Marx, Musk and the Sex Machine
When Elon Musk blamed neo Marxism for the breach with his "trans daughter" he was ridiculed but the truth is the LGBTQ+ movement continues to be haunted by its origins on the Far Left.
Note: I posted this piece last night, but then noticed so many typos I’ve posted it again. For some reason substack wouldn’t let me make changes to the original. It’ll be the first of 3 articles that examine in detail some of the historical influences on the LGBTQ+ movement.
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“A sexual revolution is in progress and no power on earth will stop it”- Wilhelm Reich from ‘The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality’ (1931)
“Be proud of who you are … and if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that’s the only language that the pigs understand” - James Fourratt, founder of the Gay Liberation Front.
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In an interview with the Financial Times in October, Elon Musk blamed Neo-Marxists for his poor relationship with his 18 year old trans son, sorry “daughter” who had broken off all contact with his dad, sorry “her”…dad
A meme on social media then appeared that claimed Musk had been secretly recorded bemoaning a Marxist plot to spread transgender ideology. That meme turned out to be a fake: the Guardian hadn’t run the story, which is a shame because if Musk *had* said those words he might have been on to something.
It’s no great secret that during the ‘long decade’ in which the gay and trans movements came into being (roughly 1968 to 1982) Marxism of various sorts played a seminal role. The question is whether this influence continues to shape the behaviour and agenda of the lobby today. There’s a good case for saying that it does.
To understand how we need to return to those formative years of the birth and rapid growth of the LGBTQ+ lobby’s antecedents when young gay activists in particular were swept up into the utopian slipstream of warring Marxist sects which convinced them gay liberation, and later trans liberation, were the unlikely keys to wider social revolution.
In the 60s and 70s there was hardly any leading activist from the movement, on either side of the Atlantic, that didn’t sign up to the revolutionary tenets of Marxism of one variety or another, whether it was Harry Hay, progenitor of the ‘Radical Faeries’ and pro-paedophile communist trade union organiser, Jim Fourratt, long-haired hippy militant, participant in the Stonewall Riots and key instigator of the first Pride March Parade or Leslie Feinberg whose ‘Stone Cold Butch’ became a seminal text of the trans movement and who devoted her life to the miniscule Workers World Party, which broke away from the SWP in order to support the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Leslie preferred the pronouns she/zie and her/hir and not because they sounded vaguely Hungarian.
The roll call of pioneers of the gay and trans movements who were heavily influenced by Marxism range from Dennis Altman, Jeffrey Weeks, Simon Watney, John D’Emilio, Michael Bronski, Peter Tatchell, and Roz Kaveney to Guy Hocquenghem to name just some of the better-known names. Others like Gayle Rubin, high priestesss of Queer Theory, have acknowledged they formed their ideas in relation to Marxism.
Today’s LGBTQ+ lobby likes to date itself from the Stonewall Riots in Manhattan which broke out on June 28th 1969. It’s tempting to compare the way the story of Stonewall has subsequently been rewritten with the way the Soviets liked to airbrush the Russian Revolution. You know how one minute Trotsky and Kamenev are at Lenin’s side…the next they’ve disappeared?
Something similar now happens to boring old gays. When the BFI celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall its publicity mysteriously disappeared the people who did the work and replaced them with latterday Stalins in make up.
The blurb read, “The evening will also feature a screening of short film Happy Birthday, Marsha! ….about the iconic transgender artist and activist, Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson and her life in the hours before she ignited the 1969 Stonewall Riots.”
Ignited the riots? Why don’t they go the full hog and put Marsha on the barricades beside Lenin? There’s one aspect of Stonewall which has been airbrushed just as much as who “ignited” the riots: the political context. The background leading up to the Riots is almost always passed over, whether it was the annual marches in Philadelphia between 64 and 68, the brave campaign against McCarthyite firings of homosexuals by Frank Kameny or that by Barbara Gittings to get homosexuality removed from the list of psychiatric disorders. They lack the violence which Marxism has always seen as the necessary birth pangs of revolutionary change.
It may have been ordinary lesbians and gays who protested against the police raids on the first night of Stonewall but Marxist groups soon flocked to try to shape what came next. Here’s Martha Shelley an icon of the early gay movement, GLF and the Christopher Street March (the first Pride) explaining at 0.50’ that very soon after the Stonewall Riots gay activists went to the Alternate U, a left wing political centre. In another interview Martha added detail. “We leftists who were in the more traditional gay organisations like Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine met with gays who were in lefty organisations, and that fusion became the GLF.”
Gay Flames, GLF’s newsletter, was soon advertising regular Gay Nights at Alternate U as an attempt “to build an alternative to the bars/baths cruising scene which has become a way of life for so many homosexuals”. These Gay Nights offered classes on “racism, squatting, demonstration and Marxism”. Whether these had much impact on the attendance at New York’s bath houses is difficult to say.
In many senses it’s remarkable that any gay person embraced Marxism. In the 1930s when an early British left wing campaigner for gay rights, Harry Whyte, wrote to Stalin to complain about how the Soviet Union had backtracked on its early commitment to greater freedom for homosexuals, Stalin merely scribbled a blunt instruction on the letter,
“Archive. An idiot and a degenerate”.
By the 60s things hadn’t improved anywhere where Marxist-Leninists held sway. In Cuba, Castro considered homosexuality a deviant outcome of capitalism and homosexuals were jailed in UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) camps. In an interview in 1965, Castro explained that “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” Che Guevara loathed homosexuals. During the Cultural Revolution in China, which began in 1964, homosexuals were castrated and in the Soviet Union throughout the 60s and 70s Stalin’s view in the 30s continued to hold sway. In the West at the time almost all Marxist groups were actively hostile if not to homosexuality then certainly any form of autonomous gay movement. Despite all this, the early LGBTQ+ movement proved remarkably susceptible to the prescriptions of Marxism. What gives?