Schweitzer had been arrested in a park on a morals charge and not only did Marx and Engels refuse to join a committee defending him, they resorted to the cheapest form of bathroom humor in their private comments about the affair.
[3] One of the first important politicians to speak out in favour of gay rights in public debates was the German Marxist and co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, August Bebel.
Although Bebel personally considered same sex relationships to be "against nature", he was among the signatories of Magnus Hirschfeld's petition from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to overturn Paragraph 175 from the German penal code.
[7] During the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany joined with the Social Democrats in support of efforts to legalize private homosexual relations between consenting adults.
Notable LGBT+ members of communist parties include: The phrase "Sexual bolschevism" originated in Weimar Germany in the 1920s by Pastor Ludwig Hoppe of Berlin as a more general term of approbation at licentiousness.
[35] The advance of doctors, psychologists and social workers into the arena of human sexuality during the Weimar era (as well as the feminist movement) threw up a variety of conspiracy theories, especially amongst more conservative aspects of society, regarding communism and homosexuality.
[33] There are specific events which glbtq.com ("an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture") claims to have contributed to the linkage of communism with homosexuality in the United States as well: For example, in 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an editor and writer at Time magazine and a former Communist Party member and courier in a Soviet spy ring infiltrating the American government, accused Alger Hiss, head of the Carnegie Endowment, of perjury and, implicitly, of Soviet espionage.
In addition, the 1951 flight to the Soviet Union of gay British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean also helped fuel the association of homosexuality and treason in the public imagination.
[59] In December 2015, KKE voted against the Civil Partnerships Bill proposed by Syriza that would extend cohabitation agreements to same-sex couples, responding, among other things: The family is a social relationship, it is an institution for the protection of children, as it was formed in the context of today's society, capitalism.
[60] However, the KKE also supports strengthening legislation to punish homophobic behavior, and has spoken against such discrimination, stating that "Unacceptable and condemnable discrimination and violence against our fellow human beings, based on their sexual orientation and other personal characteristics, are not addressed by cheap declarations of equality and words of sympathy, but by strengthening legislation against perpetrators of sexism, racism and homophobia, with the full social support of those who suffer from such behaviors.
[71] In Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Trotskyist People Before Profit party is in favor of LGBTQ+ equality, stating that they are in favor of equality in marriage and blood donation, as well as laws against homophobic and transphobic hate crimes, anti-bullying initiatives in school to protect LGBTQ+ students, LGBTQ+ awareness training at workplaces, and free gender care through an "Irish NHS" which would include psychotherapy, counselling, speech and language therapy, hormone therapy, hair removal, and gender reassignment surgery.
[76] The Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains socially conservative on LGBTQ rights, voting in favor of the anti-gay propaganda law[50] and introduced legislation in 2016 to prohibit coming out as LGBT.
[87] In 2023, the party made a statement denouncing the Turkish government's targeting and violence against LGBTQ people, stating that "this discrimination manifests itself as mobbing in the workplace, threats in the neighborhood, and brutal force in the hands of law enforcement".
[96] On the party's Twitter account, it has claimed the LGBTQ rights movement has become a "mainstay of monopoly capitalist assault on the working class" and almost a "NATO front".
In 1962, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic decriminalized same-sex sexual intercourse after scientific research from Kurt Freund led to the conclusion that homosexual orientation cannot be changed.
The government of Thuringia moderated Paragraphs 175 and 175a in a manner similar to that contemplated in the draft criminal code of 1925, while in the other states (Länder) the 1935 version of the statute remained in effect without changes.
However, in contrast to the earlier action of the OLG Halle, the new Paragraph 175a remained unchanged, because it was said to protect society against "socially harmful homosexual acts of qualified character".
From 1953 to 1957, following Uprising of 1953 in East Germany, the GDR government instituted a program of "moral reform" to build a solid foundation for the new socialist republic, in which masculinity and the traditional family were championed while homosexuality, seen to contravene "healthy mores of the working people", continued to be prosecuted under Paragraph 175.
Same-sex sexual intercourse was "alternatively viewed as a remnant of bourgeois decadence, a sign of moral weakness, and a threat to the social and political health of the nation.
This was because the official position of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany was to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but to otherwise ignore that LGBTQ relationships existed.
On 11 August 1987 the Supreme Court of East Germany struck down a conviction under Paragraph 151 on the basis that "homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior.
One year later, the Volkskammer (the parliament of the GDR), in its fifth revision of the criminal code, brought the written law in line with what the court had ruled, striking Paragraph 151 without replacement.
Under Article 410 of the Somali Penal Code, an additional security measure may accompany sentences for homosexual acts, usually coming in the form of police surveillance to prevent "re-offending".
According to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which was affiliated with the institute, the Ministry of Health delegation was positively receptive to a film concerning the topic and considered it unworthy of scandal.
In the 1930s, along with increased repression of political dissidents and non-Russian nationalities under Stalin, LGBTQ themes faced official government censorship, and a uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union.
On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code, throughout the entire Soviet Union, that expressly prohibited only male same-sex sexual intercourse with up to five years of hard labor in prison.
[142] Some historians have noted that it was during this time that Soviet propaganda began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascism, and that Article 121 may have a simple political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation, and to solidify Russian opposition to Nazi Germany, who had broken its treaty with Russia.
Yet, during the late 1950s – early 1960s, Aline Mosby, a foreign reporter in Russia at the time, attributed to the more liberal attitude of the Khrushchev government the fact that she saw some gay couples in public and that it was not uncommon to see men waiting outside of certain theaters looking for dates with male performers.
Perhaps the first public endorsement of LGBTQ rights since Stalin was a brief statement, critical of Article 121 and calling for its repeal, made in the Textbook of Soviet Criminal Law (1973).
Author Gennady Trifonov served four years of hard labor for circulating his gay poems and, upon his release, was allowed to write and publish only if he avoided depicting or making reference to homosexuality.