Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:
Anarchists (should) understand the importance in opposing the regulation of sexual and gender behavior by governments and other allied forces such as the church and capitalism. In fact there has been a long history of anarchism as a movement and a philosophy recognizing and embracing the pivotal importance of sexual and gender liberation. Within this history there has been a prominent role of queer anarchist sex radicals who kept this significant engagement at the forefront of the anarchist movement and philosophy. Yet despite the pioneering anarchist sex radicals at the turn of the century and those during the heyday of the (gay, feminist, black) liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, there has been an increasing trend by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) liberation movement toward embracing the government and its role in regulating sexual and gender behavior. And this current “liberation” movement has worked in complicity with the state simply to broaden and reform the definitions and social norms of sex and gender, as well as focus on the assimilation of LGBT within the State through marriage reform, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and by enacting laws that seek to entrench and empower the police and incarceration system through increased funding and engagement through hate crime legislation. And so we see a liberation movement that moved from a focus on fighting the state and its associated systems of corrupt police, politics, and social norms to a liberation model complicit with a state and its allied power structures that makes no excuse regarding its control, regulation, definition of, and legal boundaries regarding, sexual behavior and gender identity and expression.
Yep, anarchists should understand this. But honestly, anyone with a desire to liberate people should recognise that liberation does not happen through reform. It cannot. That's impossible. You do not liberate people by forcing them into assimilation.
In 1897 Berlin, the German sexologist and sex radical Magnus Hirschfeld and several colleagues formed the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC)—the world’s first homosexual rights organization. The members of the SHC were radical intellectuals who helped create new understandings of homosexuality and championed new political goals and ideas as well as strong critiques of oppressive social norms and values. During this first wave of sexual liberation many of these radical intellectuals shaped new understandings and forms of same-sex political and social consciousness that had immediate and long-term impacts on the lives of European people.
Why did the Europeans come at sexuality from this direction? And how? Because it's fascinating to see that it blossomed in a different way, but I want to know more about how this direction occurred.
Within the United States, unlike Europe, the politics of sex radicals did not arise from a blossoming homosexual rights movement. Instead, it arose from the anarchist movement of the time. Anarchist sex radicals like Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Leonard Abbott, John William Lloyd, and Benjamin R. Tucker wrote books, articles, and lectured across the United States regarding same-sex love. Emma Goldman [1869–1940] is without question the first person to openly lecture on homosexual liberation (emancipation) and openly supported Oscar Wilde against his persecutors. Though not an anarchist himself, Magnus Hirschfeld praised Emma Goldman as the “first and only woman, indeed, one could say the first and only human being, of importance in America to carry the issue of homosexual love to the broadest layers of the public.” The US anarchists of this time were unique in articulating a political critique of American social and legal rules as well as the societal norms that regulated relationships. In this effort, and through leveraging the anarchist movement of the time, they were able to center homosexuality within the political debate. By doing so, they created a fundamental shift in the sexual, cultural, and political landscape of the United States, not only during their time but also for decades to follow. As Terence Kissack notes: “The anarchist sex radicals were interested in the ethical, social and cultural place of homosexuality within society, because that question lies at the nexus of individual freedom and state power…The anarchist sex radicals examined the question of same sex love because policeman, moral arbiters, doctors, clergymen and other authorities sought to regulate homosexual behavior.”
I wonder why it is that anarchism seems to have lost (neglected?) its history of queer folks or supporting queer folks.
Coincidental with this decline in the anarchist movement we saw the rise of the Communist Party (CP) as the primary vehicle of the left. > Sex radicals of this period began to work under a left that was dominated by the CP, which marginalized the ideas and ideologies of their anarchist predecessors. The CP was an organization that, contrary to the anarchists, enforced uniformity of belief and action. And in regards to homosexuality, the CP had a policy of discouraging membership of gays and lesbians who refused to be silent about their private lives (clearly a 180 degree reversal from the beliefs and actions of anarchist sex radicals like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman). In theory the CP enacted the first “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy” against homosexuals, even though many prominent sex radicals and homosexuals of the left were members of CP.
Just... no wonder a lot of communist parties feel unsupportive to queer folks? This isn't at all surprising.
The first political organization formed in wake of the Stonewall riots was the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The organization was named in honor of the National Liberation Front, the Vietnamese resistance movement, and as a gesture toward the unity of the struggles of blacks, the poor, women, and the colonized in the “Third World.” One early flyer, distributed in the Bay Area in January 1970, proclaimed, “The Gay Liberation Front is a nation-wide coalition of revolutionary homosexual organizations creating a radical Counter Culture within the homosexual lifestyles. Politically it’s part of the radical ‘Movement’ working to suppress and eliminate discrimination and oppression against homosexuals in industry, the mass media, government, schools and churches.”
STAR advocated for an inclusive gay liberation that strongly embraced trans rights, nurtured homeless street youth, and worked to create a communal trans family unit. They worked to dismantle the very state institutions of a capitalistic society that they deemed responsible for their oppressions. In a publication by STAR, they noted in closing: “We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throw us into jail to rot. This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.”
Both the GLF and STAR formed during the early stages of this third wave of sexual liberation but were undone by ideological factions within the gay liberation movement. In the case of STAR and the budding trans liberation portion of the movement the severe fractionation of the movement unveiled itself at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally. The bitterly public feud—Sylvia Rivera storming the stage to speak out for imprisoned Trans folks and street youth, Jean O’Leary of the Lesbian Feminist Liberation condemning men who impersonated women for entertainment and profit, and Lee Brewster of the Queens Liberation Front castigating lesbians for their refusal to let drag queens be themselves—thereby exposed the dramatically contrasting views on the meaning of gay liberation. In the case of GLF, it was a move from multi-issue movement building to a single-issue, white-dominated, legislative-focused vision dominated by GLF’s successor, the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA).
This really is proof that a movement that leaves trans people behind? Is not useful for anyone. The fact that Jean O'Leary was the first lesbian to be embraced by the Democratic Party (serving on the DNC board for twelve years), highlights the fact that there were intentions to separate people.
She derided trans and non-binary people at the Liberation Day Rally and was rewarded with safety by the Democrats. These parties are not for us, they never were, and they never will be.
And in addition, single-issue organisations are fucking pointless. Especially those run by white people.
The way the queer liberation movement has gone, nothing will make me hate the word queer and how inclusive it is.
However, from the mid seventies onward the anarchist-style liberationist framework became less important to the dominant gay and lesbian organizations, who increasingly favored an ethnic model that emphasized community identity and cultural difference (as originally championed by the homophile movement). Today we can see that marriage equality is a core example of identity-based politics and operates to the exclusion of others desiring nontraditional families and relationships not requiring state sanction or regulation. In essence, sexual liberation evolved from the precept of the anarchist liberationists into an assimilationist and identity-based liberation of “different but equal under the law of the State.” During the middle part of this period as the mainstream LGBT organizations, media, and communities embraced assimilation within a capitalistic society, there was the ever-present undercurrent of radical social change organizations such as ACT UP, OutRage, and others that embraced “queer,” not LGBT, as an identity label that pointed to separatist and non-assimilationist politics.
For me, it is clear that any so-called liberation movement for the trans community today is, like its gay and lesbian counterparts, entrenched within an assimilated and capitalistic framework. And in this liberation framework the trans community is still securing its liberation to the same wagon of its gay and lesbian counterparts. If we are to liberate society and ourselves from the tyranny against those who traverse gender and sex, we liberate ourselves from the mental and physical constructs that manipulate us into subordination for the benefit of the “greater good of society, religion, and state.” It is now time for the trans community to embrace and continue the militant and revolutionary paths our trans elders laid down for us if we are seeking revolutionary (rather than reformist) changes. So a key tenet of trans liberation lies within the liberation of one’s self (and others) from the tyranny of the state, religion, and society; and equally important—from our own self-imposed tyranny.
The heart of this point was reinforced at a recent demo protesting the hypocrisy of Human Rights Campaign, where one of the chants included the words “Fuck you HRC.” Several people asked with all seriousness, “Are we allowed to say that?” Then when the first police car came, they were convinced that the police were called because of our using the words “Fuck You.” In reality the cops didn’t really give a damn what we were chanting about. Clearly on the surface this is all kind of silly and a nit, except for the fact that the reaction and fear of this trans person typifies the implicit warnings of Emma Goldman—that the tyranny, or fear of such tyranny, by the state has a profound impact on our actions and our behaviors. This clearly ties in very closely with our goal of achieving trans liberation.
