Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

of the nineteenth century. In Britain, laws began to distinguish between bestiality and homosexuality and, for the first time, to punish gay men caught seeking others like themselves in public venues. In 1861, the death penalty for buggery was ended and a sentence of ten years in prison, later amended to two years of hard labor, was enacted because authorities discerned that a sentence less harsh than death was likely to be applied more frequently.

      There are some historians who oppose the social constructionist framework and instead argue that homosexuality is part of peoples’ essence and has existed throughout history. This “essentialist” viewpoint contends, “queer desire is congenital and then constituted into a meaningful queer identity in childhood.”³⁶ Chapter 7 will take up the biological determinist claims; however, it’s important here to assert the centrality of economic and social forces in shaping the possibility for the existence of LGBT identities as we understand them today. It is one thing to argue that sex acts between individuals of the same sex have occurred since there were humans, and quite another to assume a suprahistorical homosexual identity.

      Social constructionism for Marxists is both materialist and dialectical.³⁷ In other words, it is based upon an understanding of history that sees human beings both as products of the natural world and as able to interact with their natural surroundings; in the course of their actions humans change themselves and the world around them. Several processes developed over time to create the following: 1) the social spaces for same-sex desire to flourish; 2) the formation through repression, resistance, and accommodation of self-identified homosexuals with subcultures of their own; and 3) the legal regulation of these social spaces that authorities defined as “deviant.” Because the development of sexual identity took place over many years as societal shifts enabled it to evolve, there were elements of the later homosexual subculture in the era that preceded the Industrial Revolution. For example, men who had sex with men in what were known as Molly houses in early eighteenth-century London and Paris usually had wives and children and abandoned all effeminate affectations and used quintessentially male mannerisms when they left those houses for work or home. When the Society for the Reformation of Manners worked to close these Molly houses in 1726 and shut down more than twenty, it was part of their campaign against sodomites, prostitutes, and those who didn’t honor the Sabbath—not homosexuals.³⁸

      When essentialists like Rictor Norton challenge constructionists they argue that some Renaissance Italian artists and monks were gay men, yet this contention also serves to undermine his case. The economic and social organization of Florentine and monastic life made it possible for some men in these sections of the Old World to express their homosexual desire—precisely the case constructionists argue. Conditions, however, had not yet ripened for many outside of the arts or the monastery to express this desire or for those who did to see themselves or be seen by others as a separate sexual identity, distinct from heterosexuality. As one historian explains, “The homosexual, however, is not simply a ‘sodomite’ who has accidentally stumbled into new capitalist conditions.”³⁹ The process of developing gay, lesbian, or bisexual identities occurred over time, with some elements of the new social relations in the old and vice versa. Without the ability to live autonomously, without society’s efforts to limit the erotic potential of some human beings, and without the development of a subculture of these new social categories, those who engaged in what modern society refers to as gay sex are likely to have remained sodomites.

      In Paris and Berlin, medical and legal experts in the 1870s examined a new kind of “degenerate” to determine whether or not these people should be held responsible for their actions. The word “homosexuality” was first coined in 1869 by a German-Hungarian physician named Karl Maria Benkert (he went by the surname Kertbeny after 1847). Benkert wrote an open letter in defiance of the developing illegality of homosexuality in some German states (unification of Germany did not occur until 1871). Benkert argued that homosexuality was “inborn, not acquired” and therefore should not be punished by the state.⁴⁰

      Homosexuality as a modern “type” evolved in scientific circles from a “sin against nature” to a mental illness. The first popular study of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis in 1897, put forward the idea that homosexuality was a congenital illness not to be punished, but treated. Nineteenth-century sexologists developed ideas about homosexuality as a form of insanity. One famous theory held that gayness was the result of “urning”—the female mind was trapped in a male body (or vice versa). This widely disseminated theory of sexual “inversion” by Benkert’s colleague and friend, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, referred to homosexuals as a third sex.⁴¹ Ulrichs was the first openly “inverted” man to speak favorably of homosexuality in public forums beginning in the 1860s.

      In fact, it took more than two decades after the advent of the “homosexual” before medical doctors began to write about the “heterosexual.” Modern bourgeois ideology assumes that we need not trace the genealogy of heterosexuality because it must be a timeless concept and practice. But just as homosexuality was invented, so too was heterosexuality.

      The first recorded instance of the word “heterosexual” dates back to medical journals of the early 1890s. The English publication of the Viennese doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1893 actually introduces heterosexuals not as “normal” sexual beings, but as those with wide-ranging sexual appetites that included non-procreative sexual acts, though not with those of the same sex.⁴² By 1905, the terms heterosexual and homosexual were in wide enough use for Sigmund Freud to employ them to refer to types of people and feelings, not simply sex acts. His sessions with various upper-class patients led him to conclude that homosexuals must be treated for their “fixation” on what he contended was an “immature” stage of their sexual development. Interestingly, Merriam-Webster’s first dictionary entry for homosexuality in 1909 describes it as “morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex,” while heterosexuality wasn’t defined until 1923. ⁴³

      As historical materialists who believe that peoples’ behavior and attitudes are shaped by their material surroundings, it follows that socialists are constructionists when it comes to questions of gender and sexuality. In other words, sexuality is a fluid and not fixed behavior, and its various expressions have been historically determined.

      Capitalist society depends on the nuclear family and the ideology that justifies it. Among those ideological tenets are reactionary sexual ideas—including gender norms—that not only reinforce the family but also are used to stoke divisions among workers and the oppressed, as well as to control our behavior. Capitalism’s creation—and repression—of sexual identities has produced divisions that have often proved lethal. In a society where people were not oppressed, or even defined, by their sexual identity, people would be able to develop a fully liberated sexuality.

       CHAPTER TWO

       Repression, Resistance, and War: The Birth of Gay Identity

      When the famous Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde was convicted of sodomy in 1895 and sentenced to two years of hard labor, newspapers around the world were filled with lurid descriptions of a form of sexuality few had previously acknowledged existed. The trial came to define gay men in the popular consciousness as effeminate aesthetes, but also raised awareness among latent homosexuals of the existence of others like them. Newspaper accounts allowed Londoners to discover where to go to find men looking to have sex with other men. But it was hardly an exuberant “coming out” moment. Wilde, who was married with two children, accepted the popular clinical thinking about his “condition.” His writings of the period reflect the debate about whether homosexuality was a form of sickness or insanity, complaining of his “erotomania” while in prison.¹ For years Wilde remained the world’s most famous gay man.

      Early on, women who had sex with women were less visible than gay men. Men’s greater financial independence and integration in the public spheres of work and community afforded them more opportunities to explore alternative sexual lifestyles. Wage-earning men could live in urban boarding houses where they could invite other men to their rooms, providing an