One reader's rave

"Thanks for the newspaper with your book review. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with this terrific piece of writing. It is beautiful, complex, scholarly. Only sorry Mr. Freire cannot read it!" -- Ailene

Cassie Jaye, the day before I met her at the _Red Pill_ world premiere

Thursday, December 30, 2021

The Great American Landscaping Novel




This is a review of the novel Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.

I decided to read it and judge for myself after seeing that in many locations, people were challenging its presence on the shelves of school libraries. Typically the claim was made that it "promotes pedophilia." This is the passage that was frequently quoted:

"But there's one thing I'd never tell Nick in a million years, not that it really matters: in fourth grade, at a church youth-group meeting, out in the bushes behind the parsonage, I touched Doug Goble's dick, and he touched mine. In fact, there were even some mouths involved." (p. 19)

Except -- the passage isn't quoted in its entirety. All the people objecting to the book started with the words "not that it really matters," capitalizing the N to make it look as if that's the beginning of the sentence.

See the trick here? By leaving out the first clause, these liars make it seem as if "not that it really matters" refers to what follows, which in turn would make the entire passage gratuitous. Which is what they want people to think. But it actually refers to what came before it. The protagonist, 22-year-old Mike Munoz, is claiming it doesn't really matter that he would never tell Nick about this incident. But that's only because of where he is at this point in the story. The fact he wouldn't tell Nick, his best friend, may not matter in itself, but the reason he wouldn't does, because what it means is that Nick's unabashed homophobia puts a limit on how open and frank Mike can be with him.

So, in a sense, Mike is lying to himself in saying that it doesn't matter. This becomes clear later in the story (pp. 91-93) when, increasingly frustrated by Nick's bigoted attitude about gays and others, Mike does tell him about this incident, and Nick doesn't take it well. He walks out of the restaurant in which they're meeting.

I won't say more about what follows to avoid spoilers, but this makes clear how dishonest the protesters are. They deliberately and deceptively edit a passage from the book to make it look as if it was put in there for no reason (except to "corrupt the youth" presumably) when it actually sets up something crucial to the whole story.

And, of course, it's not depicting sexual contact between a child and an adult, but between two children, such as has been quite common historically*. It's only a refusal to acknowledge this reality that drives some people to attribute such honest depictions to "pedophilic" motives.


*"As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women. [p. 197] [...] After reviewing the cross-species and cross-cultural evidence, we are convinced that tendencies toward sexual behavior before maturity and even before puberty are genetically determined in many primates, including human beings." -- Ford. C. S.. & Beach. F. A. (1951). Patterns of sexual behavior. New York: Harper & Row.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

"You have learn to fight for things.”




Today is French president Emmanuel Macron’s 44th birthday. In 2017 he told The Telegraph how confronting the challenges to his relationship with Brigitte Trogneux, now his wife, helped form his personal resolve:

“French President Emmanuel Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior. They first met when he was only 15 years old and took part in drama plays at the very respectable Jesuit school of La Providence in the quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Amiens, Northern France.

“Macron tells how he fell in love with Trogneux:

“’It was at secondary school, through drama, that I met Brigitte. It was surreptitiously that things happened and that I fell in love. Through an intellectual bond, which day after day became ever closer. Then emerged a lasting passion.’

“It appears that the intellectual bond started when Macron was 15, and that the passionate relationship began when he was 16.

“Brigitte Trogneux recalls that … ‘all the teachers were buzzing about Emmanuel.’ Her own daughter, Laurence, a classmate of Macron’s, also spoke of him as ‘that amazing guy' [… …].

“’Every Friday, for several months, we spent several hours working on a play together,' Macron writes. [ … ] ‘We decided to produce it together. We chatted about everything. [ … ] I felt that we had always known each other.’ [ … ]

“At the time, Trogneux was 39 years old, married, and the mother of three children. Emmanuel was succeeding at school with disconcerting ease. Girls did not seem to be his main interest. His parents remember only one girlfriend. [ … ]

[Emmanuel’s father] “was ‘surprised’ all the same and ‘almost fell off his chair’ when he learned about his son’s relationship. His mother admits: ‘When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say: “how wonderful!”’ Emmanuel’s grandmother, however, was ‘very conciliatory.’

“Macron’s parents, a bit shaken, decided to meet Trogneux and ask her not to see their son until he had reached adulthood. His father, however, was not convinced this was the right response. ‘I thought it could even have an adverse effect.’ But his wife insisted, and so he told Trogneux: ‘I forbid you to see him until he turns 18.’ ‘I can’t promise you anything,' Trogneux answered tearfully. [ … ].

“As it happened, Emmanuel was due to go to Paris to complete his final year at secondary school. Was the decision motivated or accelerated by his romance with Brigitte? Did his parents see this as a way of getting him away from his beloved? Both deny it, rejecting any version of the romance in which they would have ‘kicked their son out of the house.’

[… …]

“’It is very hard,' he says. ‘An experience like that makes you think... You have to learn to fight for things, to bear the burden and have a life which does not in any way correspond to other people’s lives. That was what we went through for fifteen years. We managed to achieve the situation we’re in today, because we knew it was what we wanted. It didn’t just happen all by itself.’”

Source: Anne Fulda, “The Macron affair: How the French election winner’s parents discovered he was dating his teacher.” The Telegraph, 2017. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/macron-affair-french-presidential-candidates-parents-discovered/ Quoted in T. Rivas, Positive Memories. Still available for now from lulu.com at https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/t-rivas/positive-memories/paperback/product-24450434.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Thursday, December 09, 2021

Lust for Life

"I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighborhood filled with gangs.... Under her guidance I became a different person.... I am eternally grateful."

Today would be screen legend Kirk Douglas's 105th birthday. As reported in the January 24, 2007, New York Post:

"Kirk Douglas is 90 years old -- but time hasn't dulled his memory when it comes to some of his more colorful sexual experiences."

"In his new memoir, Let's Face It -- 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning, due in April from Wiley, the cleft-chinned Oscar-winning star of such pictures as Spartacus and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral recalls a fling with a 'big, tall blond' German airline stewardess who liked to be disciplined in bed. During their enthusiastic sex sessions, 'she would scream, I'm a Nazi! -- which was my cue to slap her, which I did,' Douglas writes.

"He also remembers getting deflowered in high school by his English teacher.

"'I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighborhood filled with gangs.... Under her guidance I became a different person.... I am eternally grateful. By today's standards she would have gone to jail. I had no idea we were doing something wrong. Did she?'

"Douglas didn't stop at his teacher. He also wanted to bed a "beautiful young redhead" who sat in front of him, and wrote her a drippy, Shakespeare-like sonnet that ended:

"'Bewitched by a vision so fair,
I reach out and touch your hair;
Happily you turn and smile at me,
And change my humble state to ecstasy.'

"Despite his stab at 'bad poetry,' it worked, and 'I got the girl,' Douglas writes. Much as he loved sex, Douglas occasionally drew the line. One summer vacation during college when he was working in a steel mill,

"'I met a very attractive girl with rich parents.... She said her father would buy us a nice apartment in New York and take care of all of our expenses while I was in drama school.... She had a beautiful Cadillac and there was the extra dividend of good sex. What else could a poor Jewish boy want? But deep down inside I knew I would end up as a man without character. Bottom line, I just couldn't do it.'

"The Hollywood legend also recalls once being awakened by Ava Gardner, then wed to Frank Sinatra, who showed up at his door at 2 a.m. and sobbed to him:

"'Frank and I had an argument. He had a gun. He threatened to commit suicide. I don't know what to do.'

"Douglas told her, 'Ava, married people have arguments.... Frank loves you. You must go back and try to act like nothing happened.'"

Douglas has been praised for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit. (ABC News, June 29, 2012 --
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/06/kirk-douglas-on-helping-to-break-blacklist)

Most of the above information is taken from Positive Memories by T. Rivas. If you'd like a copy and can't find one online, PM me.

Sunday, December 05, 2021

A Great Artist, and the Love of His Life

Born on this date: flamenco star Camarón de la Isla. As reported by T. Rivas:


"José Monge (or Monje) Cruz, known as Camarón de la Isla (1950-1992), was one of the greatest flamenco singers of the 20th century and he still has many followers today.


"What is less known about flamenco singer Camarón is that, in 1976, he married a gypsy girl, Dolores Montoya, whom he nicknamed La Chispa (The Spark). He had first met the girl about a decade before and he asked for her hand in marriage when she was only fourteen.


"Together they had four children. On a range of websites, La Chispa is mentioned as the love of his life and she is also mentioned as his viuda (widow).


"The Reportaje de TV del entierro de Camarón (TV report on Camarón's funeral)* consists of a video about Camarón, his funeral, and La Chispa. In it she says he 'was a very good person and a very good husband and artist.'


"According to other sites, the often deified Camarón turned out to be human after all, because he really smoked too much, which brought about the lung cancer he died from at a very young age. He also did some drugs. The most negative thing I read about him was that for some time he wanted to be a bullfighter, something which unfortunately is not all too uncommon in flamenco circles, for historical reasons.


"On a more neutral note, he could be quite capricious about expensive beautiful cars, while at the same time being callado (introverted) and raro (eccentric).


"I haven't found anything bad about his relationship with La Chispa (as such) though. I did find: 'La Chispa, que lo adoraba' (La Chispa who adored him).


La Chispa also used to visit (or still visits) his grave for years after his funeral. For four years she mourned for him ('ella estuvo cuatro años llorando') and she became so depressed that she did not eat enough. She simply did not know what to do without him and their children were being looked after by her father and sister. Dolores was saved from her depression when her children told her that if she stopped eating they would too.


"•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10wxc1Fou9g

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTwIWSfc5g. In this show we see Camarón, La Chispa and their children."


Unfortunately, Rivas' book Positive Memories, from which this account is taken -- and which also includes nearly two hundred other such happy "March/September" stories in all gender combinations, as recounted by the younger partner -- is no longer available from the IPCE site and soon will not be available from lulu.com either, because of worsening censorship laws in his home country of the Netherlands. But, for anyone who's interested, I'm in possession of a PDF copy.

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Quote of the Month: Marxism and Enlightenment

 "In this epoch of capitalism in advanced decay, we communists who have as our aim the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new egalitarian socialist basis are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of the bourgeois revolution: we are intransigent fighters for bourgeois-democratic liberties—for the right to bear arms; for the abolition of all monarchy and aristocratic privilege; for the separation of church and state; against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; for the defense of free speech and assembly against the encroachment of the bourgeois state; against barbaric “punishments” such as the death penalty; for juridical equality for women and minorities." -- Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program, International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

Saturday, November 27, 2021

The American Exchange Program

“Right now it’s far too easy for Americans to generalize about people in another state or region or walk of life. If we have each high school graduate spend time with a diverse set of graduates in different parts of the country, they would forever form a different, deeper and broader understanding of what it means to be an American. It would improve our culture and politics immeasurably over time. Plus, every 18-year old would love a road trip.” – Andrew Yang

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Quote of the Day

 “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

To be precise, the healthiest person is able to function even in a profoundly sick society, but uses that ability to try to change it.

Friday, October 22, 2021

Call for Papers: ICSA 2022 Annual Conference



Call for Papers: ICSA 2022 Annual Conference -- Submission deadline coming soon


Online Conference: June 24-26, 2022


Conference Theme: Exploring the Needs of People Who Leave Groups and Controlling Environments


The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is conducting its 2022 Annual International Conference jointly with Info-Secte/Info-Cult of Montreal. The conference will be online and will take place from June 24-26, 2022. The conference will address the needs and interests of ICSA’s four main constituencies: former group members, families, helping professionals, and researchers.


The Committee will consider proposals on the theme of the conference as well as other aspects of the cult phenomenon, including victims’ perspectives, psychological and social manipulation, coercive control, religious fanaticism, terrorism, law enforcement, treatment, prevention, and legal, social, and public policy aspects of manipulation and victimization.


Attendees and speakers at past conferences have been diverse, including academicians, researchers, helping professionals, former and current group members, families, clergy, educators, and others. Individual sessions will be 50 minutes. It is recommended that no more than three people speak on a panel.


ICSA is firmly committed to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. Consistent with these values, ICSA’s policy with regard to conferences has been to encourage a wide range of viewpoints. Opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of ICSA's directors, staff, or supporters.


Proposal abstracts should be in English.


Submission Deadline: October 31, 2021


https://www.cultnews101.com/2021/10/call-for-papers-icsa-2022-annual.html

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

Quote of the Month



"How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and keep it from the rest of the world except by a punishable usurpation, since all others are being robbed, by such an act, of the place of habitation and the means of subsistence which nature gave them in common?"

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

https://constitution.org/2-Authors/jjr/socon.htm

Monday, September 20, 2021

A Once -- and Future? -- Idyll




 



Judith Levine turns 69 today. Her best-known book is Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, and the perspective she presents there is informed by an idyllic experience she had in summer camp -- an experience no longer possible because of the ever more paranoid "age apartheid" that has come into effect over the past couple generations.

This account first appeared in the July 2, 2002 edition of The Village Voice, and is republished on pages 191-95 of Positive Memories, compiled by T. Rivas for Ipce.

"Summer of Love: The Romance a Teenage Camper Couldn't Have Today" by Judith Levine

https://www.villagevoice.com/2002/07/02/summer-of-love/

“This is an innocent story. In 1967, the summer before my 15th birthday, I fell in love. It was my first intense erotic love, and its object was the photography counselor at camp – a lean, bearded, blue-eyed guy I'll call Jake. He was 26. Nothing sexual happened. Still, I think of those two months as the summer of my épanouissement, a French word meaning blossoming or opening, which also means glow. Jake took hundreds of pictures of me, and his affirmation and his camera opened me to myself. They helped me begin, sexually, to glow.

"If the same events had occurred in 2002, they would not be viewed as innocent. The adults around me would write my chaste romance as a perverse tale, casting Jake as a predator and me as his hapless, clueless prey.

"Had I started my sex education with good-touch-bad-touch lessons in kindergarten or listened for a decade to media reporting on a world allegedly crowded with sexual malefactors sniffing the world for young flesh, I might even have believed that my friend and mentor Jake was one of them. That sweet idyll would have been, instead, the summer of my victimization. And instead of opening me, Jake's attentions might have closed me down in fear and confusion.

"The photographs were another kid's idea. Jake and I and a few other campers were messing around in the dining room after supper early in the summer, and a boy named Ezra suggested I model for Jake. Judy would make a gas model, he said. Gas, in 1967, meant cool. And looking back, I have to say, I was a cool kid.

"I wrote poetry; I played guitar and piano pretty well. According to the adults who knew me then, I was precocious and perceptive. My friends remember me as witty and impassioned. I affected a late-beatnik-early-hippie look: skimpy tank tops worn without a bra (I didn't need one anyway), low-slung bellbottoms that revealed the curve of my belly where it dipped between my hipbones.

"Come to think of it, the clothes weren't so different from the ones today's parents (who wore them as kids!) condemn for prematurely ‘sexualizing’ their daughters. The clothes were sexy then; they are sexy now. And to this day I can almost taste how good I felt in them.

"Before that summer, I still considered myself a little ugly and plenty awkward. In my high school, girls like me, who didn't have pageboy haircuts and didn't wear mohair sweaters with matching knee socks – and worse, who were smart – were untouchable.

"At camp, though, I had suitors to spare. That summer several boys pursued me. One wore wire-rimmed glasses – avant-garde at the time. Another kept pleading with me to take my first acid trip with him. I was unmoved. I idolized the glamorous Jake, who had spent a year photographing guerrillas somewhere in Africa, who drove a battered Volkswagen, who meditated at an ashram. And he – miracle of miracles – liked me, a lot.

"He liked me, I felt, and he saw me – saw the person I was beginning to know as myself. I could read his recognition in the photographs. They are straightforward, not arty, not pushy. I posed as I wanted; he shot. My body in them is at that heartstopping stage between baby plump and adolescent fleshy. My face varies from picture to picture: Here I am a giggly kid, here a dreamy near-woman. One photo, which still hangs on my mother's wall, shows me holding Queen Anne's lace, gazing into the distance. It's a bit hokey: I'm working hard at looking soulful. But Jake's camera didn't mock. It's as if he believed I really was thinking deep thoughts.

"What I was thinking about was sex. I tried to seduce him. In the flowery fields where we often went, I struck what I thought were enticing poses, leaning back in the long, scratchy grass, arching my back to reveal a bit of belly, dropping a shoulder so that a strap would fall invitingly off. In the little hand mirror I kept in my bunk, I rehearsed sucking in my cheeks and pouting my lips. And in the evergreen-smelling nights, I fantasized the day Jake would ask me to take my shirt off, brush his lips over my nipples, then pull down the short zipper of my pants. I imagined the bristles of his beard as he kissed me there.

"He never did. In fact, he mentioned sex only once that I remember, as I sat on the counter in his darkroom, watching his red-lit face concentrate on the images emerging in the trays (the smell of developing fluid is still erotic to me).

"He said,

There are two things I know I can't do while I'm working here: smoke pot or make love to a woman. 

"Was that woman me? I closed my eyes for a second and imagined I was, pictured him stepping between my dangling legs, taking my face in his hands, and kissing me. I opened my eyes, unkissed. 

"Maybe Jake considered me a little girl, not a woman at all. But somehow, as he gazed at me through that lens, I began to see myself as a woman, at least a little.

"One hot sunny afternoon, shingling a roof with Jake and some other campers, I admired the muscles of his tan, bare back flexing with each hammer swing. The bitter-salty odor of his sweat drifted toward me on a breeze. 

Hmm, I said to myself, smiling as I noticed that I liked the smell. This must mean I'm growing up.

"Once, skinny-dipping, I felt my body go as liquid as the lake as I watched him climb onto the shore, the red-blond fuzz on his body beaded with water.

"Today, camp policy, like that at many schools and community centers, might forbid Jake and me to spend those hours alone in a dark little room. The camp director might pull him aside and ask pointedly what we were doing out in the fields. A counselor might interrogate me about his actions and insinuate that he was exploiting me. She might even persuade me it was true.

"Of the dozens of rolls he photographed, there are a few shots of me with my shirt off, folk-dancing in a downpour with some other girls. I remember stepping back toward him, breathless and ecstatic, my face hot in the cool rain. You're amazing, he said, and raised his camera again. Today those photographs could be called child pornography, and Jake could be arrested for taking them.

"He never touched me, except to drape an arm over my shoulder or sit close to me on a bench. He kissed me on the lips only once, mouth closed, on the last day of camp – and gave his boots to another girl, throwing me into paroxysms of jealousy. But he made me feel beautiful. He made me feel desirable.

"Recently, the publication of my book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex9 lit a conflagration among conservatives, who called for its suppression – and called me an apologist for, even an advocate of, ‘pedophilia’.

"Why? In one chapter, I suggest that statutory rape laws are often unjust and unrealistic. They not only criminalize consensual teen relationships and categorically deny teens the right to consent to sex, they erase the very possibility that young people might desire – or initiate – sex at all, especially with an older person. At the same time, the book says, we've come to suspect all adults as sexual con artists, cajoling kids through popular culture and advertising to want sex, or seducing or coercing them to have it, before their time. It's as if adults, should they find a young person sexually appealing, could never control their impulses.

"My book acknowledges that kids desire – and I know they do, because I did – and this apparently makes me a ‘pedophile's’ patsy. Writing the book, I often felt lucky that I came of age during the brief moment when young people's sexuality was considered lovely and good and when adults who appreciated it were not regarded as perverts.

"In the summer of '67, a man gave a girl the innocent gift of her emerging erotic self. I wonder if I could receive it with such happiness and grace were I a girl today.”

Sunday, September 05, 2021

Criminalizing Child's Play

 "Criminalizing Child's Play," a report from SOL Research.


An incredible irony: these registry laws are passed in the name of "protecting" children from adults who want to have sex with them. Yet many of those put on the registry are themselves juveniles, and often it's for consensual sex play with other juveniles. So who actually has the most use for this information? Why, it's... adults who want to have sex with kids!


No more need to troll playgrounds or rec centers -- the government has done their work for them, providing a free online directory of juveniles with a demonstrated interest in sexual activity, complete with names, addresses, and often photographs!


https://solresearch.org/report/Criminalizing_Childs_Play

Friday, August 27, 2021

Portrait of the Autist As a Young Man

Autistics are known for learning instrumentally, rather than socially. One implication of this is that, since learning is more about accepting propositions rather than persons, it may be easier for us to parse out the different components of what someone tells us, accepting the parts that make sense to us and simply dismissing the rest. In fact, at the Building Bridges conference, I saw a video of a researcher demonstrating a procedure for taking an item out of a box -- a procedure that intentionally included a superfluous motion. It was related that when neurotypical children who'd just watched this were asked to accomplish the same task, they often incorporated the superfluous motion in their action, whereas autistic children skipped it.

Since I learned in February 2019 that I'm autistic, I've reflected on many of my past experiences in the light of this new knowledge. One that stands out for possibly having gone differently because of my wiring occurred when I was ten.

Usually I went straight home (a 10 or 15-minute walk) at the end of the school day, but for some reason I didn't feel like doing so this time. Instead, I hung out near the school's front door, doing nothing in particular. After a little while a man came from across the street and started a conversation with me. As best as I can remember, it was largely him asking me about my family, and me telling him about how my parents were very interested in current affairs like pollution and the war in Viet Nam. I may well have also told him I had a particular interest in science, and perhaps mentioned my admiration for Albert Einstein, about whom I'd read a book (The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett) the previous year. Looking back, it's quite natural that I responded to questions about myself and my family in terms of my special interests and those of my family members. This is how autistics typically respond when asked to tell about ourselves.

After some minutes, the man asked if I'd like to take a ride in his car. I declined, explaining that my parents had told me that it wasn't safe to go places with strangers. Then, in the manner of making a friendly parting gesture, he offered me a little change (fifty cents if I recall correctly). I asked what it was for, and he said I could buy myself a soda with it. I had no particular interest in doing so, but I politely accepted the money. Then he repeated the offer of a ride in his car, and I simply repeated what my parents had told me. So he said goodbye, and I never saw him again.

Now you might think, from this account, that I'd never been told not to talk with strangers. You would be incorrect. My mother had, in fact, implored me not to, more than once, and I had wanted to know why. So she had told me that some people might want to hurt me. I again asked why, and she had said someone might kidnap me. So, of course, I asked "why" again! So she ended up telling me that I might be kidnapped and held for ransom, and that she and my father might not be able to pay it, and then I might not see them again.

This seemed like a plausible scenario, and I also clearly got the message that it was something that greatly worried her, and I wouldn't want to add to her worries. So I resolved to make sure I wasn't kidnapped.

These considerations were in the back of my mind when the man started the conversation with me. I wouldn't put myself in a position where I could be kidnapped, in case that might be his secret intent. But, equally obviously, he could only do that if I got in his car or went with him to some unfamiliar place. Simply talking with him wouldn't give him any power over me.

I suppose a neurotypical child might have responded in a more binary way to the parental message -- either "believe Mommy" or "don't believe Mommy." But for me, it was perfectly natural to analyze the message and just assimilate the part that made sense, chucking the rest.

I never told my mother about this incident, but I did once recall our earlier conversation to her, and she admitted that she hadn't been comfortable stating what she'd actually been worried about. More recently, I've become aware that it may not have been so inevitable that I'd have come to any harm if I'd gotten in the car, since many minor-attracted people won't do anything without consent anyway. But, since some do, there's no doubt that leaning in the direction of caution was the smart move.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Tell Apple: No snooping on our iPhones!

Apple has announced plans to put spyware on iPhones that would allow it to compare customers' images to reference images from elsewhere. The stated purpose is to assist enforcement of laws pertaining to children and sex, but past experience tells us that any such capacity for indiscriminate spying will be abused.  Here is the message I've sent them:  "I do not consent to the transformation of my phone into a spying device. The photos that I keep on my phone include intimate and treasured moments, that are for the eyes of myself and my loved ones only. Apple's plans to allow a secret spyware system to analyze these photos is a betrayal of my trust. It could expose my private photos to strangers, and falsely place me under suspicion of kidnapping or raping children. I demand that Apple honors my expectation that photos I keep on my phone will be kept private."  You can leave your own comment at https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone 

 https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1271920956662616067

Monday, July 19, 2021

On This Day in 1979: the Sandinista Revolution

On July 19, 1979 a guerrilla army led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) swept into Managua and overthrew the Nicaraguan dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, initiating a revolutionary process that lasted for several years.

In addition to democracy, the revolution brought a number of important improvements to the country, including nutrition and literacy programs. Because many of its leaders identified as revolutionary socialists, however, it quickly became a target for the US ruling class.

The Nicaraguan people overwhelmingly returned the Sandinistas to power in the next national elections, held in 1984. Because this wasn't the outcome desired by the US capitalist rulers, their controlled politicians and press depicted the elections as illegitimate, although independent observers judged them to be free and fair.

Over the next six years, an increasingly murderous campaign of counterrevolutionary terrorism was conducted by "Contra" guerrillas organized and financed by the United States, with President Reagan declaring that he aimed to make the Nicaraguan people "cry uncle." He got his wish with the second national elections in 1990, when Nicaraguans succumbed to this political blackmail by voting the Sandinistas out of office, ending the revolutionary process.

The FSLN subsequently returned to office, but they no longer run or govern on a revolutionary program. They've become just another capitalist party, and are now managing an increasingly repressive neoliberal regime similar to many others.

Sunday, July 18, 2021

I Talked with a Pro-Lifer Today

One of the protesters engaged me in conversation today while I was volunteering as a patient escort at Planned Parenthood.

She related how she had had an abortion once and had come to feel it was a terrible mistake. She described her parents as extremely liberal and said she'd chosen abortion because she thought her mother would "kill her" if she learned of her pregnancy (which doesn't sound very liberal to me). I observed this meant she hadn't had a choice and she agreed, adding she'd been coerced by her boyfriend.

I told her I was sorry about what had happened to her and made the point that we sometimes make bad choices, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't have choice. In the course of further discussion I also noted that a society that was more supportive of parents and children would make it easier for people to avoid abortion if they want, but that banning it wouldn't help accomplish that.

Neither of us changed the other's mind, but it was a good conversation.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Happy Bastille Day!

In honor of the occasion -- and because I hadn't come upon it in time for the Fourth of July -- I'm sharing this essay by Chris Cutrone of the Platypus Affiliated Society on "The American Revolution and the Left "

http://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/ American Revolution and the Left."



    “We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”
    * * *  

    “I am delighted to come and visit. Behind the fact of [Fidel] Castro coming to this hotel, [Nikita] Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad they came to the United States. We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”
        — Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York during his 1960 presidential election campaign, October 12, 1960
        
 
ANY REVOLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES will express the desire to preserve, sustain and promote the further development of the original American Revolution. The future of socialism, not merely in North America but in the whole world, depends on the fate of the American Revolution. But the “Left” today denies this basic truth.

Marx called the United States Civil War the alarm bell tolling the time of world socialist revolution in the 19th century. That did not happen as he wanted, but the subsequent rise of the massive world-transforming force of American capitalism signaled — and still signals today — the task of socialism.

My old comrades in the Spartacist League had a slogan, “Finish the Civil War!” It was vintage 1960s New Leftism in that it was about the Civil Rights Movement and overcoming de jure Jim Crow segregation as a legacy of failed Reconstruction. More than 50 years later, we can say that the task is more simply to complete the American Revolution. Former President John Quincy Adams (the son, not the father), speaking before the United States Supreme Court in the Amistad case advocating the freedom of slaves who rebelled, foresaw the future U.S. Civil War over the abolition of slavery and called it “the last battle of the American Revolution.” He did not foresee capitalism and its new tasks and future battles.

The American Socialist Eugene Debs famously said that the 4th of July was a socialist holiday and that American Revolutionary figures such as Jefferson and Lincoln belonged to the struggle for socialism — and not to the capitalist political parties of Democrats and Republicans. Today, more than 100 years later, this remains no less true.

Up to the 1960s New Left, the American and global Left and socialists and Communists all used to know this basic truth. — Indeed mainstream capitalist politics acknowledged this fact of the ongoing task of the American Revolution: Kennedy claimed the revolutionary heritage for the U.S. against the Soviet Union; even Nixon in 1968 at the Republican National Convention before his election called for a “new American Revolution.”

Today, Bernie Sanders and Trump call themselves not politicians but leaders of a movement; Sanders calls for a “political revolution” in the name of “democratic socialism.” What they mean of course is an electoral shift to support new policies. In 1992, when conceding to Bill Clinton’s electoral victory after 12 years of Republican rule, George Herbert Walker Bush (the father, not the son) said that the U.S. accomplishes through elections what in other countries requires civil wars.

We are discussing the meaning of the American Revolution for the Left today because we face a general election later this year.

Such elections for the President and Congress, which have stakes at a global and not merely national level, raise issues of the U.S. political system and its foundation in the American Revolution. The future of the American Revolution is at stake.

In the recent Trump impeachment farce, there was at least the pantomime of conflict over the future of the American Republic: Was Trump a threat to the Republic? — Were the Democrats and their allies in the Deep State permanent bureaucracy? There has been an evident crisis of legitimacy of the political order.

Do the rather mild and moderate policy reforms Trump has been implementing and seeks to accomplish amount to a Constitutional crisis — threaten a civil war? Despite the overheated language of the Democrats, Trump’s confident and rather blasé attitude, and the matter-of-fact Constitutional arguments by his lawyers and Republican Senators and Congressmen seem appropriate — indeed unimpeachably correct.

What about “fascism”? This favored word on the Left and even among Democrats speaks to the threat of civil war — extra-legal action and perhaps violence. There has been the so-called “resistance” — a term that Attorney General Barr said implied the danger of civil war and even revolution: he also said, in the same speech before the Federalist Society last year, that the U.S. Presidency embodied the “perfected Whig ideal of executive authority” as envisioned by Locke and the English Glorious Revolution — that is, a revolutionary ideal of political authority.

Mao said to Nixon in China that one finds among the left-wing followers of Marx actual fascists. He was contrite about the results of the Cultural Revolution and admitted its pathology. — Today’s Maoists and DSA Democratic “socialists” ought to listen and take heed.

It is not a matter of wanting the revolution but rather of its actuality.

The struggle for socialism will not be according to the fevered fantasies of today’s supposed “revolutionaries.” A socialist revolution will take place — if at all — on the basis of a mass desire to save society, not destroy it. Capitalism will appear as the threat to America, not socialism.

The problem is the exaggerated rhetoric of mainstream politics today. It expresses a partial if distorted truth, that capitalism recurrently produces crises in society, over which political conflicts take place. We are in the midst of such a crisis now — expressed by the crisis of the major capitalist political parties symbolized by Trump and Sanders.

It has happened before. The Great Depression brought a sea-change in American and indeed world politics: in the U.S., a change of the political party system through FDR’s New Deal Coalition overturned the more than 50-year post-Civil War and Reconstruction dominance of the Republican Party. The 1960s experienced a new crisis and change of politics with an upheaval among the Democrats and bringing forth not only the New Left but the New Right that triumphed 50 years after the New Deal. 50 years after the 1960s, today we are experiencing another change out of the crisis of the New Right — the crisis of the Reagan Coalition of neoliberalism and neoconservatism and of the culture wars that came out of the New Left and the crisis of American society that followed.

The Democrats have desperately sought to stem the tide of Trumpian post-neoliberalism — and indeed against the swell of support for Bernie Sanders’s Democratic “socialism.” They have done so on the basis of their prior existing post-60s neoliberal electoral coalition of wealthy progressives, ethno-cultural and/or “racial” minorities, liberally educated women and others, queers and what remains of organized labor. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and immigrants’ rights activists have protested not only against Trump, but have hounded Bernie and his Sandernistas, the much-maligned “Bernie Bros” and Millennial hipster straight white male Brocialists more generally — the “Squad” of Congressional Representatives AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley notwithstanding.

Last year’s New York Times 1619 Project led by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — aimed at delegitimating Trump after the failure of the Russia collusion hoax, in what Editor Dean Baquet called the “shift from Russia to race” — took the occasion of marking the quart-centenary of the arrival of African slaves in the English colonies and explicitly sought to negate the American Revolutionary founding in 1776.

Trump’s Presidency seems to prove the invalidity of the American Revolution, and indeed has implied that its meaning was confined to privileged white males who must at all cost be cowed in the public sphere. It seems obvious that women, blacks and other minorities have no stake in and must disavow the American Revolution. The idea of a kind word being said about the American Revolutionaries — the Founding Fathers — nowadays seems importune if not simply a provocative offense and outrage — the Tory Alexander Hamilton’s musical fame under Obama notwithstanding.

This is a sad commentary on our historical moment today. It speaks to the utter and complete destruction of the original historical Left, socialism and Marxism — the complete triumph of counterrevolutionary ideology over everything from Classical Liberalism onwards. Such ideology ensures the continuation of capitalism.

However, this is a historical phenomenon only 50 years or so old. And it speaks not to the future but the past. The Millennials blew their chance to relate to history in new ways that challenged and tasked them beyond post-60s doxa.[1]

The problem is that the recent and ongoing crisis of the post-60s neoliberal political order has been expressed either by Trump and his new direction for the Republican Party or by a nostalgic desire to reconstitute the old Democratic Party New Deal Coalition that fell apart a half-century ago, symbolized by the old New Leftist Sanders and the reanimation of the post-60s collapse into the Democratic Socialists of America, both of which date to the Reagan Revolution era of the 1980s and its “resistance” to that time’s neoliberal changes in capitalism. This does not augur new possibilities but holds to old memories from a time when many if not most were not yet even alive. Its spectral — unreal — quality is evident.

“The past is not dead; it is not even past.” And: “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it” — are condemned to be trapped by it. These banal catch-phrases can hide but also reveal a meaningful truth: that we are tasked by history, whether or not we recognize it. American history continues, regardless. The U.S. President is indeed, as is said, “the leader of the free world.” As Trump says, America is the greatest country in world history; as his impeachment prosecution declared, his Senate jury is the “highest deliberative body in the history of the world.” This is simply — and undeniably — true. Why and how it was constituted so, historically, is an unavoidable fact of life, for people here and around the world, now and for the foreseeable future. — Can we live up to its task?

My own rejoinder to Trump’s Make America Great Again is to Make America Revolutionary Again. — But no one else on the Left seems to be seeing the sign of the times. Instead, everyone seems eager to rescue the neoliberal Democrats from the dustbin of history. Even Bernie must genuflect to their PC orthodoxy. — But not Trump!

This is indeed a time of reconsideration of history and its haunting memories. The question is whether they must, as Marx said, remain “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” or can they be redeemed by the struggle for freedom in the present. It seems that the Millennial Left of the last two decades has joined the dead generations that came before it. Any rebirth of a true socialist Left and of a Marxist recognition of its actual tasks and possibilities must reckon with the history that has been abandoned by recent generations, starting at least since the 1960s, and pursue its unfulfilled potential.

For the American Revolution still lives.

_________________

  1. See my “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100 (October 2017), available online at: https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/.

Saturday, July 03, 2021

Quote of the Month

"Bosses, like toddlers, will do what they can get away with. It's up to workers to tell them no." -- Alexandra Bradbury, Labor Notes, July 2021

Thursday, May 27, 2021

When It Wasn't "LGBT Rights," but Gay Liberation

 "Our struggle is not one merely for tolerance but for full acceptance as human beings. We are not out to preserve the subculture of the gay world into which straight society forces us when it fails to turn us into docile heterosexuals. Our goal is not to preserve any 'homosexual way of life.' The very concept of 'homosexual' as a distinct variety of human being is a myth deliberately fostered by heterosexual society to buttress its rigid exclusive heterosexual norms. In reality there are only people whose sexual drives naturally lead them to engage in various kinds of sexual acts, including homosexual acts 

"Our struggle is ultimately for a society in which there will no longer be 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals' but simply human beings expressing their natural sexual inclinations. Our struggle is for a society that will ensure and protect the free development and expression of sexuality. Our struggle is for a society that not only tolerates homosexuality but provides for a positive institutional integration of homosexuality. Such a society will not be a heterosexual society."

-- David Thorstad, "Gay Liberation and Class Struggle," June 18, 1972, reprinted in _Gay Liberation and Socialism: documents from the discussions on gay Liberation inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970-1973)_, selected and with an introduction by David Thorstad, 1976

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

"The Socialist Workers Party vs. Gay Liberation (or The Cuckoo Builds a Strange Nest)"

Forty-two years ago -- right around the time I was being forced out of the Socialist Workers Party's youth group -- the party announced a new public policy on the gay liberation movement. This change had a connection to my personal experience with the group's attempt to brainwash me but, owing to my overreliance at the time on the party's press for political information, it's a connection I wasn't aware of. I plan to write about that shortly.

At a public meeting May 11, 1979 at which the party was going to explain its new policy, gay rights activist and former SWP member David Thorstad, who'd resigned earlier over an internal memorandum of which this new policy was an extension, composed a leaflet and passed it out to those attending, who represented a broad cross-section of local activists. It was subsequently expanded into the article below. You can also read it at "The Socialist Workers Party vs. Gay Liberation (or The Cuckoo Builds a Strange Nest)" - William A. Percy (williamapercy.com)

Thorstad introduced it this way in a 2009 introduction:

This polemic was written in the heat of struggle, at a time when both left groups and the gay movement were in a different place from where they are today. The left has virtually vanished as a force in American society, and the gay movement has abandoned sexual freedom as a goal in favor of conventional and conservative assimilation into hetero society. The very concept of posing a challenge to heterodominance seems rather quaint nowadays in view of the widespread focus among same-sexers on conventionality and patriotism — the embrace of same-sex marriage, efforts to get into the imperialist military to do Wall Street’s dirty work against third-world countries like Iraq and Afghanistan — and support for thoughtcrimes legislation (hate-crimes laws). The gay movement no longer plays the radical role for social change that it still played in the late 1970s, and consequently, this polemic serves as a snapshot of a moment that has passed.

Since the late nineteenth century, when homosexuals took their first steps toward self-definition and organization, an exchange of views and even a certain amount of mutual interaction and support have characterized their relationship to the labor movement and the socialist movement. At times, especially during the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, they have won outspoken backing for their demands from the left — socialist, communist, and anarchist. At other times, as during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and under the Castro regime in Cuba, they have fallen victim to reactionary policies as severe as any in capitalist countries.

With the rise of the present wave of gay liberation, unleashed by the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, a new and more far-reaching debate than ever before has been going on within left-wing organizations throughout the world about the significance of gay liberation, the nature of sexuality and homosexuality, and the relationship between the struggle for sexual freedom and the struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a more civilized, rational, and humane social arrangement — socialism. This is a debate in which homosexual revolutionists have been playing a central role. It is a debate that on one level is no different from the debate on homosexuality and gay liberation that is going on in the rest of society — in religion, the scientific community, and many other institutions—and it is creating just as much turmoil.

The debate within the left, however, differs in a number of respects from these other manifestations of the increased awareness of homosexuality and its social implications. First of all, the left in North America carries far less weight in the body politic than it does in many other areas of the world. Therefore, many people, including many gay activists, are only vaguely aware of the scope and nature of this debate. Second, many left groups refuse to discuss this question openly, before the gay movement and the working class as a whole, preferring instead to restrict it to their own memberships, and to put their best face forward in the gay movement itself. Third, the left shares with gay liberation, as well as with other movements of the oppressed, a vision of a better society. It shares a need to ruthlessly criticize the status quo. And it generally promises a future social order of freedom for the exploited and the oppressed. Put another way, the left promises more, so it is not unreasonable to expect more from it than one might from liberal capitalist politicians whose primary devotion is to maintaining a political, social, and economic system based on inequality and profits for the few, rather than on freedom for the vast majority.

The debate within the left has been uneven. Although it is making inroads in virtually all left-wing groups — Maoist, Stalinist, anarchist, Social-Democratic, and Trotskyist — it has been most extensive, and has made the greatest progress, in Trotskyist groups. Of these, by far the most important debate has taken place inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), where repeated discussions and struggle have occurred since 1970, when the party abandoned its policy of banning homosexuals from membership.[1]

The SWP is a small and generally uninfluential American organization, with close ties to Trotskyist groups in dozens of countries. It is, next to the Communist Party, probably the most important left-wing group in the United States.[2] It is also one of only a few left-wing groups to have actively, though inconsistently, participated in the gay liberation movement since the early 1970s. In general, its involvement in gay liberation has been most evident in New York City and California.

Even there, however, it only really got involved in any significant way following the Dade County defeat in June 1977. It, like some other left-wing groups, was compelled by the massive upsurge of the lesbian and gay movement that Anita Bryant provoked to reassess its abstentionist position and to dip its toes, however gingerly, into the struggle.

It did so, however, with a rather limited grasp of what the struggle for gay liberation is all about. It supports equal rights for (adult) homosexuals before the law, but at the same time it regards gay liberation as “peripheral” to the class struggle — that is, not as important as other layers of American society (such as the labor movement, women, and Blacks and other racial minorities). In fact, its position — which it has never fully made public in its own press — differs little from that of bourgeois liberals who oppose discrimination, but who regard homosexuality as an exotic deviation from the heterosexual norm that affects only a minority of people. Like any other institution in this society, it too has internalized antihomosexual prejudice fostered by the bourgeois ruling class — though it officially condemns such prejudice. It continues to suspend judgment on whether homosexual behavior is just as “natural” as heterosexual behavior, on whether homosexuality is a potential of the human animal or an aberration of class society, and seems particularly averse to solidarizing itself with the notion that Gay Is Good. And, like most leftist groups, it sees the struggle against capitalism, and all the forms of oppression and discrimination that go with it, through glasses colored by the political “line” it has adopted at any given moment.

The SWP “Comes Out” — A Bit

As the 1970s draw to a close, the SWP has finally decided to make public part of its true position on the struggle for gay liberation. This has taken the form of a two-page article in the April 13, 1979, issue of its weekly newspaper, The Militant.

The article, which appeared under the byline of Rich Finkel and Matilde Zimmermann, was entitled “The class-struggle road to winning gay rights.”

 The article has created a stir and considerable confusion among many gay liberationists, and no doubt among some members of the SWP itself. It is bound to have repercussions within the left as a whole, both within the United States and in other countries. For this reason, it calls for a response and an explanation.

There is another reason for answering it. And that is the fact that today, more than ever, the gay liberation movement is looking for answers, is attempting to develop a strategy for liberation, and this has led more sisters and brothers than ever before to consider socialism as an alternative to the repression, antisexuality, oppression, and exploitation of capitalist society. Today more than ever, people are becoming aware that the horse-and-buggy morality of American society is completely out of kilter with the needs and realities of the space age. At a time when our most vociferous opponents are clinging for dear life to this antiquated moral code, homosexuals are beginning to realize that we are part of a historic process of redefining traditional religious and moral values that belong to social orders that have long since disappeared. We do not know yet what the new order will bring, but we can say with certainty that its emergence is already beginning to sweep away the old crap. We should be glad to be a part of this historic process.

The Finkel/Zimmermann article is what is known as a “line” article. That is, although it is signed by individuals, it really represents a policy statement, publicly binding on all other members of the group. This in itself is interesting because the article appeared like a bolt from the blue, takes positions that are antithetical to Marxism, and at least in part appears to have been determined by leading bodies of the SWP rather than by the membership as a whole. To the extent that this is the case, it can be expected to provoke some consternation inside the SWP, which prides itself on being a democratic organization in which the party line on any major issue is elaborated only after thorough internal debate. The fact that a line article, which on the surface at least appears to deviate from the previously touted line on gay liberation, is being handed down from the top, without prior internal discussion, raises some serious questions about how democratic the SWP really is. It also suggests that there is more going on here than at first meets the eye.

Such an article is different from a trial balloon. Rather than testing the terrain or announcing the beginning of a discussion on a strategy for gay liberation within the SWP, it appears designed to whip the membership into line before such a discussion can even begin. In this connection, its timing can hardly be accidental. For 1979 is a convention year for the SWP, and its preconvention discussion—a three-month period during which members may submit documents on any subject for publication in an internal discussion bulletin — begins in May. So, in a sense, the Finkel/Zimmermann piece signals a decision by the party leadership to go public, so to speak, even before the ranks have had a chance to get involved.

Why such a bureaucratic maneuver should have been felt necessary is anyone’s guess. So is the extent to which the article may have poisoned the atmosphere inside the SWP and rendered a democratic discussion more difficult, if not impossible. But there is little question that it has helped to poison relations inside the gay movement, particularly in areas like New York where gay activists have been working together with members of the SWP for goals that were thought to be shared.

What Did The Article Say?

The ostensible setting for the article was an analysis of the Philadelphia conference February 23–25 which called a lesbian/gay rights march on Washington, D.C., for October 14, 1979. It took the Militant more than one month even to report on this important conference. This in itself was unusual, particularly since the SWP had a half dozen people at the conference. At least one of its members strongly argued from the floor in favor of the march. One of its lesbian members was even elected co-chair of the proceedings. And the SWP has a well-deserved reputation for supporting mass marches by any oppressed group.

Finkel/Zimmermann devote a few introductory paragraphs to summarizing the debate at the conference over whether or not a march by the gay movement should be called. They spend the remaining one-and-three-quarters pages laying the groundwork for opposing the march and belittling efforts of the lesbian and gay movement to develop a national focus and plan of action. What are their arguments? They correctly point to the fact that the capitalist ruling class is on a campaign to cut back on the social, economic, and political rights of the working class, to weaken the unions, and to erode the democratic rights of the masses of the American people. These attacks are “aimed at establishing an atmosphere of greater conformity and weakening the self-confidence of all oppressed or exploited persons. The antidemocratic assault must include attacks on personal freedoms that do not directly stand in the way of the employers satisfying their profit hunger. Attacks on gay rights fall into this category.” Nothing to quibble about here.

Nor are our authors wrong to claim, “Anything that succeeds in blocking this capitalist offensive strikes a blow for the democratic rights of all.” They list as examples a whole series of victories — the 1978 miners’ strike, the Iranian revolution, the ERA deadline extension, the defeat of an antilabor referendum in Missouri. These events are correctly described as “big advances for the gay rights struggle.”[3]

Nowhere, however, do we see here even lip service given to the massive mobilizations of gay people themselves in 1977 and 1978 in response to the mounting assaults on our rights and our very existence. But our mobilizations, in which hundreds of thousands participated, were the largest mobilizations by any oppressed grouping in American society for many years, and the biggest demonstrations of any kind since the anti-Vietnam War movement. In some areas of the country, such as in the South, gay demonstrations were bigger than any demonstration of any kind in history — including by the labor movement and the antiwar movement.

A year and a half ago, the SWP took a more accurate and realistic view and recognized that the fact that gay people themselves stood up by the hundreds of thousands and said “Enough!” to bigotry and persecution was an inspiration and a victory not only for gay people, but for the entire working class. In a report to the SWP convention in August 1977, SWP national secretary Jack Barnes pointed to the fact that the gay mobilizations had prompted a mineworkers’ official to get up at a meeting of 200 officials in Kentucky to argue in favor of a march on Washington by mineworkers by saying, “If the homosexuals in this country can get recognition, so can the coal miners.” (Militant, September 16, 1977). But today the SWP’s line has changed, as Finkel/Zimmermann proceed to make clear.

Gay Liberation Gets Cellar Priority

After pointing out the potential power of the labor movement, and its crucial role in the economy and society, as well as its importance for a revolutionary strategy whose aim is to overthrow capitalism, they warn their members and whatever unionists may read their paper that “the unions should not throw the same resources into the defense of gay rights that they must throw into the defense of women’s rights and Black or Latino rights.” They offer as a strategy for gay liberation, as well as for women and Blacks, one “that includes doing everything possible to strengthen and protect the working class. . .” They seem to be suggesting that gays are not in fact in their majority themselves workers, and that the only road for gay liberation is to join the unions and/or focus on working in the labor movement — which they have just advised not to put much energy into fighting for gay rights. To me, this sounds like advice to lesbian and gay activists to stop fighting their own battles, to stop building an independent movement that fights for us, even if no other group in society is willing to do so. Such an approach would be suicidal.

Let me be clear. I believe the lesbian/gay movement must do much more than it has so far to win the labor movement, as well as other oppressed layers of society, to support our just demands for an end to persecution and for freedom. But we can only do this by continuing to build our own movement, independent of any outside force, and under our own control. This is an elementary lesson that we should have learned from the history of the Black and women’s movements, the antiwar movement, as well as from the labor movement itself. This also used to be the view of the SWP — before it made what it calls a “turn to the industrial working class” a year or so ago.

It is revealing in this regard that three photographs accompany the Finkel/Zimmermann piece. The first, and largest, is of a West Virginia miners’ rally during the 1978 coal strike. (To me, they all look like white males.) The second, about half as large, is of the ERA march in Washington July 9, 1978. The caption credits the turnout to the assertion that the participants were “bolstered by [the] miners’ battle.” The third photo, also smaller, and at the bottom of the second page, shows two gay men carrying a sign urging: “Jimmy: Human Rights for All Americans.” Wouldn’t a photo of one of the many mass mobilizations for gay rights have been more appropriate? In a paper like the Militant, the selection and placing of illustrations is not haphazard. The message is clear: gay liberation is a distinctly peripheral aspect of the class struggle, one which needs to look elsewhere for validation, one which neither the socialist nor the labor movement should do much to advance. Such an assessment is not only out of line with reality; it also suggests a hostility to gay liberation itself.

Is Sexuality Irrelevant?

Finkel/Zimmermann sneer at what they call “the so-called gay movement defined by sexuality.” Is sexuality, then, irrelevant to the struggle for lesbian/gay liberation? Is it irrelevant to our oppression in a heterosexist society? Is it a mere side issue for a party that aspires to lead a revolution and usher in a new social order? Is it no longer true that the moral code and behavioral norms of this society are based on an active and ubiquitous proselytizing to exclusive heterosexuality?

Are lesbians and gay men preventing hordes of straight people from supporting our just struggle because we are open and proud about being queer? Are gay people wrong to be fighting to protect their rights to live their lives as they see fit, to defend a sexuality that they cherish as a gift? Would there even be a gay liberation movement at all were it not for the fact that homosexuals themselves stood up to fight back against centuries of oppression — at the very time, incidentally, that the SWP itself was banning homosexuals from membership? Considering the SWP’s own record, the Finkel/Zimmermann sneer will not be quickly forgotten by proud faggots and dykes. Nor should it be. Moreover, it is an observation that suggests an underlying hatred of queers; and coming from a socialist group, it is the kind of remark that gives socialism a bad name.

Furthermore, it is still not possible to imagine the Militant expressing similar contempt for other movements of the oppressed. What would Blacks think, for example, if they were to read in its pages a reference to the “so-called Black movement defined by race”? Or women if they were to see their movement described as the “so-called women’s movement defined by sex”? Where does the SWP think such movements come from anyway? They certainly do not sprout full-blown from the labor movement the SWP has so recently discovered.

For Finkel/Zimmermann, this “so-called gay movement defined by sexuality” appears to include only people they do not like. It includes “bar and bath owners who profit from the exploitation and isolation of lesbians and gays.” It includes “real or aspirant ruling-class politicians.” It includes “gay preachers whose religious role is not a bit less reactionary than that of more orthodox clergy.” It includes “individuals who insist that living a certain ‘lifestyle’ is the road to victory in the fight for gay rights.” Now this is truly something new! It is not often that the SWP rails against bar and bath owners, and one almost never reads in its press criticism of religion. Certainly, it is not in the habit of attacking the Black or women’s movements for such undesirable elements, which they have in far greater quantity than does the gay movement. I cannot recall ever reading a criticism in the Militant of the phenomenon of women’s banks. And surely there are far more Black capitalist politicians and preachers than there are gay ones — at least who are involved in the “so-called gay movement defined by sexuality.” The same could be said of the labor movement itself, whose leadership contains numerous unsavory characters. To judge from this nonsense, Finkel/ Zimmermann, and the SWP leaders who helped them write their diatribe, have never seen a gay worker, and never hope to see one, but they can tell you anyhow, they’d rather see than be one.

Covering Up an About-Face

But our authors have only been warming up. Now they are ready for their pièce de résistance. Supporters of a gay march on Washington, they moan, “did not even consider the broader framework in which their deliberations at the Philadelphia conference occurred. They failed to weigh thoroughly the political import of their demands, downplayed the narrow representation at the conference, and underestimated the forces lined up against the action.” Marching, which the SWP has strongly favored for more than a decade at least, is now demoted to a “tactic,” and in this case a “tactic” that the SWP wishes had been scrapped. Fine. They have a right to their opinion. But why don’t they explain why none of their own people at the Philadelphia conference took the floor to argue against the march? Or why none of them stood up to enlighten the benighted delegates about the “broader framework” they now say should have been discussed? To judge from their article, you would think they had not participated at all, but were there merely as observers. Why, then, did they allow their members to speak in favor of the march? Why did they allow one of them to be nominated by the women’s caucus to chair the conference? Why do they fail to report their participation in their article? Furthermore, why did they, as a member group of the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, not object to the CLGR position paper distributed at the conference — a position paper for which they voted? Why did they wait until now to snipe at and undermine the call for a march on Washington, since they supported the idea before? Or did they mislead the Coalition into believing that they supported the march? Are they themselves now making common cause with the “forces lined up against the action”? Do they intend to support the march or not? If so, why are they actively campaigning against the march by urging other groups, like the National Organization for Women, not to endorse it? And what is the significance, if any, of the fact that one of the two authors was not even present at the conference? Isn’t this a bizarre form of reportage?[4] Finkel/Zimmermann provide no answers to these questions. But their lengthy delay in reporting on the conference, and the hostile nature of their “report,” may offer some clues.

The SWP, as well as other Trotskyist groups (in Canada, for instance), are now busy reorienting their members to take jobs in heavy industry. This no doubt worthy endeavor undoubtedly creates considerable difficulties for them, both on a personal and a political level. It is in light of this reallocation of their somewhat limited forces that the Finkel/Zimmermann piece must be seen.

Official Position on Gay Liberation

The SWP’s official position on the gay liberation movement was adopted in August 1973. It is called a “Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement.” This document, which was approved by a majority of its convention, contains a key section in which gay liberation is characterized as relating to a “relatively narrow sector of the population,” as lacking the “potential mass” and “social weight” of movements for women’s and Black liberation, and as “much more peripheral to the central issues of the class struggle” than those movements. It argues that it would be a mistake for the SWP to “generally assign comrades to this movement.” No point in wasting time on “peripheral” movements. The lesbian/gay upsurge following Dade County made such an abstentionist policy untenable for the SWP. Hence, it began to get involved, on a limited scale, in the gay movement in a few areas. But this involvement, such as it was, now appears to have outlived its usefulness. In fact, it may be getting in the way of more important things, like getting jobs in steel plants. Therefore, the party seems to be casting about for an excuse for pulling out of the gay movement — but it has to do so in such a way that it seems justified to its membership.

It is in this context that the report by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes to the SWP National Committee last December must be seen. In that report, published in the March 16, 1979, issue of the Militant, Barnes goes to great lengths to explain why the Briggs Initiative in California was defeated. Twice he warns the SWP membership not to “overestimate the weight of the gay movement” in defeating this antigay initiative. (Were some SWP members beginning to question the “Memorandum's" characterization of the gay movement as “peripheral” and nearly weightless?) He warns against pointing too much to the opposition of the labor movement, which was genuine and widespread, in helping to defeat Briggs. The ruling class itself, he suggests, played a key role in the defeat. But would Briggs have been defeated if the gay movement itself had not responded with massive mobilizations against it, if it had not reached out to the labor movement to enlist its support? Possibly, but not likely. Still, the whole thrust of Barnes’ analysis leads to a denigrating of the self-mobilization and struggle of homosexuals themselves. To be wrong on the character and scope of the forces in the fight against Briggs, he says, “could lead us to a false estimate of the state of the class struggle, the current tactics of the ruling class, an overestimate of the strength of the gay rights movement, and cause us to veer away from the correct strategic line of march for labor and our party.”

That “line of march” now appears to be straight out of the gay movement. Anticommunists in the gay movement will rejoice at this prospect, no doubt. But for socialists, for people who recognize that the ultimate goals of the gay movement, as well as of all the oppressed and of the working class, lie in the overturning of capitalism and its heterosexist dictatorship, such a retreat can only be interpreted as a betrayal of the struggle for sexual freedom and socialism.

A further clue to the SWP’s current behavior might be found in another passage of its 1973 “Memorandum,” which is still the party’s official line on gay liberation. This passage refused to “take a stand on the nature or value of homosexuality,” and suggested that to do so — that is, to recognize what science has already proved, namely, that homosexual behavior is a natural form of human sexuality — might jeopardize the effectiveness of the party as a political organization and alienate it from the masses (who, as we all know, hate queers). To take such a stand, it argued, “would cut across its purpose, dilute its nature as a political organization, transform it into an organization advancing one or another scientific or cultural viewpoint, narrow its appeal, and cripple its ability to mobilize the masses on political questions.”

These are strong words. They suggest that the gay liberation movement is inherently apolitical, little more than an exotic sideshow playing itself out on the fringes of society. Were the massive mobilizations of gay people during the past two years, then, not political? Just the opposite. They were extremely effective in thwarting our enemies and in extending the influence of gay liberation in American society. They inspired other layers of the oppressed and exploited to fight back. And they occurred in spite of the fact that the SWP believes gay liberation to be inherently “countercultural,” riddled with “lifestylism,” and “peripheral” to the class struggle. How far out of it can you get?

The SWP’s unscientific, un-Marxist view of gay liberation and sexual liberation is what it is now counterposing to its “turn to the working class.” It has long berated the gay movement for not having a national focus. Now that the movement is beginning to develop one, now that it has an opportunity to move onto the national scene with a march on the nation’s capital, does the SWP respond by encouraging this process? Oh, no. It is reluctant to go a step further. It seeks to force the realities of the class struggle to fit its own political line, rather than the other way around. It behaves as though the gay movement were in conflict with its “turn” toward the labor movement. It seeks refuge in its wretched “Memorandum” and its belief that gay liberation is, after all, really not “political.” It is doing what a revolutionary party should never do — it is pitting itself against a movement of the oppressed. Any party that does not champion the rights and demands of all the oppressed does not deserve to call itself a revolutionary party. Can a witch hunt against whatever proud lesbian and gay members it may still have left in the SWP be far behind?

The Sexual Rights of Young People

It is entirely possible that some members of the SWP may not be impressed with the arguments against the gay movement and the march on Washington that Finkel/Zimmermann have concocted. It is for their benefit, no doubt, that our authors pounce on an issue about which not only they, but most of their readers as well, are profoundly ignorant. This is the issue of cross-generational sex, an issue that is currently being widely discussed and debated within the lesbian/gay movement.

This issue arose at the Philadelphia conference when the Gay Youth caucus introduced a demand for “full rights for gay youth, including revision of the age-of-consent laws.” This motion was passed, but was subsequently replaced, following a poll of the delegates by mail, with another demand which read: “Protect lesbian and gay youth from any laws which are used to discriminate against, oppress, and/or harass them in their homes, schools, jobs, and social environments.” (Finkel/Zimmermann rewrote this demand in their report to omit the word “jobs,” though it is not clear why.) This substitute demand was proposed because of strong objections from the women’s caucus, which did not agree with the idea of altering the age-of-consent laws. I myself, let it be said, voted against this substitute because I am in favor of full rights for gay youth, including their right to have sex with whomever they want. As a non-ageist radical, I also favor a repeal of the age-of-consent laws, which punish consensual sexual acts between an older and a younger person. These reactionary laws protect nobody, and in fact cause great suffering to large numbers of young people and adults. I believe that both the gay and socialist movements should get in step with Freud and Kinsey and recognize that children have an active sexuality.

In my opinion, sexual freedom remains a distant dream so long as the state and the church are allowed to impose their sex-negative morality on young people, as well as adults. In my view, it is unscientific, as well as damaging to millions of young people, for the gay and women’s movements, not to mention the socialist movement, to kowtow to the bourgeois notion that sexual rights should be the prerogative only of adults, preferably heterosexual adults. I myself, and just about every male homosexual I know, have suffered greatly as children from this irrational and reactionary legal repression of sexuality.

Many gay movements in other countries have recognized this, and call for a repeal of the age-of-consent laws. The American gay movement is out of step with them, and with scientific knowledge about sexuality, so long as it refuses to support full rights for gay youth. This is my personal and political conviction, and I intend to continue to express it. But I recognize that the American lesbian/gay movement needs considerably more discussion on this subject before it is in a position to bring its horizons into line with reality.

Socialists tend to be ahead of other people in recognizing the importance of child sexuality, and in stripping their approach to such matters of all religious and reactionary moralizing. To my knowledge, the SWP has never had a discussion of the question of cross-generational sex. But that does not prevent Finkel/Zimmermann from jumping into the fray with both feet and no head. They devote two columns to a delirious and absurd discussion of the subject, as well as to a personal attack on me for having publicly expressed my views on it. Not only do they blow the whole issue all out of proportion, but they completely distort it as well. The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand, they assert, “even though its supporters try to pass themselves off as defenders of adolescents against legal victimization.” This may be news to some of the SWP’s co-thinkers in other countries, such as Australia, who are officially on record as favoring the repeal of age-of-consent laws. Certainly, it makes a mockery of the very real oppression that many men and boys face when they are caught up in the labyrinth of the law for their purely consensual and loving relationships. I know personally of such people, some of whose lives are ruined as a result. I have seen teenage boys dragged into Family Court and harassed by the authorities for sexual relationships they sought out and willingly, nay joyfully, engaged in with men. I am convinced that the “treatment” for such offenses against morality is far worse than the “crime.” Moreover, it is similar to the suffering of adult homosexuals caught up in the same heterosexist legal system. How do you “protect” a young person by putting his older lover in jail and hauling the boy into Family Court, or worse? Laws that punish sexual acts freely engaged in should be discarded as relics of human prehistory. This is the only humane and civilized solution to a very real and widespread problem.

Finkel/Zimmermann, however, not only come out against the progressive demand to repeal or revise such laws, they also resort to slander to make their reactionary case. Those who advocate the repeal of such laws, they claim, “are primarily adult men who believe they should be unrestricted in having sex with children.” (Why not just call them monsters?) Advocating such legal reform, they say, is “anti-working-class, anti-child.” It has “nothing to do with gay rights or human rights of any kind. It has no place in the struggle to end discrimination against lesbians and gay people.” And black is white, and white is black. How long will it be before Finkel/Zimmermann tell us that the earth is really flat?

They don’t go quite that far yet, but they do drag in a most original, but ridiculous, argument to bolster their flimsy case:

“Saying that children have the ‘right’ to ‘consent’ to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to ‘consent’ to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day.” To me, these are in reality quite different matters. Sex is fun.

Sex is play. Sex is not work. And sex hardly resembles working in a garment factory for five minutes, let alone twelve hours. If this is an example of the SWP’s use of dialectical logic, or even formal logic, it is safe to say that the SWP is in serious trouble. After all, things are not always their opposite. Maybe our authors are simply trying to impress their readers with their formidable grasp of labor history. I, for one, can think of nothing more irrelevant to the subject of consensual cross-generational sex than working in a garment factory. I do hope the Militant will spare its readers such foolishness in the future.

Finkel/Zimmermann also show that they have learned well the guilt-by-association method perfected by the ignominious Joseph McCarthy of 1950s witch hunt fame. “Some of Thorstad’s associates,” they assert, “argue that, at least for male youngsters, prostitution can be a freely chosen and fulfilling ‘lifestyle.’” Who are these unnamed “associates”? Whoever they might be, they do not speak for me, for my view of prostitution, as well as that of all boy-lovers I know, is just the opposite. It is true that many boys in American society turn to prostitution, usually out of poverty, or because they can’t get jobs, or because they regard it as one of the ways they know about to meet men. But I can’t think of a single boy-lover who argues in favor of prostitution as a “fulfilling lifestyle.” I know several who consider themselves oppressed by the prostitution to which this society has driven some of their young male friends.

But isn’t this a strange argument to read in a socialist newspaper? After all, the women’s movement has made far more of an issue out of prostitution than pederasts have. It has even organized demonstrations in support of female prostitutes, and some prostitutes have been involved in the women’s movement. Yet the SWP has never chosen to attack or disassociate itself from the women’s movement on these grounds.

One of the SWP’s gay minions, Michael Maggi, even brought a motion to the CLGR on March 27 which stated that “adults having sex with children is exploitation and is the antithesis of the fight for lesbian and gay rights.” But this is not a true statement. Adults having sex with children may or may not be exploitative, just as adults having sex with adults may or may not be exploitative. These things must be determined on an individual basis. In many cases, adults having sex with children, or children having sex with adults, is just the opposite of exploitation. But this may all be too complicated for our pseudo-dialecticians to understand.

It is interesting to note, though, that this party, which takes a hysterical stand against homosexuality between men and boys, is the same party that refuses to “take a stand” on the “nature or value” of homosexuality. No longer does it merely pooh-pooh the concept that Gay Is Good; today it is saying that in cases involving young people Gay Is Bad.

Here are a few verbatim quotes made by SWP members during the debate on Michael Maggi’s motion at the March 27 CLGR meeting:

Finkel: “Man/boy love is not part of the gay rights movement; it’s exploitative of children.”

Maggi’s motion “does not oppose the right of children to have sex with whoever they want.” [!]

Maggi: “I originally supported abolition of the age of consent.”

“It would be deadly to take up David Thorstad’s position” on man/boy love.

[But Thorstad never asked the Coalition to do so.]

“Sex between a 30-year-old and an 8-year-old is child molestation.”

“I am not for giving children the right to consent to sex.”

It is one thing to have an opinion on these questions, however reactionary and unscientific. It is quite another thing, however, to go on a campaign in the gay movement around such a reactionary outlook. But that is what the SWP has done. Had its motion passed the CLGR meeting, it would have split the Coalition apart. Group after group stood up during the debate to state that they would have to leave the Coalition if the SWP motion passed. Fortunately, it was overwhelmingly defeated.

But surely the SWP knew in advance that its motion would not pass. Was that the reason they insisted on bringing it? Were they looking for a defeat that might give them an excuse to withdraw from the Coalition? Or were they actually trying to break apart the organization? For years I have defended the SWP against charges that they were “splitters.” But it is hard to come to any other conclusion in light of the recent behavior of its members in the CLGR.

Since Finkel/Zimmermann obviously don’t understand the first thing about this subject, why have they chosen to write about it at such length? Is it because they have joined forces with reactionary fools like Anita Bryant, the Interfaith Committee Against Child Molesters, Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, and William F. Buckley? Objectively, they most certainly have, because their arguments are exactly the same. Word for word. Perhaps they rushed into this whole thing too quickly. But one thing is for sure: They should get the facts before they start putting their half-baked ideas onto paper.

There may be more going on here than is immediately apparent. In nearly two years of more or less active involvement in gay liberation, the SWP has, to my knowledge, recruited not one single lesbian or gay activist. Certainly in New York they have not. This in itself is a devastating commentary on the inadequacy of their position on gay liberation and on the ineffectiveness of their activity in the gay movement — at a time when so many gay activists are seriously considering socialism as the solution to the myriad problems facing our society. At a time when the SWP has decided that heavy industry is where the action is, they need a rationale for not allocating their meager forces to a “peripheral” movement like gay liberation. In their rush to justify their current line, it seems, any and all arguments, however absurd and unjust, are acceptable. This is the only rational explanation I can think of for the Finkel/Zimmermann piece.

But time marches on. Efforts to build a mass movement for lesbian/gay liberation and sexual freedom will go on. The struggle to build a mass, combative movement of the workers and the oppressed will go on. And sooner or later I believe that capitalism will be overthrown. But what about the need to win the Marxist movement to gay liberation, and the gay movement to Marxism? On this, the SWP has once again shown that it has no constructive ideas to offer. Its “Memorandum” has come home to roost.

 

Notes

1.      The first, major debate inside the SWP has been documented in the book I self-published in 1976 entitled Gay Liberation and Socialism: Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation Inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970–1973). (Since 1973, two other internal SWP debates on gay liberation have taken place, and another one appears to be shaping up.) This book is now out of print, but can be found in a number of libraries. I was a leading participant in this discussion, which generated more than 100 documents, none of which had been made public prior to my publication of this compilation. I was told at the time that the SWP leadership regarded my decision to make the documents public “scurrilous.” Despite a small printing of only 200 copies, the book was welcomed by gay liberationists throughout the world, and has been reproduced in a number of areas by gay socialists who found it useful in understanding their own problems in winning the left to a Marxist position of actively supporting gay liberation and integrating it into an overall struggle to overthrow capitalism. Because of the continuing demand, I am considering putting out a new, updated edition. [The second edition came out in 1981, and is now out of print. — DT.]

2.      [This is no longer true. The SWP has devolved into an irrelevant sect around its longtime leader Jack Barnes, and the party abandoned the label Trotskyist in 1982, following a speech by Barnes rejecting the theory of permanent revolution. This speech was published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today. In 1983, a large number of dissidents, including longtime top leaders of the SWP, were expelled. The Communist Party as well has become virtually irrelevant.]

3.      [It is clear, even if it was not yet so clear then, that the Iranian revolution not only put a reactionary theocratic elite in power, but was the opposite of a “big advance for the gay rights struggle.”]

4.      [The march drew about 50,000 people. The NAMBLA contingent was fifty men and boys strong, and right behind it came the NOW contingent.]

5.      [More than thirty years later, in his memoir on the SWP, party leader Barry Sheppard, who wrote the “Memorandum” for the Political Committee, revealed that he had originally planned to include a formulation whereby no “organized national party participation” in the gay movement would be projected, but involvement would be left up to local branches to decide. He was told by longtime leader Farrell Dobbs that even that would be going too far: “He said that the opposition in the party to having anything to do with the movement was based ‘purely and simply on prejudice.’ But, he said, if we stuck with the position I had outlined, it would split the party, and we therefore had to reject any reallocation of our forces to the movement by the branches. In other words, we had to capitulate to prejudice” (The Socialist Workers Party 1960–1988, vol. 1, The Sixties: A Political Memoir [Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2005], 322). The party membership was never informed about this at the time.]