the nature of the work
place and the trade union movement. They cannot be
accepted as perfect as if in some magical way, during the
struggle for gay rights, lesbians and gay men will no longer
have to deal with sexist and oppressive work places and trade
unions. Nor if we go around as tireless gay activists supporting every trade union struggle will homophobia and sexism
be expunged from the labour movement. Without an overall
critique and a movement to support us we, as individuals,
can't hope to change people's sexist and homophobic
attitudes. Those attitudes are formed and supported by an
ideological system which goes far beyond the workplace and
far beyond what we can counter as individuals.
There are no easy answers to these questions or problems,
and it is certainly wrong to suggest that the answers lie solely
in work place and trade union struggles. For a start some
people might feel too isolated to ask any of these questions,
their needs may be best met through self-help groups. Others
may be aware of the questions but feel too unsupported in

Gay Left 5

many delegates, that at times those of us who saw ourselves

as having a major commitment to that movement might have
wondered how we'd achieved anything in the last ten years
because we would have been too busy "chatting, having cups
of tea, or socialising". If I wanted to be as dismissive as many
of those delegates, I might say that perhaps the Left has
failed to reach the masses in the last ten years precisely
because it refuses to see the importance, within the context
of political activity, of "chatting, socialising and having cups
of tea".
It is not my intention to go through the ins and outs of
what went on at the conference because that won't mean a
lot to those who were not there, but what I do want to try
and do here is say why I and many others were opposed to
the conference motion which was passed by a narrow but not
an overall majority.

The movement has also taught those of us who are

socialists the need to make connections between the struggle
for the control of our lives with the struggles of other people.
Paragraph two of the motion, in an oblique way, suggests an
understanding of that relationship for it calls on the labour
movement "to support the struggles of gay people for their
own liberation". It would be meaningless to call on the
labour movement to do this if the struggles of both move-.
ments didn't in many ways complement each other. This is
another necessary reason for making a strong statement of
support of the gay movement and its role in.the struggle for
gay rights at work come first in any gay rights at work conference motion.

One important aspect of the conference was that those

delegates who spoke earlier in the day and supported the
motion later on, mirrored the attitudes and priorities
reflected in the motion. This is of course no mere accident,
just as it was no mere accident that so many delegates dismissed the gay movement as being an irrelevance, consistently told us about all the other struggles we had to support as
trade unionists before we could expect other trade unionists
to take up the struggle for gay rights, consistently reduced all
struggle to the level of trade union and workplace struggles,
consistently patronised us, "I don't know if you've heard of
Derek Robinson" one delegate asked us, and finally totally
ignored in the agenda presented to us the vital question of
sexism in the workplace and the trade union movement.
What this motion and many delegates fail to recognise is
that the oppression which lesbians and gay men face is not
formed in the workplace but reflected and reinforced both in
the workplace and in the trade union movement. Thus without strong women's and gay movements we are being asked
to work in organisations which are oppressive because of
their sexism, and at the same time we are asked to believe
that either sexism is irrelevant to the struggle for gay rights
or as I stated earlier will disappear with gay rights campaigns.
A cursory look at the last ten years tells us this isn't so. I
know of no attempts by the traditional left to take up sexual
politics unless they have been forced to do so by those working in the women's and gay movements. It has only been at
our insistence, that sexual politics are an essential strand in
any socialist practice that the left has responded. It has never
initiated a single campaign around gay rights at work, let
alone the more difficult critiques of the rampant sexism of
the labour movement and its structures and organisations.
However what I am not saying is that we should ignore
the labour movement or not bother with workplace struggles
because they are sexist. Obviously most lesbians and gay men
are discriminated against in the workplace and obviously non
discriminatory clauses protect us against the worst excesses
of homophobia and help to raise people's consciousness while
we fight for them. I also recognise that a lot of support has
been given in some union struggles by the far left and this
support has enabled us to mount much more effective campaigns than we could possibly manage on our own. But
because the fight for gay rights at work can only deal with a
part of the oppression we face, we have to take our sexual
politics we have learnt in autonomous movements with us.

The importance of the gay movement

In so far as the motion of the Gay Rights at Work Conference
is concerned, I would argue that a commitment to autonomous movements in general and the gay movement in
particular is a priority and should come first in any motion
on gay rights at work. If it were not for the gay movement
we would not have the identity or consciousness necessary
to demand gay rights in the first place; it is not the trade
union movement or the workplace which has enabled us to
even begin to think about the need and importance of
coming out at work, or the importance of fighting victimisations; our involvements in the gay movement has given us
this strength.
6 Gay Left

This recognition of the importance of the gay movement

also underpins my criticisms of the final paragraph of the
motion. One of the strengths of the gay movement has been
its concern with ways of creating groups in which people can
work together around various campaigns in a more open and
relaxed way. This doesn't mean we believe in no programmes,
no structures, no chairing or no agendas, but it does mean we
want to encourage people with varying abilities and varying
needs to feel more able to become involved in a campaign,
and more able to communicate ideas from one's own
experience, even if that experience doesn't appear to be the
most "right on" ever stated. The other strength of gay movement meetings is the implicit belief, because of the history of
the gay movement, that meetings are not just about activists
coming together, working out a plan of action and then
going home to a "private life". In the best sense they're
about creating political and personal meeting points in our
lives. This bringing together of what is generally considered
two separate parts of our life leads to a much more supportive atmosphere and I think this enables people to become
involved in things who would otherwise feel too nervous, or
too unsure. We need to be aware therefore of the myriad
points of oppression we face as lesbians and gay men and
work out structures which give us personal support and
enable us to continue with our campaigning.
The success of this approach can be seen in the dozens of
groups listed in Gay News and though we may raise our eyebrows and sigh a little that few if any of these groups are
explicitly socialist, they have spawned and survived in a way
that gay socialist groupings never have. Why this is so can't
si mply be explained by a put down of the gay movement as

being petit bourgeois it does have something to do with

people's perceived needs. Obviously dozens of listings in Gay
News doesn't signify the imminent downfall of capitalism.
Neither is there much cohesion between groups. The gay
movement is fragmented and the co-option of the movement
into a gay consciousness "a la capitalism" has to do with our
inabilities as gay socialists to connect our politics and campaigns to the needs of the thousands of lesbians and gay men
who participate in the movement. Thus an understanding of
those structures and the need for them would certainly help
U S.
The final paragraph of the motion shows no comprehension of this problem. The calling for representatives and
delegates in itself doesn't guarantee commitment or discipline
-- those things cannot be imposed by some conference
organising committee, they are more likely to arise out of
people's own recognition of the need for a gay rights at work
campaign, and that recognition has to be cultivated within
the dozens of groups which comprise the gay movement.

Political positions
Earlier I stated that the line which dominated the Gay Rights
at Work Conference was no mere accident and of course
neither is this reply. These two political positions occur
within a political climate in which the spaces created by all
of us, the rights which have been hard won by various groups
since the advent of the welfare state, are under attack. What
we need to be clear about within this context, is that the
arguments here, reflected in the conference but obviously
going beyond them, are not about the need to defend those
space and rights. Nor are the arguments about the need to
create working relationships between different groups of
oppressed and exploited people. We, as gay socialists, are all
aware of that regardless of our disagreements. For instance,
as a teacher and a National Union of Teachers member, I am
no less aware than a miner or a woman in a factory, of
employers harassing and victimising workers; no less aware of
lousy wage negotiations which divide workforces or are
insufficient to live on; no less aware of infringements by
employers of agreed policies; no less aware that at all times,
but especially now, with cuts, rising unemployment and the
attack on all workers of the right to effective picketing and
striking that a strong union calling on all members to
organise against those attacks is essential.
But what I am arguing about is that however important an
understanding of and organised opposition to the above is, it
is not the source of all of our oppression. It has been this
latter message which has been at the forefront of the
struggles of all autonomous movements and those movements
have spoken in an urgent and creative way to the needs of
thousands of people who were and still aren't reached by
traditional left politics. The needs of people to understand
more about the ways society shapes our consciousness and at
the same time inhibits our ability to question, challenge,
organise and fight back, in every institution in society and in
all spheres of our life, is no less important now than it was in
the early seventies. The need to turn to other lesbians and
gay men when mechanistic, workerist politics either exhausts
us or doesn't appear relevant to our particular needs is no less
i mportant now either. The need to define for ourselves our
own areas of work and our different structures to deal with
that work is equally valid now. The need to assert that the
criticisms of the women's movement and the gay movement
about the sexism and heterosexism, which is oppressive, in
the workplace and the unions is needed more now than ever
before. Because if that oppressive power isn't eradicated
many struggles will be lost as people say, "why should I
bother? The people are cold, and oppressive, I don't understand the jargon, the struggle doesn't appear to connect to
my needs".
What I am arguing against is the politics reflected in the
motion passed at the Gay Rights at Work Conference which
elevates one type of crude workerist politics, within the context of the workplace, as the essential politics, indeed as the
only politics. What I am also arguing against, and which I

think is also heavily implied in the motion, is a shopping list

approach to gay rights at work campaigns and a sort of
politics which says "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch
yours". Why should we as lesbians and gay men always have
our demands framed within the context of "be good trade
unionists and revolutionaries on everything else, then
workers, trade unionists and the far left will recognise your
rights"? Our rights and our criticisms shouldn't depend on
that approach. After all blacks and women don't figure
greatly in trade union organisations or as militant workers,
but I've never heard trade unionists or the far left ever say
we're not going to recognise the needs of women or blacks
until they start coming to trade union meetings, support a
thousand other struggles, or join far left organisations that
type of racism and sexism would be totally unacceptable.
But when it comes to gay rights, our rights never stand forthemselves. Somehow it seems we're not quite acceptable, or
our rights aren't, until we've gone around exhausting ourselves as rubber stamp revolutionaries. And even if we do that
and win a non-discriminatory clause from our unions, there is
no guarantee that it will be anything more than a paper
motion, sat on by executives and ignored by other workers,
trade unionists, and the left until we as lesbians and gay men
say once again, why isn't it being advertised, talked about
and implemented. I would argue that the only guarantee
against that happening is not through the motion passed, but
by strong and angry women's and gay movements proclaiming very long and very loud that the issues we raise about our
oppression in the workplace affect everyone. Gay rights at
work will then mean something.
How we achieve a strong and angry gay movement with a
socialist current running through it, especially as the movement is so fragmented at present, is a difficult area to think
through. I don't feel as an individual writing this article in
my kitchen, on my own, that I can provide the answer. However I think that debate needs to be started and I think all of
us as gay socialists have a responsibility to make sure that
autonomous movement politics and their vital messages are
not lost. Our politics can and must inform everyone, not
only in defensive battles against a right wing Tory government, but in demands about what we expect during any
struggle for socialism, and what we want our present and
future lives to be like. For as I stated in a personal-political
article in Gay Left No. 8: "... I feel that only by piecing
together our gayness and our socialism and combining it with
collective action can we defend and advance the gains of the
gay and women's movements. I can't say capitalism will
crumble tomorrow, next week or in a year because of our
action, but I know that without it 'Socialism and the New
Life' will remain a mere slogan." That message seems more
i mportant now than a year ago. The responsibility for seeing
it put into effect lies with us.

Gay Left 7

Socialism, Feminism &

Socialist Feminism

by Ros Coward

This article was originally written as a discussion paper for a

women's caucus. Though addressing itself specifically to the
question of socialist feminism, it raises issues which are
central to the concerns of gay socialists and to the left
generally.

Introduction
That we need a "new perspective on socialist politics" has
almost become a commonplace on the left. That socialist
feminism might provide the solution, or at least the model,
for what this new perspective might be is no less common an
opinion. Witness the enthusiasm which greets the possibility
of a new alliance between libertarian leftists and socialist
feminists around the perspective suggested by Sheila Rowbotham in Beyond the Fragments.
But while many feminists themselves believe that socialist
feminism will be a necessary direction for any effective
socialist politics, the relish for this perspective from male
leftists seems to many like a strange state of affairs. It is
strange for two reasons. First of all, many feminists have
returned to mixed socialist groups and campaigns because of
the political climate, only to be confronted with the realisation that very little has changed in the years of our absence.
Not only do many left groups proceed in their old ways
often bureaucratic, always pleasureless but also we find
that the issues which have been so central to feminism,
questions of sexual relations and practices, contesting of
ideological forms are still not central to the projects of
many left groups. Not surprisingly women continue to find
these ways of working not only oppressive but offensive too.
In short, we are still angry.
Secondly, it is strange for socialist feminists to find themselves promoted to holding the potential solution by British
socialism at this moment. If we championed that confidently
before, it is quite clear that our own movement is now in
some kind of a crisis too. It's that sense of a crisis which I
want to consider because it can tell us what are the problems
confrontin g socialist feminism, what is distinctive about
socialist feminism and whether this distinctive path can at
this stage be compatible with left and libertarian groupings.

The crisis of socialist feminism

Many socialist feminists feel that the movement is in some
kind of crisis, because of a crisis of fragmentation, of the
lack of any overall demands or network by which a series of
feminist issues can be put together or find a unified
expression. This crisis is experienced as more or less serious
by various groupings depending quite a lot on political
positions but it is rare to find anyone who does not acknowledge some kind of lack. The disintegration of various information networks, the disapperaance of the large conferences
and the turbulence of the realm of women's theory have
generated a gargantuan nostalgia for the days of 'the
Women's movement'. Whether or not the Women's movement ever was a coherent entity as we sometimes dispute
doesn't seem relevant here. The fact is that nostalgia is an
expression of a wish and clearly the majority of us recognise
the need for more contact between groups, more
co-ordination over campaigns and indeed the need for a
specifically feminist / socialist-feminist perspective on
politics in general. After all, it is the promise of such a perspective, combined with the supportive structures, which are
the grounds for many of us remaining almost exclusively in
feminist politics rather than working as feminists in mixed
groups.
Yet at the same time, it is possible to find just as many
socialist-feminists who dread the thought of returning to the

8 Gay Left

open conferences and meetings which had no more point of

unification or common objectives than just being a woman.
Faced with that dread, the fragmentation into specific areas
of work and politics Women in Entertainment, Women in
Housing etc are welcomed developments, where women
can discuss political perspectives as feminists, but starting
from problems arising out of a particular area of struggle.
Here at last are structures where political aims and objectives
are not given in advance by some general theory of 'capitalism' or 'male oppression'. Simultaneously, though, women
acknowledge the need to overcome the isolation of these
particular campaigns or issue-conferences. Even if you may
not hanker after the return to women's conferences, you
nevertheless recognise that there are points of contact
between the various issues, and what is more important, that
there should be. We continue to identify an overall problem,
variously designated as 'the position of women in general' or
`sexism in society' which requires overall, co-ordinated
solutions. It requires still a politics which can formulate and
express what we recognise to be an overall problem. The cosy
vision of a world populated by the small socialist feminist
groups can't deal with the wider political questions. It can
neither fuel immediate campaigns which need broader
support nor can it transform existing politics, if it never
presents itself as a wider based political movement.
These contradictory feelings among socialist feminists
point to the crux of the matter. And that is the unresolved
state of what feminist objectives actually are. The story of
the dilemma of socialist feminism is too old to be worth
repeating here. Everyone knows the problems of a political
position which refuses to just be about women, but also
refuses to just add on women's issues to existing left
strategies and objectives. Once you make the claim to have a
perspective that will actually transform the existing ways of
working and existing objectives on the left, and decide that
autonomous women's groups or caucuses are the ways to
achieve this, then you are committed to some notion, however minimal, that being a woman is a basis for political
action. And this is still our problem as socialist feminists: we
don't know quite how to understand or what to do with that
potential basis for unification.
I want to suggest that it is very important, perhaps our
most important political task, that we do confront this
problem because it seems to me to condense a whole number
of other political questions.

The political problem

What are these political questions? And why should defining
women's politics be so crucial for them?
They relate to questions of alliances between groups. For
example the objectives of one political movement, the
women's movement might be, for the time being, quite
different from those of an existing left group. The problem
then is, should these objectives be merged to produce new
socialist feminist objectives; if that seems tactically unwise
should either movement seek unity with the other; and
finally how could this form of alliance ever be achieved?
The issue raised here seems to be one of what kind of
political theory we have. This is an important question
because it is the lack of an effective political theory which to
some extent underpins a general crisis in socialism at the
moment. Disillusion with the idea of a socialist party (either
a traditional marxist leninist or a labourist idea or an avantgardist notion) is now quite widespread. Most socialists now
recognise that the reason why socialist parties do not have
any real mass support is because socialism itself is now dis-

credited, and the blame for this cannot be laid exclusively at

the door of Tory controlled media. Existing socialist programmes seem not to arise from the facts of people's existences nor answer people's needs in any real way. In this context, virtually anything written on socialism now includes
the index of approved activities extra-parliamentary,
popular activities which are recognised to be bringing other
issues into the arena of 'the political' and are capable of
mobilising some kind of mass-support, eg anti nuclear campaigning, tenants groups, the women's movement etc.
Although these activities are now recognised as 'political',
and no longer consigned to the scrap heap of bourgeois
deviation and marginality, people still go on talking about a
crisis on the left, a crisis of fragmentation the problem of
how to articulate these various activities into a perspective
for socialism. Once we have travelled along this road in agreement, then all hell breaks loose. Because the routes out of
here are multiple. Do we need broad democratic alliances
between interest groups; do we need a party to articulate
these various interest groups in some kind of hierarchy;
should politics be completely rethought in a way that bipasses the question of the party and its relation to
parliament? All this at first may seem to be a diversion from
the questions which I first raised of what are feminist objectives from a position of socialist feminism and what is the
relation of feminism to being a woman, but they are not such
radically different issues. For in thrashing out what feminist
objectives are and how they might be achieved we precisely
confront the question of what is the basis of alliances
between various groups and the question of whether any of
these political movements has the capacity or the desire to
translate itself into an overall political perspective.

between private and public, effective feminist politics have

never really raised issues in the way suggested by this
approach, ie as a strategic lever to a broadening out of
political issues in general. Instead we have had classical
divisions between campaigns dealing with parliamentary
legislations and reforms on the one hand (discrimination
against women), and women's issue campaigns on the other
(abortion etc). The other issues, though present, have largely
been a matter for discussion, for theory or for construction
of utopias. Moreover, the effectivity of all these politics has
precisely been based on women constituting themselves as
women, in women's groups, as women's caucuses in mixed
groups. In other words, feminism has constructed itself as a
gendered movement, even to the extent that most of us have
sat through embarrassing occasions where the expulsion of
transvestites from women's conferences/groups has been discussed. I have already said that many of us dislike a politics
which assumes that 'being an anatomical woman' is enough.
But the fact that feminism has constituted itself as a movement based on gender is not the same as this at all. It has
constituted itself as a gendered movement in response to a
real problem, out there in society. Because this society does
recognise anatomical basis and construct basis and division
on that difference. This is not to deny that different
discourses produce different representations of men and
women but it is completely misguided to assume that all discourses are totally distinct from each other and are not just
constructed as distinct by our theorisation of them as discourses.

The bases of feminism

I would contend right from the start, against some positions
now prevalent amongst socialist feminists that feminism as a
politics is about being a woman, whether we like it or not. In
fleeing from the Scylla of the radical feminist 'womanhood'
as the basis for political action, socialist feminists have been
sucked into Charybdis, the whirlpool where concrete men
and women disappear, to be spewed out as 'categories' produced in discourse. The political concomitant of this has
been to say that what feminism has raised politically are not
questions of 'the oppression of women' but issues about 'the
domestic', 'the social', the arrangement of the home and the
hierarchies of relations within the home (a position exemplified by the journal M/F). We need not think, according to
this argument, that there is any pregiven antagonism between
men and women, resulting from the fact that they are
anatomically men and women.
This is a sympathetic political position for socialist
feminists. For one thing, socialist feminists have always seen
the contradiction/antagonism between men and women as
one contradiction amongst many, and not the only source of
oppression in this society. For another, it is quite clearly the
case that 'men' and 'women' are not produced the same in
all discourses. Even within the same institution, the mass
media for example, there are a variety of ways of interpellating or addressing 'womanhood', ranging from 'mother'
to `sex-object'. What's more, the difference between these
various categories of womanhood can be the very source of
contradiction, and provide the basis of women's politicisation. Thus the position which argues against any idea of
essential men and women, and argues instead for the
theorisation of sexual difference and its effect in a variety of
social practices seems an initially attractive description of
what socialist feminism is about.
There are two major related problems with this position.
First of all, it doesn't accurately reflect how feminism or
socialist feminism have operated as political movements.
Secondly, because of this, it has dangerous political
implications in actually dissolving all that was most radical
about women's politics.
In spite of the wealth of literature on personal politics,
and the need to rethink domestic relations and divisions

Once we recognise that discourses and practices do not

take place in isolation from one another but are constituted
in their inter-relation, a striking feature appears. While
various discourses and practices may interpellate men and
women differently, all discourses in our society nevertheless
construct 'man' and 'woman' as significant differences. That
central difference bears witness to the way in which in our
society a gendered distinction is attributed with immense
significance. It is perhaps the most significant distinction by
which identities are presupposed. Society constantly recognises us as gendered subjects, albeit in a variety of very
different ways.
A man can walk around at night alone, a woman can't. If
a man walks down the street in the day, different things
happen or don't happen. Anatomical women are constantly
and continuously recognised as women. We are still, decades
after Simone de Beauvoir, the gendered minority. What we
do is explainable by our behaviour as a minority. All our
achievements are done in the name of our sex, and all our
failures and peculiarities are the effect of being 'the sex'. We
are 'the sex' because we are sexed, while men are the univerGay Left 9

sal, mankind, the subject which does not have to be sexed.

So, I think, feminism has arisen again over the last decade as a
response to this constitution of us as gendered, and oppressed
as a result of gender. The various discourses and practices
may do it differently, indeed many of us would admit that
our constitution as women in some institutions and practices
does give us advantages. But the fact is, in general, we are
recognised by our anatomy as women, and in general this
leads to our treatment as an inferior group.
That's the first point: the unavoidability of gendered subjects. But as we all know, that's where the women's movement started and the story after that has been long and
complex. I've already said that women are not treated homogeneously in all social practices, and women may get more
advantages in one area than others, like their treatment in
work. Because of this complexity, feminist politics has
touched on a whole variety of issues and struggles not
reducible to issues of antagonism between gendered subjects \
Beyond the Fragments has drawn attention to the way in
which feminist politics have coincided with or initiated a
whole series of democratic struggles about work-place and
community care, challenging traditional hierarchies and
exploring the question of what kinds of life style might break
down these hierarchies. But again, it is worth pondering for a
moment what these anti-authoritarian perspectives on
questions of private/public divisions, organisation of leisure
etc have been based on. And here we come up against something interesting. Much of what is distinctive about feminist
and socialist-feminist politics has its origin in the possibilities
opened up by the deconstruction of gendered identity which
feminism began to explore.
I would claim that contemporary feminism does have
certain distinctive features. They become very apparent
whenever you attend meetings about `women's issues' that
aren't organised by feminists. For example, Labour Party
meetings on women's rights, while informed by and often
attended by feminists, tend to have no real language about
`sexism' in general. Every so often, there will be enraged
complaints about representations of women, or the degrading language used against Margaret Thatcher as a result of her
being a woman. These comments have no real place; they
came like unexpected squalls and buffet the discussion about.
Women's movement meetings tend to know that it is precisely these questions that are under scrutiny. The 'outside'
of legislation and policy representations, languages,
attitudes these are precisely our problems. And this distinctiveness is premised on a confrontation of our construction as women. What this confrontation has made possible
are the first tentative steps onto the no-man's land of socialist politics questions of identity, the unconscious, pleasure,
needs. It is this which has made feminism defiantly open to
the idea that the socialist tradition may now have got it
wrong about what are the sources of conflict and antagonism
amongst people.

The question of identity

There are several ways in which the deconstruction of identity has become and is an issue. Firstly, having said that
feminism is premised on the idea of gendered subjectivity, it
should simultaneously be acknowledged that feminist politics
and theory is also the place where the naturalness and
inevitability of that subjectivity has been questioned. From a
variety of perspectives, not all psychoanalytic, women have
confronted the precariousness of the coincidence between
anatomy and female identity. Confronting our pasts is always
a confrontation with a multitude of identities which have
been refused, peopling our memories like the partially dead
in purgatory. Society may recognise us because we are
anatomically women, but that's no guarantee that the riot
of emotions, of aggressivity, of dominance and so on, can be
beaten into correspondence with the presumed identity of
anatomical women. In fact the closer you looked the more
everything would disintegrate. Could you really say unequivocally that you were heterosexual or homosexual; could you
really say unequivocally that you were very "feminine" or
actually quite "masculine"? Weren't these options a whole

10 Gay Left

Cartoon from the 2nd edition of Sourcream

published by Sheba Feminist Publishers,
183 Swaton Road, London E3.
Jo Nesbitt
Printed by the Onlywomen Press.
series of constructs with which you temporarily coincided
only to suffer the return of the repressed in other areas of
your life? In fact, couldn't we begin to think about identity
as something formed only in a given context, in a process of
exchange with another person?
The inevitable question then arose: why was it that the
construct of identity in sexual relations with men could be
the basis for forms of oppressive actions and experiences in
society in general? Such a question could and has provoked
a mass of answers and comments. Not all women experience
sexual relations with men as oppressive, although most
feminists recognise the thin dividing line between the politics
of representation and the politics of the bedroom. But perhaps most striking about the responses to such questions was
the recognition of our own complicity in the identity formed
in our exchange with men, the recognition that perhaps certain needs and desires were being satisfied that lead us into
conflict and antagonism elsewhere. As Barbara Taylor and
Sally Alexander so felicitously put it in their article in the

New Statesman

Did not Freud help us to understand that in learning to

love men we learn also to subordinate ourselves to them?
The ropes which bind women are the hardest to cut,
because they are woven with so many of our own desires.
It is this line of enquiry that has led many feminists into
conflict with existing socialist organisations and perspectives.
We may agree with much that male socialists say and do; we
may even love them. But they are also a source of conflict
and danger. Given the average male leftist's resistance to an
exploration of what is involved in style and identity, in
modes of talking, and resistance to exploring what is implied
in the language and images they use, they are also potential
enemies. They are the bearers potentially of forms of identity on which hierarchies of domination and subordination
are constructed. Where this logic does not go, from a feminist
perspective, is to 'men, the main enemy'. We are ready to
acknowledge that power relations are constructed just as
readily within gay relations, and interestingly not just
through the adoption of masculine and feminine roles within
those relationships. What we have begun to recognise for
example is that many of the problems of submission arise
from the exclusivity of sexual love and passion. For women,
many of the problems of feeling oppressed within relationships are not so much because men treat women badly but
because of the disappointments and dangers entailed in the
desire to love and be loved totally. And that trajectory is as
likely to construct dangers and inequalities between two
people of the same sex.

All that knowledge was there in the early days of the

modern women's movement, with its critique of monogamy,
but our resentful retreat from the fray as a movement is witness to the terrible problems and threats which that trajectory awakened. Very few people have been able to break with
the needs and desires, the dependency and possessiveness
that a sexual relationship constructs within this society.
Where they have, they are as often as not branded as exploitative. Confronted with these often harrowing encounters
with the forms of oppression connected with the construction of sexual identity, the responses have been multiple
within feminism. There has been the emergence of political
lesbianism, not the worse for being political, in that it
registered a protest against men; there have been various
more or less successful attempts at collective living; perhaps
the least painful and most successful response to these
questions has been the affirmation of female friendship, in
the context of political work, an example of the nonhierarchical challenge to identity

Feminism and socialism

What all of these have raised implicitly is a protest against an
uncritical acceptance of the identities and styles which
society has moulded us in. That then is one of the reasons
why feminism is always in a potentially antagonistic relation
to traditional socialist groups. For issues such as these have
never been of any priority within socialism. And it is for this
reason that a feminist perspective potentially opens out onto

a different perspective as to what the sources of discontent

and misery within society may be. Because it does not
assume that all conflicts are given within and derive from
economic relations, it may also be open to the possibility
that hierarchies of power and instances of oppression are by
no means confined to economic inequalities. It is a reductionist view of socialism to assume that socialism is only concerned with economic inequalities. Anyone could disprove
that assertion. Except in its most statist form socialism has
regularly presented itself as the vision of a society where all
areas of life are democratised. Socialism's problem is another
one. It hasn't developed a way of hearing what the sources of
discontent are; it hasn't developed a vision or a politics which
either explores these or offers any alternatives. And the
rejection of the element within feminism which seeks to do
just that is only another instance of socialism taking the
wrong turning.
In this piece I've argued almost deliberately (but also compulsively) from what might be construed more as a radical
feminist than a socialist feminist perspective. I've not considered all the areas in which socialist feminism has traditionally intervened, and its obvious interrelation with traditional
left groups. This is not because I don't think all that is vitally
i mportant. It is because I think that the kind of issues raised
by confronting the problem of what are women's politics in
their specificity, as being an effect of relations with men, are
perhaps those issues which hint at the new perspectives for
socialist regeneration. This is not to suggest that the future
of socialist feminism is either exclusively the small group, or
has nothing to do with parliamentary forms or parties. It is
not a vision of the left transformed into a vast consciousness
raising group. It is an argument that insists that the issues
raised by considering what are 'men' and 'women', what do
their relationships do to each other, how do those relationships get inscribed and reinforced in various institutions and
practices, may well be the way to learning about how to
think about needs in general. And it is this which we must
consider if we are to produce a politics which has any chance
of capturing anybody's imagination.

Conclusion
It would seem that the assumptions now current that the
ti me is ripe for a socialist feminist regeneration of the left
are perhaps problematic. For they seem to be based on a
playing down of those areas of enquiry which have given
feminism its specific colour, which have themselves arisen as
a response to social pressures. A regrouping of the left which
fails to take on board these areas of enquiry will only repeat
the mistakes of its predecessors.

Gay Left 11

Geoff Brighton:
Anatomy of a
Campaign
by Peter Bradley
On Friday December 7th 1979, as I was preparing to go out
for a bop, Geoff Brighton phoned and told me about his
medical examination the day before. When I put the phone
down, I had heard a clear, horrifying case of discrimination
against a gay person in education and one that needed fighting. As I write this (in May 1980) the campaign to defend
Geoff is to all intents over and won. I think it's worth examining this campaign, for I'm sure it will not be the last time
gays will need to organise to defend an individual.
Geoff Brighton is a final year student in agricultural
science at Leeds University, taking his finals in summer 1980.
Wishing to become a teacher, he applied to do a Postgraduate Certificate of Education, again at Leeds, starting in
autumn 1980. Leeds University Department of Education
accepted Geoff conditional upon his passing his finals and
the routine medical examination. On December 6th he was
examined by a Dr Ryan of Leeds University Student Health
(LUSH), who pronounced him medically fit to teach but sent
him for a routine blood test. Then Geoff was unexpectedly
asked to return to LUSH, where Dr Ryan said that he had in
the interim noticed on Geoff's medical record that Geoff was
a homosexual in 1978. When Geoff confirmed that he is still
homosexual, Dr Ryan said that this cast a different light
upon things and that Dr Ryan would not issue a medical
certificate until Geoff had been examined by a psychiatrist.
Geoff had long been openly gay, active in the University
Gaysoc and in the local gay community (he had casually
mentioned his gayness to a doctor at LUSH in 1978, which is
how it was on file) and argued at length with Dr Ryan. In the
end Dr Ryan delivered the ultimatum: no psychiatric examination no teaching career.
Isolated, Geoff gave in. However, going home, he talked it
over with Martin, with whom he lives, and decided to fight
(John Warburton went through a similar change of decision
the day his storm broke). Having decided to fight, Geoff
sought support from Leeds Law Centre, the NCCL, and
the London Gay Teachers' Group which is how I, as its
secretary, came in.
When such a blatant injustice occurs, there is a temptation
i mmediately to rush into campaigning; but I believe this
should be firmly resisted. Campaigns are important: won,
they build the strength of the gay community; even lost campaigns teach us things about our position in society that we
learn no other way. But a full-blown campaign lasting
months or years against an entrenched opposition can devastate the campaigners: 'too long a sacrifice can make a stone
of the heart'. The person around whom the campaign is being
fought particularly needs great strength to withstand the
pressure of meetings, demos, media coverage and the toll on
one's personal life.
So we didn't rush into a campaign. Instead Geoff went
back several times to reason with Dr Fraser (head of LUSH,
on whose orders Dr Ryan had been acting). If Dr Fraser had
reversed his decision then it would have been a mute,
inglorious end but it would have got Geoff on his chosen
course as an openly gay person, a not insignificant victory.
To rush into a campaign for battle-lust and without caring
for the needs of the individual for whom you claim to be
fighting is monstrously irresponsible.
Only when Dr Fraser confirmed as immutable his original

12 Gay Left

referral of Geoff to the psychiatrist did the serious choice

arise: to comply with Dr Fraser's demands, or to challenge
them. It was important that that decision be Geoff's alone, as
he would have to live with its consequences. It's also important that anyone faced with such a decision should be
assured of support by the gay community, whether that
decision is yes or no; and if the injustice is great, it's often
difficult for gay activists to accept and respect the fact that
there will be people who will say no. On the other hand,
where someone is willing to fight, they should be assured of
support. It is one very real measure of our strength in this
country that someone like Geoff can feel able to take a
stand, knowing he'll be supported; it was not always so.
Geoff did decide to fight, and I believe his was an informed
decision that is, as informed as anyone's can be before one
has actually undergone the experience.
The modern gay movement wants to redefine what it
means to be gay. Starting from the premise that gay is good
we assert that for gays our happiness, well-being and sanity
depend on coming out: integrating our gayness into all areas
of our lives. The whole movement and groups within it are
i mportant in this process but we often also advance through
the achievements of individuals. Like the black woman in
Alabama who refused to go to the back of the bus, sparking
off a civil rights struggle, when John Warburton refuses to
promise not to discuss gayness in class and Geoff Brighton
refuses to go to the psychiatrist, they extend the range of
possible ways of being gay, and reduce the number of ways
we can be oppressed, for all gay people. Because individual
cases can strengthen the whole gay community. As in Geoff's
case, such challenges become a testing ground for society's
attitudes, and the fight to make that gay person's challenge
successful can turn into a campaign with widespread ramifications with the establishment closing ranks to defend the
status quo and calling on great efforts from the gay
community.

Campaign: organisation, aims, materials

The London Gay Teachers' Group learned many things from
the John Warburton campaign which could be applied to
fighting Geoff's case. One big lesson was that a campaign

should be speedy John's went on for over two years,

exhausting all participants. In Geoff's case we had an Easter
deadline for work in the university, a major area of the campaign, since student activism evaporates in the summer term
because of exams. A second big lesson of the Warburton
campaign concerned the importance of good organisation
and co-ordination as opposed to a haphazard reacting to
events. The Geoff Brighton campaign then was co-ordinated
by a Leeds-based committee, the Leeds Campaign for the
Defence of Gay Students, of which I was a member. Internally, the Committee was well-organised a box number
address, a treasurer and bank account, and the minutes of
meetings so that progress on promises could be monitored.
It first met eight days after Geoff's initial interview with the
doctor and drew up a list of aims and outlined areas for campaigning in remarkable fullness.
From the outset it was decided that our campaign should
not just seek justice for Geoff but raise broader issues, and
that we should aim (a) at getting LUSH to adopt a positive
position on gay students' needs, and (b) at raising locally and
nationally the general issues e.g. medicine's role in oppressing
homosexuality. However, although we planned our campaign
as best we could, many things couldn't be foreseen and the
realities of campaigning often altered our tidy plan!
All material produced by LCDGS was designed with a
double purpose firstly to inform, then to suggest courses
of action. There was a poster, and a more detailed information sheet. Individuals were invited to sign a petition
groups to pass a resolution. One interesting feature of this
resolution was that all who passed it were asked to notify the
fact to: (a) Lord Boyle, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University,
(b) Dr Fraser of LUSH, (c) the BMA, (d) the GMC and
(e) the LCDGS. I believe it's difficult to overestimate the
value of this: the cumulative effect of so many groups notifying these organisations/individuals of their support for Geoff
was enormous, keeping up a constant pressure on all the
points of conflict. I believe that the threat of continuing bad
publicity that this represented was a significant factor in
prompting the university's eventual climb-down.

Launching the campaign

We wanted Geoff's story to have a big initial impact, both
locally and nationally. This precluded a haphazard release of
the story to the local press with the hope that the nationals
would take it up. Instead we planned a single co-ordinated
press release. January 10th 1980 was the date chosen, (a) to
avoid Geoff Brighton competing with Jingle Bells and,
(b) because it was Gay News' first issue date of the new year.
Barry Jackson wrote an excellent press release and issued it
in CHE's name. There was good coverage in Leeds of course
but also nationally because, by a stroke of good luck, the
Press Association took up the story. The story was not only
widely but, on the whole, fairly, even sympathetically,
reported. Afterwards, only the local media covered the story
consistently, although there were radio mentions and Geoff
appeared on the Gay Life gay teachers programme. The
national press didn't follow up the story: an event is newsworthy, a process is not. We worked closely with Gay News
and generally their coverage was detailed and of a high standard. Occasionally they needed prodding and sometimes the
conflict between their search for the newsworthy and our
need for regular supportive reporting of progress led to what
I considered inadequate coverage.

passing of the resolution and a generous donation on

December 15th were a tremendous boost at the start of the
campaign. We were able to save postage by sending campaign material through the CHE Groups' Mailing. And many
CHE groups did pass the resolution; apparently such a small
thing, yet indicating to us how much support we had, and
one more way of impressing. on Leeds University the extent
of opposition.
I have already spoken of the crucial role played by Gay
News in breaking the story and keeping interest in it alive.
Gay Activists' Alliance, Gaysocs, Gay Teachers' Groups,
GLFs, the IGA and FUORI were among the many gay
groups, nationally and internationally, who supported us and
maintained pressure, so that the Registrar at Leeds could
point to a pile of correspondence and sneer, 'Do only gay
groups support you?'

(ii) Students
I was dismayed that Geoff seriously doubted if he'd receive
the support of his own union. Yet with its Tory President
and a generally more conservative student mood, Leeds
Student Union did indeed threaten to leave Geoff isolated in
his own university. Fortunately, Dr Fraser came to the
rescue, saying in an interview with the Union President that
Geoff reminded the good doctor of ' homosexual tarts' he
had known in the forces and that he would 'probably' not
have referred Geoff to a psychiatrist if Geoff had been
heterosexual. From then on the Student Union played a
major part in the campaign on campus, publicising the story
indefatigably, organising meetings, pickets, lobbying, an
occupation, sometimes with more energy than gay political
awareness, but at least acting like a union should!
Outside the university, student unions throughout Leeds
area and over twenty unions in the UK passed the resolution.
NUS nationally? Sound and fury signifying nothing, and not
very much of that. With NUS on the verge of dropping its
gay liberation campaign, that is not surprising: it is nonetheless depressing that the next gay discriminated against can be
assured of a firm policy of no support from National NUS.

(iii) Trade Unions

It was hoped to get broad support among the trade unions
on campus and in Leeds. It was hoped ... Lord Boyle filibustered a Leeds University AUT meeting so the resolution
wasn't reached. Leeds NUT made haste slowly. The campus
unions passed motions in support, then their representatives
on the LUSH Advisory Committee voted against raising
Geoff's case. It was a story of delay where speedy support
would have been appreciated and of homophobes preventing
discussion: in short, a pretty accurate reflection of current
attitudes to gay rights in the British trade union movement.

SEEKING SUPPORT

The union most work was done in was the NUT. The issue
was obviously relevant; most activist gay teachers are NUT
activists too, and, largely as a result of their work, the left in
the NUT (Rank & File, Socialist Teachers) has begun to take
up gay questions. Half a dozen Local Associations passed the
resolution. The National Executive, despite a vigorous lobby
at NUT Headquarters, washed their hands of it because Geoff
wasn't a member. Interestingly, the Leeds representative on
the NEC said he would have supported Geoff but no one had
asked him; what you learn in the course of a campaign! In
the London Committee, Dick North suggested asking local
NUT Associations to affiliate to the LCDGS, in return for a
newsletter, suggestions for action etc. Before this could be
put into effect, Geoff won his case. It's sobering to think
how much more would have been achieved had we done this
early on.

(i) The Gay Movement

(iv) Party political

CHE emerges from this campaign with credit at every level.

Barry Jackson worked hard on relations with the media and
with the Discrimination Commission in the huge area of
lobbying the medical profession. CHE National Council's

This was the area in which least was done, reflecting the fact
that the people most closely involved in the campaign are
not involved in conventional politics or are simply disillusioned with them. Knowing their record on the ground, Geoff
was slow to approach local MPs. Local Labour Parties in

In retrospect, it's clear that our targeted campaigning

divided into two types: (a) Seeking support, (b) Applying
pressure.

Gay Left 13

Leeds and elsewhere were similar to trade unions in their

reactions gay rights are not a priority. Left groups on
campus were generally supportive. One shining exception to
the general sloth and apathy was the Liberal Party, whose
National Committee passed a resolution supporting Geoff
the day after it was contacted. That this was due to the
personal energy of its openly gay President, Michael Steed
speaks volumes. Had the campaign been prolonged, we would
have sought MPs' help more. The NCCL, supportive throughout, has a strong Parliamentary Civil Liberties Group of MPs,
to whom we could have turned. It is pointless to speculate
now how things might have evolved had we contacted MPs
earlier: it was a big campaign we didn't have the energy to
tap properly every source of support from the start.

(v) London Committee

A month after the story broke, the London Gay Teachers'
Group decided to call all interested parties to join a
committee to see what could be done in London to further
the Leeds campaign. With representatives from CHE, GAA,
NCCL, STA, R&F, and various London gay groups, the
committee worked in a number of areas before being overtaken by events in Leeds, with the successful conclusion of
the campaign.

(vi) Legal
This illustrates the proverb that where you leave no avenues
unexplored, one of them will turn out to be a cul-de-sac. We
wondered if Dr Fraser could be challenged legally: GLAD
and others quickly advised us that a doctor's clinical judgement cannot be. It was a relief not to have to add a lawsuit
to the other battles ...

APPLYING PRESSURE
(a) The Medical Profession
This section of the campaign began of course with Dr Fraser
and the not-so-luscious LUSH. We had formulated very clear
aims here, asking Fraser to drop the referral to the psychiatrist, and LUSH to adopt positive policies for dealing with
gay students. Despite enormous pressure, Fraser never conceded these demands and to this extent we failed. However
the extraordinary changes in attitudes to gayness in the
university have created a climate which will render virtually
i mpossible a repetition by Fraser of his treatment of Geoff,
and will I hope lead in time to changes even in LUSH.
Aside from LUSH, the main medical targets for campaigning were the General Medical Council and the British Medical
Association, both to be notified by every group passing the
resolution. Again, the short-term results were nugatory. The
GMC's position was that it could take no position. The BMA
upheld Fraser's clinical judgement. However, it also firmly
asserted that doctors should not hold anti-gay prejudices,
and this is a pointer to what may turn out to be the longterm results of the campaign. The medical and particularly
the psychiatric professions have long been used to oppress
gay people. This campaign, with openly gay doctors writing
to the BMA, and the CHE Discrimination Commission's
lobbying have deepened the debate on the role of medicine
and gays.

(b) The University

The campaign among the academic and administrative staff

14 Gay Left

of the university followed a troubled course. Initially, many

academics supported Geoff. When it became national news,
the whole of the administrative apparatus, in a campaign
orchestrated by Lord Boyle, was swung behind Dr Fraser.
Staff withdrew support (Privately I'm with you, publicly I
must vote against you'); a campaign of disinformation was
waged; university bodies at all levels blocked any criticism of
Fraser or expression of support for Geoff. Stalemated, we
changed tactics, asking the university, if it would not discuss
Geoff's particular case, to make a general statement that it
opposed discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
If passed, this would be a powerful, if oblique, criticism of
Fraser. With a strong rearguard action by Lord Boyle it
seemed that even this would prove too much. After four
months of campaigning we were exhausted and, it appeared,
had nothing to show for it: before us still the brick wall of
bureaucratic intransigence.
Suddenly the facade cracked. University Council passed a
resolution opposing discrimination on the grounds of sexual
orientation. They set up an inquiry to define the areas of
responsibility proper to a doctor and an education department in determining admission to a teacher-training course.
University Senate voted to seek amendments to the University Charter banning discrimination on the grounds of sexual
orientation, the first university in the UK to do so. Geoff was
seen by another Medical Officer who passed Geoff fit without referral to a psychiatrist. Dr Fraser, through whom this
certificate had to be routed, passed it on without comment
to Leeds University Department of Education who finally
accepted him for the course (let him not fail his finals now!).
Some final points: reading through the above X letters
written, Y petitions signed, Z resolutions passed it is easy
to forget how much sheer, slogging effort by so many people
resulted in those bald statistics, and what a rich diversity of
resources available in the gay community and elsewhere that
they point to..It is difficult too to convey how in a campaign
you learn, slowly and piecemeal, the details of the geography
of oppression and how best to tackle it. You learn a lot about
people yourself and others. There are days of depression
and days of elation; days when you drop out of it all. How
good you feel when people pass a resolution or send a letter;
how bad when you get disinterest or denigation. There was
my anger that individuals and institutions could tolerate
blatant prejudice; my admiration for Geoff's energy, cheerfulness and perseverance through an awful time.
The issue of gay people and the young is the most sensitive
single issue determining attitudes to gays in our society.
Lesbian custody cases, the prejudice against gay teachers,
point to this. John Warburton, 'Ms X', John Saunders, Richie
McMullen: many of the gays discriminated against in the last
five years have worked with the young; and it is frightening
to contemplate the implications for all gays of the forthcoming PIE Trial. This campaign achieved a lot, and not just
for Geoff. But in a wider context, one campaign about a
student in Leeds getting onto a teacher-training course,
barely dents all these prejudices. We have a lot to do: building the strength of the gay community, coming out more,
campaigning in trade unions, at work, creating better
curricula, fighting sexism, seeking allies and ourselves giving
support. Fortunately, this work is going on. But alongside all
this, feeding and being fed by it, there must always be space
for fighting for individuals like Geoff: their fight's our fight.

`GAY LIFE'`
DESIRE, DEMOGRAPHY AND DISAPPOINTMENT
by Mandy Merck
In February 1980, London Weekend Television debuted their much-anticipated current affairs series,
Life. It was to attract, in the words of one LWT executive, 'something no other British television teamGay
has
ever encountered a concerted boycott by a number of those who were supposed to be regular contributors to the programmes'. But ultimately many gay militants including members of the Gay Left
collective chose to lend the project a measure of critical support. In the aftermath, Mandy Merck considers the contradictions.
'Broadcaster should recognise that the whole audience is
made up of the sum of its parts.' -- John Birt, Controller of
Features and Current Affairs, London Weekend Television.
In early 1978, the Gays in Media group invited broadcasting
notables to a panel discussion at the Gay Times Festival in
London's Drill Hall. No one arrived from the BBC, and the
independent companies fielded a force of precisely two
Jeremy Isaacs, then Head of Programming at Thames, and
John Birt, Controller of Features and Current Affairs at
London Weekend 'men of liberal goodwill both', as Peter
Fiddick put it in his Guardian report.
The two execs faced a barrage of criticism about TV's
treatment of homosexuals, criticism which, to cite Fiddick
again, focused on two major concerns, the medium's antagonism to and neglect of homosexuals: 'the way homosexuals are portrayed on the box, (and) the attention that
television gives to the problems, interests, even let's face it,
the existence of the gays in our society.'
Neither programmer promised any improvements, but a
few weeks later Birt noted 'growing pressure from special
interest groups about the lack of attention they get from
television' when he announced a new Minorities Programmes
Unit within LWT's Current Affairs division. The programmes
were pegged for the Sunday lunchtime slot occupied by
Janet Street-Porter's much-praised series for teenagers, the
London Weekend Show, and were to include series on blacks,
teenagers, and gays. 'But I think,' Birt declared at the time,
`we shall be finding some other time for the gays' (11.3012.00 on Sunday night, as it turned out).

This fact was not noted when Gay Life praised the series'
anti-stereotypical attitudes in programme 8.)
Finally, in 1979, John Birt delivered an influential address
to the Edinburgh Television Festival propounding the doctrine of 'minority programming':
` Most television programmes made for the peak-time
viewer assume that there is a single and homogeneous
audience with a single cultural identity and with a single
set of values. In consequence, television fails to make
proper provision for the delicate interplay of tastes, ideologies and interests which constitute our variegated,
infinitely complex, rapidly changing and very interesting
society ... Broadcasters should recognise that the whole
audience is made up of the sum of its parts. They should
put aside the singular vision in favour of a pluralist one, in
which all significant voices are given a chance to be
heard ...'
(Left-wing exponents of this programming philosophy should.
take note of its efficiency in delivering target audiences to
the advertisers, and also the following caveat from Birt's own
lecture: )

In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that Britain's first

gay current affairs series would emanate from LWT. The
company had a reputation for 'serious' reportage consolidated by Birt and Peter Jay's work on the Weekend World
series and their manife
series and their manifesto, 'The Bias Against Understanding',
which slated television journalism for being 'slick, fast,
personalised, pictorial and down to earth' (words to ponder
when watching Gay Life). The London Weekend Show
included two programmes on homosexuality for its young
viewers (at Sunday lunchtime!). A Question of Sex (produced by the later Editor of the Minorities Unit, Jane
Hewland) covered gender roles (although stylistically it
veered between sexist light entertainment repartee; gameshow audience participation 'All right, now hold up your
weekly intercourse score sheets'; and a satire on television's
presentation of science 'This may look like a Christmas,
tree covered with ping-pong balls, but actually it's a chromosome'.)
Then the co-compere of A Queslion of Sex moved into
light entertainment proper with Agony, a comedy series
about an Anna Raeburnesque advice columnist which purported to deal progressively with TV's hitherto stereotypical
(or unmentionable) hinterlands feminism, impotence, the
gay couple living next door, etc. (But Anna Raeburn resigned
from the show in its second season, when LWT foisted a
more conventional male writing team upon her in place of
gay co-writer Len Richmond, who'd returned to the USA.

'A pluralist approach if adopted would mean that

activists should no longer attempt to persuade broadcasters or the authorities to halt, for example, programmes like Are You Being Served? because they are
offended by its gay stereotype; or to abandon advertisements or dramas or entertainments which buttress the
traditional view of women; or, if you are another kind of
activist, to stop dramas which show explicit sex ... The
more fruitful way for activists to proceed is to argue for
other programmes factual, entertainment and drama
which will express their beliefs and outlooks, but which

Gay Left 15

will coexist with other programmes. Such new programmes, if they are convincing, will cause makers of
existing programmes to adapt, not only because their
appreciation will become more sophisticated, but also
because so will the appreciation of the audience, which
will cease to be amused by older fare. Crude stereotypes
and traditional views, if that is what they be, might thus
wither away.'
In pursuit of this pluralism, the London Minorities Unit
hung out its shingle, appointed 'out' LWT staffer Mike
Attwell producer of Gay Life and recruited three black and
two gay (but no lesbian) researchers. Such a laudable effort
to hire blacks and gays is virtually unknown in the media,
but LWT's career structure, in which researchers are the
`lowliest' (to quote Jane Hewland) of the professional
programme-makers, means that an important reportorial role
(it's not just research) is undertaken by young, inexperienced
journalists whose contacts with black and gay groups and
policies are often minimal. When I, as a lesbian journalist
with five years experience on Time Out and considerable
interest in the media's treatment of sexual politics,
approached LWT about working on the series, I was discouraged from applying as journalistically and politically
over-qualified!
Nonetheless, LWT's unusual efforts suggest that British
television is not the monolith it's often made out to be a
point made in slightly more plaintive tones by the Gay Life
staff, who really did sincerely attempt what? 'the most
exciting, rewarding and important television either of us has
ever made', 'the greatest service we could do gay people .. .
to begin dispelling the ignorance and prejudice against them
from the straight world' (Jane Hewland and Michael Attwell
in Gay News, April 3, '80).
In 1976, Thames Television (sophisticated, metropolitan
London's other independent company) pulled its seven-part
documentary Sex In Our Time out of its schedules, despite a
chorus of protest from its own employees, critics, gays and
feminists. Television documentaries have a generic licence to
be 'partial' which current affairs series like Gay Life lack (see
below), and Sex was only intermittently partial. Often, as in
its very selective choice of featured interviews (e.g. the
woman who'd apparently been rendered hysterically frigid
by supposed feminist injunctions to sleep around !!??) the
Thames series surveyed 'changing social mores' with the
chilly hauteur of Lady Bracknell considering the number of
engagements in Hertfordshire. (Co-compere Sarah Dickinson
to feminist therapist Elearnor Stephens: 'Do you all lie on
the floor and masturbate?')
Nonetheless, the very inclusion of matter such as feminists
viewing slides of female genitalia displeased the watchdogs of
the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the Thames
management. In the supposed interests of 'taste, decency and
public feeling' the shows were scrapped.
And as for the British Broadcasting Corporation, a body
which traditionally regards itself as the arbiter of the range of
debate appropriate to the general commonweal is hardly
likely to endorse Birt's proposals for the dissolution of its
audience into disparate, opposing, constituencies.
Differing corporate policies, differing conventions of
representation, differing practices of professional personnel,
create a space for intervention within television. It's a space

16 Gay Left

bounded, in Stuart Hall ' s terms, by capital determining 'the

structured field in which individuals compete to be heard',
but that determination leaves a fair field for profitability
(particularly with the licensed monopolies afforded British
broadcasters). The first eight editions of Gay Life garnered a
rating of 8 (350,000 homes viewing) when a figure of 2
(80,000 homes) is considered respectable for 11.30 pm
Sunday. (It's tempting to imagine a more radical set of programmes securing even larger audiences for the advertisers,
simply because the narrow constraints of current programming render any departure sensational.)
But if television is not a unified expression of a conspiratorial bourgeois patriarchy, different companies, genres
and programmes are nonetheless affected by factors such as
legal requirements, stylistic conventions, projected audience
reactions, and professional ethics. These factors structure
'the field in which individuals compete to be heard' so subtly
that the programme-makers are often the last to recognise
them.
' We've got to accept the framework of LWT.' LMU Editor
Jane Hewland to Time Out, February 8th, 1980.
The way the LMU staff see it, Gay Life was always
beleaguered by the contradiction between its subject (homosexuals) and its intended audience (homosexuals and heterosexuals). The very fact of this contradiction suggests that the
Birt 'horses for courses' formula was not, and perhaps cannot
be, practised within current legislative and corporate restrictions. If minority programming involves in Birt's phrase, 'programmes . . . which will express (activists') beliefs and outlooks', it cannot also be required, to cite LWT Current
Affairs chief Barry Cox, to have 'understood all points of
view and . . . fairly reproduced them'. Cox's defence of Gay
Life (The Listener, May 8th 1980) pleaded the restrictions of
`broadcasting in its present state a publicly regulated scarce
resource' and the Television Act. Neither of these restrictions
is i mmutable (despite state and capitalist arguments to the
contrary, the ozone can accommodate an immense number
of competing channels, and 'due impartiality' need not be
obligatory in either a state-controlled or privately broadcast
medium).
At any rate, the 'for and about' issue was interpreted by
the Gay Life team (and to be fair, by some of their critics) as
a question of absolute gay access versus LWT-researched
`truth'. As Cox put it:
` We were bitterly criticised for including Mary Whitehouse
in Gay Life and the police in Skin on the grounds that
they had more than enough access to the media already
withput being included in 'our' shows: the journalists'
counter-argument that these attitudes were an
i mportant part of the processes and relationships under
examination went unregarded. It was this resistance to
mainstream television concepts of balance and comprehensive inquiry that precipitated the brief boycott of
Gay Life.'
There are at least two problems with this formulation:
first, the objections raised about Whitehouse's appearance in
Gay Life were much more sophisticated than Cox apparently
realised; secondly there is no single 'mainstream' of television
concepts of balance and comprehensiveness, but a varied set
of practices relevant to particular programme-makers and
television genres.

From the very start, the Minorities Unit programmes were

established within LWT's Current Affairs department. They
shouldn't have been. As the IBA guide, Television and Radio
1980 argues, the job of newscasting is to report 'what is
happening at any given time . . . the function of current
affairs programming is to help viewers understand what is
happening.' News magazines like Granada's World In Action
and LWT's Weekend World tend to enlarge upon the events
reported in the news, and the criteria for such 'newsworthiness' rarely admit any material about kids or gays, and
remarkably little about blacks. A 'riot' in Southall, or at
some British equivalent of the Stonewall might make News at
10, the daily harassment of Asians and gays would not. So
much the better, one might conclude, to give these minorities
the 'coverage' they lack. The problem is whether the current
affairs genre, with its nose for news, is appropriate to that
task.
The 11 Gay Life programmes covered the following
subjects:
February 10 Security Vetting
February 17 Male Gay Lifestyles
February 24 Child Custody and Adoption
March 2
Police Harassment of Gay Males
March 9
Gay Relationships
March 16
Discrimination against Gay Teachers
March 23
Gays in Heterosexual Marriages
March 30
Media Stereotyping
April 20
Young Lesbians
April 27
Gays in the Armed Forces
May 4
Gay Political Organisation
With the possible exception of the Blunt affair, none of these
programmes ad ties to current stories on television or in the
national press. Many of them weren't based on any particular
`story' at all. Nonetheless, they all got the current affairs
treatment, involving:
1. The relatively tiny budget and tight schedule deemed
appropriate to a series which would simply react to topical
events, rather than the planning, and research and shooting
ti me available to documentaries.
2. The legal obligations on news programmes to present
material with 'due accuracy and impartiality'. Documentary
programmes are legally and conventionally permitted far
more latitude in style, topicality and partiality, e.g. Thames'
Superman and the Bride on gender and the media; or Gone
For A Soldier, a passionate attack on British imperialism,
including its current role in Ireland, ironically broadcast by
BBC 2 opposite Gay Life on March 9. Meanwhile Gay Life
was setting up and then knocking down its own evidence on
police harassment and the unwarranted judicial bias against
lesbian custody, in the interest of providing 'a version of
events which persuades . . . straights and gays, that it has
understood all points of view and has fairly represented
them' (Cox). E.g. the notorious voice-over concluding the
custody programme 'But the courts and the adoption
agencies have in their custody the future lives of children .
Until such time that more research is available and public
attitudes have changed, we can hardly be surprised if they
opt for caution; despite the distress to gay parents.'
3. The current affairs 'style': an authoritative voice-over for
exposition, 'talking head ' interviews and lots of 'sexy'
location shots for illustration. Gay Life's interviews adhered
to traditional TV news conventions: on-site, and often noisy
and uncomfortable locations for the protagonists; professional surroundings for the experts. Often, though not
invariably, gays fell into the former ca tegory. Thus Bob Cant,
acquitted for importuning, told his story seated in the
sleaziest of cafes, while other gays in the police harassment
programme 'reconstructed' their arrests while ambling atmospherically down streets or through parks (that dirty old man
in the bushes was actually a Gay Life researcher!). Some
choices almost slipped into comedy: Zipper editor Bryan
Derbyshire filmed next to an enormous motorbike and the
ex-sailor interviewed in front of the defunct HMS Belfast
moored on the Thames. Then there was the young lesbian
who wished to become a model 'discovered' posing for a

very Blow-Up style photo session: 'A little more to the left,
darling! (click) Swing your hair! (click) Yes! (click) Marvellous! (click) etc.' (A relatively expensive and elaborate
set-up to establish this young lesbian as feminine and to
make something happen on a talky programme.)
Meanwhile, 'experts', varying from barrister Sadie Roberts
(custody) to Susan Harris, writer of LWT's Soap (stereotyping) to Gay News staffer Alison Hennegan (several programmes) were shot in a quiet room, often near signs of
expertise like books, desks and typewriters. In the last programme Jeff Weeks was filmed against a window inside
LWT's Thames-side tower, his panorama of 11 years in gay
liberation majestically (but no doubt accidentally) reflected
in the lofty perspective behind him. Mary Whitehouse didn't
get quite so exalted a treatment on the gay teachers programme, but she certainly wasn't interviewed in a greasy
spoon. Her on-camera appearance in quiet surroundings
effectively legitimised her views far more than a simple
quotation of them might have done.
Broadcasters don't consciously inscribe such codings into
their programmes: factors like location are supposedly
chosen to inject 'colour' and 'authenticity' into the proceedings. Indeed the latter consideration is so important in
choosing interviewees if you don't get the major protagonists, you scrap the story that Gay Life changed their
lesbian custody programme into one about lesbian custody
and male gay adoption after they discovered that few lesbian
mothers would be filmed. When, at their March 10 meeting
with critical gay militants, someone suggested that they film
a friend of an embattled mother explaining why she couldn't
risk appearing (good telly, n'est-ce pas?) the team's look of
bewilderment was quite remarkable.
Nor is it likely that they deliberately included the series
sub-text of little dramas (the couple who lost custody pacing
the square outside their home; the young lesbian nervously
turning a lighter in her tatooed hand as the camera goes in
for a close-up). But in a genre based on filming the visible
event, it's not surprising that such moments creep in. This
penchant for the picturesque was further supported by the
Minorities Unit's effective definition of homosexuality as a
population rather than a practice. Non-whites and teenagers
may constitute numerical minorities in Britain; although, as

Gay Left 17

Julia Mclymont argued in the March Leveller, being a

minority need not be the same as being marginal to some
ultimately reinforced white norm. Desire is even more
difficult to accommodate to demography. How can a Minorities Unit treat bi-sexuality? Are homosexual practices/
attractions/lifestyles specific only to the series' oft-described
`gay community'? (A community invariably treated as homogeneous until it split over whether to support the series,
whereupon the Gay Life team suddenly discovered a militant
minority and a quiescent majority.)
Programme two featured drag acts as a 'gay lifestyle',
'
despite acknowledging the entertainment s roots in pantomime and working class culture generally (the Salford police
en pointe). What about the heterosexual audience for pub
drag? What about straight transvestites? Significantly, the
working title for that programme was 'Gay Geography',
suggested by the team's conclusion that London's male gay
commercial culture divided into drag in the working-class
South, leather in the Wild West of Earls Court, and 'clones' in
up-market discos like Charing Cross's Heaven. Again the lure
of the picturesque produced a rather limited and to many
gays, oppressive picture of male homosexuality (people
who frequent peculiar night-clubs in peculiar costumes).
Demi-mondes are easy to map, sexuality is rather more
difficult to locate and visualize.
If Gay Life hadn't been tied down to current affairs conventions, more adventurous techniques and themes might
have been essayed. The series' single example of such experiment occurred in the stereotyping programme, when the
screen was left blank for a moment to indicate the paucity of
lesbian representations on TV. In the context of the rest of
the programme, it looked like a transmission fault. Compare
that with the opening of the suppressed Sex In Our Time
programme on homosexuality:
Compere Tony Bilbow introduced a studio discussion
about coming out between a fiery Scottish gay militant and
an unlit gentleman who refused to give his name. It wasn't
that he was embarrassed to be gay, explained Mr X; after all,
homosexuality gave the world Shakespeare and Wilde. It was
simply that it was a private matter. The Scottish militant
went berserk and practically tried to throttle his closeted
opponent, while a frantic Bilbow laboured furiously to
separate them. Finally the lights went up to reveal 'Mr X' as
Gay Sweatshop actor Drew Griffiths, author of the play by
the same name.
In that brief sequence, Sex In Our Time not only introduced the debate about coming out in an arresting manner, it
also took the precious decorum and authority of the studio
discussion and its arbiter, the on-camera presenter, and sent
them up rotten. It was Gay Life's insistence on maintaining
precisely that authority for Atwell's voice-overs that provoked the boycott against the show. In these off-camera
expositions the gay producer veered constantly between
what was termed 'society's view' (invariably seen as anti-gay)
and a very ambiguous 'we'. At the March 10 meeting
between gays (from organisations spanning Sappho, Wages
Due Lesbians, FRIEND, Gay Legal Advice, CHE, Gay
Teachers, Gay Left) and programme-makers Atwell,
Hewland, Cox and researcher Simone Mondesir, one gay man
'
recalled the voice-over s consideration of the possibility that
gay parents might 'corrupt' (i.e. influence towards homosexuality) their children. Who, another asked, was meant to
be speaking? 'Is it LWT, patriarchy, or what?' Would a gay
person regard homosexuality as corruption?
To redress this 'impartial' expression of anti-gay views and
the first four programmes' neglect of lesbians, the gay
women's organisations demanded certain conditions for their
participation in a projected programme on lesbian feminism:
1. An all-woman crew as far as possible.
2. A woman's voice-over instead of Atwell's (or none at
all).
3. Editorial consultation on the use of their interviews and
the final script.

18 Gay Left

The Minorities Unit seemed willing to concede points one

and three, and briefly even considered the second. But no TV
journalist, Editor Hewland ultimately concluded, should be
seen to concede such points to pressure groups (the spectre
of right-wing requests was appropriately dangled). 'If I'd
given way on this,' she told Time Out, 'I'd have been setting
a precedent for journalists everywhere ... we made it clear
to them that this was not an "access" slot.'
' We are not naive; we know Gay Life is not an access programme, but we also know that ordinary programmes have
ceased making racist and sexist comments under pressure.'
A Lesbian Line collective member speaking to LWT programmers, March 10, 1980).
But despite two subsequent meetings (including one in which
LWT proposed that the lesbians agree to on-camera interviews with Atwell some solution!) the Minorities Unit
never met those demands. Subsequently many gay groups
(including Gay Left) called off their boycott and LWT
declared that it had collapsed (`partly because those who had
led the attack had run too far ahead of their own supporters,
partly because most gay activists came to feel that Gay Life,
whatever its flaws, was better than no series at all' Cox).
But none of the lesbian groups who'd originally applied the
boycott appeared on subsequent programmes, and no edition
on lesbian feminism went out.
Over the last three years London gay groups (particularly
the lesbian ones) have become seasoned exponents of direct
action against media sexism. Their January 1978 sit-in at the
Evening News after its concerted attack on AID for lesbian
'
mothers (Dr. Strangelove ) secured considerable public
support and the right of reply within the paper's news (not
just letters) pages. It is widely regarded as exemplary by
many sections of the left. With even the NUJ withdrawing
from the Press Council on the grounds that it's a toothless
front for the proprietors, and the IBA held in similar contempt, it's difficult to know how else to exert pressure on
the media. Furthermore, the demands made to LWT by the
lesbian groups (and the support they got from gay men)
expressed an increasingly sophisticated understanding of TV
institutions and representations (so much so that Cox and
company may not have understood them).
Political abstention (particularly a non-unanimous
abstention) is a controversial tactic, invariably attracting
accusations of purism. And the Gay Life team's selfacknowledged gays and feminists share no values with the
gutterpress sexists of the Evening News . . . except for a
strong belief in their own professional competence and
independence. But London Weekend needs the co-operation
of London's lesbian groups if their projected 1981 Gay Life
series is to be successful. They have the time to improve their
liaison with London gays, and more importantly, to begin to
understand their sexual politics. John Birt once declared that
`researching blacks is no different from researching SALT
talks'. It obviously is as is researching homosexuality and
the subtle sexism of its representation on today's television.

Gay Liberation in Central America

Good reasons can be given as to why the gay liberation movement started in the most advanced capitalist countries. The
general change in sexual culture following the spread of
contraception, for example, and the greater social space for a
life not centred around the family. But the great issue of
gender that the contemporary women's and gay movements
have raised is certainly not something relevant only to this
particular corner of the globe. It is especially interesting,
therefore, to see how, a decade after the beginnings of gay
liberation in North America and Western Europe, our movement is now beginning to take root in the Third World.
The Mexican gay movement must be set in the context of
Mexico's particular social and political system. On the one
hand, there is a chasm between rich and poor in the cities,
and another gulf between the urban sector and the 'Indian'
peasants in the countryside. Gross disparities of income are
protected by a vast and effective repressive apparatus. On the
other hand, there is a very extensive middle class, a proportion of university students as high as in Western Europe,
and a rudimentary system of social welfare. There is a formal
framework of democracy, and opposition parties can now
campaign quite freely; yet effective power is held by the
Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI), which by its
grip on the state bureaucracy has managed for almost half a
century to gather 80 per cent or more of the popular vote
and appoint the country's powerful president.
In the late 1960s, a strong New Left grew up among
Mexico's young intellectuals, but was crushed following
demonstrations during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, with
several hundred students killed by the police. It took several
years for the climate of repression to relax somewhat, but by
the mid 1970s the left was again on the offensive.
The first Mexican gay liberationists met together as far
back as August 1971. Interestingly, the new ideas reached
them not from the USA, but from a Mexican student at
Essex university. Regular discussion meetings were held in
private apartments, and awareness groups set up explicitly
after the model of the English GLF. At its peak, some 60 or
70 people were involved, and the movement went through
many of the same ideological developments as elsewhere. The
lesbians, for example, left to start a separate group. Yet this
all took place completely in private. The combination of
machismo culture and political repression still made it
i mpossible for gay people to come out in the open.
Mexican law does not proscribe homosexuality as such.
But the gender system is far more rigid and extreme than in
the advanced capitalist countries. Among the popular classes,
independent female sexuality is severely repressed, while
boys unable to adopt the masculine role very generally go in
for transvestism as the only option open to them. If you
can't be a proper man, the only alternative is to try and be a
proper woman. In the cities, at least, there is a certain space
for gays to be tolerated in this marginal role. Transvestites
will regularly attend dances and bars in the working-class
quarters of Mexico City, and be accepted as viable partners
by 'straight' men. (I wouldn't call them 'drag queens', as that
seems to imply a degree of freedom in the role that is
precisely lacking.) Slightly higher up the social scale, spectacular drag balls and beauty contests a la ' Miss Universe'
became increasingly common in the 1960s and 1970s.

by David Fernbach

By 1978, with a certain political liberalization, a new push

forward by the left and the development of a vigorous
women's movement, the Mexican gay liberationists saw that
the time was ripe to start a public campaign. They formed
the Frente Homosexual de Accion Revolucionaria (FHAR),
the same title as used by the first French and Spanish gay
liberation movements. In May, Juan Jacobo Hernandez, a
university teacher, became Mexico's first gay and proud
public figure when he sent a letter to a newspaper attacking
anti-homosexual attitudes on the left. On 26 July, the FHAR
took part in a march to commemorate the tenth anniversary
of the 1968 student movement, and in September it held the
first action of its own, a demonstration against police abuses,
which was widely publicized.
The response of the public authorities to the FHAR's
activities was characteristic of the Mexican political system.
The interior ministry called in the Communist and Trotskyist
parties to ask them about the FHAR, and were told that
these were 'serious' people. The established left, in fact, were
quick to support at least the right of gay people to organize;
they were aware that this development had already taken
place elsewhere in the world. The FHAR was defined as
'political', and has so far been tolerated by the state. On the
other hand, the Mexico City police chief declared all-out war
on the gay community, and the winter of 1978-79 was
marked by raids on bars and clubs, mass arrests of transvestites, and the illegal exaction of 5000-peso fines. (The law
actually provides for only a 300-peso fine, or 36 hours in
jail, for 'immorality'.)
The FHAR reacted very courageously, holding pickets
outside police stations, and attempting (unsuccessfully) to
bring legal proceedings against the police. The best result was
that gays on the street learned for the first time what their
rights under the law actually were, and when a new wave of
arrests took place a few months later, spontaneous demonstrations took place without any initiative from the FHAR.
This first attempt to intimidate the gay population thus
proved counterproductive, and was called off; presumably on
ministerial instructions, the Mexican government typically
seeking to 'manage' a social conflict by selective use of
repression and concession. In the last year, the social space
for gay people has definitely widened. New bars and clubs
have opened, some run in the traditional way by Mafia-type
elements, but others for the first time by honest gay
capitalists. FHAR groups have also been founded in several
smaller cities; there is a new lesbian magazine, A mazona, and
a Christian gay group, Sebastian. In June 1979, some 3000
people showed up for Mexico's first gay pride celebration.
The effect of lesbians and gay men openly parading through
the streets is far more shattering for straight spectators than
it ever was in Britain or the USA, and this event also gained a

These gay transvestites are particularly prey to the everyday violence of macho society, and to the more specialized
violence of the police. Around 80 gay men are murdered per
year in Mexico City alone. Many transvestites get into prostitution (for 'straight' men, again) as the only way to make a
living. The police drag them off and rape them in their cars,
then demand a 500-peso (= 100) fine for soliciting, as the
alternative to fifteen days in jail. (The rape figure for women
in Mexico City is estimated at around 100,000 per year,
perhaps half the assaults being committed by policemen.)

Gay Left 19

good deal of press coverage more favourable on the whole

than expected. A similar march is planned for June this year.

lics' dominated by landed oligarchies, traditionally backed

up by the North American big brother.

There are signs, however, that a new wave of police

repression may be on the way. In mid-March there was a
large raid on a popular gay bar in one of the working-class
districts of Mexico City, and many people were arrested. But
this did not prevent FHAR from successfully holding a dance
to commemorate its second anniversary, a militant celebration attended by over 1200 lesbians and gay men from all
age groups and all walks of life, the first openly advertized
gay dance that Mexico has ever known.

But Central America is now in the throes of change. The

Nicaraguan revolution, already steering towards socialism,
has stimulated class struggle throughout the region. Full-scale
civil war is developing in El Salvador, while the Guatemalan
dictatorship is digging its heels in for a last-ditch stand
against any kind of democratic reform. In Guatemala City,
2000 trade unionists and other opposition figures were
murdered last autumn, while police with sub-machine-guns
stand guard on street corners.

The FHAR collective, with a core group of about 30 in

Mexico City, and many more supporters, are explicitly anticapitalist, and seek the integration of homosexuality into a
future socialist society rather than into the present Mexican
social formation. They want to avoid the reformist direction
that the gay movement has taken in the advanced capitalist
countries, above all in the USA, and indeed, it is unlikely
that anything like the 'post-Stonewall' gay community of the
North American metropolises could develop in Mexican conditions. What is interesting, however, is that the staunchly
revolutionary FHAR has been challenged for leadership of
the Mexican gay movement not by a reformist, civil-rightsonly campaign such as successfully took over from GLF in
the United States and Britain, but by a rival Marxist group,
LAMDA.
LAMDA was founded and is led by activists in the PRT,
the largest of Mexico's three Trotskyist parties. Very
commendably, LAMDA takes a strong stand in support of
women's liberation and against all forms of sexism in the gay
movement. Its committees all have equal numbers of women
and men. Like the FHAR, it is militant and oriented to mass
struggle, and has indeed worked together with FHAR on
various issues. LAMDA criticizes FHAR, however, for countenancing transvestism (seen as anti-woman), and especially
for using drag and make-up in its political activity. (FHAR
raised money, for example, and political capital too, from
their production of Eva Peron, a French satire quite
unrelated to Evita, with male lead.)

It's surprising, then, that there should be an open gay

group in Guatemala, Grupo Lamda (no relation to its
Mexican namesake). This has existed since 1974, even publishing pamphlets and articles in such alternative press as
exists. Yet in Guatemala, political repression does not go
hand in hand with sexual repression.

FHAR, on the other hand, see LAMDA's politics as seeking to be 'right on' in formal terms, but lacking any mass line,
and possibly having a false conception of what being gay is
all about. LAMDA seem all too eager to denounce effeminate
men and butch women, and too anxious to promote a gay
image that is 'respectable' in straight terms. Like the early
GLF, the French FHAR and the Italian FUORI!, FHAR
very definitely do see gay-ness as subverting the categories of
gender, so that drag and make-up, properly used, can be
revolutionary weapons. They don't see the traditional gay
subculture as purely negative, or themselves as a vanguard
having all the 'correct' answers. They aim rather to develop
in an organic relationship with the gay population, and are
attempting to create a viable alternative subculture with their
own discos, dances and parties, also a bookshop and coffee
bar which they are in the process of setting up.
With both FHAR and LAMDA, though, the Mexican gay
movement is still decisively led by radicals, and, in conditions
where reformist integration would seem far more difficult, it
seems set to maintain its revolutionary course for a good
while. Both groups are very aware of the importance of international links. They took part in the Conference of Third
World Homosexuals and Lesbians in Washington, DC last
October, as part of the Latin American Homosexual Bloc
(BHOLA). But they found the context of the March on
Washington rather unhelpful, and hope to hold a specifically
gay-socialist international conference in Mexico some time in
1981. If this comes off, it should certainly be a stimulating
experience.

20 Gay Left

The main factor here is undoubtedly the sharp cultural

change that is already apparent in south-east Mexico, in the
region of Mayan civilization that stretches from here down
into Honduras. Women are at least somewhat less ground
down than in central Mexico, and there is more sensuality
and less violence in interpersonal relationships. Male homosexuality, here, is less sharply tabooed. There is less pressure
on men to marry, and even sex with adolescent boys is not
seen as particularly scandalous. In Merida or Guatemala City,
you rarely see transvestites on the streets, while 'regular'
homosexual cruising is far more open. Even in Guatemala,
this is not harassed by the police. Indeed, Grupo Lamda
actually enjoys good relations with the police, and can call
on them for help in such cases of queer-bashing as do arise.
In return, Lamda has to take on a quasi-policing role of its
own. It keeps tabs on Guatemala City's two public gay bars,
making sure there's no dope or violence.
The precondition for Grupo Lamda to exist is that it plays
the system. It does not hold public demonstrations, it
doesn't use words such as 'liberation', far less 'revolution'
whereas in Mexico even the government is 'revolutionary'.
Instead it cultivates good relations with sympathetic
Congressmen (in Guatemala's rubber-stamp parliament) and
bishops. (In class politics, the Guatemalan hierarchy is
extremely reactionary, denouncing the guerilla movement
without a word against the violence of the state; whereas in
El Salvador the archbishop himself supported the revolutionary movement.) When there was a move in Congress for
homosexuality to be included in a new penal code, Grupo
Lamda was able to mobilize its friends in high places to have
this dropped. And among its members it still includes both
extreme right and far left, even while armed sturggle is
already under way.

Nicaragua
What will happen to gays in Guatemala as the country lurches
towards revolution is impossible to predict. The example of
Nicaragua, however, is a favourable indication. Nicaraguan
gays exiled in the United States played a significant role in
mobilizing foreign support for the struggle against Somoza,
and their 'Gay People for Nicaragua' has been publicly
thanked by the new Nicaraguan consul in San Francisco.
Some of them are now returning to their country, hoping
both to join in the work of reconstruction and to advance
the position of Nicaraguan gays in the process. Thanks to the
international development of the gay movement, this time
gays have found themselves on the right side of the barricades, unlike the ambiguous position of the Cuban gay
community at the time of revolution there. Let us hope this
stands them in good stead in the storms that are still to come.

Guatemala

Cuba

Between Mexico and Central America there is a big political

and cultural divide. Mexico, for all its poverty and repression,
has a tradition of popular revolution to which the PRI regime
must still pay allegiance, and which does bring certain
tangible benefits to the people. The Central American
countries, on the other hand, are the classical 'banana repub-

The situation of gay people in Cuba continues to be extremely grim. True, it is not as bad as in the 1960s, when gay men
were simply rounded up and sent to punitive labour camps.
Yet under a regime structured almost completely along
Soviet lines, there is no possibility in the foreseeable future

for even a minimal emancipation. Anti-gay propaganda continues, one form now favoured being selective quotation
from the North American gay press, designed to confirm the
official view of homosexuality as a product of capitalist
decadence. Thus an article in the mass-circulation Cuban
magazine Opina ( November 1979) quotes small ads from the
New York After Dark, going on to claim that yanqui
monopoly capital is preparing to export homosexuality on
the world market, in the train of slavery, the arms race, chile
prostitution, etc.
The Mexican FHAR was hoping that its credentials as a
revolutionary gay movement in Latin America would make
some kind of dialogue with the Cuban authorities possible,
and sent a reply to this article. But how poor the prospects
for this really are has since been shown again by the Cuban
presentation of the recent mass refugee exodus. Castro himself set the tone by railing against the refugees as 'degenerates, drug addicts, criminals and homosexuals'. (By
definition, homosexuals are criminals and degenerates, so
why not throw in 'drug addict' as well?) It certainly seems
that both lesbians and gay men are making use of the
occasion to escape from the prison that Castro's Cuba
undoubtedly is for any homosexual. Once again, the Soviet
model of 'non-capitalist development' has shown that it
offers not the slightest space for gay people.

Dykes in the Granite City

AN ARTICLE ABOUT LESBIANS WORKING IN
ABERDEEN
An article about lesbians working in Aberdeen
by Caroline Airs
When I first began to think about writing an article about
`lesbians working in Aberdeen' I thought it would be an
opportunity to sit back and take a distanced view of Aberdeen. However, the more I thought about it, the more I
realised that it is not so easy for me to be objective about
Aberdeen. I have become a part of Aberdeen and identify
myself as such. A lot of the things I know about Aberdeen
could well be true of other places I can only talk about my
own experiences and leave other people to draw their own
conclusions.

have grown up a gay man in Aberdeen. It was a long time

before we learned to understand and relate to the women,
and we still don't relate to the men too well on anything
more than a superficial level, but I have always been very
grateful for their friendliness and hospitality. However, we
needed to find more people who would understand what we
believed in, so we set about looking for 'radical' gay people,
particularly lesbians. Aberdeen is not exactly teeming with
radicals now, but communications are a lot easier. In those
days it took a fairly round about route to eventually track
down two women who were about to set up a Lesbian Left
group, and without that group I don't know if I would have
survived the first year or so in Aberdeen.

I suppose the first things likely to be noticed about Aberdeen

are the granite walls, the climate, the dialect, and the number
of down-and-outs around the lower end of Union Street. My
first impressions when I arrived were of a cold, wet, grey city.
Being English, I felt an outsider, and soon became aware of
the language problem and of the nationalism (which is quite
common, and some of which has rubbed off on me over the
last three years). I felt depressed, and for the first time I
experienced the kind of loneliness so many other gay people
must experience so much more intensely there I was with
the woman I was living with at the time, alone in a hostile
environment the feeling of not knowing another gay
person to talk to was alarming. My first instinct was to turn
around and go back to Lancaster, but that would be both
cowardly and impractical.

When we first arrived in Aberdeen, there was the bar;

there were discos once a month, run alternately by SHRG
and GaySoc; there was SHRG; and there was GaySoc. We
tried SHRG first, and it was just what we expected all
men, all very middle class and respectable. Of course, they all
paid lip-service to anti-sexism, but lip-service has never convinced me. Our first major argument with them was over the
price of disco tickets. We maintained that students and
claimants should get the same reduction as SHRG members,
and won the decision, despite claims that anyone could
afford a pound. (The decision was finally implemented
months later, but was recently reversed because they were in
financial difficulty). After a few niggling arguments, our final
argument was over their attitude to a few of us who mounted
a successful publicity campaign against a pub which banned
us because we were gay. The main confrontation came at a
meeting, where we put it to them that what they were saying
was that gay people deserved to be thrown out of pubs if
they wore badges and held hands or were at all obvious. They
actually agreed that that was what they were saying, so we
walked out.

We tried both bars listed in Gay News the first was full
of stereotyped gay men; the second was also full of men, but
very heavy types. We went back to the first, Jeans Bar, and
met one woman: The men turned out to be very friendly and
more or less adopted us, but they had no awareness of
feminism, and we had no understanding of what it meant to

After this episode we realised that what that group of

very bourgeois men were most concerned with was protecting their right to be gay in their own male, middle class,
respectable, quiet way. Although they are less open about it
now, I think as a national organisation SHRG has not
changed much, and, while local committees change, this

Early days

Gay Left 21

attitude still permeates much of what they do. They can

cope with more radical men by letting them have their say,
smiling paternally, and patting them on the head; but at the
time they didn't know what to do when faced with two very
aggressive women. Some of them still don't, but others have
hardened their attitudes. Recently a gay man of the SHRG
mould said he would not go to a meeting we tried to organise
for all gay people, because he thought that if he went he
would get so angry he would end up screwing a glass into my
face. (This he said to a man whose ideas are not too far
removed from my own.) It seems that some of the men are a
little afraid of myself and the women who share my
attitudes, and my aggression. (One man once referred to us as
"the heavy mob".) There are a few out and out misogynists,
but most of the men seem to have the notion that they
should be nice to women they just can't cope with women
who don't act like women should. Twice over the last six
months fights have broken out amongst lesbians at discos.
The men mutter things about the women always starting the
trouble; or make comments like "this is what really degrades
women" (as opposed to drag); or come out with statements
like, "This is supposed to be a gay disco women shouldn't
be allowed in anyway." I'm sure these things happen everywhere, but I really do believe that the ideas of Women's
Liberation, and even the tokenism that goes with it, are
taking longer to filter through to Aberdeen than to places
further south.
The Lesbian Left group was always very small, but provided
some much-needed support in the face of these male
attitudes. With the advent of Aberdeen Gay Switchboard, it
was suggested that the group drop the "Left" from the title
as it was the only group for lesbians in Aberdeen, some of
us thought it should be open to all lesbians, not just those
with left wing ideas. There was a lot of discussion about this,
and eventually the name was changed to Aberdeen Lesbian
Group. Some of the original members left the group, identifying more with the Women's Movement. It was sad to lose
them, but with the change of name the whole nature of the
group changed it could no longer be assumed that all the
women present shared certain attitudes. The group has
expanded, and is expanding, which means, as women who
have only just come out join us, we find we often go over the
same ground more than once. It can be frustrating for those
of us who have been attending discussions regularly for some
years, but as the people involved differ each time, the discussion is slightly different each time; plus we are forced to
explain our own assumptions, which is a good thing. As the
group has expanded, it has also lost much of its intellectualism, which I think is a very good thing.
One thing about Aberdeen that is different from Lancaster
and a lot of other towns, is that the gay 'community' is not
student/university dominated. I know a lot of socialists,
feminists and gay activists who take a very intellectual
approach towards everything because a large part of their
lives has been devoted to academia, and I often feel that they
are living in a dream, in a vacuum that has no relevance and
less appeal to the people they are trying to 'mobilise'. I can't
lose my background and I can't lose my degree, but since I
came to Aberdeen, where I have been working in an
`ordinary' job, I have learnt two things: first, that most
people have little time for intellectuals, assuming (often
rightly) that they are all snobs and feel themselves to be
superior to the world around them; and second, that most
intellectuals have little or no understanding of the 'masses'
they claim to want to liberate. While the intellectuals are
discussing theory, the rest of us are out sweating to earn a
living O.K. so it's a hackneyed, stereotyped idea but it's
also true. I'm not saying that discussion is a Waste of time I
think it is valuable and essential before any campaigns can
start but it has to be kept within context, within reality,
which means the participants have to be able to see reality.
It's all very well for students to talk about the importance of
coming out at work, but those of us who do work have to
spend 40 hours a week with the same people, and our jobs

22 Gay Left

are not always wonderfully exciting, so we can't afford to

risk total isolation by alienating all the people we work with.
I've been lucky in that I work with a crowd of very friendly
people, most of whom know that I'm gay and have not
reacted against me. However, they are still basically sexist,
racist and conservative Labour voters. If I pick them up on
every sexist or racist comment and give them a daily lecture
on the evils of capitalism, they're going to stop sitting near
me in the canteen, and they're going to start switching off
every time I open my mouth. In situations like these we have
to tread gently. And, as I said, I've been lucky, a lot of
people have worse jobs with more difficult work-mates; and
of course a lot of gay people live at home. I think family ties
are stronger in Aberdeen than in England people seem far
more likely to live at home until they get married, and then
move a couple of streets away. This makes life even more
difficult for gay people here, which our imported radicals
(and I was one once) don't seem to realise. The Lesbian
Group has a fair cross-section of women in it now, which
helps us all to understand each other's positions. Women
seem to be more capable of listening to each other, understanding each other and supporting each other than men are,
which is probably one reason why women get fed up with
male-dominated groups.
Which could raise the question, why do I put so much
effort and hope into GAA a male-dominated group, which
tends to be full of young, intellectual men. Except in Aberdeen, where it has been female-dominated since it began two
years ago, and where the intellectual side doesn't hold quite
so much sway.
The only reason I can think of for my consistent refusal
to completely turn my back on gay men, is the way in which
I came out, some four years ago, back in Lancaster. When I
came out I had no real knowledge of feminism -- so far as I
was concerned I was gay, people were often anti-gay, and we
had to change that so I joined Lancaster University GaySoc. There was only one other woman involved in GaySoc,
but that didn't worry me too much, and the men tried to
explain to me why there was a separate Lesbian Soc but I
didn't really understand. I was lucky in the men I came
across, and hold a great affection for them still. Basically, my
feminist consciousness was raised by gay men, and for that

reason I always feel that there must be some hope left for
political/radical gay men. In Aberdeen there has never been a
similar group of radical men, although I've found one or two,
and I can work with other men on projects such as Gay
Switchboard. I think as time has passed I have become both
more critical of men and more tolerant of them critical
because I now have a group of women around me and I can
feel the difference between working with them and working
with men; tolerant because the things I believe to be important necessitate working with men and trying to educate
them.
Because of limitations in terms of time and energy, it
seems that lesbians have to choose between the Women's
Movement and the Gay Movement. Those who choose either
tend to choose the Women's Movement, but I haven't, and I
seem to have taken the women in Aberdeen with me. There
are problems in working with men, but I have a women's
support group in Aberdeen to help me cope with that; and I
think that while there are common features and common
causes to both women's oppression and gay oppression, there
is something different about lesbian oppression which my
heterosexual feminist sisters don't always understand.
Aberdeen has its own special problems. The Church still
seems to be quite influential; the city is fairly isolated in that
it is a long way North and all the decent roads in Scotland
end at Dundee this makes it quite parochial in its outlook
and slows down change. It is a small city, with two local
daily papers, which will pick up anything of note that a local
person might do, from winning a competition to appearing in
court. People do not, as a rule, move away from the city,
which means that those who were born and bred here are
always in danger of meeting old friends and neighbours. It is
also largely a working class city, and the oil boom has not
made it as prosperous as people may think it is certainly
not the Aberdonians who are benefiting from North Sea Oil,
unless a cost of living equivalent to that in London is considered a benefit! As I have become aware of all this, I have
changed my approach to politics. I have realised that it is no
good rushing in here full of Lancaster or London ideas and
expecting to be welcomed as a new messiah. Things happen
slowly here, and activists have to accept that. Aberdeen has
changed me, and I have been through personal changes since
I have lived here (my first relationship with a woman has
broken up after three years, with a lot of pain and guilt
involved; I have entered more than once on the shaky ground
of non-monogamy; I have also chosen to work amongst "the
working classes" and become a closet graduate) -- all these
things together have made me more understanding of a lot of
things. I believe that not only in Aberdeen, but everywhere,

we have to take things slowly we have to think more of

each other and other people, we have to show a great deal
more understanding.
My beliefs, ideals and principles haven't changed, but my
methods have. I have realised that it's all a question of
balance balance between keeping my principles, and still
listening to what other people think and feel, and understanding why; balance between attempting to provide a reasonable
social environment for all gay people, and trying to make
political steps forward which will alienate many; balance
between political argument and personal friendship; and
behind it all, the balance between political commitment to
the 'cause' and personal commitment to friends and lovers.
It's very easy to get the balance wrong, and then you hurt
your friends and lovers, or feel guilty because you are not
upholding your principles, or lose contact with the rest of the
the gay community because you are not giving enough time
to them. I know my balance is wrong more than it's right,
but fortunately Aberdeen provides me with enough support,
both political and personal, to stand me up again and set me
on my way.

Gay Left 23

Groping in the
dark
by Derek Cohen

Anne and I lay motionless in my small, unlit, college room

bed. We had been going out with each other for a year and
the time had come when I felt that the proper thing to do
next was to have sex with her. It was 1969, we were both
about 20 years old, and it was our first sexual experience
with another person. My knowledge of sex was limited to
what I had read in a few rather inadequate, coy books, and
had picked up from other boys at school. Neither of these
sources had prepared me for what happened the first time I
had sex. Nothing. I didn't have "an erect penis" to move
with "thrusting movements" in and out of the totally
unknown, but supposedly complementarily designed, vagina
of my girl friend. And I didn't know what else to do except
kiss her deeply and hope that would trigger some response in
one or both of us. Her body was a total mystery to me. I had
read descriptions of female sexual organs but never seen
them in real life or photographs, only inadequate line drawings. My meagre sex education had also omitted to mention
anything about foreplay, different erogenous zones, or anything except the quickest way to achieve a simultaneous
orgasm.
Because I was the 'man' in the relationship I was supposed
to know it all. I didn't really know anything, and we were
living proof that there is nothing instinctive and natural
about sexual activity. We had simply failed to learn what to
do. In the end we did what did seem instinctive and comfortable: to be supportive and apologetic to each other and
go to sleep. We never tried again and soon afterwards our
relationship ended. That night's events had touched a little
too close to what I knew did arouse my body thoughts of
men. The college doctor, to whom I mentioned nothing
about my sexual attractions, diagnosed guilt and tension and
prescribed a weekend in a hotel. I took a strong dose of
celibacy for the next three years and then the pattern
repeated itself a couple of times.
When I decided that my attractions to other men would
not disappear, and I resolved to start accepting my homosexuality, I found myself getting into a similar situation. By
now, somewhat too late, I had better ideas about what could
go on between men and women, and it was possible for me
to transfer some of this to my relationships with men. My
first sexual encounter with another man at the age of 25
was fortunately with a caring, experienced acquaintance. He
tried to fuck me, but I was far too tense and shook with
nervousness for about 20 minutes. In the morning I sucked
him off, which was all I could think of doing to 'give him an
orgasm' (one of many heterosexist notions I carried around
with me).
My early sexual experiences with men were, on the whole,
non-orgasmic on my part. I felt comfortable sharing in
various activities, and enjoyed the sex, but none of them
were exciting enough to produce anything but fleeting
arousal in me. I became quite good at engaging in 'whole
body eroticism', licking, kissing, biting, rubbing, stroking,
massage - - an endless list of things. Yet while I sought to
value these experiences and defend them as valid and pleasurable in themselves, deep down I felt I was missing out on the
big 0. Orgasms were what I had afterwards, on my own,
wanking and thinking of the sorts of sexual fantasies I'd had
since I'd had any sexual fantasies at all of men on motorcycles, of bondage and other sorts of domination. None of
these things were ever mentioned in any of the sex books I
had read, nor talked about seriously by anyone I knew. A
friend of mine did say he fantasised about women with whips
and boots, but he didn't want to act those fantasies out. It
has taken me a long time to be able to own these fantasies, to
feel that I control them rather than them me; to feel that I
24 Gay Left

can act them out when I want and not repress them, playing
them across the TV screen of my mind while I engage in
more socially acceptable sorts of gay sex.

Read all about it

There was another side to my sexual education the books
I read. In the late 60s and early 70s I was an avid reader of
Forum and Playboy, about the only places I read anything
positive about homosexuality. Yet the risque reputation of
these magazines also militated against their power of validation as compared with the other things I read at the time,
which were more serious, more authoritative. An
example was David Reuben's infamous Everything You
Always Wanted to Know about Sex
"Homosexuality seems to have a compelling urgency
about it. A homosexual walks into the men's washroom
and spots another homosexual. One drops to his knees,
the other unzips his pants, and a few moments later, it's
all over. No names, no faces, no emotions. A masturbation
machine might do it better."
I did look further afield the public libraries were a safe
place to look up forbidden subjects such as homosexuality
and masturbation in the indices of books I wouldn't be seen
reading publicly. (The public libraries can be a lot more
private than most people's homes!) They all said the same
thing -- homosexuality was a phase I would grow out of (or
should have done) and masturbation was OK if not done to
excess (though none said what the correct frequency was)
and so on.
Eventually The Joy of Sex and its successors arrived. I
don't now remember if I read any of them. Those sort of
books were tending to make tokenistic references to homosexuality as something not to be frightened of, something to
be coped with in threesomes, and how to refuse a homosexual advance. I could get better validation from the gay
pamphlets I was reading at the time. Yet nowhere was there
much about what gay sex was about, I had to find it all out
by experience. For a very long time I had the idea that there
were certain sorts of activities (sucking, fucking) that I ought
to be doing, it should be that I would know how to take part
in these activities, and that I would necessarily enjoy them. I
lacked any idea that I might explore my own and my lovers'
sexualities; that I might try different sorts of sexual activity.
When I read the pamphlet, Growing Up Homosexual,
probably around 1975, it was a revelation. It actually said
that I could enjoy masturbating throughout my life, rather
than making me feel guilty or inadequate because of my
prime sexual enjoyment. It said something I have yet to find
in any sex manual gay or straight something so devasta-

while 'Guilt' astounded me with the detailed way in which it

described the tiny facets of our/my everyday behaviour
which signify that somewhere I still believe that gay is not
quite as good as straight. The origins of these feelings are not
really explained, however, and guilt comes across as just one
of those things we experience and have to deal with.
The section called 'First Time' on having sex for the first
time reinforced all the things traditional attitudes to sex
education deny that sex has to be learnt, that there are no
right and wrong ways of doing it, and places the importance
of patience, time, communication and relationships in a
radical rather than a traditional context.
Despite the alphabetical listing of the entries in the book I
really benefited from reading it all the way through (after my
initial dipping in at various entries). That way I read sections
(such as 'Coming Out' and 'First Time') that I might have
otherwise skipped as being "no longer relevant"; I still seem
to have the illusion that it is possible to pass proficiency
tests in being sexual, in being gay.

ting I have never forgotten it: "The most obvious way of

having sex with another person is for you to masturbate one
another." Every other sexual guide starts off with what seem,
by comparison, complicated and strange techniques fucking, 69, earth-moving simultaneous climaxes. But this
pamphlet, despite its limited size and scope, was more powerful than anything I'd read for a long time, and was comparable only with the effect of discovering gay porn.
Despite, or maybe because of, the usually ageist and racist
i magery of most pornography, many of the stories and illustrations in pornography gave me ideas about the breadths of
sexual activity possible between men. They fed both my
fantasies and my practices. They gave me the permission I
felt I needed to explore the less conventional aspects of my
sexuality. Also there was one essential element in the sex
portrayed in these magazines sex was fun.

The illustrations by Michael Leonard, Ian Beck and Julian

Graddon are delightful and are informative in themselves as
opposed to being mere illustrations to a self-explanatory text.
The grainy texture of Michael Leonard's colour paintings
adds to their eroticism, while Ian Beck's pastiches on classical
art forms reinforce the replacing of gay men in a history of
culture that has often excised us. Julian Graddon's line drawings, unlike the other two sets of pictures, are scattered
throughout the text, relating to specific entries. I found them
rather too reinforcing of the idea that all the gay men who
have fun are perfectly proportioned 20-40 year olds.
Some of the text also suggests that gay men are, on the
whole, middle class and affluent free facilities for meeting
and having sex are not included in the advantages of either
cruising or cottaging (`Tea Room Trade'). While the illustrations do show a black man, a section on racism and its
relationship to gay struggles would have been useful, as
would one on sexism. Lesbians and women in general seem
to be considered only in the context of bisexuality in men,
and children appear only in a five line section on custody
(paedophilia doesn't even make the index).

This year's models

This year I have read two books that have once again stunned
me with their coverage of gay sex for men. The Joy of Gay
Sex and Men Loving Men come from very different sorts of
publishers. The former is published by Simon and Schuster,
New York, though the book was originated in England by
Mitchell Beazley, who have not published it here. The latter
book is published by Gay Sunshine Press, California. Both
are available as imports if you're lucky but more of that
later.
The Joy of Gay Sex is written by two gay activists,
Charles Silverstein, and Edmund White, and is modelled on
Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex. Its 200 pages of alphabetically arranged topics include many gems of gay writing as well
as a few things that would be better left out. Some sections
are worth describing in detail. The 'Introduction' gives a good
summary of the situation of gay men today, placing us in
both a historical and a political context, the latter being more
gay liberationist than socialist. The section on 'Coming Out'
I found really moving. It consists not of abstract considerations of why people should come out or concessions to why
some don't but of two detailed personal accounts one the
first time a man has sex with another man, the other how a
gay man recognises his closeness and belonging to a wider
gay community. The importance of coming out to the ethos
behind the book is shown by the fact that this is by far the
longest section in the book. Both accounts recognise that
coming out is not a single event but a continuous process in
which sex is neither everything nor nothing, but an integral
part of discovering our sexuality.
`Enemies From Within' identifies the ways in which we
have grown up to have negative attitudes to homosexuality,
Gay Left 25

Yet despite its flaws this book was far better than I
expected from a commercial, profit motivated publisher
though of course publishers make profits from producing
good books. It is mainly about sex which is what it aims to
do "An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a
Gay Lifestyle" is the subtitle but it places sex in the context of pleasure, pride and a wider gay politics.
Men Loving Men is arranged quite differently from The
Joy of Gay Sex, though it, too, is an attempt to correct the
omissions of Alex Comfort's original. It has a long historical
introduction, four long sections on 'Masturbation', 'Fellatio',
`Anal Intercourse' and 'Group Sex, S&M and Other Scenes',
followed by sections on 'Gay Health Problems' and 'Love
and Gay Consciousness'. The large amount of space dedicated
to each topic means that each is covered in considerable
depth, each section starting with more specific histories and
quotes from literature. But somehow the interrelatedness and
interchangeability of different sexual activities loses out in
this format, and the grouping of all non-conventional gay sex
into one section reinforces the idea that there is right-on and
not-right-on sex, even if the text doesn't say this. The
historical contexts came across to me rather as ways of
validating the present, while I believe that we have to validate ourselves in terms of our own current situation, not by
comparison with Greeks and Ancient Celts.
The section on 'Love and Gay Consciousness' provides a
wider political statement than appears in The Joy of Gay
Sex, but it delves rather deeply into the mystical for my
taste, seeming to rely upon a "secret gay love-source" and
ignoring the real divisions that society creates between gay
men.

Censored!
Getting hold of these books has been a difficult task. They
are both published in America. Mitchell Beazley, though
English publishers, took the advice of their solicitor who said
that they stood a risk of being prosecuted for obscenity if
they published The Joy of Gay Sex in the present moral
climate. We are in a situation where the "contamination"
theory of the cause of homosexuality is gaining ground, and
anything which is seen to promote, explain and demystify
homosexuality is likely to be given a hard time. A prosecution is possible, but the gay community could support its
challenge.
Even those mail order and bookshop services which have
tried to import the books have had copies confiscated by
H M Customs (who are not obliged to explain or defend their
actions). This has been particularly the case where that shop
is known to sell gay or other radical material. The Joy of
Lesbian Sex, a parallel volume, has not been seized, and the
arrival of ransacked packets with the gay men's books missing
and the lesbian ones remaining says more about the role of
lesbian sex as straight men's fantasy pornography than for
the custom men's support for lesbians. It is possible to appeal

against such seizures, but such proceedings are expensive, and

only relate to specific shipments, there are no precedents set
by winning.
Those who believe that information is power are correct.
My own lack of knowledge about the specifics of sexual
activity with both men and women certainly played a large
part in my sexual repression. The Joy of Gay Sex, Men
Loving Men and books like them could certainly help many
gay men to feel easier and more confident about their
sexuality, to push some, maybe, over the hurdle into having
their first sexual experience with another man; into an awareness of the political nature of being gay; out of their closets.
The lack of availability of these particular books, and the
absence of more books like them, I do not see as part of
some great conspiracy to keep us underground, but I do not
see it as an accident either, unrelated to other forms of gay
and wider sexual oppression. For me reading these books this
year has been an important event; six years ago they would
have been devastating. They are available in this country to
those who know where to find them larger bookshops, gay
mail-order services, and at a price (about 6). They ought to
be both freely available and possibly free. Books are
weapons, and these two could be useful tools in the fight
against the isolation and ignorance that are integral parts of
our oppression.
Growing Up Homosexuat. Birmingham Gay Education Group
1975.
The Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein and Edmund
White, Simon & Schuster, 1977.
Men Loving Men by Mitch Walker, Gay Sunshine Press, 1977.

Against Public Morals

Campaign Against Public Morals
Last July, several members of the Paedophile Information
Exchange (PIE) were arrested. They are charged with 'conspiracy to corrupt public morals' and their case is expected to
come up at the Old Bailey early next year. CAPM is a group
set up around this, and the issues raised by the trial, seeing
the charges as an attack on freedom of speech and
association, but also as more profoundly reactionary. Conspiracy to corrupt public morals does not require that the
purpose itself be unlawful: a sentence for life is possible for
conspiring to do something which isn't criminal!
`Conspiracy' can be used to regulate a number of possible
actions, and even bourgeois jurists have recommended the
abolition of the Common Law charge.

26 Gay Left

CAPM demands that the laws against PIE be dropped and

that the Conspiracy charge should be scrapped.
But even with all that CAPM might do, and with the
efforts of those who support its aims, it seems likely that the
PIE trial will happen and that it will be the occasion for the
orchestration of a major moral panic. We hope in the next
issue of Gay Left to discuss the implications of the trial and
the way it could be used to cut back the ideological space in
which 'dangerous' subjects like child sexuality could be discussed, as well as the havoc that it will produce in the lives
of self-professed paedophiles and of other perceivedly
`deviant' adults.
CAPM itself can be contacted through:
CAPM, BM 1151, London WC1.

The Hunt, Hunter and Hunted

I've always felt that one of the blessings of the gay men's
movement has been its freedom from having too many
"correct lines". Ideological warfare between groups may be
rampant, but on few controversial issues does one tendency
impose its point of view to the exclusion of all others. When
we agree with one another it's usually because we really are
convinced, and not because we're afraid to say the wrong
thing. Perhaps this is the result of having to work out most
things for ourselves; few of us, until the last ten years or so,
had worked out even the meaning of our own sexuality, let
alone a politics that would explain the significance of gay
oppression in general.
Whatever the reason for the diversity of opinion among
gay men, I was very forcibly struck by its absence for once
-- when I was doing some preliminary reading for this article.
There seemed to be a complete unanimity about the
frustrations, dangers and political incorrectness of going out
to cruise for sex partners. Even Dennis Altman, generally the
most positive about it, threw in a few references that implied
regret at the amount of time spent on the prowl which could
be more "constructively" utilised. Personal accounts were
usually written in a tone of very real anguish about the
cruelty with which gay men sometimes treat one another.
The opening paragraph of Perry Brass's "Cruising: Games
Men Play" is a typical instance:
"The games people play go on and on and on. This is
especially true of that cruellest of human games known as
cruising. In cruising, the hunt is on and the hunter becomes
the hunted. Eventually the tension becomes so high that the
whole aspect of meeting someone with the prospect of an
evening, a week, or even a lifetime of satisfaction, or even
pleasure, becomes lost in the confrontation of wills. Cruising
is one of the great male chauvinist games: I can be tougher
than you can be. I can hold out longer than you can hold
out. I don't need you. I can't open up to you until you open
up to me."
And then the political theorists developed this line of
thought into an attack on masculinist attitudes in general, as
in this terse extract from the "Effeminist Manifesto": "We
must therefore strive to detect and expose every embodiment
of The Male Principle, no matter how and where it may be
enshrined and glorified, including the arenas of faggot
objectification (baths, bars, docks, parks) where powerdominance, as it operates in the selecting of roles and objects,
is known as 'cruising'."

cruise for half an hour and not meet anybody, or get turned
down by everybody you meet. That's rare though. People are
not so picky in parks. I've spent time with men whose glance
would have frozen the beer in my glass if I'd cruised them in
a bar."
Now the Body Politic article was written last year, and
most of the other articles I read and have quoted date from
the early days of gay liberation the 1970-74 period. This,
I think, is relevant. I'm not trying to claim that cruising was
once what the sociologists often said it was the resort of
lonely and desperate faggots in raincoats and is now the
pursuit of aware men who keep non-objectifying relationships uppermost in their minds even in a railway station
cottage. But I do believe that cruising, like everything else
about the gay world, has changed significantly in the last ten
years. In this article, I want to have a look at some of those
changes and at the reasons why much gay movement thinking about cruising isn't adequate to explain the realities of it.
I'm restricting my discussion to the kind of cruising that
occurs in public places such as parks and cottages, and not
that which occurs in pubs, discos and movement meetings. I
have two reasons for doing this. First, the motives and
actions of people are different in the two situations. If you
go out cruising in a park, then you go almost entirely for one
reason: to meet a sexual partner. It is possible and common
to have sex with him on the spot, and not to talk to him or
find out anything about him for him to be, in short,
nothing but a partner in a sexual act. In a pub or disco, it's
different. You're quite likely to want to talk with your
friends, drink and dance as well as cruise; and if you do meet
someone then you have to relate to him intellectually as well
as physically, even if it's only to decide whether you're going
to his place or yours. More importantly, the very act of going
to a pub or club implies being at least part of the way out of
the closet. Consequently, it's dangerous to make generalisations about gay men based on the behaviour of people in
these places. In a cottage, however, you'll find virtually every
type of gay man, from the most fearful and closeted to the
most public of activists men that is, who have nothing in
common apart from their sex and their sexuality.

What I found particularly surprising about this agreement

among writers of many political viewpoints was that it was
completely at variance with the opinions of most of the gay
men I knew. Even allowing for the eternal gap between the
things that movement activists say and the things that the
majority of gay men actually do, I found the discrepancy
puzzling. And then I came across a column in the Canadian
gay liberation magazine, Body Politic. Gerald Hannon and
Bill Lewis are both gay activists who are certainly aware of
the attitudes I've already mentioned. Their piece about
cruising in the parks of Toronto shows, however, little of the
negativity that the others did. Rather, its tone is completely
matter-of-fact, and the authors obviously share the belief of
many open, urban gay men that cruising is a recreational
activity like going to a restaurant or pub:
"Here, you can spend time with men you never say a
word to, or you can talk before, during or after, you can
meet people who are just coming out as well as men you've
seen in every bar and bath in town, you can even ask someone to come home with you and he'll come. You can also

Gay Left 27

sexuality, however, differs from straight men's in a fundamental way. It is socially repressed, and can be expressed
only under very limited conditions. For the very closeted
man, these conditions include complete anonymity and
secrecy at all times. Even very open gays are rarely able to
meet one another under normal circumstances: the romance
in the office or the darts team is usually not for us. In urban
areas with large and open gay populations, visibly gay men
can meet in such places as railway platforms, streets and
theatres. More often, however, we're restricted to the
commercial scene or parks and cottages.
Given these characteristics of gay men's sexuality, it's easy
to see how closely attuned to men's sexual needs cruising is,
and how it can be modified according to the degree to which
a man identifies himself as gay. The very closeted man,
usually married, can go to cottages for purely physical, wordless encounters that will not disturb the normal routine of his
life. Another type of closet gay, the one hung up about his
masculinity, can just "get his rocks off" without the selfidentification as homosexual that more emotional relationships would imply. And then there's the kind of macho oneupmanship that Perry Brass describes, often associated with
the pressure to prove one's desirability as a Hot Number by
getting laid as often as possible.
It's also apparent that cruising of this sort can easily lead
to objectification, power games, unwillingness to respond to
a partner's needs, and all the other less pleasant aspects of
casual sex. Ironically, since these are often the result of guilt
and furtiveness, they may also occur in sophisticated urban
gay society where everyone is well aware of the need to
project an "image". Where gay subcultures are absent or
undeveloped, gay men dress and act generally in accordance
with straight norms. The businessman and the labourer are
instantly recognisable as such, and even the raving queen is
partly acting out straight expectations of gay behaviour. But
This still does not mean, of course, that assumptions
in communities with large and visible gay subcultures this is
about gay male sexuality can be drawn from the actions of
not necessarily so. Many men dress to act out their fantasies,
those men who go cruising. But the fact that all types of gay
and to encourage others to do likewise hence the prolifermen do it, whereas lesbians don't, seems to be a useful
ation of hard hats, motorcycle gear, uniforms and so on.
starting point for a discussion. Indeed, most criticism of
When men dressed in this way meet, they may often have
cruising uses this very point as a basis for the argument that
exciting and satisfying sex as long as the encounter remains
with
all
male,
activity
but
is
specifically
it's not merely a gay
brief and impersonal. Once the partners get to know each
the destructive and oppressive hallmarks of male sexuality.
other better, even to the extent of going home together, the
The argument, briefly, is that gay men are men first and gay
illusion, and hence the excitement, is often destroyed. The
only second; and that their sexuality has common features
bedenimed hunk is revealed as an art director who collects
that transcend differences in politics and lifestyle. A gay
Dresden shepherdesses, and the cosmopolitan sophisticate as
male activist, for instance, shares many convictions with his
a British Rail clerk from Neasden. There is consequently a
lesbian counterpart; and yet his sexuality will have less in
very
strong incentive not to get to know partners too well.
common with hers than it does with that of a closeted and
The alternative, which is even less desirable but increasingly
politically conservative gay man, or with that of a heterocommon, is to create a whole new personality to go with
sexual man for that matter.
one's appearance. Instead of merely looking macho, some
It isn't necessary to get involved in the debate on the
gay men choose to act it as well, often in the crudest and
degree to which the differences between men's and women's
most stereotyped ways. Too often this means that by taking
sexuality are biologically inherent or socially conditioned.
their masculinity seriously they begin to play the same games
Whatever the truth, we can say there are general characterthat straight-identified gays have always done ("If you're a
istics that distinguish them. (Always bearing in mind that
good boy, I'll let you give me a blowjob"). Inevitably, this
direct comparisons are difficult because women are not
leads to further depersonalising and objectification of their
permitted to express their sexuality as freely as men are.)
sexual partners.
Men's sexuality is basically genitally oriented: when we say
Cruising, then, can often be what its critics claim it to be:
that we "need a fuck", then we mean that we want a genital
an expression of predatory or frustrated male sexuality.
orgasm. It's urgent and insistent we get erections in
Analysis of it only at this level is, however, dangerously
response to direct sexual stimulation, and the erection
incomplete. Although such an analysis shows what cruising
It
is

to
use
a
much-abused
word

now.
demands attention
has in common with other expressions of male sexuality, it
promiscuous. That is, it's directed not only at those whom
fails to explain what is specific and particular about it.
we know well emotionally and intellectually, but at anyone
Objectification, for example, is common to all types of male
who has whatever physical attributes sometimes only
sexuality. But objectification of one man by another is not
details like hair colour or dress that we find attractive.
the same as objectification of a woman by a man because
And, lastly, it's connected with aggression. Aggression is
power inequality is not inherent. Even when it exists, it may
most readily apparent in rape but is much commoner in more
be reversed: the most desirable of men can never be sure that
subtle ways: it can be expressed as hostility to our partners
he won't feel the desolation of being a rejected object, as
or as competition with other men to see who can be sexually
John Rechy eloquently attests in The Sexual Outlaw.
most successful.
Moreover, many of the assumptions made about
These characteristics are common to both gay and straight
objectification are misleadingly sweeping. It's generally taken
men, though perhaps the emphases are different (urban gay
for granted that because men cruising sum one another up
men often have more opportunity for sex with large numbers
largely on the basis of physical attractiveness, then the old,
of partners than straight men, for example). Gay men's

28 Gay Left

the ugly, and the socially awkward are liable always to lose
out. This simply isn't true; it may in fact be their only way
of making sexual contact. I'm thinking particularly of a
fiftyish man I used to know, who once explained to me that
Tuesday was his big night out. After going to a gay liberation
meeting early in the evening, he would pay a visit to his
favourite cottage. He never once met anyone in the gay
group who would go to be with him though he was wellknown and liked but rarely failed to make a pickup in the
toilets. As he put it (and who can blame him?): "I dearly
love all the guys in the group in a brotherly way, but somehow it just isn't enough to get a hug at the door from them
when things are over and I know that a lot of them will be
going home to bed together." Even for this man, who was far
more open about his sexuality than most of his generation,
and who mixed with people who were far more aware of
ageism than most, cruising was the only way of finding
sexual relationships. And until significant numbers of people
start to pay more than lip service to the problems of gay men
who aren't conventionally attractive, it's likely to remain so.
Equally importantly, conventional analyses of cruising are
inadequate precisely because they ignore the type of
response typified by the Body Politic article. During the last
ten years, thousands of gay men, including many who
consider themselves to be completely apolitical, have rejected
secrecy, furtiveness and role-playing. They're well aware that
the very act of going out specifically to look for sexual
partners is essentially sexist, and that in the liberated future
cruising will be a strange and unwanted anachronism. But to
accuse gay men who acknowledge this fact and yet still
cruise of hypocrisy is to be hopelessly liberal-minded. It's
strongly reminiscent of the argument that, because the
commercial gay scene is exploitative, it should be totally
rejected: theoretically true but, given the lack of alternatives,
not particularly helpful. I think the problem is that too many
theorists (and I'm not referring solely to gay liberationists
here) do not sufficiently realise that our needs and attitudes
are no less real for being conditioned into us. Perhaps, in
fact, our conditioned needs may be more real to us than
some of our "natural" ones, simply because we take the
latter for granted but are likely to feel that there's something
wrong with us if we don't feel the former. (Many men with
low sex drives, for example, are convinced that there must be
something wrong with their hormones.) This is particularly
true of sexual politics, where intellectual convictions are
often way ahead of emotions. We all know the contradictory
situations that can result: the gay activist men who are
appallingly ageist, or the feminists who are totally
masochistic in their personal relationships.
Most of the gay men I know who are aware of an
inconsistency between their anti-sexist beliefs and the
realities of their sex lives make the point that the attitudes
they bring to cruising make a difference that amounts to far
more than merely a reduction in guilt and furtiveness.
Openly gay men are often much more inclined than their
closeted brothers to see sex as play and recreation, as mutual
agreement with another person to share a good time. It's
often much easier to achieve this by wandering around a park
late at night than it is in ordinary situations where the
normal social rules of introducing yourself, making small
talk, and so on, apply. I think this "social" aspect of cruising
has been too little commented on, as most writers seem to
believe that the actual sex act is much the same for all men,
closeted or not.
Even an acute observer like Jack Babuscio (in his book,
We Speak for Ourselves) explains cruising as follows:
"Generally speaking, cottages are particularly well suited to
men whose immediate interest is focused upon genital contacts ... Of course, there are also gay men who, long after
they have rejected feelings of guilt and shame, will continue
to cottage, simply because they have learned, through conditioning and habit, to enjoy it. For such people, cottaging
has two important advantages: first, it can provide sexually
satisfying and emotionally non-involving encounters; second,
the risks involved, though potentially disastrous to one's

domestic life and professional career, may heighten the sense

of sexual excitement."
As far as this comment goes, there's little to disagree with.
The only thing I'd seriously dispute is the assertion that
many gay men find danger exciting; in my own experience,
the prospect of the arrival of the police, far from being an
aphrodisiac, is likely to cause temporary impotence. I believe,
however, that Jack Babuscio does not sufficiently explain
why openly gay men come to enjoy cottaging, bearing in
mind all of the risks. Sex itself, in such circumstances, can be
extremely satisfying but often isn't, especially in physically
uncomfortable surroundings. I think that the enjoyment of
cruising comes rather from the variety of men you're likely
to meet, and the ease with which it's possible to make contact with them not merely sexually but (with other openly
gay men) socially as well.
Cruising has, of course, an unwritten but strict set of rules
to which most people are forced to adhere. You are, for
example, risking either hostility or utter consternation if you
approach a man and make it plain that you'd rather talk than
fuck. But, paradoxically, cruising also reverses many of the
rules that govern ordinary social situations. Rather than hide
behind a barrier of social niceties, you are permitted and
even expected to be direct in your approaches. It's often
struck me that one of the reasons why the English, as compared with, say Australasians or North Americans, are such
inveterate cruisers is that English social rules are so much
more rigid. At any rate, you can't fail to notice the astonishing alteration in the behaviour of some gay men who
maintain the iciest of reserve in pubs and discos, and yet
start flashing blatantly the moment they get into the loo.
It seems to me that the ease of meeting other men in this
way is particularly attractive to the gay who goes out cruising
for much the same reason as he'd go out drinking for an
evening's pleasure. And despite the extreme casualness of sex
in these circumstances, it's often not at all impersonal.
Indeed, many affairs and friendships begin with sex in a
cottage or park because it's often a lot easier to talk to
someone after having sex with him than by walking up to
him in a bar and attempting to start a conversation out of
thin air, often under the critical gaze of one's friends who are
appraising both one's choice of partner and one's success in
trying to chat him up.
I'm well aware that the attitudes to cruising that I've been
discussing in the latter part of this article are restricted to a
very small minority of gay men. Even among open gays,
cruising is too often merely an activity by which one can
obtain a quick fuck with an anonymous hole in the dark.
But I've been trying to make the point that cruising can be
more than that, and for an increasing number of gay men is
a pleasure rather than a compulsive need, largely because
they have rejected both guilt and power games. I think we
have to regard cruising as we regard everything else about the
gay world as it currently exists: dialectically. On the one
hand, we recognise it to be a product of male sexuality at a
particular time and place and that as such it will eventually
disappear as our sexuality evolves into something different.
On the other, we should also realise that sexual encounters
are just as easily based on mutual agreement and respect as
on the "power-oriented selection of objects" that we
routinely denounce. The principle that separates the two
rejection of selfishness and acknowledgement of the needs of
others is surely just a personal dose of the medicine that
we prescribe for society as a whole.

Lindsay Taylor was atso the aulhor of Gay Politics in New

Zealand and not Lindsay Turner as credited. (Gay Left 9)

Gay Left 29

35 into the 80's

THIRTY FIVE INTO THE EIGHTIES
by Bob Cant
At the age of 35, I find myself thinking more and more about
ageing. I do not feel old and I know that my position as an
openly gay, employed person in a European country is
far more favourable than that of many other 35 year olds
throughout the world. Nonetheless, I feel myself constrained
in several ways because of my age.
One such constraint is the change or even decline in
the state of my body. I never really used to consider it very
much at all. It was just there. Now I feel increasingly unfit;
I run out of wind when I try to catch distant buses; I put on
weight very quickly; I sometimes find it difficult to maintain
an erection when I have been drinking; my hair is turning
grey; I have crowns on some of my teeth. I have to be aware
of my body now. I have to think about what I eat and drink.
This pre-occupation with my physical well-being quickly
extends to my physical appearance and the way that affects
me on the gay male scene. I have always had mixed feelings
about the scene, sometimes finding it friendly and supportive, but sometimes finding it predatory. Previously, however,
I never felt obliged to alter my image. It was not that I had
risen above images but I conformed to one of them (Gay
Radical Man, London, early '70s) without realising that I was
doing so. Because I feel comfortable with that kind of image,
I stick to it and so I often find that I look out of place. My
i mage is from a different period and, therefore, I feel as if I
am older and less desirable. Sometimes, I make concessions
to the '80s images; sometimes, I obstinately foster the one
from the '70s; but whatever I do I know that I cannot escape
from the fact my image makes me a commodity and, therefore, affects my relationship with the gay male scene. Since
this is an important way of meeting other gay men in
London I have no doubt that I will continue to pay attention
to my image. Given the value attached to a youthful appearance, I would be remarkable if I did not try to foster that.
Another important result of these physical changes is that
I am less energetic than I was. I simply cannot do as much as
once I did. I have to pace myself and to make sure that I rest.
I have to be extremely careful about how I choose to use my
time and, politically, I have to be much more selective. I still
retain a world view, albeit a jumbled one, but my activity is
now a fraction of what it once was. I work for London Gay
Switchboard; I am Action Officer in my union branch; I do a
course in Trade Union Studies which includes research on
discrimination against gays at work. All these activities are
characterised by clearly defined limitations on my personal
responsibility. The current political climate plus my loss of
energy has left me to confine my responsibilities in such a
way that I do not take on leadership roles. I do what I can
with groups of other like-minded people.
And as I look around at my friends of a similar age, this
specialization seems not uncommon. We may continue to
regard ourselves as committed to an overall transformation of
society but many of us are involved, to a great extent, with
one issue. With some it is a political organization; with some
it is their career; with me it is the trade union movement.
I feel concerned about this in two ways.
Firstly, it is very easy to rationalize one's lack of energy
into a new set of political beliefs. Thus, we may find ourselves believing, 'Because this is all I can do, this is all that
needs to be done'. Secondly, we may become so sucked into
the structure of our particular organization that we give
priority to the survival of the organization rather than to its
aims. I sometimes fear in my union branch that because I
understand the procedures better than anyone else I am
beginning to think on the same terms as our bureaucratic

30 Gay Left

leadership. I worry that I may be seen as a conservative

force. I still believe in the principles of direct action and selfemancipation but it is difficult to hold to such values when
there is little opportunity or will to put them into practice.
The other principal constraint which makes me think
about ageing is increased isolation. The fact that I am
involved in fewer activities than I was means that I meet
fewer people. The political impasse of this period means that
there is a lack of ideas and activities to stimulate me. Because
I have less energy I spend more time at home. The most
i mportant relationship I have is with the man I share a house
with. Although we are not a couple and we are both opposed
to monogamy, I am afraid of the relationship becoming too
stifling. I do not want to break the relationship but I do not
know how to break the privatization. Answering ads in
Lonely Hearts columns might be one way of meeting likeminded people, but I feel if I had enough energy and courage
to go through with that properly I might have succeeded in
getting out of the spiral of privatization already.
The lack of new stimuli, however, has thrown me back on
myself in ways which seem quite positive. I have had to
accept who I am and not just the parts that I like but also
the irritation and the paranoia. I have also had to consider
the way my ego affects my behaviour; the way I protect
myself from rejection by shyness; the way I bear grudges; the
way I am reluctant to disagree and so bottle up my anger.
None of these will go away but I am dealing with them better
than I have ever done before. Life now does seem too short
to continue fostering these feelings. It might not last for long
but I do seem better able to accept myself as I am and others
as I find them. I understand why some people turn to
Freudian therapy or Buddhism to explain the inescapable in
their lives. I understand why others seek solace in their allotments or in overeating. Perhaps that is why I write articles for
Gay Left.
There are two points that I want to finish on. They are
not conclusions but they do not seem to fit in elsewhere.
The only thing about my ageing which makes me really
despair is the near total lack of collective memory in the gay
male scene and sometimes in the gay movement. It is easy to
become nostalgic about the Gay Liberation Front of the
early '70s but many of us did learn a lot from that period.
When we see these lessons being ignored by our younger
brothers, it is difficult not to feel useless and hopeless. It is
even more difficult and more important not to say, 'I
told you so' afterwards.
One thing, on the other hand, which makes me feel very
positive about ageing is the loss of naievete. I miss the energy
and the enthusiasm that I used to have 15 years ago even
five years ago, but the naivete is well gone. My hopes and
dreams in the '50s were fed by politicians who promised us
never-ending material blessings; they were also fed by pop
songs which pedalled an insidious, romantic, monogamous
pulp. It took a long time to rid myself of these illusions. I do
not feel cynical or blase; although my dreams and hopes are
as unattainable as ever, at least they do not screw me up like
they used to do.

Eros Denied
EROS DENIED, OR THE REVOLUTION
BETRAYED
White Hero, Black Beast. Racism, Sexism, and the Mask of
Masculinity by Paul Hoch (Pluto Press 1979, 3.95)
Homosexuality and Liberation. Elements of a Gay Critique
by Mario Mieli (Gay Men's Press 1980, 3.95)
Army of Lovers by Rosa von Praunheim (Gay Men's Press
1980, 3.95)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Weeks
These books under review raise central questions about the
nature of sexual politics, particularly as all touch on the
relationship of sexuality to wider social forms. Their
appearance is therfore extremely welcome. Paul Hoch's book
is one of the very few which have directly confronted the
issue of the social construction of masculinity and its
political consequences, and will I hope stimulate a lively
debate. Even though I do not agree with much of its
theoretical underpinning, I found it lively and in many ways
enlightening. Coincidentally, its perspective is quite close to
Mieli's book, while many of the assumptions of both works
are also written into Rosa von Praunheim's collection of
interviews with American gay activists, and are apparent in
the book and in the film of the same title on which it is
based. The three books, I would suggest, have a common
project is a sort of resurrectionary politics, a surprising
revival of the often millenarian theories and utopian hopes of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. So rather than write a
straight forward review I want to offer a common critique,
taking up some of the themes rather than assessing each
book as a single unity.
Before doing this though I also want to say something
about the publishing politics these works represent. Those of
us involved in sexual politics have been indebted to Pluto for
some time for their publications in this area. Though their
list is rather eclectic, alone of the left publishers they have
sought to involve themselves in sexual politics, and they are
to be congratulated now on producing Hoch's book. The Gay
Men's Press represent a more specialist publishing inter- vention; it is also a major event in British gay politics. The
development of the gay movement depends on an extension
of debate and constant growth in our understanding of the
oppressive regulation of sexuality. This has always been
central to the project of Gay Left over the past five years
indeed the left elements in the gay movement have survived
only because small pockets of socialists throughout the
country have maintained an engagement with issues relating
to sexual oppression, often against the odds and in conditions of some isolation. If I criticise the current publications it is not because I do not welcome very warmly their
appearance. On the contrary, their publication has enabled
me to reconsider my own views and given me the opportunity to set out my political disagreements in I hope a
constructive way.
The three books have a common origin in a politics of
moral criticism which at times becomes a moralistic politics.
This may seem a strange thing to say about two books
(Hoch's and Mieli's) which are ostensibly materialist accounts
of gay oppression and masculinity respectively, and even
stranger about a collection of interviews. Indeed the moralismoralism is not overtly strong in Rosa von Praunheim's
book, though it comes over loud and heavy in the film. And
in the other two books the moral stance is clear but superficially at least subordinate to a theoretical perspective. But
I believe their real value comes from their moral critique of
existing relations rather than from any new theoretical
insights they offer. In fact their theory has a common root:
the radical attempts at a synthesis of Marx and Freud so
central to the 'liberation' movements of the late 60s and

early 70s, and best epitomised by the work of Marcuse. What

these attempts did was to delineate the problem in passionate
terms and to offer an essentially moral statement of why it
was necessary to decipher the fit between psychic structures
and the perpetuation of the rule of capital. But the actual
explanations offered relied on a series of metaphysical statements which owed more to poetry than to materialism, and
which make a politics, (that is a practice leading to a transformation of the relation of power) virtually impossible.
The core of the theory is the belief that the repression of
sexuality (capitalised in Mieli's book as Eros) is integral to
the perpetuation of capital. The corollary of this is that gay
oppression and the structures of male dominance are
necessary aspects of the rule of capital; and that the gay
struggle and the challenge to patriarchal dominance are in
their different ways essential aspects of the struggle against
the rule of capital. Both Hoch's book and Mieli's share, that
is to say, a cosmic functionalism. Thus Mieli:
the dogma of procreation as the sole true goal of sexuality
grew up historically ... as a justification for the condemnation placed by society on all other libidinal
tendencies, with a view to sublimating them into the
economic shpere.
And Hoch:
the sexual fulfilment promised at the end of the rainbow
is used as the ultimate carrot to keep men in competition
in war and production. This partial impotence syndrome
has thus enabled societies with our form of family
structure to divert a greater and greater amount of what
would otherwise be libidinal energy into acquisitive
competition for masculinity in work, warfare and consumption.
The actual mechanisms by which the intentionality of
capital organises and controls the dynamism of Eros are
never spelt out. For Mieli the process is related to the JudaeoChristian tradition and the way in which this provides the
basis for the automaton that is capitalism (a view that is perhaps explicable in an Italian faced by the complicity between

Gay Left 31

authoritarian catholicism and the bourgois order). For Hoch

there is a clear relationship between the growth of private
property and the structuration of repressive masculine
character traits, but though he offers very suggestive links
(such as in his fascinating discussion of the racist and dualist
metaphor so common in our culture of the white hero
struggling against the black beast of other cultures/classes)
the accounts of the specific historical moments of poitical
appropriation are conspicuously absent. But given a totalising theory in which there is a necessary congruence between all the parts of the social machine, one level built on
an other like a pyramid of tin cans, a transparent political
message can be offered. 'If homosexuality is liberated', Mario
Mieli writes, 'then it ceases to sustain this system, comes into
conflict with it and contributes to its collapse.' A revolutionary gay politics, that is to say is a key to the subversion of
the whole social order. Paul Hoch's book is less millenarian;
he merely suggests the relevance of critique of male chauvinism to a wider (largely ecological and moral) attack on
capital. But the close articulation between the various
aspects of social oppression and economic exploitation is
again suggested.
Now, this approach is intensely appealing. I personally
would like to be able to embrace a holistic theory in which
all social phenomena can be explained by a series of interrelated concepts. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to accept
the theories offered here, and believe in fact that the search
for such fully articulated theories to be misguided. I want to
underline some particular points of disagreement, concentrating for convenience on Mieli's book, though the points I
make also have relevance for Hoch's.

1 The nature of sexuality

Basic to Mieli's approach is the belief in the existence of Eros
as a transexual, originally undifferentiated desire which our
culture attempts to force into the mould of compulsive
heterosexuality. Homosexuality, which by its nature is a
refusal of this repression is therefore close to the underlying
transexuality of desire. Its liberation in everyone will release
the elements of intercommunication between people for
`Communism is the rediscovery of bodies and their fundamental communicative function, their polymorphous
potential for love'. Not only therefore is gay liberation
revolutionary but even the everyday actions of gays (or at
least gay men) contribute to the challenge to the heterosexual Norm: 'anal intercourse is itself a significant revolutionary force'.
Much of this is close, superficially at least, to positions I
hold. I believe that the body is potentially both bisexual and
polymorphous as Freud suggested, and I agree that categories
such as heterosexuality and homosexuality are social
restrictions on the flux of desire. But it is wrong, I believe,
to apostrophise these bodily potentials as if they were a
transhistorical, transpersonal, biological force which
apparently preexists the entry into culture of the human
child. This is to give metaphysical status to a series of
possibilities. As recent work in psychoanalysis has suggested,
desire does not preexist the cultural acquisitions of
masculinity and femininity but is shaped in the process of
those acquisitions. What is suppressed, therefore, is not a
given amount of sexual energy (the sexual essence) but a
series of wishes that cannot be allowed access to consciousness.
The concept of repression poses further problems, partly
because it so easily slides from an individual to a social
context. What it constantly evokes is the damming of a pregiven essential force, suggesting as its antithesis a 'liberation',
a release of this energy to shatter all hitherto existing
restrictive norms. But as Michel Foucault and others have
suggested, this 'repressive hypothesis' actually obscures the
real mechanisms at work. The organisation of sexuality does
not proceed through the physical control of a rebellious
energy but through the regulation, categorisation, discursive
ordering and defining of a series of possibilities. Sexuality,

32 Gay Left

that is to say, is riot inhibited, in a straightforward way,

through social control; on the contrary, social mechanisms
construct sexualities. All this implies that we must rethink
what we mean by sexual politics. If it cannot be about
releasing sex from restraint, then we must accept the political
consequences of seeing it as being about redefining what is
'
socially possible. `Transexuality cannot be `liberated'; it can
only be created out of the possibilities of the body as
socially mediated.

2 The relationship of sexual oppression to class

society
This approach means that we cannot fruitfully see the
relationship between sexual oppression and class society as
having any unilinear effectivity. Capitalism does not work
with coherence or intention to produce a sexed being which
fulfils its needs, either in terms of gender characteristics or
sexual orientation. What we must now develop, as a matter
of political urgency, is a greater awareness of the complexities of the ways in which sexuality is organised and regulated
in a class society: the congruities, and contradictions, the
strategical relationships and the conjunctural interventions.
That means revisiting that much despised activity, historical
analysis. It means understanding both the symbolic significance given to sexuality in our culture and the various
strategies through which this has been realised. It means not
subordinating our theorisations to notions of a predetermined connection between one social phenomenon and
another. It means above all being aware of the various
potentialities for change, the points of contradiction and the
opportunities for resistance. It is on this terrain that sexual
politics has to work, not on the mega-plain of transcendental
aspiration.

3 Political Practice
This in turn has important implications for political practice.
A major theme of Mieli's book is the distinction he suggests
between the revolutionary gay, who refuses any accommodation with the existing society, and the reformist, who lies
back and thinks that all is for the best of all possible worlds
in our consumer paradise. We are sternly warned, however,
that 'Tolerance is repressive' and that 'the purpose of liberalisation, for the present system, is above all to prevent and
block any genuine liberation'. But the actual 'revolutionary
action proposed turns out in the end to be our old friend
epater le bourgeois: drag, street theatre, counter cultural
resistance and the schizophrenic trip; all no doubt important
for the individuals or groups involved, but leaving all the
power to define, to regulate, to oppress, unworried, untouched, supreme. In fact the real gains of the past ten years
have been achieved not by those who have simply done their
own thing, nor by those who retreated from the fray lamenting a revolution that failed. They have been won by those
despised so called 'reformists' who have battled on reshaping
our own self concepts, and bit by bit challenging the oppressive categorisations and practices which inhibit the play of
sexuality. Despised activities such as befriending, publishing,
cultural activities etc have actually begun to transform what
it means to be gay and sexual in our society. The interviews
in Army of Lovers amply illustrate the changes that have
taken place, in all their ambiguity.

This does not mean that all is well, that all that remains
to do is tidy up the edges. But it does mean that we must
move away from the all or nothing approach, the 'total
liberation of desire' or the 'sell out'. And that means moving
away from those comfortable categories which give us
comfort in the dark nights of the soul, but have little matching in the concrete world: the absolute split supposed, for
instance between 'reform' and 'revolution'. We must begin to
explore oppression and exploitation in their complexities,
and to develop strategies and tactics which are alert to the
mobility and elusiveness of power relations. We need to
understand gay oppression in its specific context, and be
aware of the inherent difficulties of a gay politics, as well as
the possibilities for radical transformation. Some of the
essays in the forthcoming book edited by the Gay Left
Collective, Homosexuality, Power and Politics, do this much
more subtly than Mieli precisely because they start from a
different theoretical and political base: no less committed to
changing the relations of sex, but aware that the choice is not
between total freedom or defeat, `transexual desire' or
commercial exploitation.
What I am trying to suggest is that a radical sexual politics
does not depend on an assumed automatic relationship
between one structure of oppression and another, nor on a
politics which believes there is a hidden nature that can be
beneficently released. It depends rather more mundanely on
continuing efforts to gain influence over those institutions
that have the power to define and regulate oppressively, and
on constant interventions to shift the locus of categorisation
in favour of our declared aims. That means recognising that
these institutions have their preconditions in wide social and
economic and political relations of power. It means constantly bringing home the moral critique that is at the heart
of the gay and women's movement. And above all it means
moving away from the politics of nostalgia, to seek a socialist
politics that is alive to people's aspirations and aware of the
possibilities for a renewed advance.

Gay+ Feminist books

New+Secondhand.
U.S. Imports
Badges,
Posters +
, Records

Gay Left 33

Facing The Crisis

by Dave Landau
There are few on the left today who subscribe to the simple
theory that in a period of economic crisis, the capitalist class
is thrown into disarray, there is increased class polarisation
and working class militancy and hence an automatic shift in
the relationship of forces in favour of the oppressed. It has
been recognised by most radicals that such a crisis is a dangerous period for all classes in society there is a greater likelihood for intense violent battles, the results of which cannot
be assessed in advance.
Nevertheless, it is not generally recognised that there are
features intrinsic to an economic crisis which are politically
favourable to Capital, i.e., make it easier for the class to rule.
It is my thesis that the period we have now entered is a crisis
in which these features are accentuated and that the present
government is cognisant, at least empirically, with these
features, and capable of exploiting them. Further, I intend to
show that as a consequence gay people specifically, are going
to face a very dangerous and critical twelve months.

Economic competition
It is in the very nature of an economic crisis that the material
resources available to the oppressed is significantly decreased.
Throughout the history of capitalism this has been expressed
as cuts in the real value of wages and increased unemployment. In modern capitalism it involves considerably more
than that, because of the resources provided by the Welfare
State cuts in housing, social services, funding to help
organisations (including gay counselling bodies), increased
rents and rates, education cuts etc.
It follows inevitably that there is a tendency towards competition between sectors of the oppressed for a slice of the
considerably diminished cake. In the old days this competition was mainly around jobs and wage differentials. Today
there is far more to squabble over; which parts of public
expenditure should be cut the most, which geographical areas

34 Gay Left

need subsidising, rent increases, versus rate increases versus cuts etc.
Of course, this increased competition is a tendency. There
is no social law saying that it has to become the dominant
feature. It has, however, been very apparent over the last
year and I would suggest it is likely to become more apparent
over the coming years.

Hierarchy of power
One of the most important features of our society is that it is
not merely stratified in terms of class. This is too often forgotten by the left, particularly the parties of the left. There
are very definite hierarchies of relative power operating
within and between the oppressed. Some of these are constructed completely by the workings of Capital itself. For
example, the system of wage differentials, the formation of
an aristocracy of labour, the reserve pool of labour, the international division of labour by imperialism and its expression
in terms of immigrant and migrant labour within the
i mperialist heartlands.
There are other hierarchies which started their lives long
before capitalism. Most significant amongst these are those
associated with patriarchy. The power of men over women,
of adults over children, the divisions between intellectual and
manual labour, and the divisions between both of these and
domestic labour. Far from being atavistic hangovers from the
past, they are pre-capitalist foundations of capital and have
been developed and reconstructed by the development of
capitalism, institutionalised in the modern nuclear family,
legislation, and more recently in state education, health,
patterns of employment etc.
From these divisions are founded pernicious ideologies
and hence pernicious ideological practices which in turn
generate further hierarchies and divisions. The most significant of these are, of course, racism and sexism.

Dependence and identity

It might seem sufficient to relate this notion of hierarchy of
powers back immediately to the situation of crisis driven
internecine competition to see how they compound one
another. To see the full impact of this, however, it is
necessary to dwell a little more on the question of consciousness .
Any distinct type of society is characterised by a set of
relations by which individuals and groups of individuals survive within it. These relationships are described by Marxists
as the 'social relations of production' or the 'economic base',
though these expressions are liable to give rise to misinterpretation (I would suggest that Marx and latter Marxists
deliberately suggest these misinterpretations but that is
another matter). Classes and distinct fractions of classes are
defined by the fact that their members survive in essentially
the same way, and that this method of survival is mutually
dependent on the way in which another group survives.
Thus to take the most well known example there is a
mutual dependence between capitalists and workers. The
capitalist survives by virtue of the surplus value created by
labour. The working class survives b y virtue of the wa g es it is
paid by Capital. I don't have - . to,, Left that this
relationship, while mutually dependent is essentially unequal.
However this more obviously 'economic' relationship of
mutual dependence for survival is not the only one fundamental to this society. The relationship between housewives
to their husbands is another such relationship and all these
various relationships are woven together to form the 'base'.
The reason for my little excursion here into what is, after
all, a re-definition of 'historical materialism' is to illuminate
two basic points. The first is that the class relations and other
relations of oppression are entered into by individuals in
order to survive and they are therefore dependent upon
them. The second is that these relationships are therefore not
chosen, are not consciously constructed. The state may consciously intervene to repair, reinforce, and occasionally
reconstruct them, but for the oppressed in particular, they
are no more and no less than a way of life and what appears
to be the only way of living.
What I believe follows from this (and my argument here is
inevitably schematic) is that the individuals' sense of self
identity, their emotional and intellectual framework, is an
internalisation of how that individual experiences her/his process of survival. As the individual has played no part in
consciously determining what this process consists of, from
cradle to grave, this identity is largely unconscious and
unarticulated. It is what the left calls false consciousness,
Now, of course, some of this identity will express itself
articulately as a set of ideas, as ideology, but this is only the
tip of the iceberg. The 'ideological practices' to which I
referred earlier, are not simply practices directed according
to the specifically ideological parts of consciousness, but
practices based upon the whole and largely unarticulated
components. Thus 'ideological practices' is a short hand
phrase. Now this is no pedantic distinction. It is absolutely
crucial when considering the politics of an economic crisis.
Without any global crisis at all every individual has to cope
with a dramatic revolution in the dependent relations of
survival. The change from childhood, to adulthood i.e. the
change from dependence on parents to dependents upon
-employers and the resources of the state on the one hand and
dependence upon a spouse on the other hand (that is if the
adult develops 'normally' by which I mean more than simply
that the adult is not gay but that the adult is committed to
family life). This revolution goes under the name of
adolescene. A whole series of institutions are provided to
ensure that the individual survives this upheaval with a sense
of identity intact i.e. a sufficient continuity is experienced to
ensure that the adolescent doesn't come to realise the extent
to which their identity is unconscious and dependent and
based on things that are falling away and being replaced. For
once that has been exposed the fact of powerlessness is
discovered.

There are two essential responses to the discovery of

powerlessness. One is to recognise its source in the social
order itself and to struggle against that order. The other is to
seek a niche in the existing hierarchy of power, asserting an
identity as white, straight, male, or a combination of these
depending upon the youth in question. By doing this one
defines an identity as a negation of another, and power
relative to the power of another. Both these responses
explode when the agencies of continuity cease to be effective
and can be seen to have a marked impact on the streets.
In an economic crisis we are all adolescents in this sense.
As the social order fails to deliver the goods, as the relations
through which we are dependent for survival, fall apart, so
the unarticulated identities crumble exposing our powerlessness. In turn the two responses present themselves, but with
a difference. They are compounded with the internecine
economic competition engendered by the crisis. This
reinforces the hierarchic response and creates an explosive
mixture of devastating proportions. Naked racism, queer
bashing, and misogyny manifest themselves in brutal fashion.
The opposite revolutionary response also combines with the
solidarity tendency of crisis. The question left open, is of
course, which response dominates. This depends upon the
specific nature of the crisis and in particular where it stands
in relation to the period which has just preceded it. To a
lesser extent it depends upon the strategies of the government of the day.

The end of an epoch

Since the end of the Second World War, successive governments, both Tory and Labour, have been openly committed
to the expansion and maintenance of the Welfare State. They
have espoused the philosophy of state provision, the philosophy of universal and ever improving educational and
health facilities, the eradication of homelessness, poverty and
unemployment, the protection of the weak and incapable
and so on. The motivations behind these policies were not so
philanthropic. The objective was to improve and control the
way in which the essential social relations reproduce themselves.
The real break has come with the present government,
informed no doubt by the escalating world recession. There
are no pretences now. The epoch of welfare capital has been
pronounced closed by the Thatcher Government. Stand on
your own two feet. Lest there be any confusion, it should
not be concluded that the whole edifice of post war society
is being dismantled in this country. It isn't. The welfare state
will continue, but it is being qualitatively reduced and
restructured. What is entirely new, is that this is no longer a
secret. Our society is identifying itself by a new name, and
the rulers legitimising themselves in a new way for the first
ti me since the war.
How have the specific features of the epoch of welfare
shaped mass consciousness and what bearing does this have
on the responses to the present crisis which marks its end.
a) Proliferation of competitive sectors. The welfare state
creates a diversity of resources. In a recession this gives rise
to a greater number of potential interest groups fighting each
other for a slice of the cake.
b) Migrant labour, the epoch which has just ended has been
the introduction of a large number of black people deliberately restricted to the bottom layers of the labour market
accentuating the racist content of the hierarchy of powers.
c) Before the war, the state presented itself as a neutral
arbiter of conflicting interests. Since the war it has invited
the individual to relate to a super-family. A new dimension
of dependency consciousness has been constructed vis-a-vis
the state as parent. Thus a collapse of this role throws the
discovery of powerlessness into sharper relief than ever
before. The failure of the state to provide defines sharp
reactions. On the one hand an attack on state power in terms
of self-determination and liberation. The other responses,
however, have a greater potential virulence. There are greater
opportunities to find an identity in the hierarchy of powers.

Gay Left 35

The material presence of the nuclear family, presents a readymade universe to replace the vacuum created by the crisis.
But perhaps the most significant point is that what we have
defined as two opposite responses to powerlessness have the
possibility of combining together into a new one situated
firmly on the right.
In identifying the source of powerlessness in the paternalistic state one may oppose it by affirming an extreme
individualism. This individualism, far from opposing the
hierarchical response, breaks the old opposition and fuses
with it, reinforcing the competitive tendency still more.
Thus, in summary, the present crisis brings forth three
rather than two kinds of responses, the radical, the familialhierarchical-competitive, and the individualist-hierarchicalcompetitive. This is what loads the dice in favour of reaction.

Right Populism (in and out of government)

We have examined the polarisation of responses within the
oppressed to economic crisis. I call Right Populism the
practice of a political tendency to exploit the reactionary
responses. There are many kinds of right populist organiisations; Fascism is the most extreme example. What makes
Right Populism so important today is that it is a central
plank of government strategy.
As early as 1975 a section of the Conservative Party
recognised that right populism was not simply a way of
gaining support, but that it was the best way in which to
govern society in the coming period. If the welfare system is
collapsing despite the policies of a Labour government, why
not advocate its dismemberment, an economic necessity for
Capital anyway, and mobilise those disaffected with it?
This wing of the party launched itself decisively when Sir
Keith Joseph made his famous 'classes 4 and 5' speech. It
seized control of the leadership remarkably quickly in a
few months Thatcher was Tory leader. For the next four
years, the Tories adopted consistent right populist tactics.
What most of the left felt at the time to be a desperate
regression in defeat which would weaken the Tory base and
alienate any working and lower middle class support they
had, turned out to be an eminently correct strategy
It took no great sophisticated political understanding to
decide upon this strategy or to carry it through. It must be
said, however, that as a matter of fact, the Thatcher-Joseph
leadership are politically sophisticated. But their success did
not really depend upon this sophistication. It's largely a

matter of following your nose and going after the main

chance. The reactionary responses to the delapidated welfare
state were expressing themselves in all kinds of individual and
collective forms. Increase in racist violence, proliferation of
male street gangs, increased protest against rates and taxes,
calls for law and order, the growth of the NF etc. The Tories
did not create these. It is doubtful that they understood
what social forces linked them together. It was sufficient to
recognise that they formed a whole, and propound a suitable
political framework to give them a coherence as an organised
political force. This the Tories did zealously, learning all the
ti me from the successes and failures of the smaller right
populist organisations. They championed the family and the
individual against the paternal state, condemned inefficient
bureaucracy, advocated reduction of taxes and rates, cuts in
public expenditure to be replaced by more free enterprise,
buy your own home, and identified the paternal state with
communism and socialism. The left consistently played into
their hands by failing to seriously reject this state and
bureaucracy and being seen more and more to be identified
with it.
Anti-immigration propaganda and harder policing also
figured highly in their approach, linked together through
racism.
Once in government, they have ruled in precisely the same
way. They justify their economic policies in terms of the new
individualism, seize on the competition engendered by these
policies, to champion the bigotry of one section of the
community against another, enshrining it in immigration
legislation or initiating an attack on social security claimants.
Finally they reap the rewards of the violence of the divisions
they have nurtured, by using them to legitimate a qualitatively stronger police presence on the street. They have their
cake and eat it. At the end of the day, when they make their
serious assaults on wage and employment levels, they will
have the upper hand. They aim to have the working class
sufficiently divided, isolated and policed to win and institute
a crushing defeat.
None of this presupposes a high level conspiracy of 'divide
and rule'. Once the framework is established and accepted at
all levels of the state, the tactical manoeuvres can be worked
out quite empirically on a day-to-day basis by each department of the state almost independently. Why'?, because it is a
framework in which the economic imperatives of capital and
the political methods used to achieve them, mutually
reinforce one another.

The coming homophobic offensive

All this has very specific and dangerous implications for
lesbians and gay men. The long and short of it is that all the
reactionary responses to the crisis, encouraged by government converge upon us. We are another against which an
identity can be defined. In the patriarchal hierarchy of
powers we are near the bottom, it is against us that other
powerless groups can define their power. Our place is not in
the nuclear family, it can only be found in civil society as a
whole, in the eyes of the nuclear world our place is therefore
in the commy super-family which has failed to deliver the
goods -- and if anyone needs protecting by the forces of law
arid order it is the 'innocent children' who we threaten to rob
from the family. The blacks and 'scroungers' were the first to
be put in the pillory, we are the next in line, we are going to
be fighting for our survival in the next twelve months; we
will be facing an onslaught greater than anything since 1967
and probably since the war.
Even under the Labour government in March 1979 the
Northern Ireland Office presented, in its evidence to the
European Commission on Human Rights against the NIGRA
case, the argument that the decriminalisation of homosexuality endangers the family and children. Such an argument is
clearly not specific to the "Six Counties".
If these ideas were around then, they are sure to be
around under Thatcher. But the decisive thing is that there is

36 Gay Left

a peg around which an anti-gay offensive will naturally hang

itself. That peg will be the trial of executive members of the

Paedophile Information Exchange some time in the beginning
of 1981. This trial will last for many weeks. The press will
take it up day in and day out.
When the gutter press start spreading the dirt, backbenchers will start calling for tough measures, queer bashers
will reach for their flick knives, there will be a public outcry
which will give the police chiefs a long awaited chance to let
all hell loose, conspiracy to corrupt public morals will for the
first time have popular consent and the DPP will start
investigating all gay organisations with a view to its possible
application, a Judge faced with a lesbian mother will reel
back with twice as much horror as before and finally the
government itself will respond, the champion of populist
bigotry once more. How it will respond is unclear, perhaps
instructions to social administrators and education authorities to root out the gays who could be 'corrupting' children?
Anti-gay legislation? There is no way of predicting precisely
how they will react. They probably aren't aware of the trial
yet. All one can be sure about is that when there is a bigoted
outcry a right populist government ignores it at its peril and
has everything to gain from responding to it.

Fighting back
I have painted a bleak picture. But is there anything we can
do about it? I propose no strategy for the gay community
here. The purpose of this article is to define the problems
which any strategy must be designed to meet. However there
are certain things which any such strategy must include.
In the first place it is a paramount necessity for the gay
community to educate itself on the issues of child sexuality
and paedophilia and to initiate a debate in the sexual politics
movements, the left and ultimately the labour movement on
these questions in preparation for the PIE trial. Secondly it is
i mportant for the gay community to be on the offensive with
considerable outside support when that trial starts. If it is to
be isolated and passive it will simply run for cover. Thirdly it
is i mportant that a comprehensive legal and physical defence
apparatus is established within the gay community well
before the trial begins.
The Campaign Against Public Morals exists to win support
for the defendants in the trial and is very much concerned in
the first task. It is very important that more gay activists
involve themselves in the activities of this campaign.

As for the second task, NIGRA has provided us with an

opportunity for an offensive gay campaign this year. It is
almost certain that the European Commission has come out
in favour of decriminalisation of homosexuality in the "Six
Counties". It is equally certain that Thatcher will not be
eager to implement that judgement. With a government in
contravention of a Commission on human rights it should be
possible to build a mass campaign for the decriminalisation
of homosexuality in the "Six Counties" and in Scotland.
Such a campaign could have significant labour movement
support. It is winnable.
If we can force the government to implement these
demands before the trial they will be far less likely to go on
an all out offensive against us. Even if we don't, a campaign
that has a mass character at the time of the trial will give the
gay community that much more confidence and support to
meet the challenge. It would be criminal in the present
circumstances not to seize and make the most of this opportunity; criminal not only in terms of our responsibilities to
our sisters and brothers in the "Six Counties", but also in
terms of our own self-defence.
So all is not lost. This will be a critical period. We have to
play our cards right or we will be sunk.

Gay Left 37

Acting It Out
GAY COMMUNITY THEATRE
Emmanuel Cooper
No other area of gay culture has flourished quite so
dramatically as gay theatre, most of which is deeply rooted
in the gay community. It offers not only the collective
strength and support for the people (mostly men) working in
the theatre group, but also provides the opportunity for
sexual and political themes to be explored which relate
directly to the gay experience. In this article I want to look
at some recent productions in London, the ideas they put
forward and their contribution to our political consciousness.
That small scale, politically based fringe theatre should
flourish at all at the time of recession and cut-backs is a
further testament to the strength of the commitment. While
West End commercial theatres stand empty for lack of suitable shows and keen audiences, or managements turn to
small-scale cheap productions "Establishment Fringe"
the committed fringe continues to draw crowds: irony of
ironies Wyndhams Theatre is currently showing (May
1980) 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist', the 'Belt and
Braces' fringe production aimed originally at politicising
audiences anywhere except in London's West End. Whatever
its shortcomings as a play, it is a thousand times better than
most junk on offer.
Political fringe and commercial theatre whether on a large,
West End scale or on a low budget' have very little in
common. Unlike commercial productions, the actors, writers
and helpers in the fringe and community theatre thrive on
commitment rather than profit. Actors are rarely famous or
`stars', many have little or no professional training, but all
perform in parts in which they believe: it is the theatre of
life not of make-believe. In conventional theatre, fascists may
speak socialist lines, racists may declare their lack of prejudice, a homosexual may play a heterosexual (all too often),
but if such play-acting exists in the fringe it is done openly:
there is a very different relationship between actor and play.
To start with groups come together through a series of
shared beliefs even if these are not clearly stated. In Gay Left
No. 7, members of Gay Sweatshop described why they were
(or were not) members of the company. Though as
38 Gay Left

individuals they expressed different ideas, these overlapped

in huge and important areas. All of them wanted their gayness to be central to the plays they were doing and they
wanted to work with openly gay men and women. As the
most established openly gay company, Gay Sweatshop has a
reputation for well presented, innovatory plays which touch
upon areas of our lives in a direct and often moving way.
Sweatshop also has a political commitment which is central
to the work they do. This was particularly evident in the
recent play 'Who Knows' .
Written and performed by women and men under 21, the
play looked at the problems for young people of 'coming
out' to friends and parents. It is a play aimed particularly
at young people and intended to be performed in schools and
youth clubs to question conventional notions of sexuality
and the stereotyping of butch and femme. (Reviewed by
Philip Derbyshire, Gay Left No. 9.)
"But aren't you just preaching to the converted" was a
comment from one member of the audience in the discussion
after the performance I saw, as if we all felt so sure and smug
about the tender and delicate areas with which the play was
concerned, that we need not speak of it again. Rightly there
were objections to this attitude converted we may be, sure
and confident we rarely are. Serious treatment given to the
very real problems of 'Coming Out' is rare and very
welcome.
Like Sweatshop, "Bloolips" is a professional company
who earn their living from their performances. The Bloolips
production "Lust in Space" incorporates gay humour in a
cabaret format. 'Lust' has a thin plot and though the title is
clever, it does not have, like most of the gay fringe, even a
hint of lust. "Six nutty men who have opted for a stockpot
of pantomime, punk rock, ballet, Busby Berkely, Bette Davis
and Bette Bourne" was the description in the press release,
and seems fair and adequate. The all male company sings,
dances and speaks to a plot of wild and zany fantasy, pausing
only to adjust their exotic and improbable asexual space-like
drag costumes culled from the tat of Portobello Road or the
leftovers of a wild punk party.
Bloolips demand commitment: this is gay entertainment
by a gay group for a gay audience. The tone is high, if tatty
camp no high class Chelsea Drag Ball numbers here
which exudes the sort of gutsy enthusiastic atmosphere to
which we can relate. There is never the feeling of a gap
between actors and audience which has to be bridged. We
feel involved because this is a part of our lives we are watch-

ing even if it is disguised in fantasy and wrapped up in

glittering tinsel.
Both of the other two groups 'Brixton Faeries' and
`Sexual Outlaw Workshop' are community based, and both
perform works they have written centred on their own
experience.
Brixton Faeries production 'Gents' employs much of the
same sort of high camp as `Bloolips' but the theme is interleaved with more 'straight' theatre. Set in an old-fashioned
underground gentlemen's toilet, 'Gents' is a direct political
intervention which deals with areas of gay men's sexuality
most people would like to forget; it looks at how gay men
are lured, mesmerized and even terrified by cottages. It is
probably true to say that cottaging is still the way most gay
men make contact: for most of them cottaging is not a
tremendously exciting liberating experience, but one fraught
with fears being seen by friends, arrested by the police, or
perhaps most importantly an aspect of sexual expression
they would rather suppress. Judging by the way many men
scuttle away once orgasm is achieved, it does not give the
sort of lingering pleasure we usually associate with sex.
For men who live in a supportive gay society and who feel
reasonably confident about their sexuality, cottaging can
offer the chance of a casual pick-up, a quick and exciting
orgasm; a sort of icing sugar layer on a rich, and on the whole
satisfying life. Cottaging can also be seen to challenge the
assumptions we have about right and wrong sex, in or out of
relationships (or bed) an expression of the sexual outlaw,
in total defiance of society's views on sex. Yet for most men,
their expectations of cottaging is minimal even if their fantasies are high, and it remains a furtive and secret activity.
`Gents' is based in the utterance of a judge that "without
police vigilance these gays will be holding parties in our
public toilets", and it attempts to look at ways in which
cottages have been and still are used and attitudes people
have to them. The ending, logically enough, takes place in a
toilet, now transformed by chandeliers and decorations, into
the party of the year.
Rightly 'Gents' did not attempt to say that any aspect of
cottaging is wrong, and its refusal to moralize was one of its
greatest strengths. Equally, its exposure of methods of police
entrapment and their condemnation was important. What
`Gents' did not do was deal with the problems and contradictions of men whose only contact with others is through
cottaging. The celebratory ending, of a party in a dark and
dank cottage seemed to me a long way from any sort of
sexual liberation.
A similar theme was explored by the Sexual Outlaw Workshop: following the model of John Rechy's book 'The Sexual
Outlaw', they set about comparing the ideas of police harassment and persecution of gay men with those of sexual liberation in a series of alternative sketches, posed and counterposed, eliciting from the audience strong images of fear and
pleasure. Beautifully presented, the Sexual Outlaw Workshop
were setting out quite specifically to argue a political case.
On the one hand, there was life as it could be such as the
innocence and excitement of childhood sexuality, the joy of
discovering that other people of the same sex could share
your interests, or the thrills of a sexual encounter on Hampstead Heath. Opposed to this was the heavy hand of the
parent, incurring anger and implanting guilt, or the harassment by the police of gays on Clapham Common, or the
entrapment of men outside the Coleherne.
All the situations beautiful or ugly were based on
actual incidents and elicited from the audience powerful
emotional responses; yet, the content had been limited by
the style and presentation of the piece. It left a feeling of
i mpressions rather than a strongly argued case.

leads us in, carries us along and brings us to a conclusion. It is

not the form of 'Men' which challenges traditional theatre,
but its content and the way it is produced. Unlike 'Bent'
which is written by an openly gay man, but performed by
men who did not state their sexuality, 'Men' was a specifically gay production and one to which we could respond
without ambiguity.
Set in the seedy Broadway Central Hotel in New York in
1973, 'Men' describes the meeting of two men. One is young
and handsome; a telephone worker who visits the `men's
room' of the hotel to meet men and have quick sex, or even
(hopefully) to talk to and make friends with men. The other
man is older 'an aging queen'. He lives in the hotel, forced
by circumstances to 'slum it'. Both men are presented very
much as stereotypes old/young, ugly/handsome, yet as the
play progresses these stereotypes are busted wide apart. The
'old queen' is confident, kindly and sympathetic, the 'handsome youth' is lonely isolated and desperate. Gradually the
two come to recognize their own needs, their own desires
and, as in a traditional love story, go off together, not quite
into a glorious sunset, but certainly into a 'happy ending'.
It is the way Stephen Holt has constructed his play, as
well as its message which gives it such a positive glow. Scenes
of the young man meeting studs and disappearing into the
lavatory shows a character whose sexuality is anything but
liberated. Everyone might like to use him, but no one wants
to give him anything in return. It is a picture of the desperation of cottaging very different from that presented in
`Gents'. In 'Men' the scene is apparently set for the two types
to hate each other. Each seems so hooked up with themselves
that they cannot hook up to anyone else. Yet slowly they
move together in a series of sideways lurches, and to our
amazement and pleasure 'get it together'. It is a play deeply
rooted in homosexual experience, which has been closely
observed and lived.
With the exception of 'Men', Gay Sweatshop and Bloolips,
the other productions are by people whose relationship with
theatre is non-professional. They choose theatre because it
offers a framework for the statement of ideas and the exploration of new ways in which they can be expressed.
Do such plays and entertainments extend or deepen and
affirm our political consciousness, and our awareness of ourselves as gay? I would strongly argue that they do and they
do this in two major ways. Firstly, they are deeply rooted in
the gay movement. They look at our fears, desires, activities
and feelings, and by openly expressing them enable us to
recognize the areas we have in common, and so break down
the isolation many of us experienced and still do experience.
Such works speak to us directly as gays and help us gain
collective support and recognition for ourselves and the
`identity' we choose to express.
Secondly, community based theatre challenges the conventional notion of culture in a capitalist society: it offers us
a positive alternative not based on commerce or the images
we find oppressive. There is a strong tradition of ordinary
informal theatre stretching back to medieval street theatre,
and encompassing en route the Globe and the Music Hall. It
is this tradition, largely lost to commercial enterpreneurs and
the expression of ideas and values of a bourgeois elite that
low cost, community based theatre can regain.
All the productions I saw spoke directly and positively
about being gay and all reflected the ideas of gay liberation
and sexual politics. All are important "expressions of the
hopes, aspirations, fears and gut feelings of gay people"
which contribute to and enrich our lives.

Which brings me to the final play presented by the Oval

House, 'Men' by Stephen Holt. Like 'Bent' by Martin Shearman, which has been a success in the West End, 'Men' is a
more conventional theatrical experience, with one credited
author who has written a traditional play with a plot, which

Gay Left 39

Making It Gay
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
by Edmund White
Andre Deutsch, 1980, 3.95

Review by Simon Watney

In this year's Marx Memorial Lecture, Raymond Williams

argued for a firm distinction between the concepts of
commitment and alignment as they are applied to writing.
'
He located the idea of 'commitment within the context of
the Romantic ideal of the artist/writer who demands freedom of expression, but only within the confines of a given
market economy, which is simply identified with Society.
The idea thus confuses a notion of creative autonomy with
control over the conditions of creativity. It assumes a freedom to choose in the first place, as if the writer were somehow placing him or herself outside the historical constraints
of language and its organisation into discrete literatures, or
modes of writing.
Against this conveniently vague idea of abstract 'commitment' (commitment to what?) Williams counterposed the
'
the firmer concept of 'alignment , i mplying as it does the
construction of the social individual in and through language.
Alignment is thus understood as a conscious commitment to
social reality, often painful and contradictory, by which the
writer recognises that he or she is always held in a set of
specific social relations, published or unpublished, celebrated
or unknown. It thus signifies a positive proposition concerning the writer's relation to the actual market-place of
literature and the rest of society including language
rather than a merely individualistic assertion of an illusory
independence.
I find this a particulary useful distinction when trying to
think about the vexing question of Gay Literature as posed
by Edmund White's Nocturnes for the King of Naples. In this
review I want to consider some current attitudes towards gay
and lesbian writing, and to see how they relate to this book.
As the result of a particular series of readings of the work
of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault it has become
fashionable in some quarters to propose the existence
of
'
specific and self-sufficient homosexual 'discourses , or modes
of thinking and writing (see for example the contributions of
Serge Leclaire, Helen Cixous and others in Homosexualities
and French Literature, Cornell, 1980). There are two major
shortcomings to this theory. Firstly, it requires a prior belief
in some totally autonomous "homosexual consciousness",
which Eric Bentley dismisses in his contribution to the above
mentioned anthology, as an example of gay self-hatred which
ultimately serves to justify and validate the exclusion of
homosexuality as if this were the result of some universal,
ti meless, and linguisticallyconstituted gay 'nature'. Following
a particular direction in French feminist analysis, the use of
language by gays is seen to be primarily determined by our
attitudes to our bodies rather than our places in society.'
The category of homosexuality is thus treated as if it were
natural rather than historical, a view which is reinforced by a
theory of linguistics which treats language as a set of laws
which supposedly govern us entirely, as if language preceded
society. The traditional omission of language from explanations of scoial structure and its determinants has become
replaced with a model in which language is the fundamental
determinant. And since language is believed to be biologically
determined, all possibility of political action is ruled out.
Secondly this argument confuses the transformations of
certain ranges of shared experience into recognisable styles of
writing, with the notion of some kind of ontological gay
literary essence. The styles of such widely differing writers as
Ronald Firbank and Jean Genet for example might thus be

40 Gay Left

regarded as evidence of a shared and intrinsic gay 'discourse',

rather than as responses to similar structures of oppression. It
is in this context that I am sure that Nocturnes will be used
to exemplify the thesis that there is in fact such a thing as a
unitary homosexual style of writing, which could in turn be
regarded as the lowest common denominator of an equally
autonomous and unitary Gay Literature. This is the inevitable result of Structuralist criticism, which almost invariably
privileges its quest for systematic rules or laws or structures
in whatever material it is being applied to film, poetry, the
novel over and above the more complex issues of actual
usage and audience.
We need to ask then whether our utterances, written or
spoken, are simply and mechanically generated by 'immutable' laws of language and biology. For at the heart of this
approach to literature there lies an implicit yet fundamental
distinction between the individual and the social. The
traditional Romantic image of the 'committed' writer as
someone who is utterly in control of language is inverted into
a new but equally idealist picture in which the writer is
utterly controlled by language. The individual and the social
can never meet because the entire method of critical analysis
is structured around the assumption of their separateness.
The whole question of whether the 'committed' writer
controls language, or whether the 'structure' of language
controls the writer seems to me to be fundamentally misplaced. What we need to appreciate are the direct and indirect ways in which language, socially produced, controls
and organises our various conflicting views of the world. We
shape language, and through it we shape one another.
These are important considerations when coming on to
consider a book which is as much concerned with style and
language as this. White's Nocturnes are related by an anonymous narrator, and all concern his relationship with an older
man, the King of Naples of the book's title. Each of the
eight Nocturnes dramatises a different aspect of the younger
man's identity, and chronicles his overwhelming and at times
obsessive sense of loss, which is underlined by the fact that it
was he who ended the relationship. For it was only after
renouncing his pedagogic former lover that the 'kept-boy'
falls in love with him. Not that he needs much keeping, since
both men are possessed of seemingly limitless private incomes

(euphemism for inherited wealth), and are limitlessly free to

roam around the globe repeating bon mots which are understood as evidence of "intellect", of which much is made.

aestheticism seems at odds with the moral drift of the actual

story, the achievement of self-knowledge, the shattering of
illusions.

The Nocturnes, then, constitute a series of reflections or

meditations upon the not entirely unfamiliar themes of lost
love, ageing, self-awareness, hedonism, and moral authority.
All this is couched in a gorgeous language which luxuriates in
metaphor, analogy, and more or less arcane cultural
references "myth". White's style amply corresponds to the
aesthetic aspects of gay sexuality which he describes, and the
way in which the actual conditions of our sexuality
exclusion, marginalisation, oppression, are themselves so
often aestheticised. The plenitude of language reflects the
"congeries of bodies" with whom the narrator seeks temporary consolation throughout the book, consolation which we
are obliged to consider false. For this is after all, a realist
novel. The narrator is seen to learn, fitfully, from his
experiences. Yet the language does not learn. It dominates:
"My dear, since I left you I have heard so much talk, all
studded with such a profusion of detail, gloves of mail
slapping at my face". The talk may slap; the words continually caress. It seems as if there is almost an inverse ratio
at work between the spareness of the narrative and the
cornucopia of styles, until one realises that it is precisely on
the level of style that most of the book's meaning resides.

Across the text floats the unseen image of "you", endlessly regretted, alternately Tristan, Osiris, Sheherezade's Sultan
the absent King of Naples the embodiment of Desire.
Like the figure of Bernard in Virginia Woolf's The Waves, the
King dominates the life of the book. Yet at the end it is the
narrator, as the young Prince Ferdinand in The Tempest,
who will in fact be King of Naples, thanks to the not so
rough magic of the long departed Prospero figure, who is
seen to have controlled events all along. For art is not, after
all, above ethics. And perhaps that extreme aestheticism
which is such a mark of Edmund White's extraordinary book
has its own role, at least in the daemonology of contemporary American fiction.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a book about style.

From its very title we are unmistakably located within the
domain of Chopin and of Whistler, both of whom produced
"Nocturnes" in music and in paint which were specifically concerned with textures, with particular effects of
musical and visual tonality, and their associated meanings.
Edmund White has written elsewhere that gay identity "was
once much more tenuous. It was an illegitimate existence
that took refuge in language". 2 In the same essay he goes on
to argue that gays today "have no need for indirection, now
that their suffering has been eased and their place in society
adumbrated if not secured ..." I'm not at all sure that I
share his confidence, which would appear to reflect the
relative security of the comfortable American ghettos rather
than any real appreciation of the crucial roles which continue
to be played by the sexual categorisations in our society.
Moreover, Nocturnes dramatically illustrates the difficulties of breaking with the learned habits of indirection of
which, he argues, we have no need. Indeed, in many respects
it represents a kind of apotheosis of the literature of
indirection which gay writers in the past were obliged to construct between the interstices of the heterosexual world of
publishing. Angela Carter has pointed out in The London
Review of Books (17 April 1980) that "the fin has come a
little early this siecle and anomie is all the rage ..." This is
certainly the impression given by White's Nocturnes, with
their studied air of 'Decadence'. Or is it simply that the
voices of the last fin-de-siecle have not yet died away? On a
literal level we find the narrator in Nocturnes actually helping one of his Italian friends with the unlikely task of translating Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, that
handbook of late nineteenth century 'Aesthetic Movement'
style and values. Whistler of the title, Whistler of the
Venetian nocturnes, Whistler whose art, however "exquisite"
was the province of a small minority whose taste, as I have
written elsewhere, "seemed to be evidence of their social
superiority".3

For the narrow and ultimately illusory commitment to

art for Art's sake may also involve a positive alignment to
something else. The British playwright David Edgar has
recently noted the emergence of a new form of right-wing
consensus politics across traditional party lines in the United
States. He argues (The Listener, 8 May 1980) that this new
consensus is constructed around social rather than economic
issues, such that "the Northern working class Democrat may
well disagree with his Republican employer over social
security and preserving jobs; but they will be at one in
opposing affirmative action on gay rights" and so on. Very
much the same process may be detected in Britain at the
moment, and helps explain the tenacious popularity of the
present Thatcher government. Hence the significance of contemporary attacks on "Decadence" and the trans-Atlantic
stress on the 'traditional' values of hearth and home.5
It is in this context that White's Nocturnes become
especially interesting. Far from being arbitrary or rule-bound,
language is the most accurate and sensitive barometer of
social change. In his seemingly perverse desire to reconstitute
some kind of ersatz gay argot from the various indirect
chroniclers of our collective oppression, it may well be that
he is pointing the way towards a positive re-evaluation of the
past. We do not sit down to write in a social vacuum. If style
is the man, as the saying goes, then the man need not be a
Romantic (or for that matter Neo-Conservative) Individualist.
White's deliberate Aestheticism may take many of its sources
from a period when culture was defined in opposition to any
idea of social significance. This is not to say that these same
sources cannot be refunctioned to present an almost Utopian
vision, based on the actual experience of being gay, which, at
least on the level of style, breaks through the average novel's
dreary commitment to the collation of 'facts'. This is
particularly challenging in Britain where, for reasons which
are far from clear, Gay Liberation has stimulated almost no
fictional work of any merit whatsoever.

This seems to me to be the danger in Nocturnes, of forging

a kind of highest common denominator style from Proust,
Genet, Firbank, and so on, which is then triumphantly proclaimed as "Gay" in some supposedly useful sense of the
word. What we must realize is that such writers were not
si mply reflecting some shared "homosexual consciousness",
but were signifying their individual alignments within differing yet equally oppressive societies and literary traditions. At
the same time this ornately architectured style fits uneasily
with the more or less conventional tell-all realist gay novel
plot around which it is bracketed. Oscar Wilde once observed
that Art is above Ethics 4 and Edmund White's deliberate

Gay Left 41

Nocturnes for the King of Naples may be read, as I have

suggested, in many different ways. As an exemplification of
"homosexual consciousness", as a resuscitated attempt at Art
for Art's Sake, as a highly 'literary' roman-a-clef, and so on.
It may also be read as a significant break with the crudely
`committed' nature of so much gay fiction, which has rarely
done more than piratise the conventions of traditional melodrama, as if one can transform a reactionary genre simply by
`making it gay'. Rather than wasting time looking for some
imaginary pre-existent gay 'discourse', we need to create new
literary forms which will be adequate to our new experience.
Nocturnes seems to me to be a step in that direction.
Notes

2 Edmund White, The Political Vocabulary of Homosexuality, in The State of the Language, California, 1980.
3 Simon Watney, English Post Impressionism, Studio Vista/
Eastview, 1980.
4 Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist, London, 1891.
5 This is also reflected in the newly fashionable study of
Sociobiology, which purports to trace the "instinctive"
roots of such institutions as marriage, class, and so on. Not
surprisingly perhaps it has recently come up with the
obliging 'discovery' that homosexuality may not be
unnatural after all. There seems to me to be a significant
relation between this sociobiological picture of an instinctive homosexual human nature a souped up Eugenics
for the 1980's and the Gay Structuralist quest for a
"homosexual consciousness" with attendant 'discourses'.

1 See for example, Women's Exile, an interview with Luce

Irigiray, in Ideology and Consciousness, No. 1, May 1977.

Who Is Eddie Linden?

Who is Eddie Linden?
A Biography by Sebastian Barker
Reviewed by Tom Woodhouse
I once passed a pleasant hour at Gay's The Word bookshop
drinking tea and watching the other customers. One of them
was a rather febrile man with sandy hair and a thick Scottish
accent. This was Eddie Linden, the subject of the book Who
is Eddie Linden? He came to Gay's The Word quite a lot at
one time and then suddenly never came back. That seems
very like the story of his life as presented in his biography,
latching on to something or someone, exhausting it or them
and then leaving; Hampstead Heath, Piccadilly Circus, The
Partisan in Soho culminating in his relentless pursuit of the
young poet Brendan Brimfull. Brendan Brimfull is just one of
a series of names that sound like characters out of an
Anthony Trollope novel. Perhaps I'm a cynic but I was never
very convinced of the reality of Sir Terence Tenderlight,
Cruella Epstein, Dorothy Dawn et al.
Eddie Linden was the illegitimate son of an Irish labourer
called Kelly and an unnamed Scottish woman. For eleven
years he lived with foster parents, Eddie and Jennydale
Linden, these were the happy years. From the age of eleven
his adolescence was a series of moves from one institution to
another. Having grown up an illiterate, Catholic bastard, he
becomes a communist and finally a British Rail worker in
London organising Catholics for Nuclear Disarmament that
other CND.
Who is Eddie Linden? is superficially the usual story about
a kid with all the disadvantages in the world who overcomes
them to achieve worldly success, in the case of Eddie Linden,
founding and editing the poetry magazine Aquarius. There
are elements of this theme in the book, the little man with
the massive ego driven by his desire to return to his place of
birth a "success". The title is Who is Eddie Linden? and the
concern of the book is to create an identity for a man who
feels he has no social identity. He fails in his attempts to
discover that identity could be through institutions, his
family (real and adopted), the Young Communist League,
the Catholic Church, and the CND. Perhaps he resolved this
dilemma through poetry, we aren't told this as the book ends
on the night of the opening party for the new magazine. We
are simply told that everyone is there, "the man from the
Spectator held a motorcycle helmet under his arm and read
comic books". The last line of the book is "I had found a
foothold in the world". What that foothold was and what he
made of it we are not to know.
If the concern of biography is simply to reveal the
author's or in this case the author's subjects' personal view of
themselves with little reference to their social and historical

42 Gay Left

situation then I cannot fault this book. As it is, I feel that

biography fails in its task if it does not to some extent set its
subject within his or her time. Eddie Linden lived within the
homosexual subculture of the fifties and sixties but all what
was a major part of his life is never described in any detail,
just a few passing references and a moral condemnation of
cruising on Hampstead Heath at night. "I saw that dark
filthy wood, where all kinds of pornography was going on;
and I saw all the men who dressed up to attract one another,
to hide their fear of ugliness, their fear of growing old, their
fear of rejection, their fear of turning into tramps." Eddie
Linden was an activist in the CND but we hear little of that
or of the Committee of 100 except "the middle-aged butch
female summed up everything in my life that I hated most.
What did I care about Pat Arrowsmith's point of view? ...
But the Committee of 100 thought to go one better than
music ... Pat Arrowsmith managed to get herself arrested".
Who is Eddie Linden? has been a much acclaimed
biography. The story of an almost illiterate working class
man who founded an influential poetry magazine is both
amazing and applaudable. I read it as a gay socialist who
found the bleak view of homosexuality and the juxtaposition
of communism with Catholicism disconcerting. That for me
the book holds out no hope cannot be a criticism of it. But
that Eddie Linden seems to reject many of the things that I
hold so dear was at least an opportunity to think again about
what I do believe, and to affirm it all over again. Not a comfy
read.

Caged In
La Cage Aux Folles Edward Molinaro
Messidor Alain Tanner

Review by Keith Birch

What do we expect from films that use gay people centrally
as characters? No such film in the past few years has met
with very positive responses even though we flood along to
the cinemas to see them Fox, Sebastiane, Bitter Tears of
Petra Von Kant, Nighthawks. It often seems that the wider
the commercial audience appeal is meant to be, the more
objectionable are the gay characters and relationships portrayed. The superficially 'liberal' approach of a film such as
A Different Story is ultimately just as negative about gay
sexuality.
Those films which have emerged from some political contact with the Gay Movement have usually had a narrow focus
of object or intention and could not meet the demands
placed on them to represent gays positively, as the criticisms
of Nighthawks illustrated. Until the range of films that
present gay characters and relationships is very much wider,
our criticisms of the few images we get are bound to be
strong.
La Cage Aux Folles has been a great commercial success.
However, it has divided opinion amongst many of us about
the way the characters are presented in terms of traditional
stereotypes. The initial review that appeared in the magazine
Time Out for example was a positive one, saying that the
fil m was funny in the context of its traditional farce format
and because of its sympathetic treatment of the stereotypes.
After strong adverse reactions from some gay readers, a
second reviewer now dismisses the film for being cheap camp
and "very nearly very objectionable".
The most important criticism of the film is not so much
the stereotyped nature of the two central characters, Zaza
and Renato, and whether they are handled sympathetically
or not. The problem stems more from the format itself, that
of theatre farce, and the film very much shows its stage
origins. What this form does is to reduce everything to one
level of humour. The central gay characters, even though projected sympathetically (in fact much more so than the
heterosexual couple), always remain the objects of the
audience's laughter. Farce makes all its characters two
dimensional by distancing real social contexts and causes.
Everything is presented as natural, nothing is really
challenged.
At a few moments the film does almost break out of this
straitjacket and the humour operates on a much more subtle
level. The scene in which the drag queen, Zaza, is being
taught how to behave like a real man how to butter his
toast and how to walk like John Wayne could be subversive
and challenging to the 'natural' signs of masculinity. However, this is undermined within the terms of the film, so that
in fact it is Zaza's failure which is presented as the object of
the audience's laughter.
La Cage Aux Folles exposes clearly some of the conflicts
within what could be described as traditional gay male culture. The use of camp can be challenging and self-affirming
but it can also be self-oppressive and despising in its attitudes
towards women and 'femininity'. This film uses camp,
particularly with regard to the latter point making laughter
of the supposed feminine emotions of Zaza and his perpetual
near hysteria. The tight use of the masculine/feminine
opposition in the relationship between Renato and Zaza,
even though they are presented positively, means that it
always comes across very much on heterosexual terms. In the
end, the film's failure to challenge any of the values and ideas
of heterosexuality makes it disappointing, though it could
help to explain its great commercial success.

Messidor is a very different kind of film, whose appeal

may be sadly more limited. It tells almost no story at all,
there being no strong narrative direction to the film. We
observe the relationship of two young women who meet
while hitch-hiking and decide to continue journeying
together with no real aim. The film moves slowly as they
talk and pass through the Swiss countryside. Their points of
contact with other people form a critique of the bourgeois
society they are trying to move away from. Jeanne is nearly
raped after they take a lift with two men. Reward for other
lifts is intimated to be sex. Begging for food is met with blind
disbelief and rejection. The journey finally ends in a pointless
tragedy of killing.
Its long, panning shots and seeming lack of narrative
interest, however, concentrate attention on the development
of the women's relationship. The effect is challenging and
gripping in a strange way. The differing backgrounds of
Jeanne and Marie are explored, one a middle class student,
the other a shop assistant. Strong emotional bonds grow
between them as they travel on the road and from their
common alienation in a complacent society. Their relationship is almost shattered at one point when Jeanne tells Marie
that she wants to make love with her. Marie violently rejects
this, but they are soon reconciled and the film leaves the
question open.
The two women are not social rebels in a positive sense at
the beginning, either as feminists or through politics. But as
they continue their journey, moving further outside the
bounds of middle class Swiss society, they inevitably become
'cri minals' and are on the run. Unlike the closed format of
La Cage Aux Folles, Messidor's openness can present a
challenge to its audience's assumptions.
Gay Left 43

Personal Politics
Dear Gay Left,
This letter has been provoked by 'Self and Self-Image'
( GL No 10) in particular, and the general development of
Gay Left over the past year. These comments are not a reply
to the collective statement as such but a response to the
trend away from 'politics' to moralistic individualism. The
article in question was the extreme of this development, a
development to the obsession of the individual to the
exclusion of any analysis of the out-side world or suggestions
of how we attempt to change society/our-selves.

More on Disco Music

Dear Gay Left,

I would like to say a few words about the ongoing debate in

Gay Left on disco music, which was started off by an article
in GL No. 8 titled "In Defence of Disco", and then a letter in
GL No. 9 by John Mumford.
Mumford seemed to suggest that there are certain types of
music which we gay socialists should like, and certain types
we shouldn't. According to him it's O.K. to like punk and
reggae because they are "progressive" but we should not like
disco because, he said, it is "perpetuative of reactionary,
oppressive or exploitative behaviour" and that it has no "real
origin amongst ordinary people as their cultural response to
their lifestyles that is accessible and participatory".
What I can't understand is how somebody can categorise
music in this way; when firstly there is enough overlap in
punk/new wave stuff and disco (and in rock'n'roll, rockabilly,
country 'n' western, r&b, blues, soul, ska, heavy, indian,
classical etc to make it hard to categorise it in the first place;
and secondly when music, which is essentially played by
individuals and groups, who all differ, is such a personal
thing some individuals and groups like some stuff, others
don't and some people hardly like music at all. I don't see
why that because you're black you should like reggae, or if
you're rebellious you should like punk, or if you're gay and
you're a socialist you should like TRB; which is what
Munford is in danger of assuming.
The point is that Munford fails to gather the central
meaning of Dyer's article "In Defence of Disco" which is
that capitalism as a mode of production is not a paranoic
system of always reinforcing bourgeois values in all its
commodities. But capitalism is a chaotic and contradictory
system that creates chaos and contradictions with things and
with people like Munford and it is precisely for this
reason that you can get irony, you get anti-capitalist books,
fil ms, music capitalism can profit out of this in the same
way as it can reactionary ideology.
Munford's reactionary reply to Dyer annoys me because
not only does he merely judge people on their cultural
appearances, dislikes and likes, which in terms of music are
really pretty harmless. But, he also believes that his own
personal leisure activities like listening to punk and reggae,
which may for him be fine, ought to be adopted by everyone
else if they want to develop "a life style that fits our politics
and that draws others into our struggle". Well there must be
something wrong with his politics if he holds such moralistic
and narrow-minded points of view. And I don't think he'll
draw many people into the struggle for socialism with ideas
which on the surface may seem very progressive, socialist and
libertarian etc but are in fact very authoritarian as regards
"personal politics". Such ideas, commonly met on the left,
are bound to merely confuse people and put them off
politics generally.
No thanks, Munford, I won't go out and buy a punk outfit, I'll do things "My Way".
Geoff Goss, Norwich

44 Gay Left

What particularly irks me is that this seems to be happening at a time when it is most inappropriate. Here we are in
1980 with a Thatcher Government launching an attack on
the left, gays and the working class, and all GL can do is
ponder the contradiction of enjoying rough trade while being
an avid fan of Edward Carpenter's concept of comradely
love. I'm not saying that this sort of discussion is irrelevant
but I do feel that GL should have some form of priorities and
political perspective on what issues are vital at this point of
time.
The collective's statement's opening five paragraphs are
the only attempt to give any political reasoning for the need
for the article, when it moralistically tut-tuts at the organised
left
"adopting a narrow class line on Women's issues, for
example, restrictions on abortions are seen solely in terms
of their effects on working class women, and gay politics
are seen as no more than a matter of civil rights"
and righteously notes
"the first effects of Thatcherism have made themselves
felt, and the left has found itself disarmed in the face of
massive attacks ... There has been a tendency to turn
away from considerations of subjectivity of how we live
and experience our lives, and a reconstruction of traditional left campaigns that ignore whole realms of lived
experience".
When I read this I ask myself who it is that's avoiding 'whole
realms of lived experience' and who isn't. I would have
thought that the effects of Thatcher's Government was quite
effective in changing whole realms of lived experience.
To reduce the rise of Thatcherism and re-emergence of
the family ideology et al as only notable for making the left
less open to take up gay issues is to negate the responsibilities
of a socialist gay magazine. The need to appraise, analyse and
take part in a discussion on how we as gays are going to react
to the present political climate is ignored. With whom and in
what forms are we to fight back, GL, it seems, neither knows
nor cares. In other words a political analysis of what it will
mean for us and how we can best counter a right-wing backlash is totally lacking. I would have thought an appraisal of
the rise of the family as an ideological weapon in the manner
of Bob Cant's article in the latest issue of Outcome would be
more appropriate.
GL is after all supposed to be a socialist magazine where
the problems of linking the struggle for socialism and the
fight for gay liberation are discussed. Most importantly I feel
that GL have failed to understand that we are no longer living
in a period of expanding liberal tolerance; the out-side world
is becoming a lot colder and hostile both for us as socialists
and as gays. The left has responded to this by a defensive
stance as GL notes and by a debate among itself and with
other European groups (the 'Debate of the Decade' is the
most obvious of this, but also the latest issue of International
Socialism carried a debate between the SWP with Spanish
and French revolutionary groups). But this is not because the
left has "been disarmed", whatever that is supposed to mean,
but because they as a movement and as a part of the working
class are under attack. In this debate of how to fight back I
feel that gays give valuable and important insights and
critiques of Thatcher ideology. Instead I fear that GL will

ignore the 'outside' debate and retreat into itself. Making it

even more likely that gay issues are demoted by the left and
that personal politics and socialist politics will become even
more separated off than now. I believe this development is to
be to the detriment of both, the straight left becoming just as
the label says (Militant, the Maoists and WRP are and always
were like this) with its analysis and tactics blunted and distorted by its omission. While the Gay movement will become
isolated and inward-looking to a point where making the
personal poltiical becomes to mean that personal per se is
thought to be 'political'.
When GL was first launched I saw it, and potentially still
do, as a chance to clear the woolyness out of the left's debate
on sexual politics, opening up the channels between gays and
socialists. Now it seems to have retreated into an academic
Gay Ghetto, cut off from the socialist debates, from any
working class politics, and particularly sadly from the Gay
community. I'm not saying that GL should become a GAY
Socialist Worker but that it should be a more open and
politically involved magazine than it is becoming. I find it
increasingly difficult to see whom GL is aimed at. Is it aimed
at a debate with the left, at non-socialist gays, clarifying
discussion for gay socialists or what? To me the magazine
seems to be playing an increasingly marginal role in any of
these movements.
As a member of the SWP my political views can be surmised, and it is true that I am prone to defend 'my' organisation when attacked more than is useful or healthy. But I do
fear the future both as a socialist and as a gay, and feel that
unless channels of debate and discussions are opened up that
there is a danger of isolation and defeat. But most importantly I fear the withdrawal of the left and GL from facing
the harsher world outside, a retreat away from action and
discussions to inward soul-searching of each other's defects.
Limiting the potential audience to smaller and purer elites.
The Gay movement has in the past criticised much of the
left for being elitist and writing to a small group of militant
activists in trade-union jargon, instead in ordinary English
and about issues outside the factory floor. It seems to me
that this criticism today applies as much to GL as it does to
the rest of the left. This is not the time for turning in on
ourselves. I fully realise that the points that I make are not a
full comprehensive analysis but I hope that they raise issues
GL will respond to, of how we are going to react to a period
of economic decline and toughening of the political climate.
Noel Halifax, London N16

Political Pertinence
Dear Gay Left,
I should like to take issue with you regarding what I see as a
shift in the political emphasis of GAY LEFT, particularly in
numbers eight and nine. In No 8 you said that "it would be
too easy to forget, to fall back into an increasingly strident
Left orthodoxy .which would make Women and Gays mere
auxiliary troops in some romanticised attack on state power,
or to try and escape into the dream world of individual
solutions. The dialectic has to be maintained, between the
personal and the political, between new ways of relating to
each other now and the building of organisations that could
effectively challenge and change the whole oppressive order.
The beginnings of socialism can't wait till after the
revolution; they have to happen now i i our own immediate
personal and political practice."
You found it necessary to repeat this patrician statement
in No 9 with the addition that "the Left has found itself disarmed in the face of massive attacks on the gains won by
working people over the last thirty years. There has been a
tendency to turn away from considerations of subjectivity,
of how we live and experience our lives, and a reconstitution
of traditional Left campaigns that ignore whole realms of
lived experience."

My first reaction is to ask: what is this abstraction which

you call 'the Left'? It rings of the generalisation that the
bourgeois media describe as 'the public' a sort of autonomous bloc with a consistent and predictable political cornplexioin. And in what way has 'the Left' been disarmed?
You did not qualify this and I am interested to know what is
the substance of your assumption. You then proceed to draw
a false equation from the 'popularity' of the writing of
Edward Thompson and Sheila Rowbotham without identifying the great political difference between Edward's work and
Sheila's - as well as what the quarrel between Sheila and
Trotskyism actually is. This is not helped in any way by
Jeffrey Weeks' surprisingly cavalier review of Sheila's book.
His throwaway comments about Trotskyists being 'eyestrained by the perusal of holy texts' (in comparison to his
fine writing on Edward Carpenter) made me go off and read
some Lenin and Trotsky to see what he was talking about.
For although a member of a 'Leninist sect' I have never read
any of this stuff before. I might add that Jeffrey's review did
not in any way present Sheila's book in a credible light;
instead it reads as an attack on Marxism on the scale of
Bertrand Russell's equation:
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Second Coming = The Revolution
The Church = The Communist Party
Hell = The Punishment of Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth
Jokes aside. The reason why I feel scandalised by your
comments is that I am myself a member of a Trotskyist
organisation and as such I am well aware of the difficulties
that this entails. But unlike many people who have found
themselves in this position I am not inclined to leave and
then spend the rest of my life flinging shit from the sidelines.
I am black, gay and born in Jamaica of a poor working class
family and so I am not ignorant to the incredible marginalisation in revolutionary organisations of the issues that affect

Gay Left 45

me personally, and which are the prisms through which I

experienced my politicisation. But I feel that I must fight for
certain demands within the Leninist organisation, for where
else do I go? At present, I am in the process of convening the
first ever black caucus in the IMG. After being in the organisation for three years, and being very miserable for much of
it, I have come to the conclusion that the political issues
which I (and the other black comrades in the IMG)
experience every day were being subordinated to something
called the class struggle which I always experience as white,
male and heterosexual. And whenever there is a resolution on
black liberation it is wrapped and packaged (by white comrades who have only an intellectual relation to my
oppression) in the familiar trappings of class struggle. So I
have come to the conclusion that it is us, black people ourselves, who must discuss, exchange views, political ideas and
experiences, and only then will we be able to make effective
political interventions and influence the organisation as a
whole on ways of making Leninism more creative.
So what I have just described to you is an example of
creative, intra-party struggle, where people are altering the
parameters of Leninism a million miles away from the
orthodoxy which you insultingly describe as 'The Left', as if
all far left organisations can be lumped together in a single
category. You must not believe that the work that Gay Left
is doing is sacrosanct. I, and many other people on the far
left have a great deal of respect for the work that the Collective has done over the years, and since I have begun reading
the journal my attitude to my own sexuality has changed,
manifestly. But I see what I have learnt as something that
must and should affect the political work that I do, and also
the relation I have with my organisation. It is not, for me, a
signal which at last releases me from the 'orthodoxy' of
Trotskyism: it is something which gives me the confidence to
make political interventions such as form a caucus. This is

46 Gay Left

positive, I think, whereas the new emphasis of your journal is

a sort of vituperative call for disaffection as if there were
an army from which to disaffect in the first place.
In GL No 8, this near sectarianism revealed itself in glaring
contradiction. In the same number you had an article by
Jamie Gough, himself a member of the 'orthodox Left' and
in his own article saying that "the question of child sexuality
points to the need for a socialist revolution. This is not to Say
that a 'campaign against the age of consent law is not important. A campaign led by young people themselves would be
a very sharp way of challenging the whole reactionary
ideology which surrounds child sexuality. It is never too soon
to start!" This is not strident; nor is saying, as you accuse the
left, that the revolution must come first.
As well as this you printed an interview with Pat ArrowSmith, a pacifist, who stood as a Socialisl Unity candidate!
What is there orthodox about that? We were accused of
abandoning Marxism!
So what I shall finally say is that you should reflect, very
carefully, upon what exactly do you want Gay Left to be. Is
it part of the autonomous gay movement which seeks to
maintain its political independence as well as placing pressure
upoin the far left to alter its political perspective? Or is it just
a collective devoted to the sacrosanct area of personal politics
which is propagated only through the subjective consciousness of its eight members?
It hink this is a very important debate for you to have, for
it seems to me that the publication of Beyond the Fragments
has provided fresh credence to your growing hostility to the
far left in a way that would be detrimental to the political
pertinence of your work.
Errol Francis, Manchester

CHE
CHE invited contributions from individuals and
groups on the future of CHE. Gay Left Collective
submitted this report.
1. CHE in the eighties needs to alter both its form and its
perspectives to be an effective organisation, whatever aims it
sets itself, to answer the needs of the gay community,
whether social, legal reform and custody for example, in
employment and so on.
2. We feel the present Commission has to deal with the
innate contradiction within CHE. Namely, on the one hand
between a small group of people who understand and are
prepared to campaign for the broader politics involved in any
notion of homosexual equality in our society (equality with
whom and on what basis is another issue) and, on the other a
large percentage of members who need the support of an
organisation like CHE as a social lifeline, but resist or feel
unable to campaign. The importance of that social lifeline
should not be underestimated, as without it most members
of CHE would have very few social situations where they
could meet other gay people.
3. It can only be by asserting the best of the traditions of an
autonomous gay movement that CHE (or any other gay
organisation) will be able to tackle the demands placed upon
it in the eighties. Unfortunately, it is precisely in this area
(the best traditions of autonomy, i.e. flexibility, spontaneity,
urgency, anger, creativity and activity) that CHE has failed in
the past.
4. The organisation appears top heavy with bureaucratic
procedures and a constitution which in itself adds nothing to
local initiatives. Indeed, local activity amongst CHE groups
miraculously takes place despite an Executive which seems
unable to carry through any campaigns effectively or with
flair. Those campaigns and initiatives have nearly always
occurred outside the framework of CHE. It is a fact that
most activists, men and women, are not members of CHE
and in trying to represent everybody and everything, CHE's
resources are overstretched and eventually ineffective.
5. Because of the inherent contradictions which confront
CHE as presently organised, we feel it would be better if
CHE concentrated on what it has done best to date: provide
a framework in which local groups can continue to meet.
These groups should decide for themselves what campaigning
they wish to undertake and what kind of central organisation,
office and resources they need.
6. The question of what campaigns and what organisation
would best be suited to advancing and defending the limited
gains of the 70s requires a different organisation and structure to anything CHE could offer.
7. We feel that a federation of all campaigning and self-help
groups, one of which would be CHE, would produce a more
flexible and dynamic structure than exists within CHE.
Groups would be able to affiliate to the main body. Conferences to share experiences, give support and advance campaigns should be called at least twice a year. Criteria for
joining the new organisation could be worked out at a
founding conference.
8. Gay Left broadly agrees with the closing comments of
Jeffrey Weeks' "Come All You Gay Women, Come All You
Gay Men" Gay Left No 4. We believe that a national convention should be called to establish an organisation to
replace CHE as a real national federation of groups and
individuals. The new federation should be explicitly antisexist. It could invite the affiliation of women's groups and
of anti-sexist groups on the socialist left (who believe in
autonomous movements). But its prime function would be
to provide a focus for unity in thought and defence in a gay
movement based on creative diversity.

9. The gay movement would then have a two tier structure

best adjusted to its present potentialities; a creative, radical,
flexible grassroots movement, and a national outlet which
would concentrate on the issues which unite rather than
divide. The result would not be a panacea. But it might
ensure a more secure unity based on differentiation and
specialisation in the first place, but working towards a more
secure sense of solidarity ultimately.
10. The Federation model would maximise our resources of
unity in which groups and individuals could feed their concerns and energies and be an effective campaigning/
co-ordinating body. Such an organisation could, we fell, meet
the needs of lesbians and gay men in the 80s.

BACK ISSUES
Gay Left No 3
Women in Gay Left, Gays and Class, IS Gay Group, Gay
Workers' Movement and usual reviews etc.
Gay Left No 5
Why Marxism, Images of Homosexuality in Film, Lesbian
Invisibility, Gays and Fascism, Gay Theatre Past and Present,
Politics & Ideology, Gay History, Future of the Gay Movement.
Gay Left No 6
( Gays) In the Balance, The State Repression and Sexuality,
Looking At Pornography, Working Class Lesbians, Gays at
Work, Motherhood, Fighting Fascism.
Gay Left No 7
Paedophilia Examined, Gay Art, Greece, Northern Ireland,
Camp, Tom Robinson, Gay Sweatshop, Nighthawks,
Chemical Castration, Reviews.
Gay Left No 8
Personal Politics, In Defence of Disco, Childhood Sexuality
and Paedophilia, and Living With Indecency.
Gay Left No 9
Self & Self Image, New Zealand, Gay Activism in California,
Hocquenghem, Lesbians in Literature, Masters & Johnson,
Fighting Fascism, Gays in Ireland, Reviews of Faggots,
Dancer from the Dance, Outrageous, Word is Out, Bent.

GAY SOCIALIST CONFERENCE

Another Gay Socialist Conference is being planned by the
Gay Left Collective for later this year. We hope it will provide a useful forum for exchanging experiences about the
projects people are involved in and for discussing the issues
and campaigns that confront us. It is one of the few opportunities for lesbians and gay men to discuss the wider context
of our activities outside of specific issues. Further details will
be available later this autumn in the gay and radical press. It
will be held on the weekend of November 22nd-23rd 1980
at Caxton House, St John's Way, London N19.

GAY LEFT 38 CHALCOT ROAD LONDON NW1

GAY LEFT RATES
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1.00 each
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Canadian cheques only)

Make all cheques (Sterling or US or Canadian dollars only)

payable to Gay Left, 38 Chalcot Road, London NW1
England.

Gay Left 47

EDITORIAL
NOTE

This issue of Gay Left marks something of a watershed for

the collective. With some changes in membership we have
been meeting now on at least a weekly basis for five years.
We have produced ten issues of the magazine at approximately six monthly intervals, as well as editing a book,
running workshops and readers' meetings and speaking at
numerous group meetings of other organisations.
During these five years the need for a magazine like Gay
Left has not diminished, and as we say in the editorial in this
issue, the need for a socialist current in the gay movement is
as strong as ever. We, as individuals, have gained great benefit
from meeting as a collective of gay and socialist men, but we
cannot assume that we can carry on meeting indefinitely. Our
book, Homosexuality: Power and Politics, provided many of
us with the opportunity to write articles which would not
easily fit into the magazine. In addition many members of
the collective have written for other gay and non-gay
periodicals and other publications, and of course we have all
been involved in many other political activities such as in our
unions, and in other organisations.
We have now reached a stage where we want to rethink
what we want to do next, and we are taking the opportunity,
with the publication of this, our tenth, issue to reassess our
work in Gay Left. We are aware that the need for the
magazine is as vital as ever, yet we cannot assume that it still
represents what we as a collective want to be doing either all
the time, or at all. There are many possibilities: to continue
to produce Gay Left as it is, but possibly to produce pamphlets and more books; to produce a different sort of magazine or magazines; to stay together or to split up. Without
pre-empting the many discussions that will take place over
the months after the publication of this issue, it seems certain
that something will appear, though not necessarily in the
present form.
We are holding a Gay Socialist Conference later this year, as
is advertised elsewhere in this issue, and there we hope to be
able to give some idea of what we are doing. Any comments
and feedback would be most welcome.
June 1980

Keith Birch, Derek Cohen, Emmanuel Cooper,

Philip Derbyshire, Simon Watney, Jeffrey Weeks,
Tom Woodhouse, Nigel Young.

Contents
Democracy, Socialism & Sexual Politics ...............................
Workplace politics: Gay politics .....................
Socialism, Feminism and Socialist Feminism. .....................
Geoff Brighton: Anatomy of a Campaign ............................
`Gay Life' ..........................................................
Gay Liberation in Central America ................
Dykes in the Granite City ................................
Groping in the Dark ..........................................
Against Public Morals .......................................
The Hunt, Hunter and Hunted ........................
35 into the 80's ..................................................
Eros Denied (or the revolution betrayed) ............................
Facing the Crisis ...............................................
Acting It Out .....................................................
Making It Gay ..................................................
Who Is Eddie Linden? .....................................
Caged In ............................................................
Letters ...............................................................
Heavy ...................................................................
CHE ....................................................................

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THE COLLECTIVE
This issue was put together by Keith Birch, Derek
Cohen, Emmanuel Cooper, Philip Derbyshire, Simon
Watney, Jeffrey Weeks, Tom Woodhouse,
Nigel Young.
GAY LEFT 38 CHALCOT ROAD LONDON NW1
Gay Left Collective 1980

What's Left
New Attacks on Gay Rights in Greece
In December 1979 the Greek police seized the gay magazine
`AMPHI' because of a poem and drawing concerning the
oppression of gays. The prosecutor has sent the case to
court and the trial will be held on 14th July 1980. AKOE,
the Gay Liberation movement of Greece, is asking the international support and solidarity. The film 'Nighthawks' has
also been prohibited from being shown in Greece. It is
described as "a propaganda piece for the spread of homosexuality."
AKOE, c/o AMPHI, 6a Zalloggou St, Athens 142.

ISSN 0307 9313

Cover photo: Tony Benn
Typeset by Dark Moon 01-211 4331
Printed by Blackrose Press 01-251 3043
Trade Distribution: Full Time Distribution,
27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R OAT
Carrier Pigeon, 75 Kneeland St, Room 309,
Boston Mass, USA 02111.

Note to our Readers in N. America

If your local bookshop does not stock Gay Left, the
collective would be grateful if you contacted our distributors
Carrier Pigeon, 75 Kneeland Street Room 309, Boston,
Mass., 02111 to take a firm order.
Back issues are also available from Carrier Pigeon.

48 Gay Left

Gay Youth Movement

A number of gay teenage groups from England, Scotland and
Ireland, have formed themselves into an organisation called
Gym (Gay Youth Movement). A provisional booking has
been made for 26th and 27th July 1980 at a hall (including
accommodation) in Central Birmingham, for a conference on
the organisation of Gym. It will be open to any person under
the age of 25. Any participant is invited to set up a stall or
workshop to air their views. Anyone who wants further
information can write to the London Gay Teenage Group,
c/o Gary Barker, 6/9 Manor Gardens, Holloway Road,
LONDON N7.
Men Living Together
A group of three men are interested in living in a communal,
primarily male household, somewhere in the country. Anyone who would like to join them or would like to know more
details of their ideas and how they see it should write to
Will Iles, Moor Farm, Stainbeck Lane, Leeds 7.