Socialism and LGBTQ rights

Gender and sexuality were significant concerns for many of the leading thinkers such as Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in Britain as well as their followers, many of whom were women.

[4] Engels responded with disgust to Marx in a private letter, lashing out at "pederasts" who are "extremely against nature", and described Ulrichs' platform of homosexual rights as "turning smut into theory".

[6] Known to both Ulrichs and Marx was the case of Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, an important labor organizer who had been charged with attempting to solicit a teenage boy in a park in 1862.

For example, he signed the first petition of the "Wissenschaftlich-humanitärer Kreis", a study group led by Magnus Hirschfeld, trying to explain homosexuality from a scientific point of view and pushing for decriminalization.

Hirschfeld, who was also a socialist and supporter of the Women's Movement, formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to campaign against German Penal Code Section 175 which outlawed male-male sex.

A certain case pertaining to this would be one in the year 1870 when Frederick Park (Fanny) and Ernest Boulton (Stella) were arrested for being men in women's clothing and framed for committing crimes.

In Europe and North America, the free love movement combined ideas revived from utopian socialism with anarchism and feminism to attack the "hypocritical" sexual morality of the Victorian era, and the institutions of marriage and the family that were alleged to enslave women.

[20] Indeed, with Marx's support, the American branch of the organization was purged of its pacifist, anti-racist and feminist elements, which were accused of putting too much emphasis on issues unrelated to class struggle and were therefore seen to be incompatible with scientific socialism.

"[28] In fact, prior to Goldman, heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (1849–98) spoke positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the 1890s in his German-language journal "Der arme Teufel" (Detroit).

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.

Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality.

The organization was based on the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and social revolution and argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel.

The group despised effeminacy and saw homosexuality as an expression of manly virility available to all men, espousing a form of nationalistic masculine Lieblingminne (chivalric love) that would later be linked to the rise of Nazism.

[36] In the context of the highly politicized Cold War environment, homosexuality became framed as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.

Hay's concept of the "cultural minority" came directly from his Marxist studies, and the rhetoric that he and his colleague Charles Rowland employed often reflected the militant Communist tradition.

The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality reports that "As Marxists the founders of the group believed that the injustice and oppression which they suffered stemmed from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of American society".

[41] African American socialist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, in 1953 for homosexual activity with two other men in a parked car.

Many African American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement.

[42] A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual", and had the entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record.

On March 7, 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code, for the entire Soviet Union, that expressly prohibited only male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labor in prison.

[48] Historian Jennifer Evans reports that the East German government "alternated between the view [of homosexual activity] as a remnant of bourgeois decadence, a sign of moral weakness, and a threat to social and political health of the nation.

[citation needed] The revolutionary Cuban gay writer Reinaldo Arenas noted that, shortly after the communist government of Fidel Castro came to power, "persecution began and concentration camps were opened ... the sexual act became taboo while the 'new man' was proclaimed and masculinity exalted.

The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his romantic and sexual relations with men (notably in a late essay, "Being Queer"[66]), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging gay liberation movement of the early 1970s.

[73] Emerging from a number of events, such as the May 1968 insurrection in France, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and the Stonewall riots of 1969, militant Gay Liberation organizations began to spring up around the world.

The then styled Gay Lib leaders and writers also came from a left-wing background, such as Dennis Altman, Martin Duberman, Steven Ault, Brenda Howard, John D'Emilio, David Fernbach (writing in the English language), Pierre Hahn and Guy Hocquenghem (in French) and the Italian Mario Mieli.

A former member of the French Communist Party, he later joined the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR), formed by radical lesbians who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971, including the left ecofeminist Françoise d'Eaubonne.

That same year, the FHAR became the first homosexual group to demonstrate publicly in France when they joined Paris's annual May Day march held by trade unions and left-wing parties.

[75] Meanwhile, the popular right-wing press featured pejorative references to lesbians, supposedly especially associated with the all-female anti-nuclear protest camp at Greenham Common,[76] and individuals such as Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election.

Hannah Dee remarked that it had reached "the point that London Pride – once a militant demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall riots – has become a corporate-sponsored event far removed from any challenge to the ongoing injustices that we [the LGBT community] face.

"[77] At the same time, an anti-war coalition between Muslims (many organized through mosques) and the Socialist Workers Party led a leading member Lindsey German to reject the use of gay rights as a "shibboleth" that would automatically rule out such alliances.