Anarchism and Gays

From Gay City News - By Doug Ireland

It may come as a surprise even to gay activists well-read in their history that, more than a half-century before the 1950 founding of the Mattachine Society as the first, lasting modern association of homosexual liberationists, there was a strong and vibrant discourse in America which unfailingly defended the right to same-sex love.

It came not from homosexual intellectuals, but from American anarchists.

In the just-published "Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917," Terence Kissack, the former executive director of San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, has given us the first book-length study of this little-known phenomenon. The work is a vital and important addition to gay historiography.

It was thanks to American anarchist writers and propagandists that the defense of homosexuality developed in Europe by the likes of Karl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany and Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds in England crossed the Atlantic to these shores - at a time when no other political movement or notable public figure in the US dealt with the issue of same-sex eroticism and love.

"The anarchist sex radicals," Kissack writes, "were interested in the ethical, social, and cultural place of homosexuality within society, because that question lies at the nexus of individual freedom and state power."

The towering figure of American anarchism, Emma Goldman, was an extremely charismatic public speaker who lectured to large audiences all over the United States, reaching, she estimated, some 50,000 to 75,000 people a year. And quite frequently she spoke about homosexuality, repeatedly devoting whole lectures to the subject.

A contemporary account of one of those Goldman lectures on homosexuality reported: "Every person who came to the lecture possessing contempt and disgust for the homo-sexualists [sic] and who upheld the attitude of the authorities that those given to this particular form of sex expression should be hounded down and persecuted, went away with a broad and sympathetic understanding of the question and a conviction that in matters of personal life, freedom should reign."

The reason that Goldman and other anarchist figures began to include a defense of same-sex love in their discourse toward the end of the 19th century was that "homosexuality had become a focus of surveillance and regulation by police and other authorities... convictions for the crime of sodomy jumped and medical journals began to feature articles on the subject..."

After homosexuality was linked to Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled political aspirant who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881, the "conflation of crime, insanity, and homosexuality [especially in the medical discourse] reflected the commonly held belief that sexual attraction - much less activity - between members of the same sex was a danger to the moral and social order."

The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde in Britain in 1895, Kissack recounts, "was a wake-up call for anarchists [which] prompted the anarchists to engage in an examination of the social, moral, and legal place of same-sex desire... The efforts of Goldman and other anarchists on Wilde's behalf constitute the first articulation of a politics of homosexuality in the United States."

Wilde had connections to anarchism before his trial. Following the death sentences given to the eight anarchist agitators for the eight-hour work day who were convicted on trumped up-charges in the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886, Wilde signed a petition to the governor of Illinois demanding clemency for them (two eventually had their sentences commuted as a result).

In 1893, Wilde responded to a poll of writers and artists by the French journal L'Ermitage asking their political views by saying, "I am an artist and an anarchist." A year later Wilde repeated his claim. "We are all of us more or less Socialists now-a-days," he said, adding: "I think I am rather more...I am something of an Anarchist."

In his first play, "Vera; or The Nihilists," Wilde quotes the pamphlet "Catechism of the Revolutionist" by the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev, who were widely rumored to have had a homosexual relationship.

Indeed, Wilde's critiques of Marx - who had used homosexuality to have Bakunin thrown out of the First International - were very similar to those of Bakunin. Opposing state ownership of the means of production, Wilde wrote that, "If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we have to face Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first," words which today, after the fall of Communism, seem rather prescient.

Goldman, who insisted that Wilde's trial and conviction were a "great injustice," found Wilde's book "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" to be "pure Anarchy," and said that his play "Lady Windermere's Fan" expressed "the revolutionary spirit in modern drama."

Kissack details how, after his trial, Wilde became "a totemic figure" for the anarchists, and at a time when the American productions of Wilde's plays were closed down and forbidden and his books pulled from library shelves, anarchist journals reprinted his texts and poems.

Goldman reprinted Wilde's "De Profundis" in one of the first issues of her magazine Mother Earth, and in a letter to Hirschfeld, the German homosexual rights activist whom she'd befriended, wrote that "the entire persecution and sentencing of Wilde struck me as an act of cruel injustice and repulsive hypocrisy on the part of the society which condemned this man," adding that "as an anarchist my place has always been on the side of the persecuted."

This statement, Kissack notes, reflected one of several approaches in American anarchist thinking on homosexuality. Benjamin R. Tucker, the well-known individualist anarchist who was the editor and publisher of the anarchist magazine Liberty, "framed his politics of homosexuality as an abstract discussion of individual rights, rather than a defense of persons who were homosexuals. He made no reference to identity, either individual or community-based." Goldman, on the other hand, who spent time with many homosexuals, "spoke of [them] as a persecuted minority like others, deserving better treatment."

Kissack devotes a chapter to Alexander Berkman and his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist," published in 1912. Berkman's book is an account of the 14 years he spent in prison for having committed, at age 21, a failed assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Andrew Carnegie's steel empire.

Kissack notes that "homosexual desire, in all its manifestations, is a key theme of 'Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,'" which was one of the best-selling anarchist books and one widely reviewed in the mainstream press. "It documents, not just the coercive sexual culture of prisons - rape and prostitution - but also the consensual loves that exist behind bars."

The book "contains an entire chapter devoted to the moral, ethical, and social place of same-sex desire...[Berkman] presents love between inmates as a form of resistance to the spirit-crushing environment of prison...It is one of the most important political texts dealing with homosexuality to have been written by an American before the 1950s."

Having read Berkman's book, that's an assessment I can heartily endorse.

In his book, Berkman - who put an excerpt from Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" on its frontispiece - described his aversion to homosexuality when he entered prison, and his rejections of advances by inmates who wanted him to be their "kid." But Berkman's attitude was transformed over time by several romantic attachments he developed to young men while he was incarcerated, and by the end he was grappling toward an ethics of homosexuality.

After his release from prison, Berkman went on the lecture circuit with a talk on "Homosexuality and Sex Life in Prison" which was, Kissack writes, "an appeal for tolerance and better understanding of the diverse expressions of erotic desire... Berkman's homosexual politics reflected his pragmatic view of the ethics of sexual desire. In his lectures he contended, 'You can't suppress the unsuppressible,' and that to make a crime out of erotic desire was - and he knew this from personal experience in prison - cruel and bound to fail. You cannot regulate the fundamental human need for emotional and physical affection. This position reflected basic anarchist doctrine, as well as Berkman's experience behind bars."

Emma Goldman is today an icon of the feminist movement, and Berkman's name survives in American history because of his failed assassination attempt. But in "Free Comrades," Kissack also rescues from obscurity such forgotten American anarchist sex radicals as Tucker, John William Lloyd, Leonard Abbott, and others, and carefully and judiciously examines their variegated critiques of established attitudes toward same-sex relations.

The American anarchist movement never recovered from its persecution during and after World War I, which it opposed, and the arrest and jailing or deportation of many of its key figures, including Goldman and Berkman, during the so-called Palmer Raids carried out against thousands of suspected radical leftists by the federal government from 1919 to 1921. Kissack devotes a final chapter to tracing the remnants of the anarchist movement after this debacle and the influence of its radical sex politics in later years, right up to today.

"Free Comrades," which is impressive in its command of the anarchist literature of the time and of the political context within which the events it recounts took place, is meticulously sourced and footnoted, and contains an invaluable bibliography for those who wish to explore further this forgotten but significant slice of the history of homosexuality.

Kissack's book is published by AK Press, a small anarchist collective in San Francisco that brings out about 20 books a year, and so unfortunately is unlikely to be readily available in bookstores. That's a pity, for it belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of gay or left history. But "Free Comrades" can be ordered directly, at a cost of $17.95 plus shipping, from AK Press, 674-A 23rd Street, Oakland, California 94612, or via the publisher's web site, http://www.akpress.org/.

A complete collection of Benjamin Tucker's anarchist magazine Liberty is available on line at travellinginliberty.blogspot.com/2007/08/index-of-liberty-site.html The complete texts of two of Emma Goldman's books are on line: her "Anarchism and Other Essays," which touches on the homosexual question, is at gutenberg.org/etext/2162 and her "Marriage and Love" is at gutenberg.org/etext/20715 Alexander Berknan's "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist" may also be ordered from AK Press, which has republished it, at the addresses above.

Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.

smoke the motherfuckers ...

smoke the motherfuckers ... play into thier fucking hand no fuvking way

Personally I don't think

Personally I don't think there should be same-sex marriage because marriage should not be dealt with by the state, and so far I haven't seen a religion that allows it. I know the state allows civil unions which is the exact same thing, minus the word marriage, so I don't know why all the gays and lesbians are bitching.

But other then that if someone is oppressed from being gay, then fuck the oppressor.

for whatever reason some

for whatever reason some people want to get married. if some homosexual people want to get married, whatever, but i think agitating for marriage to be reformist so i wouldn't get involved. i am not homosexual myself though my own preferences are monogamous but don't involve marriage: love is its own justification like any desire, i certainly do not need the sanctity of the state or god nor do i need my love recognized by a ceremony of some kind. that being said my own position is realitvly indifferent and i could see myself getting married if my lover (had i one) wanted it bad enough. but the woman i am in love with, who is at this point the only person i could imagine loving in that sense (that could change i just don't see it as likely), though we are just best friends, seems to have the same view. at any rate i take the free love outlook which, far from the way it is portrayed via the images of the 60's as a mere moral valorization on non-monogamy, i feel means that anything consensual goes and it is none of the fucking buissness of anyone outside the relationship(s).

-lord rambler

Civil unions lack over 1100

Civil unions lack over 1100 rights and protections that marriages have in the United State.

And they are...? You can

And they are...? You can just say 1100 and then not state them

the right to visit your

the right to visit your partner in the hospital if they are wounded or sick
the right to make the decision whether or not to pull the plug if your partner goes into a coma and has no/little chance of recovery
the right to inherit property, including a home
the right to be covered by the partners health insurance
the right to easily share financial resources such as bank accounts
the ability to buy property and co-own property easily without having to fill out large amounts of paperwork
the right to not have your children kidnapped by the state if your partner is the biological parent and they die
the right to inherit property in case of a partner's death
the right to gain citizenship through marriage

and literally hundreds of other things that straight people take for granted. look it up for yourself, i don't want to spend the next hour typing.

religion is irrelevant, marriage is a civil institution and a civil right. the denial of that civil right is a crime. saying that it's none of the State's business and the State shouldn't exist anyway is true - but misses the point. the State DOES exist, and in the here and now people are being denied their civil rights because of bigoted laws put into place by a religious minority that is using State power to enforce their "morality" onto others. As anarchists we don't have to like the institution of marriage to recognize that the denial of access to that institution is wrong. Likewise, we cannot sit on the sidelines and let a wrong like that be committed by the State without standing up and opposing it. No one is free while others are oppressed, after all.

Further, allowing the State to deny civil rights to a minority sets a horrible precedent. The assault on LGBT folks is part of the same phenomenon as the Patriot act which eliminated away Habeus Corpus for "terrorists" (read: anyone who doesn't support one of the 2 major parties and is working for real change) and allowed the President to strip suspected "enemy combatants" of theri citizenship and detain them (us) indefinitely without charge. In both cases, the State is asserting that it has the right to deny the rights of individuals who step outside its proscribed norms of behavior, forgetting that civil rights are human rights - they are inherant. They are not granted by States and cannot be abridged by States. Anarchists know this, hell even the slave-owning evil bastards who wrote the constitution knew that. But the Christian Right in America has conveniently forgotten it and is pushing hard to disenfranchise and marginalize anyone and everyone who doesn't fit into the mold laid out by their religio-political ideology. If we want to survive - let alone grow - as a movement we have to push back against them because we know what happens when those people get the upper hand. The Red Scare, the Palmer Raids, and the wholesale massacre and purging of radicals is what happens.

In other words, standing up for the rights of LGBT folks (and others targeted by the neo-fascist christian right) is an essential part of standing up for ourselves.

"so far I haven't seen a

"so far I haven't seen a religion that allows it."

Obviously you have looked no farther than your religion. Buddhism calibrates it, it's important in many Wiccan rituals. Look beyond yourself for your answers before you claim something.

Christianity, Islam, Judism,

Christianity, Islam, Judism, Hinduism, and Atheism are the biggest ones and the ones I looked at. Buddhism isn't a religion, it's a belief system. A religion is based upon a diety and Buddhism doesn't have a diety. Buddha is just the teacher who wrote the philosophy of it, not their god. I've never looked into Wiccan but I will.

Who cares what religions

Who cares what religions have to say about anything? Religions are nothing but political ideologies in and of themselves, and as such deserve the same public criticisim and even ridicule that all other political ideologies receive. Based on my own political critique of religions, they all fail at offering any sort of human liberation.
The fight against gay marriage is being waged by politicized religions. There are no rational arguments to disallow same sex marriage. I personally would not choose to get married as I don't believe the state, church, or anybody else has any business in my relationships. BUT, I will be damned if someone tells me I can't get married based on the imposition of their religious beliefs over mine! The fight for same-sex marriage is a fight against religious extremism. As long as the state exists (which we all agree it does) and it sanctions and rewards some relationships over others, then we have a responsibility to fight this inequality.

word, organized religion is

word, organized religion is pretty fucked up. perhaps i am stating the obvious here to you though but i am going to do it anyway: one step further, one step further. the roots of the problems of religion lie in institutionalized culture of any sort, this is why most athiests even cause me to sigh, secular humanists and even more than a few biocentrists or whatever just sound jeudeo christian moralists with a different set of beliefes as far as i am concenred. ultimately i don't give to shits what people believe: i don't care if someone thinks we were created by a god, are the results of a blind watch maker, came from another planet to this one ages ago, or were even shat out of the sky by birds or something...i care about the results, i care about what people do with these things inside them and how authoritarian or not it is. rest assured i will fight against any moralisitic imposition i see no matter where it originates.

-lord rambler

Stupid.

Stupid.

What a bizarre and idiotic

What a bizarre and idiotic comment. Religions are not "nothing but political ideologies." A religion has any number of meanings and functions. It's a cultural institution, a metaphysics, a codified body of social traditions, a temporal authority/hierarchy, an ideological apparatus, a rich corpus of historical and mythological meaning, a source of comfort, certainty, hatred, hope.

"Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world."
- Neil Gaiman, "American Gods"

This ridiculous, reductionist tendency to view everything that in some aspect is or has been a site of domination as "nothing but" one of the Many Faces of Ultimate Authoritarian Evil is insane, self-marginalizing in the extreme, and a hallmark of someone who experiences anarchism as an ideological belief system, not a practical methodology or philosophic critique. Wake up - virtually every idea, concept, structure, system, institution, tradition, art form, and culture has at some point, in some aspect, been an instrument of authority. It's an unfortunate and so far unavoidable fact of the human condition.

That doesn't mean you can't learn something from what St. Augustine said about history, or enjoy Wagner's music, or appreciate it when a cop who got into the business because he wanted to help people and was never exposed to any other conception of the police stops beside you on a dark night in a bad part of town and offers you a ride home. It's not written anywhere that everyone who got something out of Heidegger is a Nazi, or that having faith is inevitably linked to hating gay people.

LIFE IS COMPLICATED.
NOTHING IS "NOTHING BUT" ANYTHING.

Seriously. Get used to it.

--ανομος

that's my boy! he's a

that's my boy! he's a GRADUATE STUDENT

is religion based on a

is religion based on a diety? atheism doesn't have a diety anymore than buhddism does and yet you mentioned it. don't get me wrong, i agree, but i would add that, being someone who had previously had a huge interest in bhuddism during my nervous breakdown, it can be just as authoritatian or not as anything else, it depends on the holder of the beliefe and how they take it more than the beliefe in my book, though clearly like anyone else some value systems make more sense to me than others...but all are illusions when taken too seriously.

at any rate religion, to me, is just as reliant on the degree of devotion and refusal of examination as it is on a diety. to me the market is a kind of religion, as is the "workers paradise", as is civilization, as admitedly are even some forms of primitivism, sympathetic as i am to that concept. all unexamined assumptions that we little tiny speces of dust living on this muddy, greenry covered, watery entity floating out there in space can really have the clout to speak on the fundamental nature of existence no matter how clever we are. i guess that is the oppisite of religion to me, as it were, its realizing how limited your own perspective is and how personal and unique even though it was obviously socially formed and no matter how much you are devoted to it and acting from this realization rather than invoking the universe to prove your point.

-lord rambler

Nice one,I missed,you all

Nice one,I missed,you all alone copping the crap,but delivering such an accurate critique

This is a most Zen

This is a most Zen attitude,common place in eastern cultures,despised and demoralized by western cultures,,,best you re-configure your essential life path. Zan yiem

which type of

which type of "christianity"? the unitarians and quakers would be very surprised to hear your assertion that christianity as a whole opposes gay rights. and buddhists consider buddhism a religion, who are you to tell them they are wrong just because it doesn't conform to your western preconceptions of what a religion is or should be?

not that religious opinion on gay rights or gay marriage is even relevant, marriage is a civil institution, not a religious one. the group with the lowest divorce rates in America is Atheists - obviously they feel there is some value to marriage even thoguh they explicitly reject religion.

your argument is stupid and makes no sense. try harder next time.

There are those in all the

There are those in all the "major" religions you just cited that do celebrate gay marriage. Should you forcefully lump them in with "traditional" stances these institutions take. Are they not free to marry gays if they like. What are we raising hell about?---FREEDOM.

The United Church of Christ

The United Church of Christ (a mainline Protestant conference) and Unitarian Universalists support gay marriage.

I agree (largely) with this,

I agree (largely) with this, but I think it needs to be extended across the board. If the state should get out of marriage and restrict itself to interpersonal contracts - civil unions - it should do so for everyone, gay, straight, whatever. There's a world of difference between civil unions for all, which would indicate state respect for the agency of religious and social communities, and civil unions for some (in contrast to marriage for others), which indicates a "separate but equal" doctrine of appeasement to rabid religious conservatives.

--ανομος

I liked Kinky Friedmans

I liked Kinky Friedmans answer to the gay marriage question (when he ran for governer of Tx.).

"Why not let Gay people get married, they can then be as miserable as the rest of us."

jeezas car ice ta

jeezas car ice ta

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