A Short History of Queer Marxism

To briefly introduce myself: I’m a native English speaker, because I was born in the United States and was politically active in the United States. I moved to the Netherlands in 1993: first to Amsterdam, then to Rotterdam. That’s relevant, I think, because Rotterdam, like Antwerp, is a city where the far right is strong. And the far right is strong even in the LGBTIQ movement. So there are some parallels between the movements in the two cities.

I want to say some things about the history of queer Marxism, in three different periods: (1) what I would call the prehistory, the time when you had a socialist movement and a communist movement that related to questions of sexual emancipation, but there was still not a queer movement as such; (2) a second period, beginning in the early 1990s, which I would call the period of classic queer activism and queer theory; and (3) the period we’re in now, which I think is a somewhat different period. It’s useful to make clear how queer activism has had to change, particularly with the crisis and the rise of the far right, which I think makes a difference for queers too. So, let me go through all that.

I. Prehistory: socialism and sexual emancipation, 1860s–1980s

The history in Marxism and the socialist and communist movements doesn’t quite go back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, luckily. Though they had some things to say about women’s emancipation, in The Origin of the Family by Engels and so forth,¹ they had less than nothing to say about homosexual emancipation. And they had a chance, because they overlapped with Karl Ulrichs, for example, and Engels wrote about him to Marx in a letter, which was a horrible letter.² Really defensive, actually. As if they were afraid of getting fucked.

The real history of Marxism and homosexuality begins a bit later, with Magnus Hirschfeld. Besides being a pioneer of the Institute for Sexual Science and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which was campaigning for the repeal of Paragraph 175, he was also a social democrat. He personally knew August Bebel, the great tribune of German social democracy, and that helped, because Bebel was an early supporter of Hirschfeld’s campaign to repeal Paragraph 175. And that had an impact, because German social democracy was the big party of European social democracy. It was important for the socialist movement as a whole in Europe, and that became important not long afterwards with the Russian Revolution.

Even though the Bolsheviks had to break with German social democracy around issues of imperialism in the First World War, they were still influenced by German social democracy in important ways, including in this way. Soviet Russia, in its new criminal code after the revolution, abolished the existing laws against homosexuality.

And internationally, the communists played a significant role in what was called the World League for Sexual Reform, a federation of enlightened organizations in several countries, like the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and other European organizations.

So in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks, the communists, played a progressive role. Dan Healey’s book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia contains some amazing things that were totally unknown to communist parties in later periods: the role, for example, of lesbian officers in the Red Army as commanders,³ and pioneering experiments with gender-affirming surgery, which were also done in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.⁴ These things happened, and they’re interesting to remember, even though it’s the remote past, because particularly from 1934 under Joseph Stalin, with the recriminalization of homosexuality and the crackdowns, there was very little left of those gains of the 1920s. But this earlier period should not be forgotten.

Alexandra Kollontai, the first Bolshevik commissar for social welfare, didn’t particularly work on issues of homosexuality. Nonetheless, she fought for women’s sexual freedom and sexual freedom in general. Family abolition was really part of her programme at that point, with some resistance from other Bolsheviks, of course, sometimes even including Vladimir Lenin. But the whole campaign for communal dining halls and communal childcare was very much done in the perspective of liberating women from household tasks, and liberating human beings generally from the sexual constraints of the traditional family. So that was part of the original Bolshevik vision.

After the Stalinist intermission

Then came a big intermission, the Stalinist intermission and the Maoist intermission, lasting several decades, when virtually nothing of this sexual libertarianism survived. There was a return to it, a remembering of it, in the 1960s and the 1970s.

You even have individuals who make a connection with the modest role played by the Fourth International. Daniel Guérin, for example, had been a supporter of the Fourth International in the 1930s, important for the Marxist fight against fascism. He was later a libertarian Marxist, as he identified himself, and an important figure in May ‘68 and in the FHAR, the Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front, in France. There was a similar group in Argentina, the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH), founded the same year, inspired, I think, by the French example, before the military dictatorship took hold there. And again you have a connection through the Fourth International in Mexico, where Rosario Ibarra was the presidential candidate of the Mexican section of the Fourth International, at a point when that was a significant party of several thousand people.

There were definite connections made between the PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, Revolutionary Workers’ Party) and the gay liberation movement in Mexico in that period. These connections also mattered in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas were not so positive initially but were nonetheless put under pressure by gay organizing in the 1980s. That made a difference. So all this can be called part of the prehistory of queer Marxism.

II. Classic queer activism and queer theory, 1990s–2008

Then you get the start of something different in the early 1990s. It’s tricky, particularly now, because the movement is fragmented. You don’t have centralized organizations that hold congresses, pass resolutions and define the terms. So you could have a whole discussion about the difference between homosexual, gay, lesbian and queer, for example, and there was no authority to say: this is the difference, this is what it means. We’re continuing to invent the definitions of these terms, and it’s not always simple.

I remember I was in New York, still living in the United States, at the beginning of the 1990s, and there was a manifesto passed out by what became the group Queer Nation. There was a wave of groups coming out of ACT UP, coming out of AIDS activism, who pioneered the political use of the word queer. There was a famous manifesto passed out at Pride in 1990, with the heading “I Hate Straights.” It was very militant, an expression of legitimate anger, but with a tone that I think would not easily be identified with queers today, because it was really homonationalist. It was: Plato is ours, Shakespeare is ours. That’s not exactly the way queers talk today. Essentialist, we would say now.

That changed quickly, I think, under the influence of academic queer theory. There were two parallel developments: (1) queer theory, which was beginning in the universities, and (2) Queer Nation, which spread in the United States at about the same time as a new militant form of activism coming out of ACT UP, out of the AIDS crisis. And gradually the activists took over some of the spirit of queer theory at the universities: anti-essentialist, not clinging to a narrow lesbian and gay identity, but trying to get past labels and identities. And a bit later in the 1990s came the breakthrough of transgender activism, challenging gender generally, the construction of gender, the construction of sexuality as such.

Judith Butler was an early pioneering queer theorist. They⁵ were giving a new twist to the classical feminist distinction between sex and gender. Initially, the way Joan Scott, for example, formulated it, sex was something biological and gender was something socially constructed, two different things. Butler complicated that story, and Joan Scott herself has now acknowledged that the story is more complicated. Looking at transgender people and at intersex people, even biological sex itself is not always 100% biologically determined.

That has been important for feminism, I think, and certainly for queer politics: that spirit has been incorporated into queer politics. For queer Marxists, the whole story was also complicated by the fact that queer theory and queer politics grew rapidly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, in a period when Marxism as such rapidly went out of fashion.

So people at universities or in the movement were not likely initially to identify as queer Marxists. There was a sense that Marxism had been too narrow, too economically determinist, all of which was true, I think. In fact, in the 1980s, socialist feminists and Marxist feminists had very much complicated the picture of Marxism, stressing the importance of social reproduction alongside production. So by the early 1990s there was a more sophisticated Marxism, not an economically narrow Marxism. Nonetheless, in that geopolitical situation, it was very easy to write off Marxism altogether.

And a certain number of queer theorists, Judith Butler, for example – I think Butler is a more positive example among queer theorists than some – have always identified with the left, have been pro-Palestinian, and are old enough: Butler is a contemporary of mine. But though they’re familiar with Marxism, and not anti-Marxist, I would say, they haven’t identified as Marxist as such.

Queer theory meets Marxism

All that has complicated the story. But early in the 21st century, you had queer theorists, writers and activists who begin explicitly to make the link between queer thought and Marxist thought. A crucial book was Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire,⁶ which made connections between queer theory and Marxism. It looked, for example, at Butler’s concept of performativity, a concept that is easily misunderstood, because it could give the impression that gender is merely a performance, merely something voluntary. I don’t think Butler ever meant that. What they meant, and I think this is true, is that it is not necessarily the case that people are assigned female or male at birth, are from that point on assigned gender roles and functions in society, and that from that point their gender is fixed and static. One of Butler’s essential points was that the assignment of gender never or rarely happens automatically and easily. There are always contradictions.

People, and queers particularly know this, do not automatically fit into the identities and roles that are assigned to them, and therefore they have to re-perform them. They have to constantly reconstruct what they are meant to be. And sometimes people, particularly those of us who are queer, don’t do it neatly. Therefore, the understanding of gender has to be an understanding of gender as a struggle, and of people actually adopting a range of identities defined by themselves, by their movements, by their milieus, whatever.

Kevin Floyd’s contribution, I think, was to take Butler’s concept of performativity and look at it historically, particularly back into the late 19th and early 20th century, and to say that the way first manhood and womanhood, and later masculinity and femininity, were defined changed as the productive and reproductive structures of capitalism changed.

At one point, in a certain structure of the economy or in certain sectors, to be a man was to be defined as a producer, often an industrial worker: to be manly, to be strong, often to be violent. But already in the 20th century, with the development of more managerial layers of the ruling class, you have the beginning of a definition of a different kind of masculinity, and this has accelerated over the decades since. The managers were no longer necessarily men in the same physical terms as blue-collar workers. So performativity has changed historically, and that’s important for queer Marxists. Floyd was also important in drawing on the work of Georg Lukács, the famous Hungarian Marxist and communist, and particularly on Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness.⁷

Floyd introduced two key terms that have been important for queer Marxists: (1) reification and (2) totality. The first, reification, is there in Marx, of course: the treatment of social relations as things. But it was Floyd’s contribution to make that specifically about sexuality and sexual identity. To say that in sexist capitalist societies sexuality in particular is reified, is treated as a thing that you acquire and live by. Homosexuality as well as heterosexuality became almost like commodities, identities that you acquire and live by. So that was one important contribution.

The second term is what Lukács called totality. He actually said that what really defines Marxism as a school of thought is not economics as such but the viewpoint of totality: the understanding that societies are wholes in which all the different social relations play an integral part, or are linked to one another. And though Floyd didn’t put it this way at the time, I think you can draw a line between totality, as Lukács defined it and as Floyd applied it to sexuality, and what we now call intersectionality: the understanding that you cannot understand gender, sexuality, class and race independently of one another. They’re always mixed. They always go together.

So Kevin Floyd’s book was a founding moment. Unfortunately, he died fairly young, so the dialogue with him has not really continued, but he continues to be influential, I think. He was a key figure in the development of queer Marxism.

Homonormativity and homonationalism

Then Lisa Duggan’s concept of homonormativity was important. Duggan explicitly made the connection between heteronormativity, homonormativity and neoliberalism, the specific period of capitalism that began essentially in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and that helped produce an increasingly commodified version of sexuality. Sexuality was always commodified, but it became more and more commodified.

And then you have Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism, which has been key since then.⁸ Puar has not identified as Marxist, but anti-imperialist people in solidarity with Palestine have nonetheless grabbed the concept of homonationalism, you could say, and run with it. Puar initially used it in a very specific context, the war on terror after 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq. She was appalled to see, in gay bars in New York, for example, expressions of patriotism by gay men particularly, and of identification with US imperialism. The right picked up on that, and we are still living with the consequences now: the idea that the liberal West is the champion of feminism and even of LGBTIQ people. That was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and it was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan, in horrible, really appalling, disgusting ways.

If you read about the torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the concentration camp where the US Army put people and tortured them, they specifically drew on Bernard Lewis and Raphael Patai, for example, supposedly experts on Islam – Orientalists, to use Edward Said’s term – to say: Arab men, Muslim men are especially ashamed of homosexuality, so we’re going to torture them specifically by making them have sex with one another. We’re going to break them. An example of how academic studies can have really terrible real-life applications.

This understanding of homonationalism, of the links between homonationalism and imperialism, has had a long and complicated life since then. In the Middle East, in Lebanon for example, a pioneering LGBTIQ organization called Helem had a founding member, later an executive director, Ghassan Makarem, who was a Marxist close to the Fourth International, and who helped Helem play a key role in resisting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon at that point. It was interesting how Helem actually worked together with Hezbollah in relief efforts in southern Lebanon, and fairly harmoniously. That’s worth remembering now that there is supposed to be this total opposition between the left and queer movements on one side and Islam on the other. It has not always been the case.

And as BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) gained momentum, a Palestinian queer group, alQaws, played a very important role, linked with Sarah Schulman, a lesbian activist in the United States going back to ACT UP, in organizing tours of queers for BDS around the United States. That led to complicated discussions among the Palestinian queers themselves, in alQaws particularly. At a certain point, they got the feeling that they almost existed for the sake of a campaign in the United States. They were pushed to adopt a queer identity because that would help the BDS campaign there. But these were Palestinians living in Palestine, and they came to feel that the identity they had been convinced to assume was not always helpful for their integration into the Palestinian national liberation struggle. So they had to wrestle with that. It raises complicated questions.

Heteronationalism

These are some of the issues I also tried to wrestle with in my book Warped.⁹ And after Warped, I developed the concept of heteronationalism, paired with the concept of homonationalism. Another complicated discussion.

In a sense, I think you can say all nationalism has historically been heteronationalism. It’s essential to nationalism: nationalism has always been gendered. If you look at Israel today, for example, it’s absolutely clear that men in general are supposed to be the pioneers, the farmers, the soldiers, the settlers. Women are the mothers of the nation who bear and raise the soldiers, and Israeli lesbians have commented on the difficult position this puts them in. This is true in nationalist movements generally, and in capitalist nations generally.

So heteronationalism has always been there. What’s somewhat new, I think, and important to understand, is how in the world today homonationalism and heteronationalism are paired, linked in a vicious cycle. And this has become particularly important in a world of growing geopolitical divisions.

Look at the Islamic world, for example. Before Warped, I edited an anthology called Different Rainbows,¹⁰ and then pursued the question of Islamic sexualities in Warped. There was a varied landscape in the Islamic world, because you had countries like Turkey and Indonesia particularly where there were relatively strong LGBTIQ movements. The once strong LGBTIQ movement in Turkey is increasingly embattled, with arrests, imprisonments and bans. The same thing in Indonesia, where you had a fairly broad, strong coalition called GAYa Nusantara, with about 60 different LGBTIQ organizations, I think, which has again for several years now been under strong attack from the government, from the regime.

That has to do with two things, I think: (1) a homogenization of Islam and (2) the neoliberal economics of these regimes. The homogenization started particularly from the Saudi kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, which are very much linked, of course, to imperialism and to the United States, and which played a role in the CIA-backed insurgency and later US invasion of Afghanistan, imposing a particular fundamentalist version of Islam there. A country like Indonesia had a very traditionalist Islam, with elements of other traditional religions or cultural elements. And the Saudis in particular have tried to wipe that out and say the only true Islam is the Islam of Mecca, and anything else, anything more tolerant, is alien and wrong. So there’s been this cultural homogenization of Islam, linked, I think, to imperialism and imperialist influence.

The second is that some of the most repressive regimes, like Turkey, like the Indonesian regime, are also strongly neoliberal regimes: regimes imposing austerity, driving back the economic gains that people have made in these countries. This is true in general. Take the most notorious cases of anti-LGBTIQ crackdowns in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. One of the things to notice is that the great majority of the governments conducting the crackdowns are strongly neoliberal governments, linked partly, sometimes, to Christian evangelical churches that are strong in the United States and export their prejudices to sub-Saharan Africa.

But the neoliberal economics of these regimes, I think, also creates a pressure to assert an indigenous identity in other ways. To say: our economics may be the economics of the IMF and the World Bank, but culturally we’re African, and we resist alien things like homosexuality. You can see similar things in Eastern Europe, I think, where countries like Poland and Hungary have been imposing capitalism and market austerity on their countries, and alongside that need to affirm a different identity and show that they are not merely puppets of the West. They do that by rejecting feminism, homosexuality, whatever. So that’s a paradox of imperialism in our time, I think.

III. Geopolitics and the far right, 2008–present

Turning to the geopolitical contradictions of today, we see that sexual politics, which plays a much bigger role in geopolitics than I would ever have predicted, also imposes global divides. Look at a country like the People’s Republic of China. Well into the 21st century, you had a gradual liberalization, you can say, of attitudes around sexuality, decriminalization, all these things were happening.

But with the intensification of geopolitical clashes, particularly between the United States and China, this is also culturally reflected in an insistence that, no, homosexuality is really not Chinese. There’s a certain retreat from the reforms that had been going on, and a polarization with Taiwan particularly. It’s interesting that there are now three countries in Asia that have instituted same-sex marriage, and Taiwan was the first. Taiwan, with a somewhat Chinese culture, has been a pioneer of a Chinese-style homonationalism. The two developments mirror one another: as the People’s Republic gets more repressive, Taiwan gets somewhat more tolerant. It’s a geopolitical and, you could say, geosexual pattern.

The same thing applies to Eastern Europe, I think. Look at Ukraine and Russia. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Russian Federation repealed repressive Soviet-era legislation. That has now been completely turned around, of course, under Vladimir Putin, and it’s very much linked in Putin’s ideology and rhetoric with the war in Ukraine. Because, in a parallel way, Ukraine is trying to show an image of tolerance to appeal to the European Union particularly.

It’s a very half-hearted image of tolerance, actually. In Ukraine today, for example, it’s forbidden for men of military age to leave the country, because they may be conscripted into the army. And because Ukraine makes legal gender recognition very hard to get, this applies to most trans women: they are defined as men and therefore can’t leave the country, can’t flee from the violence and the killing, because they may have to go into the army. And Ukraine certainly doesn’t have same-sex marriage. It’s homonationalism in a very pale way, but it is nonetheless this geopolitical divide that you can see in Ukraine and Russia, in China and Taiwan. This is part of the gender, sexual and geopolitical landscape of the imperialist world we’re living in today.

I would say in general, and this is perhaps a gross generalization, that the trend towards greater “tolerance”, particularly in Western Europe and North America, remained fairly strong into the 21st century until about the outbreak of the economic and financial crisis in 2008. And it’s from about that time that the trend gradually dried up, you could say, became weaker.

The far right’s sexual turn in Europe

Looking at Europe specifically, I would say a turning point came in France in 2012, when the social democratic government proposed opening up legal marriage to same-sex couples. This was a neoliberal social democratic government, with not-so-progressive policies at many levels, and as for many governments, its sexual politics were something of an alibi: at least we’re for same-sex marriage, so you can say we’re progressive.

They thought they were going with the trend of the times, that it wouldn’t be that hard to push through. But there was an enormous reaction, with the most reactionary sectors of the Catholic Church playing a big role. LGBTIQ people I knew in France were shocked and afraid at how they were targeted in that society. Same-sex marriage was pushed through eventually, but with big psychological damage to the people who experienced the force of the reaction.

It’s funny: if you look at the rise of the far right in Europe today, in recent decades, the far right has not always, not necessarily, not automatically been anti-gay and anti-lesbian. Marine Le Pen, who could conceivably be elected president of France in April 2027 – though we have to fight to prevent this – initially tried to reach out to LGBTIQ people in France, as has happened, I think, in Belgium and in the Netherlands, using Islamophobia as a tool to reach out. Well, we may not be total liberationists, was a far right message, but we’re defending you against those nasty Muslims. But with the strength of the movement against same-sex marriage in France, the French far right made a turn, not towards total traditional homophobia, but nonetheless a reactionary turn, trying to run ahead of this strong reactionary movement.

And this has only grown worse in the years since then, with the rise of transphobia, which was also a turn on the right. In the Netherlands, for example, in the November 2023 election, the far-right party PVV, the Freedom Party, became the biggest party in the Dutch parliament, and it too had a somewhat moderate, tolerant profile on sexual issues. The previous government, a center-right government, had proposed a law to make legal gender change somewhat easier in the Netherlands. Right after the election, even before the far right came into government, the far right and the right-wing parties killed that law in parliament.

Organizing without the mainstream

There was a whole period in the Netherlands when, every four years or however often the elections were, the different LGBTIQ organizations met with the parties and signed what were called rainbow electoral agreements, setting out the next stages of emancipation. And generally, slowly and reluctantly, the governments tended to carry out those agreements, for a while. Not lately. There’s a sense that progress has stalled, and I think that poses a certain kind of problem for us queer Marxists, particularly for queer activists on the left. Queer activists have been good at protesting against Pride, for example, against the mainstream Pride, the commercialization, the links to the military and the police.

The problem is that we tacitly relied on the LGBTIQ mainstream to push some reforms from time to time. We took that for granted. And now, in the Netherlands at least, the mainstream organizations will occasionally express concern about what’s happening in our societies. When the far right became the biggest party in the Dutch parliament, the COC (the Dutch LGBTIQ federation) issued a statement and said: this is a source of concern, tolerance is important for us.

But for years and years, the mainstream movement has been so deeply dependent on state funding, and not in the habit of mobilizing on the streets. They leave it to us, those of us on the radical left, but they really don’t do it themselves. Again, with Palestine: the COC issued a statement saying this is a source of concern, but they don’t join the big demonstrations. You could even say that even if they wanted to, they don’t know how to. They don’t have the habit.

I think we on the queer radical left are faced with the challenge of substituting for the mobilizations that the broader organizations should do, but aren’t doing and won’t do. That’s a big challenge for us.

We face challenges on so many levels. We saw with the COVID pandemic and the big Black Lives Matter demonstrations, in the United States particularly but also spilling over somewhat to Europe, to the Netherlands and other countries, that important links were being made between queer radical activism and anti-racist activism. Anti-racism has always been important to radical queer politics. In New York specifically, alongside the big Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police violence, you had specific Black Queer Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter demonstrations. In the Netherlands, I would cite Gloria Wekker’s book White Innocence,¹¹ which appeared amid the anti–Black Pete (Zwarte Piet) mobilizations, against the deep racism that has been there in these societies all along, totally unacknowledged, unadmitted.

Wekker’s book was important as part of the general challenge to this, and one chapter of the book specifically talks about gay men. Because we have to admit, among straight friends I detect the assumption that LGBTIQ people are still sort of progressive across the board. I don’t think it’s an assumption that’s safe anymore. In particular, among cisgender white gay men: at a certain point in the Netherlands, when the far right, the PVV, became the biggest party, it also became, according to at least one online poll, the biggest party among viewers of a gay website.¹² So, that’s a challenge for us.

In Rotterdam, a far-right stronghold, a transphobic and implicitly racist gay group called the Roze Leeuw (Pink Lion) has been visibly present at Pride. At one forum where this was being discussed, I posed the question: can’t they be banned from Pride, if this is contrary to our progressive, tolerant politics? And the answer was: we can’t hold Pride without municipal funding. Livable Rotterdam (Leefbaar Rotterdam) is the second largest party – at the time the biggest – in the city council, and we will never get the funding if we kick the far right out of Pride.

These are the challenges we face, that we have to address and organize for. I think queers on the radical left have to give up the assumption that the mainstream movement will do the main work of tackling the issues for us. We have to figure out ways to organize more broadly. One last example: in the trade unions, and I’m sure it’s the same in Belgium, there are LGBTIQ groups. In the Netherlands, they are very well integrated into the dominant trade union structures, which I think in the Netherlands are even more conservative than in Belgium. But I think the radical left has to be there too, challenging the kind of politics that’s generally accepted in these broad movements, so as to really develop a radical queer politics that addresses the challenges of the rising far right, the rising reaction across the board.