In summary, the RU and others fail to support any of their assertions with concrete, historical, material facts. The few times they do offer any factual material is when it is ripped out of its historical context. In short, the methodology of the RU and other groups concerning the gay question is anything but historical, materialist, and dialectical. Their whole analysis is based on such petty-bourgeois ways of thinking such as subjectivism, empiricism, doctrinairism, metaphysics, tailism, and opportunism. These groups should follow their own pompous advice and initiate some struggle into their most personal lives, i.e., their own dearly held anti-gay prejudices.
These groups do not offer a shred of evidence proving gayness is an individual (petty-bourgeois) solution to imperialism, nor that it per se precludes struggle around male supremacy and chauvinism. Sexual relationships between two people are individual in the sense that two individuals are involved, but they operate in a social context. As such, given the concrete conditions of bourgeois society, heterosexual relationships are just as likely to be unprincipled, energy draining, “decadent”, and seen by their participants as havens from outside pressures, as homosexual relationships. At this point, neither, limited to itself, encourages the masses of people to fight around their needs. There is nothing magical about either type of relationship.
The contradiction between homosexuals and heterosexuals is non-antagonistic; it can be worked out through principled struggle. Communists, gays and heterosexuals alike, must unite with the progressive aspects raised by the gay movement and struggle against those bourgeois elements which exist. The communist’s role is not to trash or abandon any possible allies to the bourgeoisie but to show that socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class and its party is the means to the liberation of all people. This consciousness will not arise spontaneously in the gay movement. “This consciousness [can] only be brought to them from without.” Just as men, women, heterosexuals, gays and minorities cross all class lines, any organization of these groups will reflect one or another class line at any given historical period depending on the strength and development of the different class forces. Gays are not inherently revolutionary (as some gay groups would say), nor inherently reactionary (as some “communist” groups would say). The class nature of gay liberation will change only when it is given revolutionary working class leadership. Until then, like all other groups, bourgeois ideology will fill the political vacuum. Even the working class, left to itself, can only develop trade union consciousness, which in the last analysis is bourgeois. To expect the gay movement to be any different when left without proletarian leadership is pure idealism. Gay people, particularly working class gays, are perfectly capable of enthusiastically grasping the science of Marxism Leninism and of being disciplined revolutionary fighters. To make enemies of potential allies is to abandon the working class and its interests.
We make the following rightful and righteous demands:
1. that the Marxist-Leninist methodology of dialectical and historical materialism be applied to the gay question and that subjectivist, “natural” bourgeois ideas based on no investigation be cast aside;
2. that serious criticism/self-criticism be made of anti-gay attitudes among comrades;
3. that gay people who hold ideological, political
and organizational unity with a communist organization be allowed membership;
4. that the democratic rights of gay people be firmly
upheld and struggled for by communists;
5. that evidence of anti-gay attitudes among the working class be struggled with by showing whose interests such prejudices actually serve.
NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK
DOWN WITH SUBJECTIVISM AND OTHER PETTY-BOURGEOIS WAYS OF THINKING
LONG LIVE THE UNITY OF THE MULTI-NATIONAL WORKING CLASS AND DOWN WITH ALL FORMS OF MALE CHAUVINISM AND SUPREMACY THAT DESTROY THAT UNITY
VENCEREMOS