Workers World Party 1971-1972
Internal education on gay liberation
Lavender & red, part 80
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 3, 2006 8:02 PM
Workers World Party’s youth group, Youth Against War &
Fascism (YAWF), formed an internal Gay Caucus in 1971—which
soon after became the Lesbian and Gay Caucus. Bob McCubbin, who
played a key role in its political and organizational formation
and development, recalls what led up to and followed the
establishment of the caucus.
McCubbin writes that he had been doing gay liberation work and
Workers World Party (WWP) organizing on the West Coast. He had
told leading members of the Buffalo branch he was gay when he
moved to San Francisco, where there was no branch, six months
after the Stonewall Rebellion.
And he remembered that one of the founders of the party, Vince
Copeland, “had actually used the presence in New York of a
large gay community as one of his incentives to get me to move to
New York City” to work in the party center.
However, not until 1971 did McCubbin ever take the floor at a
party meeting to speak from the political perspective of a gay
man. “In the late summer of 1971, I left San Francisco for
New York City and a few weeks later, at a party meeting, I took
the floor to defend the party during a minor factional struggle.
One of the charges being leveled was that the party had no
position on the gay liberation movement.”
McCubbin stood up and said, “Well, I’m gay, and
I’ve always understood that the party supports the
struggles of all oppressed people.” There were a few
seconds of absolute silence and then strong applause, recalls
McCubbin.
McCubbin explains, “What followed the branch meeting where
I came out were several months of preliminary discussions with
leading comrades in New York, in particular with Vince and Dottie
[Dorothy Ballan, a founder of WWP], and with a few lesbian and
gay comrades in party branches.
“At the end of 1971 or the beginning of 1972, the party
held a winter conference, and I asked Deirdre [Griswold] if an
announcement could be read at the Saturday plenum to the effect
that a meeting of lesbian and gay comrades and friends would be
held in the evening. Deirdre assured me that would be no
problem.
“Well, about 50 people showed up!” Not all of them
were LGBT, McCubbin recalls. “It was a wonderful expression
of solidarity on the part of many heterosexually oriented
comrades, but the 12 or 15 of us who were lesbian and gay had to
schedule a further meeting the following morning to get some work
done after the evening meeting full of praise for us and
solidarity statements.
“This conference,” McCubbin concludes, “marked
the beginning of a party-wide effort to educate ourselves and our
class on this issue.”
Sam Marcy vs. gay oppression
Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy made a tremendous
contribution to the development of the party as a revolutionary
communist organization, and to the historic struggle for sexual
liberation, when he oriented the party about the gay struggle
politically, theoretically and historically in a significant part
of a 1972 internal document he wrote as orientation for the party
conference.
Marcy said of the oppression of nationalities, women, youth and
gay people: “The degeneration of monopoly capitalism into
state monopoly capitalism carries to an extreme all the forms of
oppression which the capitalist system, in the previous epoch,
had engendered and developed. As the crisis of the social system
becomes more and more apparent, the need of the ruling class to
unload its burden on the most oppressed sections of society
becomes more evident. Only by dividing, only by fragmenting and
continually pitting different elements of the oppressed masses
against each other, can the capitalist establishment maintain its
sway over all society, and hope to survive.”
This same sharpening of the persecution and oppression, however,
creates the impetus for a genuinely progressive militancy and
resurgence of Black and Latin@ peoples, women, youth and gay
people.
Marcy characterized the lack of widespread support for the gay
struggle in the progressive movement at that time as a legacy of
the deep-seated prejudice that emanated from the religious
bigotry of the Middle Ages and its reinforcement throughout the
entire course of capitalist development.
“It is particularly significant,” he wrote,
“that the public change in attitude—such as it
is—comes on the heels of a very formidable wave of struggle
by gay people, a veritable ‘coming out’ in a most
demonstrative way. Gay Pride took a cue from Black Pride. ...
“Without the struggle launched by gay people,” Marcy
stressed, “the prejudices which have been ground into the
consciousness of the masses by indoctrination would not even have
been challenged, let alone shaken to their foundations.
“All this shows how intimate is the connection between the
ideas of a particular time—even progressive ideas—and
the conditions of the time, in this case, the state of the
struggle.”
‘Influence of October
Revolution’
Marcy continued, “An important influence in the progressive
movement insofar as the gay struggle is concerned, dates back to
the victory of the October Revolution in Russia. In early 1917,
the Soviet government annulled all laws which restricted the
rights of homosexuals. It also, of course, annulled all the
reactionary laws pertaining to divorce as well as the
feudal-bourgeois family relations.
“What is important about this,” he emphasized,
“is that for the first time in history, a workers’
government established equality in law—and to a measurable
degree also in fact—between men and women, for
heterosexuals and homosexuals.”
Marcy noted that, “Unfortunately this period of very
progressive development was short-lived, and was succeeded by a
period of reaction with the rise of Stalin to power.” The
1934 move by the bureaucratic grouping at the helm of the
workers’ state to reinstate laws against homosexuality,
Marcy explained, had a profoundly negative ideological impact on
communist parties around the world that looked to the Soviet
Union for political leadership.
“Our party,” Marcy stated, “which bases itself
on Marxism-Leninism, looks to the early model of the Soviet Union
as the embodiment of what our own political position should be in
relation to the struggle of gay people.
“Our first, most elementary and fundamental duty as well as
objective on this question is to completely eliminate and abolish
all forms of persecution and oppression of gay people. It must
also fight against all ideological, political and social
manifestations of gay oppression which may be reflected in our
own ranks.”
Marcy wrote that the demand to end all sexual oppression and
persecution “is really an elementary democratic demand
which a bourgeois democracy should be able to grant along with
all other democratic demands. But imperialist democracy tends to
restrict the elementary rights of all people—not only gay,
women, youth, Brown and Black. It is only the struggle that can
wrest concessions. In the long run, only the abolition of the
capitalist system can produce a lasting, free and equal treatment
of all peoples.”
Marcy concluded that although regression in the Soviet Union had
bequeathed a backward ideological legacy on the question of
homosexuality, “The socialist revolution is a permanent
revolution, one of continuous change. Along with many other
changes that need to be made in the socialist countries, the gay
question is surely one of them.
“In the meantime, we ought to concentrate on preparing our
own revolution, of which the struggle for the liberation of all
oppressed people, including gay people, is an indispensable
condition for victory of the revolution.”
Next: Historic WWP contribution: Publication of “The
Gay Question” by Bob McCubbin
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