Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

labor, which in turn allows them leverage to lower all workers’ wages. As chapter 1 explains, the nuclear family provides an inexpensive way for the ruling class to foist the costs of reproduction, maintenance, and responsibility for disciplining the current and future generations of workers onto the class of the exploited. LGBT people are oppressed because their sexual and gender identities challenge the traditional family upon which capitalism continues to depend.

      If we lived in a truly free society in which material and social constraints were removed, people would be neither oppressed nor even defined by their sexual or gender identities. Only then could we begin to see how a liberated human sexuality could evolve and express itself. But in a class society that requires certain behavioral norms to discipline its workforce and ideology to justify the nuclear family, reactionary sexual ideas—including gender norms—are means of stoking division and repressing society as a whole.

      Although the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class and social control is concentrated in their institutions—the state, courts, police, etc.—the rest of us are not merely dupes and victims. From growing urbanization and immigration to global warfare, social forces set into motion from above have given rise to material and ideological means for people to drastically alter their intimate lives, as chapters 2 and 3 explain. History shows that time and again, working-class people are capable of breaking out of the legal and social constraints imposed from above to challenge the status quo. While not the first incident of mass upheaval against sexual and gender norms, the Stonewall rebellion in New York City in 1969 marked a turning point for modern lesbians, gays, and bisexuals—and gave rise to the conditions for transgender people to assert their demands and launch their own organizations, as chapter 4 details.

      The Stonewall Riots, occuring amid wider social explosions against the racial, imperial, and sexual order of U.S. society, gave expression to radical ideas of sexual liberation. Yet in the decades since there has been a narrowing of the debate and aims of the existing LGBT organizations that jettisoned all talk of liberation in favor of the aim of gradual civil rights reforms. LGBT civil rights were largely pursued within the confines of electoral politics, as chapter 5 examines. The minimalist demands of this era arose from political debates and organizations that viewed sexual freedom in terms of how individuals spoke, dressed, socialized, and consumed goods on the market, a positioning often referred to as lifestyle politics. These ideas reached their apex in the 1990s with the near-disappearance of class struggle in the United States and a steep decline of far left organizations to pose a collective alternative to the isolation and pessimism that characterized individual attempts to challenge LGBT oppression, discussed in chapter 6.

      The dominance of biological determinist ideas to explain sexual and gender identities and behaviors in recent years is the topic of chapter 7. In it, I unpack some of the myths and mistaken assumptions using current scientific thinking to take on questions about whether people are “born gay,” the rise of transgender identity, and the medical establishment’s treatment of millions born with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersex people.

      I feel as though I’ve experienced political whiplash in the final weeks of completing work on this book. From a seemingly apolitical and quiescent terrain a torrent of political organizing, protest, and healthy debate has arisen in and beyond LGBT circles in the United States. The background to it all is the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the election of the first African-American president in a nation built on Black slavery. A sense of hope and expectation mixes with deep fears about our economic, social, and environmental future.

      When I first began to research and write this book, I was hopeful that scholars and activists alike would glean lessons to be debated and put to use in some future struggles. It appears the future is coming at us faster than I had ever anticipated. The electoral defeats of same-sex marriage in California, Florida, and Arizona in November 2008 now appear to be temporary setbacks that have stoked a genuine opposition that is more confrontational and less tepid than in recent years. The youth and spontaneity of the latest explosion of LGBT militancy in response to the defeat of same-sex marriage in California’s Proposition 8 referendum are magnificent. The political outlook and social composition of this rising LGBT movement deserve comment as well. These young (and not so young) fighters are part of the growing army of café baristas with college degrees and itinerant low-wage workers that now populate every city and town of the United States. This newly forming movement is largely pro-labor, anticorporate, and explicitly welcoming non-LGBT folks into the struggle.

      New movement activists, students, and socialists organized a gay marriage forum in Chicago on December 11, 2008, one day after the historic victory of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in that city.⁵ Fresh from winning nearly $2 million in severance and vacation pay for the multiracial group of nearly 250 factory workers, Raúl Flores addressed the crowd brilliantly, saying that our struggles are united and we must be too. “Our victory is yours,” he said, “Now we must join with you in your battle for rights and return the solidarity you showed us.”⁶ Goodbye Will and Grace, hello Republic factory workers!

      The day before, hundreds of gay protesters rallying for equal marriage rights as part of the national Day Without a Gay initiative linked their march with the Republic workers’ protest outside Bank of America. Trade unionists, immigrant rights activists, and LGBT people rallied together in the most eloquent display of rainbow power Chicago has witnessed in decades. Orlando Sepulveda, a Chilean immigrant, described the day’s action as “a school for struggle.”⁷ Even the name of the LGBT action expressed the cross-pollination of struggles—the historic mass immigrant workers’ marches that hit the streets in 2006 were called A Day Without an Immigrant.

      Gus Van Sant’s award-winning biopic of the gay activist elected San Francisco supervisor in 1977, Milk, arrived in theaters in late November 2008, at a crucial teaching moment. The film alludes to a key aspect of the successful gay-labor struggles against Coors beer and the 1978 Briggs Initiative that would have banned gay and lesbian teachers and their allies from “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting”⁸ homosexuality in California’s classrooms. By uniting with Teamsters in the Coors battle and forging lasting alliances with blue- and white-collar workers in the fight against the Briggs Initiative, Harvey Milk, along with tens of thousands of activists, advanced both the fight for gay civil rights and for labor unity.

      The interaction between workplace organizing and the fight for LGBT rights has a long history. Harry Hay, the founder of the first U.S. gay organization, the Mattachine Society, got his start as a union organizer in the 1930s and 1940s in New York’s Department Store Workers Union with the International Workers of the World (IWW).⁹ Some of the research that historian Allan Bérubé did on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) in the 1930s and 1940s shows how prior to the emergence of gay rights organizations in the United States, a largely gay and multiracial group of workers led by communists on passenger ships transformed a reactionary union into one that defended gay rights, challenged racism, and won material gains for all their workers until McCarthyite tactics tore the MCS apart in the 1950s.¹⁰ The banner hanging in the hall of the twenty-thousand-strong, Black- and gay-led MCS union read: “Race-baiting, Red-baiting, and Queer-baiting Is Anti-Union.”¹¹ Chapter 8 argues that class unity among LGBT and straight people is both possible and necessary in order to build a world in which we are all sexually liberated. The book concludes with an argument for sexual liberation for all.

      A new movement will face serious challenges. The largest national gay rights organizations are sponsored by multibillion-dollar corporations and tied to the don’t-rock-the-boat posture of the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. In the midst of massive layoffs and severe economic crisis some will advocate a go-slow, back-of-the-bus approach for LGBT issues. This can and should be challenged. In addition to social equality and legitimizing LGBT sexuality, the fight for equal marriage rights is for much-needed material benefits—health care, Social Security, inheritance, and the other rights and benefits of marriage that working-class people want and need. In other words, it is part of the class struggle. Also, the same-sex marriage battle lends itself to broader organizing and questions about everything from the origins of LGBT oppression to the history of the movement and the various theoretical and political challenges in understanding