Lavender & red: Towards liberation
Call for anti-capitalist struggle draws standing
ovations
By Bob McCubbin
More than 700 people came out to hear
transgender lesbian activist and Workers World Managing Editor
Leslie Feinberg during a mid-June California speaking tour. She
drew enthusiastic audiences in San Francisco, Los Angeles and
San Diego. Her well-received remarks--which touched on many
issues but centered on the struggle against war, racism and
capitalism--elicited repeated strong applause and standing
ovations.
Her first appearances on June 13 were as a featured speaker
at the National Queer Arts Festival at the Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in San Francisco. A
repeat performance was scheduled that night after the first
event sold out. Both capacity audiences responded with
thunderous standing ovations to the call for a militant,
liberation current of the LGBT movement to fight racism and
imperialist war.
A third meeting, held the following day, was organized by
the San Francisco branch of Workers World Party and was held at
the historic Women's Building in San Francisco's Mission
District. When the newly renovated building opened in 2000, its
rooms were dedicated to 30 women leaders and freedom fighters,
past and present; one was established in Feinberg's name.
(www.womensbuilding.org/public/building/naming3.html)
At the June 14 meeting, Feinberg retraced the history of
more than a century of support by the left-wing of the
socialist movement for an end to sexual and gender
repression--including consistent support by Workers World
Party.
She examined problems faced by the countries that have
struggled to build a planned, socialist economy while faced
with imperialist sabotage. And she defended the socialist
countries as achievements of the working class, similar to
labor unions.
"Our class enemies use any imperfection in a workers' state
to try to discredit socialism. We examine the problems they've
faced in order to make socialism stronger.
"We say to those at the citadel of capital: It's your toxic
waste dump of ideology that workers in socialist countries are
forced to mop up. And while they try to carry out this task,
you encircle and strangle, infiltrate and invade like
slave-owners trying to destroy maroon communities of those who
broke their shackles.
"But we will not let you obscure the tremendous achievements
of these young societies. The poorest of these states have done
what you, the richest capitalist countries, won't do and can't
do because of your drive for profits. They have provided free
education, free health care, jobs, inexpensive housing and
transportation for all."
She called on all gathered to defend Cuba and North Korea,
whose only "crime" is trying to construct socialist economies,
and to stand up for all those struggling to defend their right
to self-determination and sovereignty, including Iraq, the
Palestinians, Iran, Colombia, the Philippines and
Venezuela.
During the hour-long question and answer period following
her talk, members of the audience showed they were giving
serious thought to how a revolution could be achieved in this
country.
A video clip from the event is on the internet. It includes
part of the important introduction by LeiLani Dowell, who
chaired the meeting, about why WWP is a strong supporter of the
LGBT movement. The viedo clip can be found at:
sf.indymedia.org/ news/2003/06/1621546.php.
A meeting on June 15 organized by the Los Angeles
International Action Center was held at the ONE Institute &
Archives, which serve as a valuable repository for the largest
research library on LGBT historical, literary and cultural
materials in the world today.
Stuart Timmons, the institute's executive director,
introduced Feinberg to the capacity audience. Timmons, the
biographer of Harry Hay, evoked the struggles of that gay
pioneer who was also a communist, reminding those gathered that
it was radicals who struggled for many of the gains that the
working class enjoys today, like unions and Social Security.
Timmons said that Feinberg, like Hay, has played a germinal
role in both the LGBT and the communist movements.
In her talk, Feinberg focused on the question of whether
overturning capitalism is really necessary. Since LGBT people
have made strides in this country, couldn't capitalism just be
"tinkered" with?
She pointed out that the first mass historic movement for
gay, trans and lesbian liberation--the German Homosexual Eman
cipation Movement--and its precious archive were destroyed by
the rise of fascism in 1935. Capitalism in times of crisis can
wipe out the gains of decades, she emphasized. "A movement that
relies solely on incremental reforms or the next election is
doomed to the experience of Sisy phus, who, in Greek mythology,
was forced to roll a heavy boulder up the hill, only to watch
it come thundering down again."
Feinberg's San Diego appearance the next day drew a
standing-room-only audience--mostly young and mostly from the
local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities--to
the Santa Fe Room in Balboa Park. The San Diego Inter na tional
Action Center organized this event with a lot of help from the
local HEAL organization.
Feinberg focused on the need for coalition building among
the LGBT communities and beyond. She emphasized how tactically
important it is that "T" has been added to "LGB." It was
gender-variant lesbians and gay men who helped birth the
movements against sexual and gender oppres sion, she noted. And
while the populations of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people
don't face a common oppression, they are up against a common
enemy. "The lesson of Stonewall is that those who do not face
the same degree of exploitation or oppression can make history
when they fight back together," she pointed out.
She related episodes from her experiences as a young labor
unionist, later as an anti-war and anti-racist activist, and
still later as a community organizer during the 1990s
ultra-rightist mobilizations in Buffalo, her hometown. The
common lesson of all these experiences, she noted, was the
power of solidarity.
You always knew, she pointed out, when contract negotiation
time was coming in the sweatshops and mills of Buffalo, where
she worked in the 1960s. The foremen and supervisors would
always seek out ways to divide the workers, using racism,
sexism, gender-baiting the butch women and feminine men,
anti-Semitism and red-baiting. The only answer to their
divide-and-conquer tactics was to show even greater unity. The
watchword she learned in practice was: An injury to one is an
injury to all.
Further developing the idea of solidarity, Feinberg outlined
struggles of the 1990s in Buffalo, when the right wing held two
national campaigns to try to shut down women's health clinics
and abortion services. LGBT volunteers played an important role
in the Buffalo United for Choice (BUC) coalition that twice
successfully beat back the fascist fundamentalists. And when
the right-wingers in a last gasp of rage targeted Buffalo's
LGBT social clubs, heterosexual women and men from the BUC
coalition helped Rainbow Peace keepers, organized by the LGBT
communities, to successfully defend these bars.
Feinberg reminded her audience that the left wing of the
early gay movement won many allies with the enthusiastic
presence of the Gay Liberation Front at anti-Vietnam War
rallies, demonstrations in defense of the Black Panthers and
the other struggles of those days.
She noted that Huey P. Newton, the inter nationally known
leader of the Panthers, publicly acknowledged and offered a
hand of solidarity to the LGBT movement. His revolutionary
statement made in the summer of 1970 is still an outstanding
example of political insight and courage.
Death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal's call for
unity against anti-gay violence was from the same heroic mold,
she said.
The Bush administration's attacks on civil rights and his
program of "endless war" and occupation won't be stopped by an
"anyone but Bush" campaign that diverts the energies of an
independent movement into electing a Democrat, she said. She
recounted how Democrat John F. Kennedy, viewed as a "liberal
hope" by some, widened and deepened the war against Vietnam,
while reactionary Repub lican Richard Nixon had to formally end
the war. "It was the courageous struggle of the Vietnamese
people and the massive protests by people of all nationalities
and ages that made the difference," she said.
She urged those in attendance to stand up to red-baiting
attacks that serve to divide the movement and divert it from
focusing on the heart of the matter: The world productive
apparatus has been built and run by hundreds of millions of
workers and oppressed people worldwide, but is owned and
controlled by a handful of billionaires.
"We don't want to break up these monopolies," she concluded,
"We want to wrest private ownership out of the hands of this
tiny capitalist class and apply consciousness and planning to
produce to meet human needs and desires. It will take a mighty
battle to bring this better world into birth.
"And lesbian and gay, trans and bi people are leaving our
imprint in this historic struggle which is already shaping the
demands and tasks of socialism."
Feinberg's audiences ratified her conclusions with applause,
cheers and standing ovations.
Are the political winds picking up and shifting direction?
Has Pentagon bellicosity and Justice Department racism aroused
a sleeping giant? Feinberg's audiences gave every indication of
being hungry for even more anti-capitalist analysis. And
Feinberg urged them to get involved in the struggle.
Reprinted from the July 3, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page