The Red in the Rainbow: Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation by Hannah Dee

Author:Hannah Dee [Dee, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookmarks Publications
Published: 2010-07-11T23:00:00+00:00

1968 — seizing the time

The clash between the old and the new experienced by lesbians and gays was one element in much deeper contradictions which were helping to fuel movements for civil rights, women’s liberation and an end to the Vietnam War. Many black people had also returned from the war only to be confronted with the same old racist violence and institutionalised segregation. Their resistance to this had sparked a mass movement for civil rights in the South, which boiled over into an increasingly militant struggle in the North. Their success in fighting back had already begun to influence some of the activists arguing for a more radical approach in the homophile movement. The same Mattachine member who moved the motion opposing the view that homosexuality was a sickness had argued that black people:

tried for 90 years to achieve his purposes by a programme of information and education. His achievements in those 90 years, while by no means nil, were nothing compared to those of the past ten years, when he tried a vigorous civil liberties and social action approach... I do not see the NAACP and CORE worrying about which chromosome gene produced a black skin or about the possibility of bleaching the Negro... We are interested in obtaining rights for our respective minorities, AS Negroes, AS Jews and AS HOMOSEXUALS. Why we are Negroes, Jews or homosexuals is totally irrelevant, and whether we can be changed to whites, Christians or heterosexuals is equally irrelevant. [109]

The year before the Stonewall riots, 1968, had seen this revolt come together in a way that put revolution on the agenda. This centred on events in France, where the biggest general strike in history caused the president to flee the country for an army base in Germany. Here he confided to the generals, “Everything is fucked. The communists have provoked paralysis across the whole country. I’m in charge of nothing.”

In the US, the legitimacy of capitalism was already being torn apart by the Vietnam War and the state’s violent attacks on civil rights marchers. 1968 started with a mass Vietnamese peasant uprising against occupying troops which brought home to the world that the US could not win the war. The assassination of Martin Luther King followed not long after and was met with riots involving tens of thousands of people. The world’s other empire, Russia, also found itself under siege from Czechoslovakia to Poland and Yugoslavia where resistance was growing to the “red bourgeoisie”. This created a crisis not only for those regimes, but also for so-called Communism itself, as the decision by Moscow to send tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush dissent began to break people’s illusions that those societies were genuinely socialist. From East to West the status quo was under attack. The revolt even entered the Olympic Games in Mexico that year when two black American athletes used the medal ceremony to raise the Black Power salute.

The modern gay movement was inspired and influenced by these events. The chant “Gay

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