I have, most recently been reading up on marxist opinion towards that of women's rights and the feminst movement. I soon got caught into a sort of study into Marx's opinion of the gay rights movement as it was starting to take shape in that historical period. I ran into letters and other various works that pointed out that homosexuality was "not natural" or a "product of bourgeois decadence", as Lenin pointed out decades after Marx's death. I shortly discovered that many Maoist and "Stalinist" groups have taken a sort of policy that would exclude membership into organizations such as the RCP, for members of the Gay and Lesbian working-class community. Many theorists suggested that this "sexual perversion", would fade away as society faded into communism.
Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, two of the founding fathers of the gay rights movement, were blocked out from all sides of the political spectrum. They approached the growing socialist movement for support in the 1860s, sending literature that they wrote to Karl Marx. Marx passed it on to Engels, and they shared a general agreement of what they thought of homosexuals. Engels commented on Ulrichs' works saying that they were "pederasts" who are "extremely against nature", and described Ulrichs' platform of homosexual rights as "turning smut into theory". He later went on to condemn homosexuality further in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, about how many men in Ancient Greece engaged in homosexual sex. Marx again, shared general agreement, stating that:
"the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being"
Marx and Engels came to see that any form of sexuality outside of a monogamous heterosexual marriage as a kind of degeneracy fostered by capitalism, which could be fixed by that of socialism. When Lenin and the Soviets seized state power in 1917, all former laws that focused on the discrimination of people of another sexual orientation were rid of; but Lenin shared a similiar view to that of Engels and Marx. When Stalin came to power though, a policy of violence was introduced to homosexual circles within the intellectual and working class. Gays were slaughtered, forced to work in the Gulags, or were bannished from the country. I am not aware if Mao or any other marxist leaders made similiar moves to destroy homosexuality.
