RCP's Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Stubbornly Held So Long?

[IrisBright]

RCP’s Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Stubbornly Held So Long? (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/rcps-anti-homosexual-line-why-stubbornly-upheld-so-long/)

Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on September 20, 2008
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/pink-triangle.jpg?w=300&h=300 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/pink-triangle.jpg)
“I was told what apparently others were told - they were busy. Huh? Busy? Denouncing whole communities as hopeless bourgeois because you were busy? Revolutionaries prevented from joining the party; youth told to cease and desist on gay curiosity; having to live in fear that I’d be found and ridiculed because I couldn’t control the bourgeois gay monster inside me. But they were busy.”


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Kasama is receiving posts from former RCP members describing the issues that brought things to a breaking point.
The question of why the party’s backward view of sexuality and gay people was so stubbornly upheld for so long emerged as an explosive controversy within the RCP during its 2001 program discussions.
This piece by xbox mentions for the first time the “closet” that some gay and bisexual people lived in within the RCP — and discusses the RCP leadership’s claim that their bigoted view of gay people survived thirty years because they had been so busy with other matters — involving the U.S.-Soviet comflict war and the development of an international movement. Too busy all through the 1980s AIDS crisis?
This argument (and others) are laid out by Bob Avakian in his conversation with Bill Martin (published as the book “Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History and Politics (http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Call-Future-Conversations-Politics/dp/0812695798)“).
Kasama is planning to post excerpts from that Conversations chapter on homosexuality soon.
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by Xbox
Thanks for sharing, Sophie (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/a-comrade%E2%80%99s-letter-life-inside-the-rcp%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ccultural-revolution%E2%80%9D/). I wish all this had been here when I left. I have never felt more alone and scared in my life. Having been in that cocoon for so long I was completely unsure of myself. I felt unworthy as a human being. How could they have treated me like that? Is this how we would treat the masses?
True I had discipline problems. It was hard to do things that didnt make sense. But I was totally open with my questions. I believed in the democracy part of DC. When the new homosexuality position came out I felt vindicated. I had stuck with them despite the lack of real debate on line questions. Struggle consisted not of the ardea skybreak style of open intellectual discourse but of going around and around until you said what they wanted to hear.
But the new Homosexuality position (http://revcom.us/margorp/homosexuality.htm) proved they could listen. Maybe there was hope for real discussion. I was so excited by the new position that I never considered what had taken so long. It took friends outside the party to point this out to me.
The weight of that question fell on me like a ton of bricks. Why did it take so long?
Up til then I had believed much of what came down from leadership. They were all-knowing and mighty. Look what amazing stuff we’d been able to create under their leadership.
But this one crack began to fester and spread. If they got this wrong what else could they get wrong? And it wasn’t the wrong line they got wrong. Wrong lines happen. It was the refusal to even consider the line was wrong for over 20 years.
I was told what apparently others were told - they were busy. Huh? Busy? Denouncing whole communities as hopeless bourgeois because you were busy?
Revolutionaries prevented from joining the party; youth told to cease and desist on gay curiosity; having to live in fear that I’d be found and ridiculed because I couldn’t control the bourgeois gay monster inside me. But they were busy. Nothing seemed as certain.
The Hostility After the Discussion
I had always thought, revolution first and the masses and the party will work out the kinks later. Now I wasn’t so sure the masses would be listened to as “the makers of history. ” The Party asked for criticism and struggle on the Homosexual Question and other questions as well. My excitement was renewed. Let the flowers bloom! We actually got to read criticism on the new H position from other comrades! Unheard of.
I laid it all out but my thoughts, ideas and criticisms were repeatedly shut down. I had often felt the disapproval of leadership but this was different. It was a hostility now. Not long after I was gone. I was told later that I had an identity politics line.
Hard to describe what it feels like to truly believe in something. To dedicate your life to it, to sacrifice for it. And then it’s gone.
It was a very dark time for me. No exit counselling. I was told that my contributions had been worthless. That was it. I was lost. It is completely irresponsible and unprincipled to treat former cadre in this way.
I got thru it. I found support in other places. I gradually began to see my inherent value as a human being. I feel like a survivor. Am proud of myself for that.
I do believe another world is possible. It’s been hard to get involved in anything. Am starting here.

[IrisBright]

Misuses of the Erotic: Debate Among Revolutionary Youth (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/misuses-of-the-erotic-debate-among-revolutionary-youth/)

Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on September 21, 2008
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/hei_fok_pink_triangle.jpg?w=300&h=300 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/hei_fok_pink_triangle.jpg)painting by hei fok

The following cues from topics opened on the thread “RCP’s Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Held So Long and Stubbornly?” (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/rcps-anti-homosexual-line-why-stubbornly-upheld-so-long/)
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“Training members to curtail their dreams, fantasies, and aspirations was part of the means by which the party leadership controlled the membership. It also has to be understood as pre-figurative in terms of how the RCP’s leadership viewed the relations between the masses of people and the party-state leadership of a future (ostensibly) proletarian state….Whatever we do, let’s not do that ever again. We should also not treat this simply as further proof of the RCP’s failure. These are not closed books – and the relationship between politics and the personal are hardly all figured out.”
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by Jed Brandt
The RCP’s position was better understood as fear of the erotic, not banal homophobia. From the English Puritans of the early bourgeois era, to the 1936 Soviet illegalization of abortion and homosexuality, through to the Communist Party’s hostility to the 1960s revolution in culture, to the RCP’s position –- there is a long-standing problem among revolutionaries towards pleasure, intimacy and “non-productive” relations. It’s still a problem internationally, though the recent recognition of a “third gender” in Nepal strikes me (with little complete knowledge) as an advanced step in the right direction!
The problem with the RCP wasn’t simply missing the boat on the changes in regards to gay people in America over the last forty years – it’s deeper than that.
It’s that they fundamentally don’t get or care to get the question of agency and how it relates to socialism. Socialism comes from the people – they are not objects to be corralled as faceless masses under the benevolent despotism of a party-state taking out “correct verdicts”. Questions of sexuality highlighted these issues because of their immediate reality. Sex isn’t waiting for after the revolution, as it were – and where the erotic came into conflict with the seige culture and asceticism of the RCP’s internal life, sex itself was equated with sexism. Good sex can’t and couldn’t be correct sex, because any desire (sexual or otherwise!) that conflicted with the 24/7 all-for-the-future mentality had to be squashed.
Training members to curtail their dreams, fantasies, and aspirations was part of the means by which the party leadership controlled the membership.
It also has to be understood as pre-figurative in terms of how the RCP’s leadership viewed the relations between the masses of people and the party-state leadership of a future (ostensibly) proletarian state.
Debate and Rejection: Chicago 1990
One story: Around 1990, when Queer Nation was “here, queeer and not going shopping”, ACT UP used direct action, participatory methods to unleash a community and identity politics were riding high, Refuse & Resist! had a meeting in Chicago over whether the RCP’s anti-gay politics were acceptable in their branch.
The meet-up in Wicker Park’s Urbis Orbis performance space wasn’t the standard gathering of the RCP’s periphery, but a larger conclave of the radical, young white left from the city’s artsy Northside neighborhoods.
Two RCYB members represented the RCP line, a couple very close supporters who worked in R&R full time were chairing the meeting and dozens of folks came, including a sizable anarchish contingent. After the meeting they weren’t all that “ish” and I watched as what was good, even precious, in the RCP’s politics, practice and potential get sacrificed on the alter of their sexuality position.
Hostility to the erotic was made, in RCP parlance, a dividing-line question — all assertions to the contrary. In the following months, the anarchists consolidated their position and virtually all of the independent radicals gravitated into their milieu. This meeting was emblematic of the national shift away from revolutionary politics to a kind of oppositional, cultural autonomism that became knows as anarchist or anti-authoritarian.
But back to debate: it was one of those real wrangling sessions that radical activists hunger for. I was hungry for it.
When I joined the Brigade a few years earlier, I had a fairly typical hostility towards homosexuality. Macho, stupid, fearful. Having lived in both Greenwhich Village in New York and the North Halsted Boystown area of Chicago, I became familiar with “out” gay people. This daily experience with emerging queer culture during my own heterosexual adolescence humanized and de-mystified relationships that are too often buried in fear and hate.
I learned how people ran from small towns all over the midwest to find freedom in these gay enclaves. Many of these young people arrived to a city without friends and worked as hustlers, prey to chicken hawks and even killers like Jeffrey Dahmer who prowled the very streets I walked on my way to school. Drug addiction went hand in hand with self-hatred. AIDS was visibly killing a whole generation of men.
And while the Brigade didn’t tolerate words like faggot and certainly had gay, lesbian and bisexual members – the underlying orientation was for the party-led elimination.
How could we be liberators when we feared and disrespected sexual freedom, when our leadership demanded we ignore the real breakthroughs happening all around us?
The Brigaders I knew, including one who supported the anti-gay line publicly, were opposed to this position. All of them. Though, as with marijuana smoking, you could tell who was working towards party membership by their changing behaviors and positions. When someone quit smoking weed, they were on their way. When they started mouthing gay = ideology nonsense they were going down that rabbit hole.
People were engaged with the issues, many had not only personal experience but also a commitment to radical politics and theory. Leaders from Queer Nation attended, as well as some of anarchist “non-navigators”, to crib a term from Ken Kesey describing the de facto leaders of supposedly leaderless groups.
Not one person save those under discipline upheld the mechanical claims about sexuality the RCP put out; which, in short, were that desire was simply ideological choice, that homosexuality was intrinsically a concentration of generalized misogyny and that lesbianism was reformist, and gender-fucking was somehow reproducing male chauvinism (such as transvestism, butch/femme relations).
The discussion in Wicker Park began with clarifications of the actual position, which I can safely report did not help the RCP’s case.
RCP’s Early Argument for Re-educating Gay People
The key passage from the then-operating program of the RCP was that homosexuals would be “reformed” and “reeducated” under socialism. In the face of the AIDS epidemic and the brewing culture wars, the idea of a government leading the charge to eradicate homosexuality wasn’t just flawed or mistaken, it was monstrous.
Debate shifted among those present to how to deal with the RCP as an organization when they insisted on this reactionary position. This was a sharp issue.
Signs of the RCP’s Self-Ostization
Some opportunists within the National Lawyers Guild, connected with other sections of the left, had put forward motions that RCP supporters should be denied legal assistance from this long-standing association of radical left lawyers.
Speaking personally, I had just endured a felony trial in connection to protests at a military recruiting station around US intervention in Central America. And while I had never acted to harm gay people and had marched in support of sodomy rights (only won federally in the last few years) – I had been charged with assaulting a police officer and felt then as now that if the NLG couldn’t support a youth fighting imperialism and getting framed for assault, then we all would be in a big mess.
The proposal to preclude RCP supporters from broad support and legal representation wasn’t to be applied across the board. These same lawyers (including, quite hypocritcally, my own!) did not want to apply this prohibition to all left groups with f’ed up sexual politics. They were deeply involved in supporting radical nationalist groups with even worse positions! So anti-communism and hostility to multi-racial organizations found refuge in distancing the RCP based on their indefensible anti-gay clause. It was a tangled situation – the kind of place real leadership is needed, and the RCP was wrong on every point.
What that R&R! debate in Wicker Park showed me was the power of open discussion.
The room quickly came to a repudiation of the line, and over the course of a few hours agreed that the RCP’s work in total was pushing for radical change. It was noted that outward manifestations of bigotry were neither promoted nor accepted in the RCP’s ranks or activities – but that this was a carry-over from older left positions that we were ourselves unlearning and struggling against.
So “unity-strugle-unity” won the day.
It was heavy. I watched a comrade I knew and love, who I entered communist activity with, learn to uphold the wrong positions as the price of admission into the party. We were only teenagers, but we were leaders and took our commitments in all earnest.
Not long afterwards, this brother became a full-time cadre and we lost regular contact, for political and personal reasons.
I moved into the periphery of the RCP, working in and around their initiatives and upholding RC politics in the social movements and wherever I could. But doing the wrong thing should never be the price of admission to an organization with a liberation politic. Training the youth to lie, to uphold reactionary positions and to fear the kind of debate I saw that day is anathema to our cause. This position upheld through a dark period internationally and domestically cost the revolutionary communist movement an entire generation.
Whatever we do, let’s not do that ever again. We should also not treat this simply as further proof of the RCP’s failure. These are not closed books – and the relationship between politics and the personal are hardly all figured out.