Marxism, Socialism, And The Politics Of Gay And Lesbian Liberation
Part I: Introduction
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • October 10, 1991 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 3,10) | ||
| • August 19, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Introduction
This is the first in a five part series on the politics of gay and lesbian liberation. Our starting point is the debate being waged at Syracuse University over the question of whether or not homosexuality should be "accepted" and "tolerated." This debate needs to move beyond its current limits if it is to contribute to the advancement of sexual liberation, not only for gays and lesbians, but also for straight men and women as well. Only by accounting for the objective conditions which necessitate homophobia and heterosexism, will it be possible to understand both what must be transformed to end oppression of lesbians and gays, and to further sexual liberation. In this, the first part of the series, we will define homophobia and heterosexism and begin to explain why violence directed against homosexuals is an essential aspect of capitalist society.
Throughout this series we make use of both "homosexual" and "gay" and "lesbian." Homosexuality refers to the practice of engaging in sexual interaction with a member of the same biological sex and a homosexual is one who prefers to engage in this kind of sexual interaction rather than heterosexual interaction -- although we will argue that instead of dividing people up into "homosexuals," "heterosexuals," and "bisexuals" we need to reconceive sexual identity as constructed across a series of interlinked continuua in which all of us are in varying degrees and to changing extents both "homosexual" and "heterosexual". In fact, we will argue, it is only because of the extreme power of historical socio-cultural prescriptions and proscriptions in heterosexist and homophobic societies and cultures that the practice of homosexuality is not much more common and even pervasive -- as common and pervasive as the practice of heterosexuality. "Gay" and "lesbian" refers not simply to the mere practice of engaging in sexual interaction with a members or members of the same biological sex, but instead to much more than this: to the open and public development of and participation in a community and culture rooted in and expanding out of and beyond the mere shared practice of homosexuality. One can, therefore, be homosexual and not gay; in fact, many who are homosexual -- or more often homosexual as well as heterosexual are often extremely homophobic whereas gay men and lesbian women are not. This distinction is very important: Jeffrey Dahmer has been falsely and slanderously identified as gay, when in fact it should be clear that any man who is responsible for picking up, handcuffing, torturing, raping, killing, mutilating, dismembering, and eating gay men is an extremely homophobic person -- and in no way one who has accepted or identified with and become a part of a gay community and culture; Dahmer's actions are antithetical to gay values and gay ways of thinking, feeling, understanding, acting, interacting and behaving. Dahmer may, however, be identified in a much more -- and strictly -- clinical sense to be once who is homosexual or at least has acted as a homosexual and has some kind of homosexual tendencies. "Queer" refers both to a particular kind and direction of development of gay and lesbian identity, community, and culture which has in fact extended beyond those who are strictly "homosexual" to include all whose sexual life and associated sensuous/sensual social identities and relations depart from the mainstream heterosexual norm -- including bisexuals, transvestites, transexuals, pedophiles, etc.
"Heterosexism" refers to a nexus of interconnected social relations, practices, institutions, and discourses which work to establish and enforce heterosexuality as the single "normal," "natural," and "desirable" way in which human beings can engage in sexual relations with each other, while rendering homo-sexuality "abnormal," "unnatural," and "undesirable," as well as, in many cases, "illegal," "immoral," "sinful," "sick," often "invisible," and even "impossible." Heterosexism sanctions homophobia. "Homophobia" refers to the fear and hatred of homosexuality and of homosexuals. Homophobia leads to restriction of, persecution of, and violence against homosexuals. Intolerance for, discrimination against, and persecution of homosexuals and homosexuality cuts across national, religious, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries. In over half of the nations of the world and in 24 of the 50 states in the United States of America, homosexuality itself is illegal. In many other nations, provinces, and local communities, only private homosexuality is legal: homosexual organizations and information are strictly banned. In all cases, the practice of homosexuality is subject to extensive repression. (Information from Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal, The New State of the World Atlas. Revised and Updated Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987 ).
Over the past ten years there has been a dramatic increase in violent acts directed at homosexual men and women in the United States -- a nation where gay liberation has been extended further than virtually anywhere else in the world. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's (N.G.L.T.F.) Anti-Violence Project reports that, on average, four out of every ten gay men and one out of every ten lesbian women are victims of violence each year. Kevin Berrill, director of the N.G.L.T.F. anti-violence project estimates that in 1990 that the total number of instances in which homosexual men and women were physically assaulted explicitly because of their homosexuality was over 50,000 and perhaps as high as 100,000. (See the attached side-bar for a sampling of the kinds of anti-gay/anti- lesbian violence reported by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the NFLTF's 1991 report. In discussing violence against homosexuals and women, we focus upon the United States of America not only because we are both from the United States, and, as such, most familiar with the situation in the United States, but also because the United States is still the richest and most powerful nation in the world and because this has enabled both gay and women's liberation to advance farther in the United States than in almost all other other nations -- and at least as far as in any other "advanced" "developed" nation. Therefore, the violence directed against homosexuals and women in the United States is violence directed against those groups of people where they are strongest. In other societies, overt, physical violence may at times be less visible -- although its actual extent, especially in the case of women, is usually as high if not higher -- and yet the institutionalized violence against homosexuals and women, including the violence of institutionalized repression, is much greater. The statistics we cite on violence directed against homosexuals in the United States are gathered from articles published on this subject from 1985 through 1991 in The Guardian, The Village Voice, Gay Community News, The Syracuse Post-Standard, and The Syracuse Herald-Journal. These articles draw a most of their information from reports of the Anti-Violence Project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 1517 U Street NW, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 332-6483).
Law enforcement authorities rarely collect any kind of information about these attacks, and, in fact, surveys show that 73 % of those victimized never report the incident to the police. There is good reason for this, as many survivors of physical attacks are subject to even further abuse from the police, and, in general, find the police to show little interest in apprehending their attackers. The courts also often show little sympathy for victims of homophobic violence, and, in fact, are many times overtly hostile to the victims and sympathetic to the perpetrators. In addition, many who are attacked for their homosexuality are afraid -- or otherwise unable -- publicly to reveal their homosexuality, and so usually do not report these attacks, thus even further reducing the numbers of reported incidents of violence. In addition, those who are known or suspected to be gay or lesbian are so regularly targets of harassment, destruction and defacement of property that they do not even think of these as acts of violence and therefore they go unreported.
Studies of violent attacks against gays and lesbians cannot document either the full degree or the full cost of the fear, self- censorship, and self-loathing that these attacks reinforce and reproduce -- resulting in higher than average rates of mental and physical illness, suicide, depression, and drug and alcohol addiction among homosexual versus heterosexual men and women. Nor can mere statistics do justice to the intense loneliness, isolation, and, as consequence, necessary psychological repression, denial, and compensation that homosexual men and women so often suffer as the result of struggling to live as homosexuals in heterosexist society.
Even colleges and universities, often considered "safe havens" for those who are "different" from the majority, -- including colleges and universities in relatively "liberal" places such as Palo Alto and Berkeley, Boston, New York City, Amherst, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Ann Arbor -- have all reported a growing number of attacks directed against gay and lesbian students and organizations. These have included not only physical and verbal attacks but also the formation of self-identified straight organizations and the sponsorship of anti-gay events by these organizations -- including mocking events such as "straight pride" days and weeks and "heterosexual kiss-ins," attempts to disrupt and sabotage the activities of gay and lesbian students and student organizations, and even, here at Syracuse University, direct calls to "club fags."
In fact, it is not an exaggeration to state that a full-scale war is being waged against homosexuals and homosexuality within the richest nation of the advanced capitalist world. The fact that the outbreak of AIDS has, in the United States, initially victimized homosexual men (along with intravenous drug users) in higher proportions than other sectors of the population has provided a convenient excuse for increasing discrimination and abusive attacks against gays and lesbians. Gays especially, although lesbians also, have often been blamed for the emergence of AIDS at the same time that this deadly disease has exacted a devastating toll on the gay population. AIDS has already killed over 100,000 homosexual men in the United States and by the year 2000 the total number of homosexual men in the United States who have contracted the HIV virus which causes AIDS could exceed 1 million. This case of blaming the victim has meant that gays and lesbians have not only had to struggle to survive the devastation of their lives and communities, but also face increased discrimination in jobs, at schools, in housing and health care, by the police, courts. They are also often denied the right to adopt children and to marry.
At the same time as violence against gays and lesbians has increased, there has been an equally dramatic rise in violence directed at women, both homo- and hetero- sexual. The F.B.I. reports rapes in the United States have increased 21.1% between 1979 and 1988, and 9.8% between 1984 and 1988 (Statistical Abstracts for the United States 1990: 170). One in every five American women will be raped in their lifetimes (1991 Senate Report on "Violence Against Women" cited in New York Post, March 22, 1991: 7). In more than three-fourths of these cases, women knew their assailant. One in four women in American colleges will be victims of rape or attempted rape. Almost one in three female homicide victims are killed by their husbands or boy-friends. Battering is the single major cause of injury to women, exceeding rapes, muggings and even auto accidents (see Statistical Abstracts). More than one million abused women will seek medical help for injuries caused by battering this year in the U.S. Physical and psychological abuse of women is so widespread that it is quite correct to refer to U.S. culture as a "rape" culture.
In addition to explicit physical violence waged against homosexuals and women, there has also been a continuation of the mass production and mass dissemination of conservative images of what it means to be a "real man" and a "real woman." Thus, for example, whereas the capacity for emotional sensitivity, the ability to understand and the potential for compassion continue to be represented as female, the capacity for rationality, the ability to assume positions of leadership and the potential for aggression continue to be represented as male. Men and women continue to be represented, in discourses produced within and disseminated from virtually all sectors of late capitalist American society, as opposite of each other in essential nature and behavior.
As the right has triumphed over the left in ideological, political, and economic contestation over the past decade, representations of a rigid difference between men and women -- and ultimately of a rigid hierarchy of men "over" women -- have returned to prominence. They have, in fact, steadily become pervasive -- and persuasive -- once more. Patriarchal sexism has stolen much of the ground that women gained through the victories of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ascendancy of Reagan/Bush and, now, the "new patriotism" following the aftermath of the "victorious" Iraq war has further encouraged the restoration of traditional -- i.e. exploitative and oppressive -- male-female relations.
Within patriarchal sexist societies, it is in and through heterosexual intercourse and heterosexuality in general that men and women define and redefine, most intimately and most fundamentally, their essential difference from each other -- and within patriarchal sexist societies, it is in and through heterosexual intercourse and heterosexuality in general that men define and redefine most intimately and fundamentally their superiority to and domination over women. Insistence that "normal" sexual relations should only occur between the biological male and the biological female of the human species is not only one instance of this division, but also perhaps the one single area where the interests at stake in this division must invest the most energy and potentially have the most to lose.
Compulsory heterosexuality is potentially the weakest link within the overall patriarchal system of gender difference and division. Homosexual men and homosexual women -- and especially gay men and lesbian women, homosexual men and women who construct and develop an open, proud, and public social and political identity as well as a distinct culture and a genuine community rooted in and extended out from their homosexuality -- represent the most serious threat to the reproduction of a seemingly fixed difference between the "proper" natures and behaviors of men and women.That is why gay men and lesbians are attacked as not "real men" and not "real women." To an extent this is true: gay men and lesbians are courageous rebels against the restrictions and inequities of the male supremacist sexist sex-gender system who refuse to be only what "real" men and "real" women are taught to be. Gay men are not afraid to "be like women" and lesbian women are not afraid to "be like men"; in fact gay men and lesbians deliberately violate the most "sacred" of boundaries between the "properly" male and the "properly" female. [sic. ... That is why gay men and lesbians are attacked as not "real men" and not "real women." To an extent this is true: gay men and lesbians are courageous rebels against the restrictions and inequities of the male supremacist sexist sex-gender system who refuse to be only what "real" men and "real" women are taught to be. Gay men are not afraid to "be like women" and lesbian women are not afraid to "be like men"; in fact gay men and lesbians deliberately violate the most "sacred" of boundaries: the boundary that divides the human species into two irreducibly and irreconcilably different beings. ... sic.]
| Part II: The Social Construction of Sexuality and Gender |
| Part III: Patriarchal Sexism, Heterosexism, and (Late) Capitalism |
| Part IV: Sexuality and Freedom |
| Part V: The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Liberation--a Marxist Critique |
