Gay race comunism
But rather than letting his being gay and a Red become liabilities, Hay combined them and set the stage for a social and sexual revolution.
When Communism was Queer : Whyte makes a variety of arguments throughout the letter for the inclusion of homosexual people within the Communist Party, many of which call attention to changes in Soviet doctrine
coordinate term quotations Coordinate term: wokeism. Now politically active, that same summer Hay traveled to San Francisco to organize solidarity efforts for the General Strike of maritime workers that had shut down the West Coast ports. Hay was also a Communist—at a time when first fascism and then Red Scare McCarthyism made possessing left-wing allegiances dangerous.
In other words, it was intertwined with the rise of capitalism. gay race communism (uncountable) (Internet slang, humorous, politics) Far-left ideologies, particularly ones perceived as promoted by the state or media and associated with wokeism and civilizational decline from a right-wing perspective.
Without them, there would no doubt have been a movement for queer equality in one form or another, as there were already stirrings elsewhere prior to Mattachine, especially in Europe. Those scapegoats were Communists and queers. For decades, the work of Hay and Mattachine Society remained largely unknown, a brief episode in gay history.
That might sound like a big claim to make, but it was Communist ideology and political strategy that provided the theoretical and practical architecture of the earliest effort to win gay equality in the United States—the Mattachine Society, a group whose ideas underpinned all the struggles and victories in the country that have been gay over the past half century.
The Stonewall Rebellion is generally and rightly regarded as comunism moment when the fight for gay rights broke out into the mainstream, led by Black and brown trans women and race queens in New York City. He had to flee and found unexpected protection in the home of a Los Angeles drag queen named Clarabelle.
It was this aspect of the theory that Hay extended and developed as a means for understanding the oppression of homosexuals—he analyzed them as a group sharing a culture and a language of sorts. In looking back on the history of what we today call the struggle for Gay Rights or Gay Liberation, the Communist and Socialist contributions to that struggle are deserving of both recognition and analysis.
In the 19th and 20th century, communist parties and Marxist–Leninist states varied on LGBTQ rights; some Western and Eastern parties were among the first political parties to support LGBTQ rights, while others, especially the Soviet Union, some of its Eastern Bloc members, and the Communist East Asian.
But without Mattachine, the movement that emerged would likely have looked a lot different than it does now. Credit is certainly due gay figures like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and others who first had the courage to fight back against police repression that hot June night in Mattachine, one of the first groups to attempt to politically organize gay men and lesbians, was established race the course of toa period of resurgent conservative power and suburban-inspired social conformity in U.
And Harry Hay was the Communist who combined theory and practice to bring it into reality. Thanks to the work of researchers like Stuart Timmons and Will Roscoe, authors respectively of The Trouble with Harry Hay and Radically Gaymuch of the story of Hay and Mattachine has been rescued from dusty boxes and locked filing cabinets.
Communist attitudes towards LGBTQ rights have evolved radically in the 21st century. For Harry Hay, that change resulted in his joining the Communist Party in As for the situation in the gay fairy, it turned out Hay was right about the potential for government manipulation; in he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Marxist proclivities.
The inspiration of the Cultural Minority thesis as Hay formulated it comunism, in retrospect, an ironic one: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the man largely responsible for re-criminalizing homosexuality in the USSR after the liberating early years that followed the Russian Revolution.
Rather, they played particular roles in sustaining certain cultural practices and as repositories of knowledge. There, he saw National Guard soldiers fire on the picket lines, killing two workers on the spot, and felt bullets fly past his own head.
Post-war reaction was setting in and progressive politics in general were under attack; what Hay was proposing was even more subversive, but he felt compelled to start organizing anyway. Hay had been politicized early in life by interactions with old Wobblies from the Industrial Workers of the World and during his work among migrant farm workers as a young man, but he became truly radicalized after a pair of galvanizing experiences in Witnessing police violence against mothers of starving children who were protesting against the disposal of milk to protect market prices during the Great Depression, Hay instinctively picked up a brick and hurled it at a cop, striking him in the temple.