We are a group of approximately ten communists who are gay women. We have come together because we are increasingly concerned with and disturbed by the spreading and consolidation of an anti-gay line which is expressed organizationally by the refusal to allow gays membership in communist organizations. Although this line has reached its clearest expression through such organizations as the Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League (OL), its influence is certainly not limited to these organizations. We feel that particularly in this period of rising political struggle concerning the building of a party, it is extremely important that this question be met head on and struggled with. The approach taken toward resolving this question will indeed reflect the way that the communist forces deal with finding the correct line in other important questions. Incorrect thinking does not stay confined to one neat little area, but spills over into all other political struggle in that it reflects an overall approach to political questions.
We found the most concrete expression of this incorrect line on the gay question in a paper the RU wrote for the Attica Brigade. While the RU disavows this paper as an official document, our experience has shown that the arguments used in that paper are the basis for the anti-gay line put forward by all the other communist forces who espouse that line. Thus, we are using their paper as a vehicle for combatting that line and the incorrect assumptions and arguments it is based on. Our criticisms of the RU paper are therefore not limited to the RU, but are extended to all such evidence of this incorrect line within the communist movement.
The purpose of this paper is to refute the incorrect analyses that are dominant today in the communist movement. As such, it is a polemic. We realize that a correct line emerges and is developed in the process of summing up practice, analyzing history, and in struggling against incorrect analyses. This paper is a beginning of that process. Our purpose at this time is not to put forth a complete analysis of our own on all aspects of gayness. Our investigation and study on the gay question is incomplete. However, we do have a clear perspective from which we have approached the question. Our experience and practice leads us to believe the gay question is integrally and structurally tied to the woman question, and the key to the resolution of both is found in the division of labor between the sexes. The nuclear family as an economic unit with its corresponding super-structural aspects has been, since the introduction of class society, the great perpetrator of the division of labor between the sexes, to the benefit of the ruling classes. Until this division of labor is broken down, by the introduction of women into production, and social and political life on an equal basis with men, and by the socialization of the functions of women within the nuclear family with respect to the reproduction and maintenance of labor power, there will be oppression of women and oppression of gay people.
Because of our limited experience, this paper concentrates more on lesbians than gay men. However, our position that it is politically incorrect to exclude people who agree on ideological, political and organizational questions from communist organizations solely because of a person’s sexuality clearly holds for both gay women and men. Our conclusion is based not so much on our experience as lesbian communists but from applying Marxist methodology. Consequently, anyone utilizing the same method of investigation, be they gay or heterosexual, should arrive at the same conclusion.
We are going to proceed with our study and hope that others, too, will take up this work. We think that this paper establishes conclusively that the exclusion of comrades from communist organizations of the basis of sexuality is incorrect. We specifically invite struggle over this question, and hope that people will communicate their ideas and criticisms to us.
Los Angeles Research Group
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Cudahy, California 90201